On Recovering Trust

[Sermon delivered at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, Phoenix, Arizona, The Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost, August 9, 2026.]

✠ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, the Trinity, one in Essence and Undivided. Amen.

By now we all should be heartily sick of hearing sermons about doubt. How doubt is this or is not that, how normal it is, how having it does not (or does, depending on the preacher) make us bad people. However, the word doubt as either noun or verb occurs more times in the Gospels and the whole Bible than anyone reasonably desires to count. Today’s Gospel passage[1] is no exception. The Disciples are in a boat (again), the weather went bad (again), they are in trouble (again), they see Our Lord Jesus walking on the water (oh, this is new), but they think He is a ghost (in their defense visibility was poor), and St. Peter makes an impulse decision (by now why is anyone surprised?), and then gets out of the boat, only to get very wet and getting the doubt card thrown down.

To start, let us put ourselves into St. Peter’s (very wet) shoes. The weather is, according to this account, very, very bad. For those of you that have never been on the water during severe weather, please take the time to imagine it, and for those of you who have, try not to retrigger the trauma. Severe weather on land is scary, but severe weather while on a water-going vessel is downright terrifying, because everything becomes unstable and we as humans are considerably out of our element. Not only is the air and the temperature turbulent and possibly harmful, even the very surface we navigate becomes highly unstable, and there is a real risk that we could be pitched from the fragile safety of the watercraft into an environment that does not support our normative means of movement and is also hostile to supporting human life. All the Disciples are cold, wet, overworked, and in possible danger of hypothermia and/or drowning, whichever comes first. Their brains would have triggered the fight-or-flight-or-freeze response, their anxiety would be off the charts, their heart and respiration rates would be alarmingly elevated, and their levels of stress hormones would keep them at a nigh irrational state for an extended period of time.

Now that we have this firmly fixed in our imaginations, let us consider St. Peter getting out of the boat. He had literally just asked, “Lord, if it is you, bid me come to you on the water,” and simply on the strength of Our Lord saying, “Come,” St. Peter decided that this was enough proof for him to leave the relative safety of the boat to come into the water.

At this point I would think that the Disciples back in the boat are just frozen in place for at least a moment, thinking each to themselves, “What on earth is that crazy loon Simon doing now?” only to realize, “Dear God, he’s actually walking on the water!” Against all reason, St. Peter stepped out in full trust of Our Lord’s assurance and started walking to him.

Here, here, is where he falters. The weather, the situation, the danger which he completely blocked out reasserted itself. His concentration broken, his gaze and hearing averted, St. Peter’s trust in Jesus’ power to keep him topside sank like a rock, and so did he. Unable to reassert this trust (not to say he did not try, the text is silent about this), in desperation and panic he looks straight at Our Lord and screams out, “Lord, save me!”

We should not be too hard on St. Peter. Many of us, the other Disciples included, would not have been able to muster the faith to step out of the boat (please note, they did not). St. Peter did, however. He had stepped out of the boat. He was actually walking on the water. He was mid-miracle. Despite all the factors that should have plunged him to the bottom of the Sea of Galilee like a rock the moment he vaulted the gunwale of the boat, he was doing the impossible. What happened is that he forgot what got him there in the first place. This was not a failure of knowledge, this was a loss of faith, or better yet, trust. Despite the evidence he already knew in his heart of hearts, that Our Lord called him out, that he actually made it thus far, St. Peter lost trust that Our Lord could bring him the rest of the way, and once it vanished, he could not reassert it.

Let us be fair to St. Peter as we have all been there. Once trust is gone, for whatever reason, we struggle and often fail to re-establish it. We lose our trust in a leader, a colleague, a friend, or a spouse, and we quite frequently say, either secretly or aloud, “I will never trust you again!” For many of us, no matter how far the other party goes to reassure us that the loss of trust was unfounded, or if the loss of trust is justified but they make more than sufficient amends to restore that trust, we smother any possibility to reassert that trust. Frequently, we have that fear that we will be put at risk again, or that the one we trusted to walk and work with us cannot or will not protect us from that risk, and so we shutter any potential for us to take up that risk and trust them again. St. Peter’s example is true to life, a bit extreme perhaps, but common to all of us. Once we lose trust, often the perception of the risk drowns out everything else.

We need to learn from St. Peter. He recognized that he was in over his head (please pardon the expression) and that he could not by himself regain that trust that would allow him to rise up and dash the rest of the way to the safety of Our Lord’s embrace and therefore did the only sensible thing: call upon the Lord for help. This is our story, too. Losing trust, especially when it is unwarranted, is startlingly common. Our Lord’s question to St. Peter becomes His question for us: why, when we are succeeding, would we self-sabotage? We encounter conflict over something, anything, with someone who has proven trustworthy in the past, but we still wreck that relationship because of one exception. We make sound, well thought-out decisions, but when we encounter a difficulty or setback, we immediately second guess ourselves and backtrack, abandoning trust in ourselves even though we have no solid proof the decision was bad. I am not talking about very real and tangible betrayals, or very real and tangible bad decisions, I am talking about a snap loss of trust, which we do all the time. Frequently, we cannot bring ourselves back from the abyss of self-inflicted doubt, and it is here where we need to ask for help all the more and not go it alone. The question, “Why did you do that?” is still valid, but it is secondary to the plea, “Lord, save me!”

To do this, we must acknowledge our inability and frailty. The human condition, the very condition of fallen Creation, makes us prone to a loss of trust, one might say it is a bug in the code. Keeping trust is important, but so is recognizing that when it is lost that we must reach out to God to bring us back from the brink. We should also remember that the storm did not stop when St. Peter asked for help, it did not stop when Jesus drew him back to the surface, it did not stop while they walked to the boat. It stopped when they reached the boat. When St. Peter’s trust faltered, he turned to Jesus and leaned on Him to finish the journey. He started out walking in the storm with his eyes fixed on His Lord, when he hit a crisis, he called on His Lord, and through the rest of the storm he leaned on His Lord. Like St. Peter, at some point the storm will become too much for us and we will in crisis need to call upon the Lord, and we will need to lean on the Lord through the rest of the storm until it blows out. This is the story we need to take with us today, that even when we falter, we can and should turn to the Lord and lean on Him walk through the storm together. It is the act of recognizing our own failure and vulnerability and turning to God where we find salvation, and that the storm will continue to rage and buffet us while we cling to God until it blows out and we are back on the boat. God will ask us why we lost faith, but He will also reach down and haul us back up to weather the storm with Him. If we take nothing else away today, we should at the very least come away with that.

✠ Through the prayers of the Most Holy Theotokos and Ever-Virgin Mary, Holy Dominic, and all the saints, Saviour save us. Amen.

[1] Mt. 14.22-33