The Sea is so Wide and Our Boats are so Small August 9, 2026

Dear Lord, be good to us. The sea is so wide and our boats are so small.  Amen.

When I worked in Israel for a summer twenty years ago, I met a man named Yuval.  Yuval was a retired fisherman in his 70s.  He had spent his whole life fishing on the Sea of Galilee as had his father and his grandfather. 

He was a real character – he looked exactly like you would expect a fisherman on the Sea of Galilee to look. 

Anyway, Yuval never mentioned it, but I eventually learned that he and his brother had saved the Kibbutz where I was staying from extinction.  Most of these Israeli farming collectives have had to find alternative sources of income in recent years.  

And while his kibbutz was in danger of going under, Yuval and his brother – both amateur archeologists – were poking around the edge of the Sea of Galilee in an area that was newly exposed due to a drought.  They saw a couple of curved planks of wood sticking up out of the sand.  And because they were fishermen, they knew exactly what they were looking at – the skeleton of a boat.  And a very, very old boat at that.

They called in the Israeli Antiquities Authority, who determined that the boat dated from about fifty years before the birth of Christ, 2000 years old.  The Kibbutz was saved.  In fact, it has become wealthy by charging admission to see this beautifully preserved first century boat and the other materials found with it.  

There is no reason to think that Jesus had anything to do with this particular boat, but it dates from the time in which he lived.  And it is exactly the kind of boat described in the Gospels – used for fishing and to ferry across the Sea of Galilee from one village to another.  It’s the exact kind of boat that we hear about in today’s gospel story.

And the first thing you notice when you look at this boat is how small and fragile it is.  It’s flat bottomed; about 27 feet long, but really shallow.  It clearly wasn’t built for deep water.  Scholars say that these boats were built to hug the shoreline for fishing.  

But the Sea of Galilee is large – it’s the primary water source for all of Israel. The sea is actually a lake, technically, but called a sea because of its size and because it’s known for sudden storms that whip up big waves. For perspective, that is approximately 175 times larger than Dublin Lake.

The first time I saw how small these boats were, I was reminded of the famous Breton fisherman’s prayer, which John F. Kennedy used to have framed on his desk:  “Dear Lord, be good to me. The sea is so wide and my boat is so small.” Granted, I’m not a boat person, but I cannot imagine what it must have be packed with twelve other people into a boat that small and fragile, miles from the shore, when a storm blew in.  

As human beings, we are so fragile and so vulnerable.  We get sick, we get older, we get hurt.  So much is out of our control: one tiny blip in our genetic code and we have cancer, someone at a head office somewhere has a vague idea about reorganization and we are laid off.  The earth’s temperature changes more than a degree or two, and our civilization might disappear. To be human is to be incredibly fragile; it’s to be a boat in a storm, adrift in a dangerous world. 

In today’s text from Matthew, Jesus commands the disciples to go ahead of him across the sea. He is urging them toward courage, toward holy and faithful risk. Perhaps Jesus is testing the disciples; or perhaps he is showing them something essential: sometimes, in order to receive faith, you have to do something that requires it.

The disciples had to take a risk in obedience to Jesus in order to see him walk on water. AndPeter had to dare to step out of the boat in order to learn to keep his eyes on Jesus and not the wind and the waves around him.

We are fragile and vulnerable, but Jesus reminds us that we can’t avoid the water, we can’t just stay on shore. We are called to live, to put our heart into things, to try, to seek God, to risk failure.

But Matthew reminds us that no matter how hard we try, sooner or later there will be a storm. And we will find ourselves in the middle of the sea, in the dark, in a tiny boat that was built to stay close to the shore.

We often blame ourselves in those moments, don’t we, for whatever the crisis is? If we get sick, it’s because of a lifetime of not eating enough Kale. If our children struggle, it’s because of what we did wrong. 

But I don’t think God works that way.  There are a lot of stories in the New Testament where the disciples take boats out into the middle of the storms. There is never a reprimand for not asking for help earlier or for getting into the problem in the first place.  In today’s text, Jesus doesn’t reprimand the disciples whatever mistakes of seamanship got them into trouble.  He just says, “it is I; do not be afraid.”  

God doesn’t reply only to the prayers of the innocent.  God responds with love and patience to the prayers of the guilty, the desperate, those who forgot life preservers. If  you start praying only because you are in trouble, I think that God is delighted to hear your voice – and that cry from the middle of the storm can be the beginning of a real spiritual intimacy.

After the disciples see Jesus, they ask him to get into the boat. But the moment they ask him to get in with them, the storm ends. The sea grows calm. In the version of this story in the Gospel of John, the instant that Jesus gets in the boat, the disciples miraculously arrive at their destination.

It seems that what allows them to arrive at the other side is their willingness to have Jesus get in the boat with them.  The act of bringing Jesus into a situation is what allows us to get through it.

There is no solution to the basic problem of human frailty and fragility.  God doesn’t intervene to protect us from sickness or aging or death.  We’re not protected from the unkindness of others; we’re not protected from the threat of poverty and terrible loss.  We’re always going to be in tiny boats in the middle of a big sea.

Our choice is whether or not we are willing to invite Jesus into the boat with us.  Will we insist on struggling alone, or will we allow Christ to be present with us in the midst of everything that’s going on? This story reminds us that if we let him, Jesus will come to us at exactly the right time.

Inviting Jesus into the boat will change things.  Jesus says that following him means going where we might not want to go and having companions that we might not chose ourselves.  But it’s the way to get through the storm to the other side. 

We can invite Christ to be the real and unseen presence in our relationships.  We can ask Jesus to get in the boat with us as we try to figure out how to relate to our bosses, our friends and family members.  

We can invite Christ to be with us in our professional lives, to form and influence our ambitions and our daily decisions. 

None of this is easy, but it’s way easier than riding out the storms ourselves.  Living in the presence of Christ doesn’t mean avoiding the storms, but it does mean being accompanied by the only one who truly understands where our boat needs to go.

Dear Lord, be good to us. The sea is so wide and our boats are so small.  Amen.