“Have you ever thought about what an odd thing that is to say in this situation? It sounds almost idiotic. I try to put myself in Peter’s position. I don’t know what Jesus is doing, or how he’s doing it, but if I see him walking on the water in a storm that might cause me to drown, I imagine I would say, ‘Jesus, come get in the boat!’ I’d even throw him a life jacket. I’d reach out my hand to help pull him in. But Peter does the opposite. He has the audacity to ask Jesus to bid him to step out of the boat and walk on the water. That gives you a clue as to why Peter is the prince of the apostles. When everyone else was too scared or too confused to respond, Peter took the lead. He alone thought to himself, ‘If Jesus can walk on the water, maybe I can do it too.’ ”

Rev. Adam Hamilton, “Simon Peter: Flawed but Faithful Disciple”

I think we should all agree that Rev. Hamilton is correct. What Peter does in this telling of the story is absolutely strange. Who, being in the right frame of mind, would possibly make that same choice to decide to get out of a perfectly good boat to walk on the water? Simon Peter actually stepped out of the boat and onto the water just moments after everyone around him was freaking out and believing that Jesus was a ghost.

You know those videos that have the security camera footage where the absolutely unexplainable happens? You know, those weird videos where one moment everything will be quiet and the next moment there’s a disembodied head floating past a window. Jesus is effectively out there like a disembodied head in the window and Peter says, “Hey, I should go over there!”

Why? Peter, why? Who goes into the dark basement when there’s a serial killer on the loose? Who goes for a walk through the graveyard when that weird meteorite is passing over head and letting off strange radiation? Who gets out of a sailboat in the middle of a storm when there’s almost not chance you could swim through the wind and the waves?

Simon Peter, that’s who. Rev. Hamilton calls him the prince of the disciples and I have to be honest, that’s a weird way to describe someone who risked winning the Darwin Award. Hamilton puts it clearly:

“Peter had been working on the water for his entire adult life. His experience had taught him that getting out of a boat on the lake meant that a person either would have to sink or swim; walking was not an option. And in a storm like that, and being far from shore, swimming wasn’t much of an option either. Yet here was Simon Peter, stepping out of the boat, no life jacket, no life buoy. Just Jesus.”

What Peter does in this story is completely off the rails and is profoundly absurd. Peter arguably does one of the craziest things a person does in scripture. Peter also is the only one of twelve who came to know what it was like to walk on water that day. Rev. Hamilton does point out that Peter waits for Jesus to invite him instead of just stepping out of the boat, but it is still an arguably unhinged thing to even think to ask such a question.

Perhaps the difference between being faithful and being unhinged is, occasionally, a matter of perspective. It is an interesting to consider now and again.

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Our church is offering a short-term Bible study for the season of Lent. While many studies for the season traditionally focus on spiritual practices or on the stories of holy week, this year we are reading “Simon Peter: Flawed but Faithful Disciple” by Rev. Adam Hamilton. The idea of the study is that we might consider how we follow Christ in our lives while considering the life of this flawed follower. These blog posts are designed with a principle I have learned from recovery work: “We identify with the stories of others and try not to contrast.” We grow more and live with greater serenity when we look for what we share in common with someone with whom we might otherwise disagree.