“The Virtue of Innocence”

The Reverend Thomas G. Steffen

St. Peter’s United Methodist Church

10 August 2008

Of the three gospel narratives that record the incident of Jesus walking on the water, only Matthew’s account has Peter walking out on the water to meet Jesus. Jesus, you’ll remember, wants to be alone and remains on land while his disciples travel ahead of him by boat to their next destination. This story flows quite nicely from the feeding of the 5,000, which begins, you’ll remember, with the desire of Jesus and his followers to withdraw for a time of rest and refreshment. Most of an entire day passes before Jesus meets up with his disciples. We are told that he walks on water, the Sea of Galilee, which really isn’t a sea but a natural lake, Lake Gennesaret, the only fresh-water lake in Palestine/Israel. Matthew suggests that the disciples believe they are seeing a ghost and are scared to death. But Jesus calls to them, “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.” Peter replies, “If it is you, command me to come to you on the water,” and Jesus says “Come.” And so Peter gets out of the boat, starts to walk on the water, but loses his nerve when the wind picks up and he begins to sink. He calls out to Jesus, “Save me, Lord,” and Jesus reaches out his hand, catches him, and says, “You of little faith, why did you doubt?” And the story ends with Peter and Jesus getting into the boat, the wind ceases, and (in Matthew’s account) someone in the boat says, “Truly you are the Son of God.”

I’m not sure what you make of that story, but for me it has served as an inspiring backdrop to a week of storytelling, singing, crafts, games, and snacks; a week of wonderful chaos with wonderful adults and kids. Brooding on this story during a week of VBS reminded me of the importance of thinking, playing, and praying with the innocence of a child. Innocence. Remember the experience? Regardless, it seems to me that we need to honor the art of telling stories and the experience of hearing stories, stories that re-introduce us to God, the God we thoroughly moderns tend to forget.

This is not the role of doctrine, guidelines, policy, or politics; it is the role of the imagination, creativity, and story, because it through imagination, creativity, and story that God is in the world. Or as Sara Maitland, in her book A Big-Enough God, suggests it is “the way the world of matter is and therefore the way we are.” How else do we discover anything that matters? Without imagination, creativity, and narrative, we are lost in the cosmos.

Take a look at this extended quote from Maitland’s book: “The naïvety of childhood is the naïvety of ignorance, but this second naivety is to become innocent, knowing that while ignorance is an unfortunate fact of life, innocence is a demanding virtue: open-minded, simple-minded without loss of knowledge or integrity, becoming as a little child again without the security blanket of lack of data; with a determination to find the world beautiful, magical, wild beyond dreams, dancing its complex patterns of truth, weaving its multi-colored threads of discourse so that all things can be true and we can once more be ravished by the beauty of God as revealed by choice, by loving power, in the whole dense, disorderly, chaotic, and joyful universe.”

To be naïve is seldom recognized as a “virtue,” because a naïve person can be easily fooled, tricked, or blind to complexity, unaware of depth, texture, and mystery. But this “second naïvety” holds out for this other way to be in the world, another way to function even in a modern world, a way to be with God and with each other.

Oh, to be open-minded without loss of knowledge or integrity, to be a child again without a lack of data; to live determined to find the world beautiful, magical, wild beyond dreams, dancing its complex patterns of truth; to be ravished by the beauty of God in the whole dense, disorderly, chaotic, and joyful universe. Oh, to be a child again – to be this way again, and to be this way here at St. Peter’s, well, it doesn’t get any better than that. And there is no higher calling to which we can aspire. Oh, there are other things we must do, but none will thrill us as much.

So, let us pray that all who walked these trails and gathered in this forest this past week caught a glimpse of the beauty of God and the wonder of God’s dancing complex patterns of truth, tucked away in story and activated by imagination, in the story of God’s love affair with the human family. Amen.

My thanks to Reva Allington, a friend and a member of St. Peter’s UMC, who edits my sermons.