Preached at Christ Church, Worton and Christ Church, Bulkington
Readings – Acts 9. 1-7; John 21. 1-19
“Peter felt hurt because he said to him the third time, ‘Do you love me?’”
Angelos Akotantos, Icon of The Embrace of the Apostles Peter and Paul (mid-15th Century). In the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.
We all love a St Paul—but the St Peters of this world are often treated with profound suspicion. Why? Well, we all love finding out we’re right, and what could be better proof of that than someone who had been one of our bitterest enemies coming over to our side. It’s harder to embrace those who were always in agreement with us, but failed to put their principles into action for one reason to another. We all love a new friend; it can be harder to forgive an old friend who has let us down. The former is like St Paul, someone who once held wrong ideas, which have now changed for the better. The person who has let the side down, like St Peter, on the other hand, is always suspected of weakness of character. They may have failed in circumstances anyone could understand, you might like them a lot, but when the going gets tough, can you really trust them? And here’s the oddest thing—after incidents where we’ve let others down, we are often ourselves our harshest critics, and we can be the very ones who trust ourselves least.
I mention that last point for this reason—although it isn’t mentioned directly in today’s Gospel reading, I hope you remember how many times Peter denied Jesus on the night of His arrest? Three times! So, in this reading while Peter may be hurt at Jesus’ asking Him three times if he really loves Him, this balances out Peter’s three denials, which had taken place just a few weeks before. And each time Peter affirms that he loves Christ, Christ shows He trusts Peter again, by trusting him with the most important job of all: to tend and to feed the lambs and the sheep of Jesus’ flock. The story of the risen Christ appearing to the disciples on the Sea of Galilee is reported only in St John’s Gospel, the Gospel where Jesus declares Himself to be the Good Shepherd. So Jesus telling Peter that he is to feed the lambs and the sheep has profound symbolic significance here—not only is Jesus’ forgiving Peter but commissioning him to a role in Christ’s own mould.
Don’t think you’re not pious enough or have made too many mistakes or are too washed up to serve God. Peter was good enough for God, even after His spectacular, public, failure. You are good enough for God and He is undoubtedly calling you to do things for Him in the next part of your life. The question is to discern what it is.
Possibly it is something very humble. Possibly it is just to keep on doing what you are already doing. It may not involve doing any specifically religious tasks beyond saying your prayers and reading your Bible. It may well be that your calling from God lies largely in the fulfilment of your working duties, and the care of those of your family too young, too old, or too sick to look after themselves.
Perhaps you think you’re far too old and frail and too dependent on others to be of any use to God, but you can be of enormous use to Him simply by witnessing to your faith, perhaps simply by smiling and being patient when others might be bitter and snappy. Perhaps God is calling you to glorify God in your death—as we heard this morning, it was part of Peter’s calling. Perhaps part of your call is to witness to your Faith in Christ’s promises to those around you as you lose hold on this life. I’ve seen that many times over the last five years of ordained ministry.
For those of you who are in a different phase in your life – whether you’re starting your career, coming up to retirement, or recently retired – ask yourselves what God may want from you now? Is there something new and different He needs from you? While God may indeed be calling you to serve Him in your secular career, never forget that it is a great thing to serve the Church. That might be in your spare time, perhaps in the parish offices that make the Church run effectively at grassroots level. But perhaps God is calling you to some sort of formally-commissioned ministry, even full-time ordained ministry. Be open to God surprising you.
Now, what do you need to give up to make space for a new way of serving God? What is holding you back from acting on the promptings of the Holy Spirit that you undoubtedly feel from time-to-time? After this encounter Peter indeed became a fisher of men, but he had to give up some things that he loved – especially his boat and his nets and his beloved Sea of Galilee. Instead, he had to open himself up to God leading him to places he didn’t want to go to. Things that were good and life giving in one phase of our life may need to be discarded in the next phase.
Finally, as well telling you not to think you’re too old for God, can I also ask you to never think you’re too odd for God. You couldn’t possibly be as odd as St Paul was. Don’t turn these very real people into plasterboard saints. Now, while Peter was a bit of an old-fashioned man’s man and probably a great laugh down at the taverna once you got some wine into him, Paul was a very weird chap indeed: very highly-strung, clearly a bit of a pedant, a terrible man for rowing even with people who cared a lot about him. Before his conversion, he’d been something far worse than that—a bigoted stirrer of violent mobs, who abused God’s name as an excuse for his own intolerance and need for aggression.
Yet the same aspects of His personality that had led him down the road of becoming what we might call, in modern terms, a mouth-piece for religious terrorism, were precisely the characteristics that God used in Him to make Him the indispensable spreader of the Gospel in the first generation after Christ. Some tough jobs can only be done by people who are willing to be awkward, terribly pedantic, and absolutely sure they’re right. I don’t particularly like being around people like that myself, but sometimes they’re precisely what God needs.
We’ve lived through a tough time in the life of the Church when the catch had become very thin. It’s hard to get enthusiastic about letting out your nets again when we’ve worked all night for little reward.
Yet I wonder what it might mean for the Church to “Cast the net to the right side of the boat” in this rapidly changing and very strange time. For I think if we do work out what letting out our nets on the right side means, that those of you who have toiled all night through a thin time in the life of the Church might just find a there’s a catch so enormous that we struggle to bring it all in. It may seem unlikely from here, but then the worldwide Church of today would have seemed unlikely to the people of Peter and Paul’s time.
Now thanks be to God the Father, who has given us the victory through Our Lord Jesus Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
Top image: The Sea of Galilee near Magdala. © Gerry Lynch, 9 November 2024.
