The late but modern monk, Thomas Merton, was a writer of profound insight into the spiritual life. In his little but big book, Life and Holiness, he writes what we have to understand at the outset of any search for personal peace: There is no spiritual life without persistent struggle and interior conflict. So if you have come this morning and seen the title of my sermon, “Peace with God,” and you think I am going to give you three points and a poem that will send you packing with a lifetime lock on peace, think again. The Christian life is not about shortcuts to our desired destinations; it is about desiring the right destination and learning how to walk sure-footedly toward it.

That’s just what we see in this water-walking story from Matthew’s Gospel as Jesus and then Peter — at least for a few gravity-defying steps in the right direction — show us. Let’s wander through the story today, keeping an ear open for echoes of Paul in his letter to the Philippians as we do.

Jesus has just fed five thousand men — women and children didn’t figure in the figures back then. Go figure. Five loaves and two fish are all it took to make a feast for the masses, which is an image of the mass that is the Lord’s Supper that fills us all, time after time, because the bread and wine from our personal pantries don’t penetrate all the way to the soul.

Immediately, Matthew says, Jesus made the disciples get into a boat and head for the other side of the lake, while he dismissed the crowds and went off to pray by himself. We find here one key to peace with God. Jesus is the eternal Son of God, and yet he gets apart to pray, to communicate and to commune with God. In any relationship of life, intentional effort to set apart time to together is the key to communion. Peace and proximity go together. You cannot experience the inner harmony of souls while repeatedly separated in body. And the same is true in our relationship with God. If we want to know the peace of God and to share in it, we have to make time to be alone with God, to get away from the crowds and even our closest friends to be with the one who alone is peace and can give it to us.

Even for Jesus, God is the source of peace. The very life of God is intimate relationship of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. So if God is peace, it is a shared peace that is experienced even in God only in the constant renewal and refreshment of that relationship of love. If Jesus tried to go it alone in his earthly life, he would quickly find himself set against God and depleted of resources. By returning again and again in prayer to the God who literally constituted his life, Jesus lived with a peace that passes human understanding.

We all want a piece of that peace ourselves — a peace that passes understanding. We looked last week at the peace of God, and this week peace with God. We want to know how to experience that peace personally. The first thing is to be in relationship with that God, who wants to give us peace. We shall see as we move through this text that peace with God is a product of trusting Christ with our lives. He is the one who leads us to share in his relationship with the God of peace. If you do not know Christ, you do not know the peace that passes understanding. But there is no hindrance to your knowing him. He is coming to you even now.

We see that when Jesus comes walking on the water to be with his disciples. But let’s not miss some other important aspects of this story. Jesus sent the disciples out on their own in the boat where they encountered rough weather. When the early church preachers preached this story they almost always saw that the disciples in the boat represent the church. We are in this together, fair weather or foul. Christ has thrown us together, pushed us in the same boat with one another. We may think we are captains of our own destiny, but we are none of us charting a course to the other side of the lake or the grave by ourselves. We have one another as companions for the journey. Peace is a personal experience, like salvation itself, but it is never a private possession of any individual. The peace of God is passed to us through Jesus Christ, and then we pass it to one another. In fact, just for practice this morning, even though it’s not a communion Sunday, let do just that. The peace of the Lord be always with you. And also with you. Good, now pass the peace to those around you.

Next, notice the winds and the waves came up while the disciples were at sea so that they could not get to the other side. Why would Jesus allow them to encounter such trouble? I mean, if a church doesn’t have smooth sailing, it must be because of sin or the devil or bad leadership, right? Surely God would only want us to have calm winds and placid waters. Not necessarily. This is one thing we need to disabuse ourselves of if we are going to grow in Christ. Circumstance does not dictate the peace. Things that are larger than us happen to us all the time, making us feel powerless and leaving us wondering if we have done something wrong to deserve it all. The economy goes bad and you are unemployed or reshuffled. You start to think that Enron was a personal act of God committed against you. Or you have children that don’t do what you have always prayed for them to do. By the time they are three, you realize they have minds of their own and you don’t really own them. But sometimes we cannot get ourselves to believe that figuring out whose fault it is doesn’t change anything. Only figuring out how to change oneself in light of it will do any good. Some of you have lost spouses to death or divorce, you have lost children or suffered with them illnesses or accidents that are winds and waves you don’t deserve and cannot control. Why these things happen, and why these things happen to some and not others is a mystery about as great as where the weather comes from.

