Walking on Water: Keeping Our Eyes on Jesus
Readings and Virtual Homily for August 9, 2026, Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time; Update on Caracas; Summer School
Readings for Mass this Sunday:
1 Kings 19:9, 11-13
Psalm 85:9-14
Romans 9:1-5
Matthew 14:22-33
Dear Friends and Family,
This week's Gospel passage is Peter walking on the water. There is a take-away from this passage that is so often referenced by preachers that I almost feel redundant here, mentioning it, but as it is the central take-away from this passage, I better mention it. As long as Peter is focused on Jesus, he is able to do the impossible. He is able to walk on water. As soon as Peter takes his eyes off Jesus and focuses instead on the storm, he starts to sink.
The clear parallel for our lives as disciples is to not let the storm distract us. Stay focused on the Lord. In him, with him and through him, we can do the impossible. This storm -- whatever it may be -- has no power over the Lord, and none over our response to him, to his invitation to get out of the boat and -- walk on water.
Having done my due diligence with regard to the main teaching point of the passage, I want to take a little time here to probe the business of why the Lord allows storms at all. When we are in the midst of one, it can be hard, simply to keep rowing the boat, let alone get out of it and start doing the impossible.
Yet it is precisely because of the storms of life that our capacity to do, if not the impossible, then at least greater things than we might otherwise have thought ourselves capable of, is brought forward. Forced forward, we might sometimes feel. I have a lot of experience with this. Just one example, one you are largely familiar with, from my own discipleship walk.
As I started my studies for priesthood, spring semester of 1995, at the Dominican School at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, I was working at the Career Planning and Placement Center on campus, living with my sister, bro-in-law and nieces in Oakland, writing on the weekends at my parents' house in Marysville, working with my agent in Manhattan, and coordinating the Confirmation program in the Marysville parish. It was a full-plate life, and I was fully engaged by it.
The decision to start classes at the GTU meant cutting back my hours at Cal. I went to class during the work day, walking from the office on campus to my classes up on "holy hill" as we called the GTU. This reduced my work schedule by eight to ten hours per week. I needed to make those hours up; I was in debt and could not get to the seminary until I had my debts paid. I needed a ten-hour-a-week job, evenings and weekends, and $400 a month.
I was so determined to pursue priesthood that I would have been glad to have done telephone sales or pizza delivery...instead of which, in August of that year, Fr. Leon, the new pastor in Marysville, on the recommendation of the outgoing youth minister in the parish, and, apparently, on the urging of the teens themselves, who had had me as their Confirmation teacher, asked me if I would consider taking over the youth ministry.
"It's very flexible, Jim," Fr. Leon assured me. "Ten hours a week, evenings and weekends -- you can set up your schedule anyway you like. I cannot pay you much, but I can offer four hundred a month."
Talk about getting out of the boat. Talk about leaving your comfort zone. Youth ministry was, for me, for the entire first year that I was doing it, somewhat akin to walking on water. I was doing something I had no experience with, no preparation for (other than having taught many of the teens in the Confirmation program). I had no trouble staying focused on Jesus, those initial months. I didn't dare look anywhere else. I knew I would sink. I remember going before the Tabernacle at St. Joseph's in Marysville, numerous times that autumn, that winter, that spring, those first six or eight months that I was doing something I would never in one million years have thought of as something I could do. I was an artist. A writer. A thinker. And yes, in the Confirmation program, I had become a teacher -- a teacher of teens.
But youth ministry? Never. In. One. Million. Years.
Fast forward twenty years to the bishop's Christmas party here in Oakland, 2014. To the invitation to walk even further out on the water, further out over deeper water, as chaplain at Bishop O'Dowd High School. It was getting out of the boat in the fall of 1995 in Marysville that had put me out there amid the teen winds and waves to begin with. I'd stayed out there, all the two intervening decades; as youth minister/youth priest in parish after parish. I'd gotten good at youth ministry, and I knew it.
But...teaching at a high school? Look. My dad was a high school teacher. There are reasons I had not become one.
