In the words of Shakespeare, it's been a heck of a week.

I've had a more intense than average week here in this holy little patch of land, and it's a week that has left me thinking about presence, and whether it matters. When it comes to our grace-reliant call to participate in the struggle for human liberation, do we get points just for showing up?

Last week I traveled with some Sabeel coworkers to the north of Israel to continue exploring our routes through villages that were destroyed or depopulated in 1948, which we will be introducing to visitors at our upcoming Sabeel international conference. (Check out www.sabeel.org for details).

The stories cling to you like the dust from these villages--small cities, many of them--that have all but disappeared. Each carries its own weight, its own story, its own catastrophe. Sahamata, bombed into the ground after the residents were expelled, leaving only one part of the church still standing. A rusty sign at the entrance to the village reads "This is a historical site. Please respect it" in three languages. The irony is physically painful. The sound of airstrikes echo through 60 years of never-to-return, 60 years of silence in what once was Sahmata.

Tantura is a beach resort, now. For me, there is something creational about the sea, something which makes it hard to believe the story of Tantura--the massacre. The rapes. The mass grave, now a parking lot, which we walk over, silent. The gate keeper of the resort is, as it turns out, an original inhabitant of Tantura. He lets us in when he finds out why we are there. There is one shrine and one house still standing. Other than that--beach resort houses, a concert stage, a beach where Israeli tourists sunbathe, ignorant of the bodies that once lay on that beach. All of that water. All of that sand. All of that quiet whispering of waves of buried memories.

The houses of Sa'sa' still stand, now part of the kibbutz of Sasa. The new kibbutz residents in 1948 fell in love with the houses of the Arab families that they had displaced. How could you not fall in love with those old stone Palestinian homes, simple, functional, quiet. They campaigned against the destruction of the houses--no word mentioned of the inhabitants, fleeing in terror to Syria, to Lebanon. The houses still stand. One is now a museum, claiming to be a monument to the many diverse cultures that have inhabited this area. The Arabs, the Palestinians, are never mentioned by name.

The people of Bir'am can return when they die. The cemetary is kept up. The church as well. The rest of the village was bombed when the villagers won a court case allowing them to return. There is a national park there now. The original residents refused to leave for Lebanon, staying in the nearby town of Jish instead. Most people cannot even return when they die.

So, does presence matter? Do our footsteps matter? Does our listening-to-stories, our quiet witness, our recovery of buried memory matter? Does it matter to the refugees? To the dead? To those longing to return? Does it matter to us? Are we changed, do we move, do we break and come back together, like the waves crashing on the beach of beautiful, massacred Tantura?

    Nobody goes homeless in Palestine.
    In the United States, where I am from, homelessness has become an accepted fact of life. Walking through the streets of our cities and our exurban environments, we are used to passing our brothers and sisters who are denied the human right to shelter, often ignoring them or occasionally throwing someone a buck as an act of charity.

     What does it tell us about our view of community that so many of our sisters and brothers go without shelter?

     I live in occupied East Jerusalem. Let me tell you why I think that it is so amazing that Palestinians do not experience homelessness. Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip, are often targeted for demolition by the Israeli government and military. While thousands of housing units in Israeli settlements, built on confiscated Palestinian land against international law, remain empty, thousands of Palestinian homes are destroyed or threatened with destruction. According to the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, since the Israeli occupation of Palestine began in 1967, 18,000 Palestinian houses have been destroyed.[1] In the West Bank in 2000-2001 alone, 720 homes were destroyed, leaving 73,600 people without homes. Homes can be destroyed ‘legally’ because Palestinians are usually denied permits to build by the Israeli government and military.[2]

      But despite all of this, Palestinians continue to build in order to provide shelter for their families. When homes are destroyed, people are taken in by extended family networks and by neighbors. Churches and mosques donate food, furniture, and counseling services. Peace and justice organizations, such as the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions and the Holy Land Trust, assist people in rebuilding homes, often only to see them destroyed again. Many Palestinian families continue to rebuild despite repeated demolitions as a peaceful act of determined resistance. Many people leave because of the constant uncertainty and fear of life caused by these policies, but nobody goes homeless.

