Lent Midweek I, March 12
“The Hand of the Lord… Who Creates and Saves”
Psalm 8:1-9; Ephesians 2:1-10; Matthew 14:22-33
Hymns: #739 “Precious Lord, Take My Hand”; #715 “Jesus, Savior, Pilot Me”; #692 “Praise to You and Adoration”; #702 “My Faith Looks Up to Thee”
(Begin message by “sharing the peace”)
Dear Friends in Christ,
Grace, mercy, and peace to you, from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus. Amen.
A simple handshake, like the ones we just shared together, is a common gesture of peace and friendship and even love. But where, I wondered, does the custom come from? You know I just had to look it up!
The handshake, it turns out, goes back at least to the tenth century BC. There are Assyrian and Babylonia stone carvings that show ancient kings shaking hands with one another. One theory I read said the custom developed as a way of showing that a person’s hands were empty and that they came in peace - and also a way to make sure someone’s hand didn’t have a knife or a dagger in it. It became a way of sealing an agreement or a peace treaty, or sealing an oath.
In the Arab world and in the Middle East, offering one’s right hand is still a sign of mutual respect and brotherhood, while holding out your left hand is seen as a dire insult. (The right hand is for eating, the left hand for lesser bodily functions).
There was a time in our culture, here in our own country, when a simple handshake meant a good deal more than it does today. Back in the day, a financial transaction or a sale or a business deal could be sealed with just a handshake. A man’s word was his bond, and once two people shook on it, the deal was done, no paperwork or contracts or lawyers or legal documents required. The good old days!
Jesus has a strong hand in our Gospel reading today. Jesus went away to pray, with those always-praying hands of His, while His disciples got into a boat on the Sea of Galilee, while the sun was going down. There in the middle of the night, a storm came up. The wind was in their faces and the waves were crashing against them, until they didn’t have the strength left to make it to shore, despite what all their hands working together could manage to do. It was panic time!
That’s when Jesus decided to go out to them – to give them a hand! He had no boat to reach them, but then again, He didn’t need one. His hands were powerful, but His feet were pretty amazing, too. So through the wind and over the waves He walked, to the place where they were. In the dark and the storm and the general panic, they didn’t recognize Him at first. They thought He was a ghost, a spirit, a phantasm, and that turned up their fright to another level; yikes!
Jesus called out to them, “Take courage! I AM! It’s Me! Don’t be afraid!” And Peter here uses a word he never should have used. Given the circumstances, I guess we can forgive him for it (Jesus did!). Peter said if… “Lord, if it’s you…” Do we trust God or don’t we? Do we believe His hand is holding us always, or don’t we?
Peter, God bless him, was willing to take that first step out of the boat when Jesus said, “Come!” while the rest of the disciples stayed where they were - which tells us a lot about the man. That was more than you or I or most of us would have done. Peter took a step or two, which is more than any human being has been able to do before or since. But, oh man, that wind was gusting, and the waves were high. Peter suddenly realized where he was, and who he was, and what he was doing (like Wile E. Coyote realizing he’s gone over the edge of the cliff, again). And he took his eyes off of Jesus to consider his circumstances, and down he went.
Here’s the part where we need to watch the hands of Jesus. Peter called out the world’s shortest, but maybe the world’s most effective prayer - what someone has called “the perfect prayer for dire circumstances” - “Lord, save me!” Peter’s hands were powerless, he was helpless, he was going to die; but the God who loved him reached out His hand and answered his prayer.
When I was living down in Kentucky, a local pastor was doing a full immersion Baptism in the Ohio River. He dunked the gentelman under the water, “in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,” and the man came up from the water and raised his hands above his head and shouted, “Hallelujah!” Then he slipped off a ledge in the riverbed behind him, and the current swept him away and he drowned. (They found his body 30 miles downstream). Not a bad way to go, when you think about it, at the moment when his faith was sure.
But Jesus saved Peter at a moment when his faith was weak - which is good news for us, because it tells us that God will save us even when we’re weak, not only when we’re strong. Having great faith is a good thing; but a little bit of faith goes a long way, too.
Jesus answered Peter’s desperate prayer by reaching out His hand to save him. Then, says our Gospel, Jesus and Peter got back into the boat, and the wind and the waves just stopped, the storm instantly and all-at-once over. Who is this man? The disciples in the boat all said, “Truly You are the Son of God.” In another storm-calming Gospel story, they say, “Who is this? Even the wind and the waves obey Him!”
Who is this man, and what can those hands of His do? Jesus truly is the God who has control over nature, over the wind and the waves and the storms and the sea (even if it may not look like it to us while we’re in the middle of it) - Because He’s the One whose hands created and made all things, including you and me. “By Him all things were made,” we confess in our Nicene Creed.
Jesus is also the God of judgment and justice, the One whose hand will judge us and all the world at the end of all things (which is a good thing to keep in mind when we’re deciding what to put our hands to doing). “It’s a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the living God,” the writer of Hebrews says. But He’s also, thanks be to God, a God of mercy and compassion, a God who’s always more than willing to reach down His hand to save us.
God sent His Son to earth with tiny infant hands, there in Bethlehem’s manger. Jesus grew up to have merciful hands, hands that reached out to help and heal everyone who came to Him, crying out that desperate “Lord, save me!” prayer. He had hands powerful enough to make the wind and waves obey Him, but also gentle enough to embrace and bless a child.
And finally those hands of His were nailed to a cross for our sakes. Those nail-scarred hands of His brought us forgiveness for our sin. Those bleeding hands of His shed the precious blood that makes our own sin-stained hands clean again. And we can’t ever forget or quit thanking God that those nail-scarred hands became living hands again, scars the disciples got to put their fingers in when He was raised to life again.
“As for you”, says St. Paul – and he means you and me and all of us – we were dead in our sins, and dead because of our sin. These hands of ours were following the desires of our sinful hearts, and we were “by nature objects of God’s wrath”, Paul says. Caught red-handed in our sin, in other words.
“But,” says Paul (and how I’ve come to love that little word!) – “But, because of His great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, has made us alive in Christ, even when we were dead on our transgressions – it is by grace you have been saved.”
God “raised us up with Christ,” Paul says, raised us up with Christ as surely as the hand of Jesus plucked Peter from the water - all by the riches of God’s grace and by His lovingkindness. Not by our works, Paul is careful to point out, not by anything these hands of our can do - but only by the grace of God.
So “we are God’s workmanship,” Paul says. An amazing turn of a phrase that is - God’s workmanship, His creation, the work of His hands, “fearfully and wonderfully made” to do good works, to do works of love and mercy, with these hands God has given us.
May our hands be as much like the hands of Jesus as our poor humanity allows us to do - hands that fold in prayer, hands that reach out to help our neighbors, hands that point people to the loving and forgiving hands of Christ.
And so we pray: “Create in me a clean heart, O God.” Sacred hands and sacred heart of Jesus, stay with us, and be with us; direct us, lead us, guide us, and show us Your Way. Precious Lord, may we have hearts after Your own heart, and may our hands be Your hands, as we tell world around us what Your hands can do. In Jesus’ name; Amen.