“That first reading about Elijah is one that is always powerful for me personally. The first pilgrimage I made to the Holy Land we were able to go down to Mt. Sinai or as it’s called here, Horeb, and we climbed up to the top of Mt. Sinai and on the way down we stopped and paused at what is believed to be the cave that Elijah had gone to and I remember reading aloud this passage about that manifestation of God that God did not manifest himself in the typical form of a theophany, but rather in simplicity. He didn’t come in the fire or the wind or the earthquake, but he came in the simple whispering sound and that’s how God comes into our own lives into our own hearts. It’s not so much in the dramatic, it’s not in the moment of just huge insight, but rather that God continually is present there with his grace. He comes to us in the simple things of our life and the opportunities that we have to serve the opportunities we have to pray to encounter him not in grandiose, but in the simple.
Our Gospel today is certainly one we are all familiar with of the apostles out there on the rather chaotic sea and Jesus coming and walking across the water certainly a great manifestation of that divinity of Christ, but that whole encounter there between Peter and Jesus is so important and there’s many lessons to be learned from that. I’m reminded of an incident that happened during the lifetime of some of us and that was when Roger Bannister broke the 4:00 mile. I don’t know how many of you remember that, but the 4:00 mile was always considered kind of the fastest that a human being could run and the idea of breaking the 4:00 mile was always seen as one of those great landmarks and so Roger Bannister did not feel himself that he could break that 4:00 mile, but his coach believed in him and his coach kept saying, ‘You can do it, Roger, you can run that fast.’ and one day he did. He ran it in 3:59 and that was a huge accomplishment in the racing world, but just a few weeks later an Australian by the name of John Landy also broke the 4:00 mile and so some of the promoters said, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we put the tow of the together and had a race and see who wins that race since both of them had broken that 4:00 mile?’ And so, they had a race up in Canada and the fact is that John Lady was the one who was in the lead almost the whole time and he was coming down to the finish, but he looked back to see Roger Bannister who was close behind him and Roger took advantage of that moment, raced ahead of him and won the race. John took his eye off the finish line and in doing so he lost the race. The lessons are simple: Roger had to have faith in his coach who had faith in him and he had to keep his eyes on the finish line and so it is with all of us that we in our life need to have faith in God for faith teaches us that we are able to do much more than what we think we can accomplish on our own. Faith in Christ and in the gift of his word challenges us to ever greater heights of holiness to greater acts of love and service to deeper joy and deeper happiness and Jesus always says to us as he said to Peter, ‘You can do it.’ Peter had faith initially, but then he looked down at the chaos of the water and the depth of the water and the wind that was there and he began to sink because he took his eyes off of Jesus. He took his eyes off of the goal and began to just look at the chaos and obviously there’s a lot of chaos within our world this day, there’s a lot of chaos through the pandemic, there’s chaos through the violence, the unrest, there is the chaos of racism, there is that chaos even of good things, but done to extreme all of those various temptations that we have as we look at the chaos of the world that puts more emphasis on the material than the spiritual on the consumer rather than on the giving and so we are tempted to look at the chaos, but Jesus invites us to continue to come forward to him and so we need to cry out to Christ, ‘Lord save me!’ And Jesus will save us. We need to fix our eyes on the goal and to have faith in Christ Jesus.”