       I think that we have a lot to learn from this. When we are truly in community, nobody goes homeless. The needs of all are taken into consideration, and those without shelter or food or clothing or spiritual care are fed and sheltered and clothed and spiritually cared for. But when there is an intentional effort to deny these rights to members of our community, or when unjust structures and laws deny these rights, we must do more than simply care for our community members. Together, we must do what we can to remove the obstacles to abundant life for the members of our community. Living in community means living justly and in right relationship with all. Living in community means that we cannot ignore the face of our brother or sister in need. Nor can we ignore the systems that keep them in need. Living in community means that nobody goes homeless—and that when we continue to see our sisters and brothers denied homes, we continue to ask why, and to act on the answer.

My friend Rachel at the United Methodist Board of Global Ministries (the folks I work for, to be simple) is creating a program to be used by youth groups who are learning about justice issues. The program involves fasting as well as education, using the text in Isaiah 58 ("This is the fast I choose: to loose the chains of injustice and untie every yoke"). Rachel explains that program, called B1, is "a fasting campaign that engages youth in issues facing impoverished communities. The name, B1, speaks not only to the vision driving this campaign but also to our connectional church. B1 stands for “One being, being one”. Similar to the South African concept of Ubuntu, B1 seeks to connect youth to issues facing our sisters and brothers both in our immediate communities and around the world."

She asked me to write a few reflections for B1, one on fasting and one on community. I figured I'd post them here, since, as you've noticed, I'm all about cheaping out and using stuff I've written already as blog material. Lame on!

            As I live and work in East Jerusalem, I am surrounded by religious traditions in which fasting is important. The Muslim community in which I live is entering the third week of the fasting month, Ramadan. Each year, Muslim believers do not eat or drink from sunup to sundown for a whole month! In Eastern Orthodox Christianity, fasting is a necessary step in repentance before taking communion. Orthodox and Catholic Christians fast during Lent. And Jewish believers fast during Yom Kippur. Believers of all three faiths fast for repentance, atonement, and contemplation.

            We also fast in solidarity with those who have no food. By experiencing hunger, we become more compassionate to those who are hungry. We also learn to hunger for unity with God who provides all things, but we notice that we often rely on power and privilege to feed us rather than on our faith in God. We become mindful of the many that do not have the same power and privilege. We are reminded that it is our responsibility to work for justice.

            I wonder what different forms of fasting could teach us about the injustices faced daily by the Palestinian community. In other words, what privileges could we ‘fast’ from in order to increase our compassion and our hunger for justice, and realize that our true reliance should be on God rather than on power or privilege?

            Many Palestinians face the threat or the reality of having their homes demolished by the Israeli military. Over 18,000 homes have been destroyed in the occupied Palestinian territories (including East Jerusalem) since 1967. Over 20,000 homes in East Jerusalem have demolition orders on them.[1] Palestinians are often not granted permits to build houses for their families, thus making their houses ‘illegal’ and subject to destruction. How could we ‘fast’ from the safety and shelter of home that we are used to? How would this make us more aware of God as our refuge and strength? How would this motivate us to ensure that all people have adequate shelter?

            Palestinians face restrictions on their freedom of movement. Many are divided from schools, work, places of worship, and neighbors by a massive Separation Wall. Many have to travel through military checkpoints to get to and from work, facing humiliation and dehumanization on a daily basis. How could we fast from our privileges of free movement? How would this remind us that our freedom comes from God? How would this reenergize us to work for movement and access rights for all people?

            Palestinians face water shortages due to the unfair distribution of water and the building of illegal Israeli settlements over key water sources. How could we fast from our privileged use of water? How could this remind us of Christ, our Living Water? How could this remind us of the need to work for accessible, clean water for communities all over the globe?

              What fast will we choose? And where, with God’s help, do we go from there?

This past weekend several of my coworkers and I took a conference planning trip north to the Galilee. The aspect of the conference we were planning, in this particular case, were the visits to the sites of Palestinian villages that were destroyed or depopulated in 1948. Having seen a fair number of examples of this, I wasn’t quite prepared for how powerfully disturbing an experience it would be.

There were three phrases that stuck with me throughout the two days.

One that kept echoing in my head was a question from my new roommate, asked several days before: “How do you keep from just being catatonic with rage?”

“You’d never know if you didn’t know,” I said to the conference coordinator, as I emerged from the tangle of brambles and cactus that once was the village of Shajara.

