- Deep waters are calling to us.
- To cast our nets out for a catch of miracles and humanity.
- Will we do it?
- Will we go for it?
- Or will we stay on the shore insisting that there is nothing out there? The nets are empty, there will never be enough.
- It is an overwhelming thing to encounter the depths of God. Peter told Jesus to go away.
- Giving up on how we think things work. The world isn’t what we thought.It means our nets are no longer for me and mine, but for the whole world. The Earth is the Lord’s and all the fullness there of.
- Will we refuse to go out in the deep? Do we prefer the nets to be empty?
- The disciples of Jesus are called to be in the world in a particular way to leave everything and follow Jesus.
- The life of a parish revolves around figuring out how to do that together, to be in the boat together with Jesus going out into the deep.
- The life of an Episcopal parish includes the creedal belief in a wider universal Church in which we participate in a way that is sacrificial. The world view of the Episcopal Church is vast and ancient and beautiful, deeply faithful to the fullness of the Gospel.
- People are drawn to the Episcopal world view because of that and they come to Grace Church because Grace lives out that world view with such liveliness, Grace embodies it like nowhere else.
- Most of the heresies in the history of the faith had at their heart an inability to live with the vast differences in the church across cultures and time.
- We use the word “diversity” now, but it is more than that, the strangeness and foreignness of some believers to one another can cause awe and fascination or revulsion.
- The early heresies left the wider church behind to be in smaller, purer and more likeminded communities. The wider Church was too messy and complicated and expensive.
- The wider church, the strangeness of the wider Church, it reminds us of the strangeness and the depths of God. It fills our nets until they burst. It is messy.
- The depths of God are intimidating.
- And the tempter knows just how to tangle our nets.
- But the depths of God are greater still.
- The nets are bursting.
- What will we do?
- Turn away?
- Or follow Jesus?
