Peter’s Sinking Feeling

This sermon was preached by Pastor Ted Carnahan as the fourth installment of the series Saints Behaving Badly on Wednesday, March 18, 2026.

Grace, mercy, and peace be with all of you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

Tonight we're talking about Saints Behaving Badly, and it's not so much that Peter behaves badly here, it's that he doesn't keep behaving goodly.

He starts off here in the boat, but before they ever get into the boat, in today's reading, we have to talk about what just happened before this reading.

The Feeding of the 5,000

What happens immediately before this in Matthew chapter 14 is the Feeding of the 5,000.

Imagine that you are one of the disciples. Let's say you're Philip, because he's the one who asks the question, and Jesus actually asks him a question. He says, "Philip, where are we going to get enough food for all these people to be able to eat?"

He starts doing the math: 15 plus 5, carry it, 5,000, carry the one. We don't have enough money. We genuinely are not going to be able to buy enough. In fact, 200 denarii, 200 days wages, would not be enough to buy food for even everybody here to have a little bit to eat.

Jesus has them all sit down on the grass. He takes the bread, the five loaves and the two fishes he's given, and he breaks it and blesses it and gives it to the people, and it spreads throughout the whole crowd.

When they take up baskets, they have 12 baskets full of leftovers. That's amazing! It's a miracle! It's one of the great miracles that Jesus does that demonstrates his power over reality, that Jesus himself can do this.

Immediately after that, we have the story of Jesus walking on the water and Peter being scared.

Peter's Fear After the Miracle

Imagine, you have been in, you just watched what will become one of the greatest, most famous miracles in the history of mankind.

When everybody says, name a miracle of Jesus, what's one of the very first things you think of? Feeding of the 5,000!

Peter was an eyewitness to that! He just literally earlier this day saw that happen!

Then he gets on a boat and there's a little bit of wind and the storm comes up and he's immediately afraid.

And Jesus comes walking out to him on the water and he can barely keep his focus for even five minutes before he begins to fall into the water and drown.

Totally and completely coincidentally, I taught this exact same story earlier today with third graders with Release Time. I didn't have it planned that way. It's really interesting that it just worked out that way, that I picked this for March 18th and that happened to be the assigned lesson for March 18th.

It was funny because I asked the kids, what are you afraid of? I got a lot of the same standard answers.

Here are some of the fears they mentioned:

• Bugs (which by the way, I don't love bugs. If they fly around my face, I'm not a fan. And if they fly around my face and they have the potential to sting me, I'm really intensely not a fan of that. I'm not that kind of person.)
• Snakes (I was like, well, don't visit our house. We have, my oldest daughter has a pet snake at home.)
• The dark
• Being alone

A couple of them had more serious things to say that I won't share here, but it was interesting to hear these children talking about things that they were genuinely afraid of. Afraid of being left behind, afraid of being alone, afraid of the dark, afraid of bugs and snakes and other things that go bump in the night.

Peter's Background and Relatable Fear

Peter is a grown man. Peter is a grown man! Not only that, he's a fisherman. He literally grew up on and in the water, nonstop, 24-7, practically all of his time, especially in his adult life, all of his time would be dedicated to catching fish in order to feed his family and to earn money and all that good stuff.

And he's afraid of a few waves? A little bit of wind? What on earth is going on here?

I think it's the simple human connection to fear that makes this story so relatable. It's so important to us here at this church. As we walk out tonight, you'll see that beautiful altar painting that's now hanging in our narthex that shows us Jesus walking on water. And where do we see Peter in that particular painting? Not standing triumphantly upon the waves, conquering his fear, but drowning and reaching up to Jesus, hoping that He can pull him up.

That's who we are. Full of fear. Full of doubt.

Cultural Context

What's funny to me about this story also is that it's one of those things that if you understand a little bit more about what's going on in the heads of the people who originally would have heard this.