“This reminds me too much of the U.S.,” was my comment as our guide translated one of the Hebrew signs posted at the spring in Shajara. The fact that there had been a Palestinian town there was mentioned once—“an Arab village”—and the flight of its residents was treated as a natural progression, just part of the evolution of the history of the region, rather than the ethnic cleansing that it really was. It’s the same way of dealing with a history of violent exclusion that we adopt in the States—recognize that people used to be here, if pressed, but take no credit for the creation of that horrifying “used to be.”

We walked through the lands of Ghabsiye. Now all that’s left is the mosque. And that is closed off, surrounded with sheet metal fencing and barbed wire. In 1951, the residents of Ghabsiye won a High Court victory, a ruling that the military could not prevent them from returning to their homes or their mosque. The military continued to control the region, and eventually destroyed all of the houses in the village—four years after they had cleansed it of inhabitants. The mosque still stands, but the residents can not return to pray in it, to clean it, to upkeep it. Our guide, the head of the Committee for the Protection of the Rights of Displaced Persons, was arrested in 1996 for entering the mosque to pray, despite the 1951 ruling and a 1996 ruling declaring that the government had the responsibility to renovate and open the mosque.

In 1948, a young man from the village tried to surrender to the Zionist forces by waving a white flag from the minaret of this mosque. He was shot. The rest of the villagers fled in fear, never to be allowed to return.

We walked through what was once the city of Beisan, now the city of Beth Shean. This is the hometown of the director of Sabeel. He walked with us, telling us where his house once was, where the movie theater—a rarity for Palestine in the 40s—had been. The church he had been baptized in is now a store. The Catholic church is now the city headquarters of the Likud party, a right wing Israeli party that has suggested transferring the remaining Arabs out of Israel as part of the requirements for any future peace deal. These Palestinians, holding Israeli citizenship—like our director—make up close to 20% of the Israeli population. But as ‘non-Jews’ in a Jewish state, they are non-entities—a potential fifth-column, ripe for ‘transfer,’ that most fantastic euphemism for ethnic cleansing.

He was 10 when the Zionist militia came into the town. They separated the Muslims from the Christians, dividing people who had lived with each other in peace for years. They sent the Muslims away, to Jordan or Lebanon. The Christians were allowed to flee to Nazareth, and thus became Israeli citizens. They escaped the refugee camps but inherited a non-place in a society deeply suspicious of them, deeply exclusive towards them, a society in which they are, by definition, permanent outsiders.

I asked our director what it was like returning to Beisan. He told me that he had come back many times now, so it was easier then it was at first. And then he told me, “This is why we don’t believe in strict justice at Sabeel. Because what do you do when this has gone on for generations? Chase these people out of their homes just like was done to me? That’s why we always talk about justice with mercy.”

We walked through Al Bassa, now an Israeli industrial park. Two churches still stand, as does a mosque and a shrine to St. George where both Christians and Muslims used to pray. We entered one church, where one of our conference speakers had been baptized. He recently had opened the church to baptize his own son there. Someone had meticulously cleaned the pigeon shit, swept the floor, cleaned the altar, and returned some small icons and candles to the front of the church. But there was nothing that could be done about the massive cracks in the ceiling, the walls splattered with feces. There was nothing that could be done about all of that echoing, hollow emptiness, a testament to a people no longer there.

Another church, inhabited by pigeons and lizards, the awful smell of neglect. And, most disturbingly of all, a Christian cemetery, sandwiched between a road and a factory, overgrown with weeds. Most of the graves were smashed open, revealing dried bones, exposed to sunlight and wind and the discarded wine bottles and chip wrappers of late night thrill seekers. I held back vomit. Thigh bones, once buried so carefully, surrounded by mourning and memories, now exposed anonymously to the sun.

Words have always meant so much to me. Words turn back at a sight like this. We found a piece of a headstone, flung face down in the dirt, inscribed with Arabic poetry. I propped it up and poured water on it, rubbed at it with my shirt, with a discarded rag we discovered nearby. Anything. Anything to make the words readable. Anything to bring some miniscule level of dignity—or more accurately, to feel like I was doing something, anything.

We found out the Islamic movement had gotten permission to clean the nearby Muslim cemetery, and had come and done what they could to clean the Christian cemetery as well. Good Samaritans, trying somehow to be human in the face of all this inhumanity.

We wondered out loud what the public reaction would be if this were a Jewish cemetery. We wondered what the people who live and work around these ruined churches and mosques and cemeteries think. How do they justify it? What do they think as they pass these skeletal reminders of the past, day after day?

