Today, the message from the readings is all about faith – and action. In the Old Testament reading from 1 Kings, we hear the story of the prophet Elijah who was told to go stand on a mountain to wait for the Lord to pass by. First came a great wind, then an earthquake, then a fire but the Lord was not in any of these. After all this drama, suddenly everything went still and was silent. It was in this complete silence that Elijah finally heard the Lord speaking to him, telling him what to do next. Elijah accepted his next mission from the Lord and set out to do it.

In the reading from the Gospel of Matthew, we have yet more drama: Jesus had gone off by himself to pray and the disciples were trying to sail their boat across the lake of Galilee, against a strong head wind. They struggle all night long against the wind and waves but by dawn they had still not reached the other side of the lake. It was then that they saw a figure walking towards them across the water. They are terrified and think they’ve seen a ghost but Jesus speaks to them and tells them not to be afraid.

The ever-impetuous Peter calls out to Jesus and Jesus commands Peter to come to him. Peter leaps out of the boat and starts striding across the water towards Jesus but then he becomes frightened and begins to sink. Jesus rescues Peter and helps him into the boat, with the piercing question, “You of little faith, why did you doubt?”

Elijah waited in faith to hear the Lord. He trusted that God would speak, and, against his expectations, he eventually heard God in the quiet and stillness.

At first, Peter launched out in faith and was able to walk on the water. He only started to sink when he became aware of the strength of the wind. Jesus’ question implies that if Peter had kept focused on Jesus, he would have been able to continue to walk on the water. It was not the weather conditions, or the laws of physics, but Peter’s distraction away from Jesus that caused him to sink.

The passage from Paul’s letter to Romans contains some of the boldest statements about the importance of faith. Paul writes that if we confess that Jesus is Lord and believe that God raised him from the dead, we will be saved. It is our faith in Christ that saves us. Again, Paul states that ‘everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved’. Our faith and our reliance on God save us. This, of course, echoes what Jesus said time and time again to the people who came to him to be healed. So often he said, as he said to the woman who was healed by touching the hem of his robe, ‘Go in peace. Your faith has made you well.’

I pray that these passages inspire you to have faith in Jesus, the kind of faith that is willing to withstand the winds, earthquakes and fires of life, in order to get to the place where you can hear God speaking to you in the silence; the kind of faith that catapults you out of your preconceptions about what is possible, so that you are able to set out walking across wild waves in order to reach our loving Lord, the only One in whom we find true safety and in whom we hear the words of life. Both Elijah and Paul had faith but they had to act on it.

The Revd Christina Rees