Christ does not immediately calm the winds and waves as a way to give us peace. See how Mathew tells us the weather kicked up in the evening and Jesus waiting until morning to join them in it. We don’t know why that is, unless he knows that some emotional and even physical distance is needful sometimes to remind us of our need for one another. Jesus does not rush to change the weather; he teaches us instead how to weather it. The old cliché comes to mind here: Peace is not the absence of trouble; it is the presence of God.

In the midst of the storm Jesus comes walking on the waves and scares the living death out of the disciples. They think he is a ghost, which is exactly what I would have thought. You? But as incredible as this seems, Jesus possesses a more incredible lightness of being. He is grounded in heaven more than earth. God is his center of gravity, so he can ride the tempest.

Jesus comes to the frightened church and declares, Courage! I AM. Fear not. Take heart, he says. God is present. I am, he says. The same I AM that should remind us of the God who told Moses that the name of the one who spoke to him from the bush is I AM. It wouldn’t be a bad inscription over the portal of any church or a tattoo on the bottom of any Christian: Courage! I AM. Fear not. (If any of you kids come home with that tattoo on your butt, tell your parents it was Jesus, not George!)

Peter sees Jesus walking on the water and decides he wants to get him some of that, as they say in some parts of Texas. So he asks for it. He prays, Command me to come to you. Peter knows he can’t set out on his own without sinking, so he asks Jesus to command him to act. This is exactly what Jesus wants us to do. All belief and all bold acts of belief come from the God who gives pardon and power. Pardon and power are the first two gifts of God to us: forgiveness of sins and the power to live as forgiven sinners. That power comes only in the Christ that lives in and through us. God does not give us special techniques for acquiring peace; the Christian life is about praying for and receiving the very personal presence of Christ that comes from the Holy Spirit and gives us a share in the peace of God.

The wind and waves represent the chaos of life that wants to deprive us of peace by convincing us that we are over our heads in the world. Peter trusts Jesus enough to venture out of the boat. He walks on the water and learns to rise above the chaos.

During my college years I remember meeting a friend from my church who worked with students. I had had a bad day at practice, and my college football career wasn’t panning out the way I planned. Good thing for the preacher career plan, don’t you know?! I didn’t know that at the time, of course, and was still in the blaming phase, thinking I was more victimized by the coaches than my ability. He asked me how I was doing, and I said, Okay, I guess, under the circumstances. He looked at me with the kind of look that either Jesus or your mother might look at you with and said, Well, what are you doing living under the circumstances?

As long as Peter kept his eyes on Jesus and drew strength from his power, he lived above the circumstances that threatened to undo him. But immediately upon taking his eyes off Jesus, Matthew says, he noticed the strong wind, he became frightened, and, beginning to sink, he cried out, “Lord, save me.” And the good news is that he does. Christ saves us again and again and again.

We have a choice before we sink and have to be saved. We can look at the chaos or look to the Creator. We can focus on our troubles or focus on the Lord. One way weighs us down with worry and causes us to sink; the other way lightens the soul and is uplifting.

We experience the presence of God and the peace that presence brings by attending to Christ among us. By practicing his presence. Prayer is one way to do that: Command me to come to you, Lord. Meditation upon the things of Christ is another. Paul says to set our minds on things that are good and true and worthy. By doing so, we keep ourselves from becoming fearful by attending to the chaos around us.

Golfer Gary Player won his third green jacket as Masters champion in 1977 at age 42. They asked him afterward about the luck you have to have to win a tournament like that. Yes, but you know I learned that the more I practice, the luckier I get.

The peace of God is the gift of God’s own self to us in Jesus Christ, but the more we practice the presence of Christ, the luckier — no, the more blessed — we are. Merton is right: perfect peace without inner conflict is not to be known this side of the grave. But Jesus isn’t waiting to give us his peace now. Perfect yet it floweth, fuller every day; perfect yet it groweth, deeper all the way. [Frances Havergal, “Like a River Glorious”]

As he would promise us abiding love, I think Jesus would also say to us today, I promise you peace. And time can’t take away that.