And of course, I thought about myself, about life in the States, blissfully ignorant of living on stolen land, ‘cleansed’ land, blissfully ignorant of the original inhabitants, blissfully unconnected to the heart of the land.

I held back the vomit as I threw away a few plastic bottles that I had picked up, into the garbage can behind the factory. The reek of garbage blew into my face. Some sort of congealed liquid leaked from the green trash can into the grass by the cemetery.

How do you live in a place where you heart is permanently breaking?

Our last stop was Zib. There, a man had collected things from the destroyed village, and made a museum. He charges 10 shekels per head to see the remains of other people’s lives. The residents of Zib are now in refugee camps in Lebanon. The history of the village that he had painted on the wall in the museum made one mention of the inhabitants of Zib. It referred to them as “Muslim inhabitants” and said that they “escaped to Lebanon in 1948.”

History buried. History plowed under. Ancient history lifted up on display, recent history brushed aside, never to return.

Never to return.

I am sorry that this is such a fractured account, such an incomplete account. But in the face of Nakba, what other type of account could there be?

What do we have other than fragments, pieces of stories scattered to the winds?

Last, and certainly least, here is the sermon I preached this past Sunday.
Please read my last two posts before you read this thing, they are much
more interesting.

I originally wrote it for the Sunday before, after giving an impromptu
message the previous Sunday because the group that was supposed to
bring the preacher never showed up (our pastor and usual speaker is
in the States trying to wake some folks up in his own quiet, gentle,
loving way). They showed up last week instead, which meant I had
a spare sermon floating around when our brother in Christ got
detained at the Gaza border and was given 72 hours to leave the
country. For more on that, see the past two posts.

Anyway, folks at church seemed to get something out of it, or
at least said they did! So I figured I'd share it with you. Hope
it speaks something to you, in spite of me:

I want to talk today about some good news. I want to talk today about Jesus being here with us now. I want to talk about Jesus being with us even in the midst of the violence and confusion and complication and frustration and depression of this world. I want to talk about how Jesus comes to us, and how we respond.

            The story I want to use to do this can be found in Matthew’s gospel, the 14^th chapter, verses 22-33. It’s a story that many of you are familiar with, but let’s read it together:   (Matthew 14: 22-33)

I imagine that this is a story that many of you can relate to. We all experience storms in our life. We all experience times of uncertainty, of fear, of seeming chaos. We all experience times when we wonder where the presence of God is, where the presence of Jesus is. And it’s a spectacular story, with storms calmed and water walked on, the sort of “special effects” type of story that can sometimes lead us to read the Bible with the eyes of a Hollywood producer looking for a new movie hook.

            But it’s a surprising story as well. And there’s a difference between spectacular and surprising. It’s easy to get distracted by the spectacle. And certainly the kingdom of God, when it breaks into our lives, is a spectacular thing! But more importantly, it’s a surprising thing. The good news isn’t always spectacular, doesn’t always seem huge or miraculous to us, but it is always surprising.

            This is a surprising story because of the way that it presents Christ coming to us in the midst of our storms. It is a surprising story because of the way that we are called to respond to the presence of Christ in the midst of our chaotic lives and our chaotic world. It is surprising because of the way that it presents Christ comforting us and saving us even in our doubts and our fears.

            There are four things that surprise me about this story, and that I think make for surprising good news in the middle of the storms that many of us experience. The first is the simple fact that at the height off the storm, Christ appears to the disciples. The second surprising, which I’ll elaborate on later, is that the disciples don’t seem to be afraid….until Christ comes to them. The third surprising thing is Peter’s prayer to Christ—not for a miraculous sign or a calming of the storm, but to come out to accompany Christ in dangerous water’s. And the fourth surprising thing is that when Peter’s faith fails, when Jesus admonishes him as “one of little faith,” is the same moment when Jesus comes on the boat and calms the storm. Our tragedy doesn’t keep Christ from coming to us. Neither does our fear. Christ has a calling for us. And even when we fail, our failures don’t keep Christ from catching us and working miracles through and with us. And that is all very good news.

But maybe before we can really understand the good news, we have to look the bad news in the face first. Before we can understand the response to the storm, we have to look around and see the storm.

Jesus’ listeners would have understood this story very well. Many of his early followers were fishermen or families of fishermen. They knew how treacherous and dangerous the Galilean lake could be. Even today, the seemingly serene lake can surprise. It’s unpredictable currents and weather patterns lead to swimming deaths on a regular basis. The lake could be a dangerous place. For those whose livelihood depended on it, hearing about the presence of God in the midst of the storms could be an immediate and desperate need.

