Matthew 14: 22-33

22 Immediately he made the disciples get into the boat and go on ahead to the other side, while he dismissed the crowds. 23 And after he had dismissed the crowds, he went up the mountain by himself to pray. When evening came, he was there alone, 24 but by this time the boat, battered by the waves, was far from the land, for the wind was against them. 25 And early in the morning he came walking toward them on the sea. 26 But when the disciples saw him walking on the sea, they were terrified, saying, “It is a ghost!” And they cried out in fear. 27 But immediately Jesus spoke to them and said, “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.”

28 Peter answered him, “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water.” 29 He said, “Come.” So Peter got out of the boat, started walking on the water, and came toward Jesus. 30 But when he noticed the strong wind, he became frightened, and beginning to sink, he cried out, “Lord, save me!” 31 Jesus immediately reached out his hand and caught him, saying to him, “You of little faith, why did you doubt?” 32 When they got into the boat, the wind ceased. 33 And those in the boat worshiped him, saying, “Truly you are the Son of God.”

Ghost stories can only exist with enough fear to fuel their being and guilt to chart their course.  You think of Marley, dragging his chains to haunt Ebenezer’s bed. We consider Hamlet encountering a ghost to bear the weight of the fact that something is profoundly wrong.  Ghost stories flourish at the close intersection of fear and of guilt.

As the disciples looked out over the tumultuous sea they thought they saw a ghost. You can understand why for they had been tossed this way and that by the waves for hours as night fell and the wind blew. Their heads and their hearts were playing tricks on them. When they saw a figure coming across the waves they thought it was a ghost, an ominous figure of what had been and that went in life before them.

I don’t believe in ghost stories but I know that trick of fear well: where fear and anxiety create before you things that feel so real, that they ask you to justify their being through your continued fear.  You may have ghosts in your family, perhaps called by a different name, an old wrong that goes back and back and back and reemerges, one generation after the next, like clockwork.  You may have ghosts in your life, where guilt and shame mix to trouble your sleep and to haunt your moments of joy.

And this week I found myself fearing ghosts; things perhaps I had been able to imagine were signs of evil so far removed that I no longer needed to be afraid.  On Friday we saw images as angry young white men carried torches on their way, evoking a tradition of intimidation, a threat that goes back and back and back and is newly embodied, of an old and terrible story.  Young white men, mostly of my generation, who felt no need for hoods as they stepped into the role of ages past, repeating words of hate borrowed from Nazis and revised for a new age.  Ghost stories flourish in that dark intersection of fear and guilt. What we saw this weekend was an embodiment of our nation’s very old ghosts.

In the very founding of our nation we proclaimed that all men are created equal and yet we know our founders didn’t quite mean all.  When counting our state’s population, some bodies were measured in fractions of others.  Built into our founding was an admission of an institution where some humans were owners and others could be owned. At the very heart of this history of our nation, at an intersection of guilt and fear, we hear that skin that looks more like mine matters more, that my pain is more concerning, that it is a skin like mine that was created to rule.  It’s a deep guilt, hundreds of years in the making. The fear that this guilt would be revealed, or perhaps the fear that the priv