***
With me so far?
The final thing to clear up is
the matter of how the Reverend and I walk on water, but
only seasonally.
It helps if you know where your
snowshoes are.
That’s right. We walk on
the frozen water that turns the landscape in western New
York white as snow in the wintertime. I’m glad that
with age comes wisdom, because as a younger man I had
no idea that I could aspire to such heights of accomplishment.
***
Let us return to the original
assertion, though, the assertion that Jesus walked on
water.
I once doubted such things, but
no longer, and not because I have in my own way, with
my own smoke and mirrors, walked on water myself on a
number of occasions, and plan to do so again, seasonally,
with every expectation of success. I no longer doubt the
small stuff, because I have chosen God at all choice points
in my life.
Jesus walked on water, turned
water into wine, and did some other things that we call
miracles. There seemed to be a preoccupation in the 19th
century with debunking these miracles stories. Earlier
scholars did the equivalent of showing us where the rocks
were, and when they had done this, I wonder, in fact,
what good had they done other than to prove beyond the
shadow of a doubt that they had lost their sense of joy,
wonder, and expectation.
***
One of my favorite crime-solvers
is the portly genius Nero Wolf, in the many detective
novels of the writer Rex
Stout. Wolf solved crimes by using
his noodle, rarely leaving the comforts of his brownstone
mansion in New York City. He had but one method by which
he solved crimes: He looked for a single fact and followed
that fact, with the help of his faithful legman Archie,
until he found the whole truth.
A single fact.
The whole truth.
I wish, for you and for me, that
this matter of walking on water, and the greater and more
wonderful assertions of Christian dogma, the pinnacle
of which is the Resurrection, would yield that one fact
and lead us to the whole truth.
In the end, what a believer has
is a conviction, bordering on fact, that God is God and
that God is alive, and that God is the One who sent the
Son, whom we call Jesus the Christ. By this other path,
we arrive at the whole truth, which we call God.
***
God chooses to be about conviction rather than about fact.
God chooses so, that we might
arrive at a life stance that has power for all, because
of the risks and difficulty we encounter in arriving at
the place where we embrace the faith – conviction
– that God holds out to each one of us.
And our doubts, about the small
details, do not offend God but are proof that we are paying
attention and using all we have to make the decision ever
renewed to follow Jesus.
***
I
once worked with a man whose skills extended to journalism
and divorce; he was good at both, and his strengths as
a journalist put him in charge of the newsroom. After
yet another divorce, and a bad patch with alcohol, he
was back in charge of the newsroom. On the bulletin board,
he posted a short memo:
