“Did you know a rock can float?” I looked at my grandfather as we both stood on the edge of the fishing pond. Even at seven years old or so, I knew that he had a terrible poker face, and sure enough, the sides of his mouth were twitching with the effort to keep from smiling. So I knew this was a joke, but decided to play along. “A rock can’t float,” I replied; “it’ll sink.” “I can make a rock float,” he persisted; “want to see?” Anytime my grandfather said, “want to see?” the answer was always yes, so I agreed. He reached down, rooted around in the soil at the water’s edge for a moment, and picked up a rock.
He showed it to me: about twice the size of a quarter, flat 
but with a bit of substance to it. He cocked his arm back, and then it flew forward, side-arm style, and the rock went flying out over the pond, then skipped five or six times: a long skip, a few progressively shorter ones, and then two or three close together before it sunk. I had never seen anybody skip a rock before, and it was pretty impressive. We turned to each other and, at the same time, said, “see?” “It floated!” he laughed insistently; “it sank!” I protested. Finally, he relented. “Well, it eventually sank. But it did some nice floating there for a moment, didn’t it?”
I can never read this story about Peter, whose name means “Rock,” walking on water without remembering that story. Peter, too, eventually sank, but he did some nice floating there for a moment, didn’t he? To be fair, it’s hard for a rock to skip itself, it’s (presumably) the first time he ever tried, and it has been a very taxing night before he tries it as the morning is finally breaking.
After the dramatic events of the feeding of five thousand people from just a few loaves of bread and some fish, Jesus tells his disciples to go ahead of him by boat to the other side of the lake, probably just to get a little peace and quiet for himself, so they do. It’s an uneventful cruise at first as the evening grows dark, but soon they find themselves battered about by rough seas and howling winds. Fighting to stay afloat, much less going in the right direction, the disciples battle the storm for hours.
Finally, as the sky begins to lighten, a figure appears striding across the water, and that’s when they really start to panic, thinking it is a ghost. Jesus doesn’t keep them in suspense for a second, though: immediately he says, “Take heart; it is I. Do not be afraid.” But Peter isn’t sure; he needs some proof. He needs another one of Jesus’ signature miracles to be sure it’s really Jesus. And so he asks Jesus to skip a rock: “Lord, if it is you,” he says, “command me to come to you on the water.”
Jesus was the one who named him Peter, after all, which means “Rock.” only Jesus can make a Rock float, he reasons, so he issues the challenge. And Jesus does it; tells him to come to him. Peter steps out, and at first he’s actually able to do it: walk on water. Can you imagine? It must have been overwhelming for him, the thrill of that mixture of fear and adrenaline and pride coursing through him as he walks toward Jesus, doing what no human being is supposed to be able to do, knowing that the other disciples are watching him from the boat, and he imagines how they’ll react to him when he comes back safely.
But it doesn’t last. As he walks, the wind begins to seem more real and powerful than Jesus; Peter falters, and Jesus ends up having to rescue him from drowning as he sinks into the waves that he was striding across so audaciously just a few moments before. You of little faith,” Jesus says sadly; “why did you doubt?”
If only Peter had enough faith, he could have walked on water. That seems to be the point of this story, doesn’t it? If only he had stayed focused on Jesus, refused to let himself be distracted by the winds; if only he had had enough faith, he would have succeeded. That seems like a pretty straightforward lesson. And it’s a very popular one, one that we hear frequently not only in sermons, but throughout American culture. Americans in general are people that believe in believing, that have faith in faith, even when they’re neither spiritual nor religious.
“You gotta have faith!” we say about whatever challenges we’re trying to overcome; “you gotta believe!” You can do it, you can do anything, if you just believe. How many times have you heard that? “We never gave up,” the triumphant athlete says to the interviewer in the locker room of the victorious underdogs. “Even when everyone said we couldn’t do it, we always believed we were going to come out on top.”
“I never stopped believing it was possible,” says the successful entrepreneur on the talk show, recalling her daunting struggle to succeed; “I always knew that this would be a success, even when everyone else was telling me I should just give up.” We love the idea that if you believe hard enough, the ordinary can become the extraordinary; the impossible can become possible; miracles can and will happen, if we only just believe. If only Peter had had enough faith, he could have made a rock float; he could have walked on water.
