A number of weeks ago, our theme for worship was “spiritual warfare.”  Remember that?  We were reminded about our unseen enemy in the spiritual realm, the devil and the demons.  We spent some time considering Paul’s encouragement to put on the full armor of God from Ephesians 6.  Our arsenal includes truth and righteousness and faith and the Gospel of peace and prayer.  Remember that?    One of the things we did not talk about that day was the unseen army who fights for us.  We are talking now about the holy angels.

I don’t know if you have ever noticed a certain little feature in our hymnal.  At the top of each page, in small letters, is a word that describes what type of hymn is on the page.  There are categories like Christmas and Easter.  There headings like Redeemer, Justification, Prayer, and Commitment.  I have here the hymnal from when I was a child. 

If you had been walking around a shopping mall in the 1990s you would have seen a particularly odd type of decoration lining the walls of the novelty shops.  These bizarre posters were normal sized, but they didn’t look like much.  No people, no pictures, no slogans, just little bits of color all arranged in perfectly random chaos.  You might describe them as a “colorful-static.” 

There is an interesting detail tucked into the story of when Jesus went to his hometown of Nazareth and preached in the synagogue. After Jesus got done teaching on that Sabbath Day, the people said this, What’s this wisdom that has been given to him? (Mark 6:2) They said this not because Jesus had given them a stimulating lecture on physics or geometry. But he had spoken to them about the Kingdom of God, about prophecy and fulfillment, about himself being the Messiah. Jesus had a different kind of wisdom.

The account before us this morning is well known to most Christians. The story of Jesus walking on the water is part of just about every Sunday School curriculum there is. Just about every preaching pericope includes the record of Jesus walking on the water. It is at the same time simple and profound. Every child can understand that Jesus walked on top of the water out to his disciples. That is simple. But there is also something very profound about this event.