Knowing this request had come straight from the Spirit, of course I said yes to it. But it was a qualified yes -- "Let's give it three years," I said to Bishop Barber, when in January of 2015 we sat down and really talked about it. "Let's think of this as the assignment of an associate priest to a parish -- which is typically three years. And...let's see where we are, the third year."
This will be my twelfth year at the high school.
I wondered, back in the mid-nineties, trying to find a way to move ahead with my hopes and plans for priestly studies, why God couldn't just speed the whole business up, by letting my hard-working agent sell a couple of my novels. The "storm" of my indebtedness and my inability to get to seminary until my debts were paid was a mystery to me. My novels were good. My agent was successful -- with other writers. Why couldn't she be successful, now, with me?
God had another plan for settling my debts. The youth ministry position in Marysville was fifty-plus hours a week and full-time pay, before I left it. It became a major factor in my eventually getting my debts paid, and moving on to the seminary. It was that, and it was so much more than that. It was the opening out of an entire ministry path, for me, a vocation within the vocation, a call within the call.
In the interest of brevity I have not elaborated on the anxiety, the frustration I felt, with my difficult circumstances, in the mid-nineties. The "storm" of my debts, preventing me from moving forward on my studies, at the time made absolutely no sense to me. "Can't we just sell a novel, Lord?" That, it seemed to me, was the clear and obvious path forward. And it would have been a development entirely within my comfort zone; no need to get out of the boat. More than thirty years of work with teenagers since, of course, I have a different perspective.
The latest I have seen in the reports from Caracas is that 6100 people died in the earthquakes, while many thousands remain missing. I am assuming that the large number of missing people has to do with the slow pace of the rescue and recovery operations, the details of which I will not bore you with here. Suffice it to say that, at this point, anyone still reported missing is almost certainly dead; the death toll is guaranteed to rise dramatically, before all is said and done.
Some good news is that another of my young guys who was out of work due to damage to his place of employment has been able to return to regular shifts, this past week. Your contributions saw him and his family through those perilous six weeks. It is also precisely because of your help that the family that was out of their apartment indefinitely has been able to rent an Airbnb; they expect to be able to return home in a month.
I am still getting thank-yous out. Hand-written notes, where I have a mailing address; by text or e-mail otherwise. I am so deeply grateful for the outpouring of generosity. It has made an incalculable difference in the lives, the hopes, the experiences through a very difficult time of my young Caraquenos and their families. Gracias pero muchas gracias.
So...it's the first week of August and for anywhere from two to five hours each day this week I have been...at Bishop O'Dowd. Meetings, orientations, the staff retreat. Classes start Monday.
Monday. August 10. It's the start of the fall semester, but as far as I am concerned it is summer school.
When I started at the high school eleven years ago, we returned for meetings and such on August 12. Classes that year started August 24. Steadily over the years, the start date has been moved earlier and earlier and this year, we start classes on the earliest date yet, August 10.
Don't ask me. Don't ask any of my faculty colleagues, not one of whom agrees with so early a start to the academic year. We've good-naturedly commiserated plenty about the absurd start date, at the (nicely catered) breakfasts and lunches on campus, this week.
It is what it is. I revere my colleagues. To a very real extent, I remain at the high school, at this point, as much because I just do not want to leave my fellow teachers, staff and administrators, as much as because I feel any real need to remain there for the teens.
I do, however, continue to feel a call to be at O'Dowd, for the teens. I have my eye and my heart particularly focused this fall on the Class of 2029 -- the sophomores, whom I will be teaching. I already have a special connection with this class, and it is surprising, given that their first semester at O'Dowd, I was on sabbatical. Nor was I teaching them last spring; I taught juniors and seniors last spring. But '29 has made its way to me unmistakably -- so unmistakably that I may write about it one day. This class "gets" that I am THEIR priest; and they already (evidently) sense my regard for them. I very much look forward to starting to really get to know them, this semester, as their teacher.
But (just sayin')...the whole business might just as easily have been accomplished, starting August 24, rather than this coming Monday...
I’ll leave it there.
Hope the summer (which we are only halfway through, despite the return to classes) is treating you well.
Take good care and God bless.
Love,
Fr. Brawn