The early church would have understood the plight of the disciples. They felt that they were living in the midst of a storm—of persecution, of empire, of occupation, of being ostracized from faith communities, of having to stand up against religious authorities. They would have listened intently to this story, looking for any clues as to how they could discover the presence of Christ, the presence of God, in the face of the storm in which they lived.

For those of us living here, we live in a place and in a situation that often feels like a storm. There are so many walls here, dividing people. There is so much violence, overt and structural, so much injustice, so much pain. It’s in the stories of the refugees, longing for return to their homes after 60 years. It’s in the hundreds of checkpoints all over the West Bank, checkpoints that dehumanize both the Palestinians forced to stand at them for hours and the Israeli soldiers who enforce them. It’s in the stories of those who have lost children to the violence. It’s in the conditions in Gaza, in Hebron—where even the tomb of Abraham is split up and guarded by the military. It’s in the more than 20, 000 homes in East Jerusalem that have demolition orders on them, because the people living there have built houses for their families despite the fact that their identity, their place of birth, means that the state does not grant them permits to build. Over 20,000 families living in fear, going to bed each night not knowing whether they will wake up to find bulldozers and military jeeps outside of their homes. It’s in the fear and the paranoia that drive so much of the policies and activities of governments. It often feels that we live in the midst of a storm, and that the storm is threatening to get worse.

In our personal lives, as well, we often feel that we are threatened by a storm, buffeted by the winds and waves of our ever-changing, quick-moving world. Perhaps we are faced with difficult decisions about our jobs and about our ministries. Perhaps we have to make choices that we don’t want to make. Perhaps we are struggling with family and friends, with relationships. Perhaps we are struggling with depression or with mental illness, or with physical ailments. Perhaps we have sick family members, friends who are suffering, community members that we’re not sure how to relate to. All of us, I would imagine, have times in our lives—and maybe are currently experiencing one—in which we feel lost in hostile seas, out of control of our lives and our destinies—afraid, unsure, alone.

            But that brings me to the first surprising thing about this story. Look back over verses 22-25, and you will find that not once does the writer of the gospel describe the disciples as afraid. The story of the boat at sea is a relatively matter of fact one—Jesus is not there, and the boat is battered by waves, carried away from land. There is no mention of the disciples. They are not yet actors in this particular story. Not once does it mention that they are afraid.

            Until—and here is the surprise—until Jesus shows up. It is not until Christ appears, walking towards them across the storm-swept waters, that the disciples are described as being fearful—in fact, described as being “terrified” and as “crying out in fear.” Misinterpreting the presence of Jesus in the midst of an already dangerous situation, the disciples react in fear, imagining that God coming into their lives is a threat to their survival.

            I don’t know if this is what the gospel writer intended, but I think this reveals something about how we deal with the storms in our lives. There is a human tendency to ‘normalize,’ to become acclimated to even the most undesirable of circumstances, even when there is something that we are being called to do. I think we are like that with many of the storms and struggles of our lives. We become fixed on obstacles rather than on vision. We begin to see undesirable situations—unjust structures, violent habits, divisions—as normal, as “just part of the way the world is,” ignoring that a huge part of experiencing Christ in our lives might just be a calling to act in the face of these structures, to humanize, to change, to call and to be called to repentance.

            And Christ comes in to mess all of that up. Shane Claiborne, a young American evangelical who has been at the forefront of efforts to stir evangelicals to share in community and to act for social justice and peace, often says “I met Jesus, and boy did he mess me up!” Often our first experience with “God with us,” with God coming to us in the midst of all of our chaos, is that God disturbs us! God shakes us out of our complacency, shows us another way, reminds us that we have a calling, that we have eyes to see and ears to hear and hearts to feel. And often we don’t want that, or at least we don’t think that we do. We have grown accustomed to the situation as it is. We have accepted the fact that everything is so much bigger than us and so out of our control, and have forgotten that God is even bigger than all that. Allahu akbar, as our Muslim brothers and sisters say—God is BIGGER than this. And God has something for us, no matter how small we are and how small we feel, to do.

            The questions I want to pose to you today are these. The first is, what storms are you facing in your life? What are the situations of confusion or of fear, of injustice or of violence, that you are experiencing?

The second is, how does Christ come to you even in the middle of all of that?