Matthew was writing to a predominantly Jewish background audience. As he's writing, he's writing things that would make sense to Jewish people, culturally and religiously, things that are going to make sense to them.

One of the things that's true here that I didn't really realize until I went to seminary was that I was told that every good Jewish kid grew up knowing that ghosts can't cross water. Duh! Didn't you know that? Ghosts can't cross water.

This story is intended actually to be kind of funny. The disciples, several of whom are professional fishermen in a boat that they would have been very familiar with, making a short jaunt in the afternoon across the Sea of Galilee, which is basically a glorified lake.

These are expert sailors on a familiar body of water in no major expectation of problems. And then out comes Jesus, walking on the water.

And their first reaction is, oh, it's a ghost!? Well, no, actually, I think Matthew might have told the story the way he did because he's intending for us, or his original audience at least, to realize that there's no way it could be a ghost.

We get a laugh at their expense. You fools, of course it's not a ghost. Everybody knows that ghosts can't walk on water!

Peter's Bold Attempt and Failure

Then here comes Jesus striding across the waves. And what is Peter's first response? I could do that. I could do that.

He says, "Lord, if you command it, ask me to come out onto the waves." That amazing, impetuous, powerful faith of Peter's is willing to charge in at the first sign of an opportunity to excel. Jesus has come. He gets up. He puts his one foot over the side of the boat, and he touches the water, and it holds.

You can almost see the smile of triumph on his face. Ha, ha, ha! Check that out!

Then he steps over with the other foot, and he sticks it down, and it's working. He looks at Jesus, and he starts to walk.

He's walking on the waves, and everything is going great until he remembers that he can't actually walk on water. Poor Peter, he can't actually walk on water.

He realizes that what he's doing is absolutely absurd. Here he is standing in the middle of a lake on top of the water.

(It's almost like Looney Tunes. The laws of Looney Tunes dynamics where, you know, the coyote is not affected by gravity until he realizes that he's supposed to be affected by gravity.)

Then what happens? He looks down. He notices the wind. He notices all the things around him that are supposed to scare him. That is when he starts to sink. That's when he cries out to Jesus, "Lord, save me."

That's when the Lord Jesus walks over and grasps him by the arm and hoists him into the boat.

Lessons from Peter's Doubt

How often we are like Peter! We want to trust the Lord. We want to put all of our eggs in his basket. We want to trust him with our whole lives.

But as soon as things start getting hard, ooh, I don't know about that. We start realizing that this following Jesus stuff means that it's going to have to change some things about our lives. Or it makes it obvious to us that there are actual things in the world to be afraid of. Or we simply just get scared of the dark or realize that what we're doing seems to be walking, not on thin air, but on the thin waves.

We start to sink. It's hard to trust something that we cannot tangibly put our hand out and see and touch and experience.

Jesus says it well in John: Blessed are those who have seen, but blessed more are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.

Faith and doubt are two sides of the same coin.

We have to trust the Lord and take the step and try the water if we can make it work. But also, we have to know that eventually the wind and the waves will get the best of us, and we will begin to drown. No matter how familiar you are with the lake, no matter how well you understand what ghosts apparently can and cannot do on water, no matter how good a fisherman you are or how self-sufficient you may be, in the end, we're kind of like little kids. We're scared of the dark, of bugs, and of things that go bump in the night.

That's when it's our turn to turn to the Lord Jesus and say, "Lord, save me! Lord, save me!" To call out to him like a little child, like a third grader, and say, "Lord, I'm scared. But I need your presence here now because I don't understand how I got myself into this mess. But I know that only you can get me out."

And the good news: he does, every time. Every single time. Somehow, in some way, we can know that that prayer is answered. When we trust the Lord Jesus Christ, we trust him with all of our hearts, we can be sure, somehow, someway, that he will extend his arm to you and me.

Trust the Lord Jesus Christ. Follow the example of St. Peter. Know that he's there.

In Jesus' name. Amen.