I’ve always wanted to be able to walk on water. Maybe it’s because I’m not a good swimmer and I could probably get across a pool faster by walking than by swimming. Maybe it’s because it would be interesting to see people’s reactions: "Look! There’s Bob, walking on water!" I don’t think I’d be willing to try it on the class five rapids in the New River. It didn’t work for Sarah Truxell. She just fell right in. But I would think that walking on water would be fun.

I’ve also sometimes wished I was a Billy Graham type preacher, one who could attract and hold great crowds, one who could convince people by the hundreds of the wonders of a relationship with God through Jesus the Christ. Sometimes I’ve wished I had the wherewithal to proclaim the good news of God’s love so that more and more people would come to be a part of the community of faith.

While we’re on the subject of "it would be nice to," it sure would be nice if I could teach people to see the Bible and the Christian faith in positive, life-affirming, yet common values-challenging ways. I want people to know a God who made us, and everything for that matter, and pronounced it good, very good.

I want people to know a God who loves us just the way we are, a God who went to the extreme of having Jesus of Nazareth proclaim and demonstrate a new way of life and a new relationship between ourselves and God which is available to all. I want people to find a faith which leads us to question the prevailing values of our culture, a faith which calls us to care for one another and for this wondrous earth God has given us. That would be nice.

And how often have I wished for the ability to heal people, people with cancer and Alzheimer’s, people with fractured hips and clogged arteries. The power to do other kinds of healing would be nice too, the power to heal broken relationships, the power to heal fear and insecurity, the power to heal grief and depression. The ability to heal would be great.

In case we’ve missed it, a few things have changed in our world in the past fifty years. One of those changes has been the decline of the influence wielded in our society by churches, especially so-called mainline churches such as ours, the Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, and so on. As recently as twenty or so years ago Jack Johnson was called upon to bless the 460 bypass. I wonder if anybody even considers having blessings for roads any more.

As a result, I fear that folks like us have come to believe that we don’t have much power as Christians, that nobody listens to us. And we’re right - in a sense. We don’t have the kind of power we used to have.

But the fact remains, we can do what Jesus did. We can do what Jesus did.

What I want to point to in the story from Matthew is that at least for a bit, Peter succeeded in walking on the water. Matthew reports very matter of fact like that, "Peter got out of the boat, started walking on the water, and came toward Jesus." Anybody besides me think that’s a rather remarkable sentence? We’re used to accounts of Jesus doing such things, but Peter? Plain ole’ fisherman-turned-disciple Peter? Walking on water?

In fact, when we turn to the book of Acts, the story of the beginning of the church, we find all kinds of accounts of miraculous healings and such performed by members of the early Jesus movement. Luke, writing Acts, says, "many wonders and signs were being done by the apostles." Peter heals a man who was lame from birth. Paul and Silas are dragged before the authorities for casting a spirit out of a slave girl whose owners made money using her gift of "divination."

Then there’s John 14.12. In John 14 verse 12 Jesus says, "Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these." "The works that I do and greater works than these."

Do this mean we all should be able to walk on water? Not necessarily. Jesus basically does three things. First, he proclaims the coming of the kingdom or reign of God. In Luke’s gospel, rather early on, Jesus says, "I must proclaim the good news of the kingdom of God to the other cities also; for I was sent for this purpose." I want to spend a little time here, because I think this is something we tend to take for granted or overlook. We think about other things Jesus does, and rightly so, but he himself says his primary purpose is to let people know that the reign of God is in the process of coming to fruition.

The reign of God, as I understand it, is a set of conditions whereby everyone, that would be everyone, lives in healthy, life-affirming relationships with each other and with God. This means things like no one has so much of the world’s goods that others lack enough to have a healthy, safe life. It means everybody has opportunities for education, access to health care, safety and security, those sorts of things. The reign of God is not where everybody has exactly the same, but where everyone has at least enough to provide for themselves and their families and live in safe, decent conditions. The reign of God is everyone having the opportunity to be the person God has created them to be.

Jesus’ message is that God is working toward this goal. Not here and there. Not every now and then. Not just through a particular church and not just through the church as a whole. God is at work. Everywhere. All the time. Through the centuries and still today we can do a good job of messing up God’s work. We have that power. But God does not stop. God’s reign is still in the process of arriving in its fullness.

And part of our job, perhaps the most important part of our job, is to say that and live toward that every day. Everywhere. Worship is intended, at least in part, to remind us that this is our job, our calling as disciples of Jesus. Our observance at the Lord’s table is intended to remind us, week after longing week, that in spite of appearances to the contrary, God’s reign really is in the process of arriving. We can do what Jesus did by continuing to believe and proclaim the coming of God’s reign on earth. Maybe not to thousands or even hundreds at a time, but in our daily actions and decisions, we can do what Jesus did.

A second thing Jesus does is to teach. Jesus has some significant disagreements with the religious leaders of his day when it comes to interpreting scripture and understanding how God is at work. He sounds like the first testament prophets, for example, in complaining that they a re paying too much attention to the picky little matters of the faith and ignoring the more important matters, such as justice and mercy. He tells them it’s ok for his disciples to pick grain on the Sabbath, even though doing so looks like work. He reminds them that what’s on our inside is more important that what’s on our outside.

From what I can gather, a lot of unchurched people have particular perceptions about what it means to be a Christian. These ideas come from bits and pieces they have picked up from other people or from what they read or see on television. Too often they see Christianity as a religion of living by a set of rules, a list of dos and don’ts. Our faith is perceived to be stuck in the past, and only interested in getting new members for their money. We need to help change those perceptions. We need to teach people that one can be a follower of Jesus and be open to new ways of looking at things, even at the Bible. We need to teach them that the rules which count are love God and love your neighbor. We need to teach them the value of living out our faith in the midst of a community which values openness and acceptance. We may not be as skillful as Jesus, but we can do what he did.

Jesus also performs healings. He does not wander around from place to place looking for people to heal. People come to him, and sometimes he simply encounters people in need. But we are told that he has compassion on those with various afflictions and crippling conditions, and he uses his power to make their bodies, and their lives, whole. While his primary purpose is to proclaim the coming of God’s reign, the healings are one sign that what he is talking about is actually happening.

We can heal people too. Maybe not by all becoming physicians, but by engaging in the various acts of compassion which build and rebuild the lives of those in need. Sometimes it is by helping build a hospital in a place that is medically under served. We do that through the Disciples Mission Fund and the Week of Compassion. But it can also be helping build a Habitat house in our own community, or putting a roof on a house in Mississippi or West Virginia, or installing new ceilings in a house in Louisiana, or, again through Week of Compassion, participating in flood relief in the Midwest and cyclone relief in Myanmar. In our service at the Gateway and through Meals on Wheels and by contributing to Couples and Kids and in all sorts of ways and all sorts of places near and far, we can help heal people’s lives. We can do what Jesus did.

We can do what Jesus did. We can proclaim the coming of the reign of God. We can teach people about the love of God. We can help people heal. We can be those who testify in all that we say and do that we believe Jesus truly is the Son of God.