And the third, and probably most difficult, is: how do we respond?

I want to suggest three ways that Christ comes to us, today, right now. We don’t have to travel back in time 2,000 years, although certainly the stories that began being told 2,000 years ago and continue to be told today will be helpful to us in discerning the presence of Christ in our lives today. And we don’t have to wait until we die, or until this world passes away. Christ is coming to us right now, and telling us that the kingdom of God is here among us, even when we don’t see it. But, in following the surprising aspects of this story, I don’t want to start by talking about how Christ comes to us to calm the fear and worries of our lives, but rather, the ways in which God comes to us that shake us up, save us, disturb us—and lead us to faith and true peace.

            First of all, Christ comes to us today in the form of a calling from God. In Paul’s letter to the Colossians, the famous epistle writer tells us that the wonderful message that has been waiting since the world began to be revealed to us is “Christ in you, the hope of glory.” Christ in us. We are called, today, to realize Christ in us and in everyone around us. We are called to realize and witness to the presence of God in our lives.

            Calling comes in many forms. But calling is always that place where our greatest passion meets the world’s greatest needs. Calling is never just about us, and that’s why it can be so frightening. We want God to come into our lives and calm the storm, but instead we find God calling us into the storm, into the frightening places, into places of need. But if we respond, we find Christ there waiting for us. We find our passion, our joy. And we find that we are held up, even when we doubt, even when we fail, even when we fall. In the midst of the storm, Christ comes to us, and calls us out into uncertainty to find true fulfillment in God’s dream for us.

Secondly, Christ comes to us in the face of the poor and the oppressed. The writer of Matthew famously reminds us that “whatever you do the least of these, you do to me.” Christ is present in all of us, but he is present in a particularly powerful way in those who are considered outsiders, the rejects and discontents of our quote-unquote civilization. The writer Naomi Klein, in her book The Shock Doctrine, talks about a concept she calls “warehousing”—the creation and then the separation-from-us of surplus people, people that we can hide away in ghettos and slums, hide behind walls, hide in Gaza or in Qalqilya or in the ghetto of Lydda, and forget about. This ought to be a warning to us Christians, because it is in these “warehouses,” these places where the forgotten people are, that Christ is particularly present. In the midst of injustice, we find God. In the struggle of the oppressed for dignity and for liberation, for the ability to tell their own stories and dream their own dreams, we find the presence of the living God.

This can certainly be scary for us. We would rather be sheltered from all that. We would rather not be called to respond to violence and injustice. We would, simply, rather not see the face of Christ in our homeless sisters and brothers, in our abused sisters and brothers, in our indigenous sisters and brothers. And we first have to be able to see them for who they are—for humans, for Christ, the Human One, coming to us, not as undesirables to be ignored and discarded. Once we have seen them, we have to respond—by caring for them, by struggling with them, by working to send those structures and those systems that keep them oppressed and keep them—and us!!—from realizing our full human potential as children of God. In the midst of the storm, Christ comes to us, telling us that we are called to live good news to the poor, liberty to the captives, freedom to the oppressed. And this can be scary stuff. But if we are to encounter Christ, we must respond.

And thirdly, Christ comes to us in community, in the church—in the Body of Christ on this earth. When we feel that we are the most alone and the most isolated, we feel God calling for us to be in community together. And that, too, is scary. That, too, makes us frightened. We are so broken, we think. Others have hurt us and have rejected us. How could we be a part of a community? How can we be part of a body with others when we have so many jagged edges? And when we have been cut by so many other people’s jagged edges?

But we are called into community regardless. We are called into a community where we recognize each other’s brokenness and dedicate ourselves to being part of a whole. We are called into a community that recognizes its own brokenness at the feet of the cross. And we are called into a community that recognizes God’s wholeness, and that works to be a sign of God’s kingdom in a world that needs so many signs of a different sort of kingdom and a different sort of reality. We are called into the impossible task of working for Christ like relationships with each other, of modeling love and justice and reconciliation for a world so in need of these things. In a world where we are taught to be individuals, taught to be selfish, this is a scary thing. But this is how God comes to us in the storm.

How do we respond to God’s presence in the middle of the raging storms of our lives? In my case, the answer is that I usually respond poorly. I usually do what I selfishly want to do rather than what I am called to do. I usually would rather ignore the face of Christ when it presents itself to me in a brother or sister who is suffering, who I ought to be struggling with for liberation of both of us. I usually try to isolate myself from community rather than praying for the grace of community, striving to create a community that in its own impoverished way can be a poor model of the kingdom.

