“Bid Me Out!”

August 11, 2002

Matthew 14:22-33

Confidence is an odd thing. I don’t know how you experience it but I experience it in little bundles. At moments I will be supremely confident and have a real sense that I can do just about anything. And then there are moments when I feel as if everything is impossible. Same person the only difference is my confidence level.

Golf, though it is only a game, is a real test of one’s confidence. And it has this funny little quality of eroding one’s confidence if you ever feel as if you are really becoming a golfer. My friend Tom Taylor whom I have known for years and have golfed with countless rounds is forever the optimist. He is not a bad golfer but to hear him talk it is as if he is just a round or two away from greatness. I don’t think there is anything wrong with that. I find it kind of obnoxious but I try not to let Tom annoy me too much.

A couple of years ago Tom had an astoundingly good front nine. He had been playing very good golf for a couple for weeks and it culminated in a below par first nine. He stood smugly on the tenth tee and announced that he thought he had finally “turned the corner” with his golf game. I looked at him in horror and said something like, “Even if that is true Tom it is the last thing you should say, the golf gods don’t like to get beaten.” He dismissed my superstition as superstition and stood up to the next shot as if he was the golfer that he had always envisioned himself to be. Now the truth is that you need some of that but not too much. Confidence is odd that way. Tom started the worst back nine I have seen him or almost anyone ever play by putting his first shot in the water and the next one too. It was like watching a train wreck. Tom said nothing after the round, I said nothing after the round but I kept the card. For his next birthday I had it framed and framed it with his famous words in bold print above the card, “I think that I have finally turned the corner.”

I think that this is why sports are interesting to me. You never know. Even Tiger can have an off day and even the great New York Yankees have been known to lose a game. This is one of my little peeves about what everyone says is wrong with baseball right now. Yes, it is an unfair system but it has always been unfair. The Yankees have always had more money. But baseball has been around a long time. The Yankees fill the roll of goliath, and every once in a while through the magic of competition goliath loses. And that makes it especially fun for everyone else. That actually enhances baseball. This subject is so much a soap box of mine that I have even called sports talk radio to remind them of it. There is one guy who always goes on about the fact that the “small market teams” with a smaller payrolls “don’t have a chance” to compete with the likes of a big payroll teams like the New York Yankees. But the truth is that however diminished the chance might be a game still must be played to determine a winner. The winner will often be determined not by how much money is getting paid to the players but rather by a whole array of other factors and perhaps the most critical is the confidence factor.

Oh and one aside as long as I am talking about baseball. I have an opinion to share with you about the upcoming baseball strike. The baseball players, if they are really unhappy making hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars a year to play a kids game all summer they ought not to go on strike. What they ought to do is quit baseball and get a job. The same goes for the owners. If owning a baseball team is so onerous and financially ruinous sell your team! We don’t need a strike we need the malcontents to go do something else with their time.

Well I could go on and on about that but I won’t because what I am speaking about today is confidence. Confidence is the key to achieving anything. Even if you have the ability if you don’t have the confidence your ability is wasted. It is as necessary to life as breath and yet you can never be certain of it. Confidence is an elusive intangible but utterly necessary part of true living.

Peter in the Bible reading for today has one of those wonderfully confident moments. He sees Jesus doing something impossible and for whatever reason he believes he can do it too. Jesus did say to his disciples that they would be able to accomplish what he did and more but I am not sure that Jesus specifically included walking on water in that. Jesus understands the power of confident faith. On any number of occasions he had remarked to the disciples that if they merely had faith the size of a mustard seed they would be able to do incredible works. So when Peter asks Jesus to “Bid him out.” It was probably exactly what Jesus was hoping for all of the disciples. He was probably waiting and wanting them to take this risk of faith and see for themselves how powerful faith could be.

So Jesus tells Peter to come out of the boat. And Peter then walks right over to him. Peter does not fall in the water like we might expect he walks on the water right over to Jesus. I think that is the bigger miracle here. Jesus could walk on water but so did Peter. That is the part of this story really worth noting. Peter, upon faith, does the impossible. People of course claim that Jesus is way beyond human so for Jesus to walk on water is utterly explainable but Peter, that is something else.

Now I know that after he had accomplished this he began to fear. And he began to sink. But that does not in any way diminish what he did. In fact I think it enhances what he accomplished. It shows that without faith his abilities were nothing but with faith he could do extraordinary things.

This particular scenario is repeated throughout the Bible. The heroes of the Bible accomplish the impossible by faith but at the same time prove to be fallible and human time and again. It is one of the most central themes of the Bible. With faith human beings can do almost anything but without it we are lost.

The story of Elijah defeating the prophets of Baal is one such story. The great prophet Elijah has a contest with four hundred prophets of Baal. The contest has something to do with bringing fire down upon an offering. The prophets of Baal spend all day calling out to their god to take the offering with fire but nothing happens. After a full day of this with a great dramatic flare Elijah has his people pour water over his offering just to make the point and then calls out to God and of course fire consumes the offering and everything around it. The prophets of Baal are seized and are killed.

Elijah is at the height of his powers he would seem to have the universe at his command and yet that very day he is threatened by Queen Jezebel. This man just defeated the four hundred glowering prophets of Baal and yet on a word from Queen Jezebel he flees. What has Elijah to fear? He is the most powerful prophet Israel has ever seen and if he could do in the prophets of Baal one jealous queen should have no effect on him at all. What would she do to him? Tie him to a stake and have him burned? Elijah could call fire down upon her! Couldn’t he?

This is the part of the faith equation that practically no one understands. Faith is not power, it is more like confidence. If faith was power Jesus would not be praying in the Garden of Gethsemane for God to spare his life before his execution. Jesus would have simply zapped the bad men and gone on his way. But that is not what faith is about. Faith is not about what we can accomplish it is about what God can accomplish through us. That is why every great hero seems so fallible at the same time. All of them know that it isn’t what they are doing personally that is making the difference; it is what God is doing. And they have no control over that. Faith in God can make you feel very confident and yet very powerless at the same time. So it is always about trust and not control.

And that is why confidence is so fleeting. We don’t want it that way. We would be far more comfortable being sure of our powers rather than trusting God’s power. But it is not set up that way for a reason. Accomplishing what we need is good for us and that is okay and I guess important. But accomplishing what God needs is good for us and everyone else and that is a far superior endeavor. So God makes us dependent on faith to be confident so we can accomplish what is truly important.