But how much faith is enough? That seems like a pretty important question here. What does “enough” even mean? It is the quantity of our faith, how much of it we have? Is it the quality of our faith, how strong and pure it is? Certainly, those have both been popular answers by some in the Christian church throughout the ages, but they’re both wrong, and this passage helps us see why. Our faith is not in the power of faith itself, whether in its quality or quantity; our faith is in the power and generosity of God’s grace. Faith is a response to God’s gracious decision to come to us; it is not an achievement in which we gather enough of what we need to make our way to God, or manufacture God’s grace for ourselves. And that is an extraordinary blessing, because there are times when our faith alone just isn’t enough to keep us afloat.
While serving a previous church, I was in Zimbabwe leading a church mission team on a partnership exploration trip and had an extraordinary conversation with a man named Joseph who was probably about 80 years old. Joseph had retired as a middle-level civil servant in the early 1990s, when Zimbabwe was considered a fairly stable, fairly prosperous country in sub-Saharan Africa. He had worked hard to get a government job and keep it, even though he might have made a higher salary in private business, because the government guaranteed him a pension for life when he retired, and he wanted that security.
And, after a fashion, the government kept its promise: Joseph was still getting his pension check every month. But at the time, the Zimbabwean economy was collapsing under the systemic corruption of its government, and inflation was skyrocketing; while we were there, the exchange rate was at least 250 million dollars to just 1 U.S. dollar, and growing worse so fast that you couldn’t even keep up with the figures. People would spend money as soon as they were paid, because if they didn’t, it would be worth noticeably less the next day. When I met Joseph, he told me that his entire monthly pension check was not enough to buy a single loaf of bread. Let me say that again: his entire monthly pension income, what he had spent his entire life working for to provide for all his modest but comfortable living expenses in retirement, would not buy him a single loaf of bread.
Well, I honestly had no idea how to respond to that, so I simply asked him how he was living. “Through faith,” he said simply. “But Jesus’ faith, not mine,” he said, and actually chuckled; “for my faith is not strong enough for life in Zimbabwe these days.” I replied that while people do not live by bread alone, bread is still pretty important, and I asked how he’s eating. “Well, that is how I know Jesus is faithful,” he said. “We are all suffering, and yet we do not fight one another, we do not cheat one another; we take care of one another. Just like the first disciples, we hold everything in common. Today my chicken lays a few eggs, and my neighbors and I eat. Tomorrow someone else finds some flour and makes biscuits, and my neighbors and I eat. The next week someone else picks some corn from their garden, and my neighbors and I eat.” He looked at me, and he smiled. “We are all in the same boat, my friend,” he said; “Jesus has been faithful, and he has gotten us this far together, so together we must stay.”
We are all in the same boat, so together we must stay. That is Peter’s great mistake: he’s not interested in just staying together with the other disciples in the same boat; he wants something more, something that is unique to him alone. But in trying to set himself apart from the other disciples, everything he does is wrong: Jesus says, “take heart, do not be afraid,” but Peter remains frightened; Jesus reveals himself by saying, “It is I,” but Peter doubts it is him; Jesus orders the disciples to get into the boat together, but when Jesus comes out to save them, Peter stops him and asks him to let Peter come out to him while the other disciples in the boat are still in danger! Every step of the way, Peter doubts Jesus, challenges him, mistrusts him, disbelieves him.
The point of this story is not, “If Peter had had enough faith, he could have walked on water.” The point is that if Peter had had enough faith, he wouldn’t have left the boat in the first place. Jesus isn’t chastising Peter for failing to walk on water; he’s chastising him for wanting to, for not having enough faith to stay in the boat with the other disciples and trust that Jesus will get them through, and get them through together. “Take heart; it is I. Do not be afraid,” he says. He doesn’t ask them to believe hard enough for miracles to happen. They don’t have to silence the winds; they don’t have to control the sea; they don’t have to walk on water.
They just have to take heart and not be afraid, trusting that Jesus will get them through together. And that’s good news, because I suspect most of us are a lot more like the rest of the disciples than we are like Peter. Most of us are not daring Jesus to give us the power and opportunity to experience things that few or no other people have done. Most of us are just trying not to get lost at sea in all the winds and waves that threaten to overwhelm us.
How much faith is enough? Enough is never enough if we mean having enough faith to save ourselves. The great irony of faith is that enough is enough when we accept that we will never have enough to save ourselves, to set off on our own and sustain ourselves alone across the wind-whipped waves. Enough is enough when we can stay in the boat with the community of disciples and listen to Jesus when he draws near in the midst of whatever waves are battering us and whatever winds are against us and says, “Take heart; it is I. Do not be afraid.” That is more than enough; that’s everything.