But I want to suggest that, if you feel the same way that I do, that Peter—in one of his spot on moments of interpretation of the message of Christ—offers us a solution, or at least the beginnings of one. Peter’s reaction to the presence of Christ in the Galilean storm is a powerful testament of faith. So I’d like to suggest that, in the coming weeks, as you face the storms of this place, the storms of your life, you pray as Peter did.

“Jesus, if that is really you, command me to come out on the water.”

The disciples were afraid. They wanted to stay on the boat, to hide, even if it meant their ultimate destruction. Other’s asked Jesus for miraculous signs. Some might have expected Jesus simply to calm the water, to save them from drowning.

But Peter understood. He asked Jesus for the only sign that would matter—for Jesus to call him out into the storm, to be with Jesus out on the trouble surface of the water.

“Jesus, if that is really you, command me to come out on the water.”

I want to ask you, and for you to ask me, in the weeks ahead, to pray this prayer of Peter’s. When it seems that you are all alone, when it seems that the storms are too much and that you can’t help but sink, I want you to look for the presence of God in your life. I want you to look for the calling of God, for the presence of Christ in the oppressed and the poor, for the body of Christ. And I want you to pray—“Jesus, if that is really you, command me to come out on the water. Don’t let me stay in this sinking ship. Command me to come to you. Even though I am terrified and full of doubts, call me out on the water. Even though I would rather be complacent and comfortable, call me out on the water. Even though I would rather be alone, call me out on the water. Jesus, if that’s really you, call me out on the water.”

Keep praying that prayer. I don’t guarantee any sort of instant result. I don’t give this to you as some sort of “fix your life in 10 days” scheme. We will have doubts. We will have failures. But keep praying this prayer. Because the most surprising thing about this story is that Jesus catches Peter when he begins to lose faith. And though he admonishes Peter—“Why do you doubt, oh you of little faith”—it is only then, when Peter has walked out with faith and then fallen down, that Jesus comes into the boat and calms the storm. It is only after we ask Jesus to call us out on the water and begin walking out towards God, towards our calling, towards the struggle for liberation, towards community, that we begin to discover the God who calms us and grants us true peace. And when we fail—and we will—we will find Christ’s presence there, waiting for us. We will find ourselves safe, even in danger and even in failure. We will find the storm seeming less frightening, less confusing, less real.

I want to end with a story about Martin Luther King, Jr., the African American civil rights leader. King was a Baptist minister, and a believer in the power of nonviolent love to create a more just and peaceful world. King found himself thrust into leadership of the civil rights movement during the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, in which the African American community stopped riding city buses in protest of the segregation policy of the city bus company. King would later reflect back on the boycott, saying: "When I went to Montgomery as a pastor, I had not the slightest idea that I would later become involved in a crisis .... I simply responded to the call of the people for a spokesman."

Although King responded to the call, it wasn’t always smooth sailing. At one point, overwhelmed by responsibility, fearing for his life and the lives of his family as death threats and assassination attempts increased, King considered quitting the movement. One night at his kitchen table, over a cup of coffee, he prayed to God, asking for a way out without seeming to be a coward. He had prayed for God’s calling, but now he was doubting. His faith was beginning to fail.

 Here is what King remembers about this night:

“And I discovered then that religion had to become real to me, and I had to know God for myself. And I bowed over that cup of coffee. I never will forget it .... I prayed a prayer, and I prayed out loud that night. I said, "Lord, I'm down here trying to do what's right. I think the cause that we represent is right. But Lord, I must confess that I'm weak now. I'm faltering. I'm losing my courage. And I can't let the people see me like this because if they see me weak and losing my courage they will begin to get weak. And it seemed at that moment that I could hear an inner voice saying to me, "Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness. Stand up for justice. Stand up for truth. And to I will be with you, even until the end of the world." ...I heard the voice of Jesus saying still to fight on. He promised never to leave me, never to leave me alone. No never alone. No never alone. He promised never to leave me, never to leave me alone.”

Pray this prayer with me, please. “Jesus, if that is you, call me to come out on the water.” And he will promise—even in the face of monstrous injustice, of personal tragedy, of loneliness and depression and indecision, of our failing faith and our increasing doubts—never to leave us alone. Never to leave us alone. Never to leave us alone.