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Central to the Chapel is a very fine stained glass window with this image of ‘The Lord, who sitteth above the water flood’. Here is the Divine Word by whom God, at creation, brought order from chaos and separated the dry land from the waters of the sea.

From creation to the parting of the red sea, to Jesus calming the storm and St Pauls journeys by boat, holy scripture is full of seas and rivers and water in story and metaphor.

And today, we worship with whales in the Nave! (Not many preachers can have said that, over the years, and I will treasure this memory). With blue lighting and some imagination we are underwater with them.  And this morning, from St Luke’s gospel, we’ve heard how Jesus teaches the crowds from a boat and calls into his particular service, fishermen from Lake Galilee.

One of the fishermen, Simon Peter is commemorated in the Fishermen’s Chapel window, Simon Peter will become not just a disciple of Jesus, but a leader, and a martyr, following Jesus he becomes someone who changes the world.

Now fishing as a hobby is one of those activities, I understand, that’s both compelling and relaxing at the same time. Lots of people love it.  But the fishing that Simon and James and John were doing every wasn’t like that.  This was hard and smelly work.

They fished the lake during the night, by throwing heavy nets into the parts of the great lake  – which experience and skill taught them would be rich with fish – and they then hauled the nets back into the boat, or onto the shore to sell the fish first thing in the morning, and then before resting, the nets and boats needed to be washed, cleaned and mended.  This is hard and repetitive labour. These are the people with whom Jesus begins his ministry, and amongst whom he seeks friends and followers.

So when Jesus arrives at the shore of the lake with a great crowd of people, with the fishermen there mending their nets, Jesus gets into Simon Peter’s boat and asks him to put out a little way from the shore so that he can teach the crowd from there.  And Simon is there in the boat with him while Jesus teaches, and afterwards when Jesus says, ‘put out into the deep water, and let down your nets for a catch.’ Now Peter, no doubt tired from a night’s fishing with no catch, might well have been thinking, ‘what on earth, would a carpenter know about fishing?’ But he says ‘we’ve fished all night and caught nothing, yet if you say so, I will let down the nets’, and he gets friends James and John to help, They do as Jesus has asked them and now there’s such an enormous catch of fish that they need a second boat and both boats are full with fish.

You may remember two weeks ago, the account of the wedding at Cana when the great quantity of water is turned to wine, how Jesus asks people to join in with a miracle, by doing some work for him, which at the wedding, was the normal work for servants of drawing water.

Above: Raphael  ‘The Miraculous Draught of Fishes’ cartoon for a tapestry

Here Jesus once again, asks the fishermen to do their normal work for him and again he transforms their ordinary work into something extraordinary.  A miraculous catch.

You can see in this lovely work by the artist Raphael, that Simon Peter responds to the miraculous catch by falling to his knees, and as he apprehends the enormity of what’s happening he’s overwhelmed, and this is authentic because when we have an encounter with God, with the mystery and holiness of God, then we realise things about ourselves. Just as the prophet Isaiah encounters Gods holiness and cries, ‘I am a man of unclean lips’, here Simon Peter falls on his knees saying ’Go away from me, for I am a sinful man!’

But Jesus isn’t prepared to leave him wallowing in his sense of unworthiness.  Jesus really ‘sees’ Simon, just as he is, and also, how he can be. Jesus  doesn’t want him to be stuck in the murky waters of self-doubt or fear, he wants to pull him out of all that holds him back.  Jesus says, ‘Do not be afraid! From now on you will be catching people.’ And St Luke records that indeed, when they brought their boats to shore, Simon and his friends left everything and followed Jesus.

So the world, for Simon, James and John is rocking on its axis, they have a change of life that is sudden and radical, and they leave everything to follow Jesus. like all those fish, dramatically dragged up from the darkness of the deep and out into the light with Christ.

For James and John this means leaving their father Zebedee, the harshness of which is, I think, depicted in this pane of the window in the Fisherman’s Chapel. Life for these apostles, and their families involved tremendous sacrifice.

And theres a tension here, for most of us, I believe between the abruptness of these conversions and what most of us experience in our Christian journey, and certainly what most of us experience in the ordinary rhythms of church life.

Some people do experience dramatic conversion that they can put a time and date to, and that changes their lives forever.  If this is you, then thanks be to God. But for most of us, it isnt like that, we come to faith gradually. Not so much being caught up and hauled ashore suddenly, but gradually, through lifes experiences, through joy and hardship, through the people we meet, through an experience of welcome, of deeper truth and greater beauty, we come to faith in God, love of Christ and experience of the Holy Sprit, It can take a whole life time. But God is gently and inevitably reeling us in. Drawing us up from the deeps towards the light.

The miraculous catch of fish teaches us that Gods presence transforms life, and that with Christ, daily miracles can happen, and that they can happen in us, and change us.

And Simon Peter gives us a great example of faith. Having failed all night to catch any fish he was prepared to obey Jesus and try again. Perhaps we fail in our efforts when we give up too soon. With faith, what might be impossible becomes possible. Don’t give up too soon. Remain hopeful.

Jesus has called us by name at our baptism and calls us every day of our lives, to stay close with him, ready to serve and be part of his transforming and loving purposes in the world.

Amen.