When I picture scenes like the one in today’s gospel, the pictures that come to my mind are the pictures from my old children’s Bible when I was 8 years old. In that Bible, as I recall, the boat was about 5 feet long, a little dinghy, and a very clean Jesus in white robes was talking to a mostly clean Simon, also in white robes. But it seems that my mental picture is wrong. Archaeologists recently found a first-century boat near the Sea of Galilee, a boat that must have been a lot like Simon’s.
The boat measured 26.5 feet long, 7.5 feet wide, 4.5 feet tall – most men were about my height, 5’5” – so this is a tall, large boat for them. Which makes it interesting to think – how many hundreds of fish would it have taken to fill this boat so high it was in danger of sinking. And what would it have taken for a businessman to walk away from a property like that? Remember that these were poor people – the owner of a boat like this would be a substantial businessman and property owner in his community, respected and prominent enough to have a license from Roman authorities to fish in Caesar’s lake. Simon Peter is a respected and prosperous businessman – and yet he has an encounter with a carpenter and leaves everything behind to start a new life. It takes an earth-shattering experience to do that to someone – to turn someone’s life upside-down so thoroughly that they leave it all behind. It takes an experience we call “conversion.”
Conversion is a word that we don’t use too often in the Episcopal Church – a word that may bring to mind pictures of televangelists sweating on brightly lit stages. For me, it reminds me of a church camp I went to as a teenager. Imagine this camp, on the banks of a creek that here in the desert, we would call a full-fledged, canyon-cutting river – 100 degrees outside and 100 percent humidity – dripping wet, no AC anywhere, hot as blazes. The church part of this camp would happen in a huge white tent with straw on the ground, metal folding chairs, and enormous noisy fans failing to cut through the heat. We would sing some songs, have a prayer, and hear a really long speech about how the speaker was a terrible sinner, then he found Jesus. Around me, kids hearing these speeches would burst into tears and go down to the front of the tent to give their lives to Jesus and be saved. But try as hard as I could to start crying, I couldn’t think of any big and dramatic sins – and that conversion experience never happened to me. The weather outside was hot, but the church services left me cold.
Which stayed with me for a long time as I struggled with the question: what does it mean to be a Christian? Are there different ways to experience conversion? What is conversion for a person like me, and like many Episcopalians, who never has a dramatic emotional conversion experience, but whose life is more of a gradual growing in Christ? What helps me is to think about that boat. Because Simon Peter has an encounter with Jesus that is different from those dramatic emotional experiences. Not that I would ever take anything away from the people who found Jesus in that tent – I just think there are other ways to think about conversion – and to me, the boat is the key.
Today we watch how conversion happens to Simon Peter: fisherman, respected community member, strong provider for his family, owner of a substantial property. This is not Simon’s first experience with Jesus. In the gospel of Luke, we find Jesus first entering Simon’s house and healing his mother-in-law – Jesus enters into Peter’s personal and family life and transforms it. Then Jesus comes to the lake and teaches from Simon’s boat. So second, Jesus enters into Simon’s business and commercial life, the area from which Simon takes his identity, his place in world – a fisherman/businessman. Then Jesus, the novice, the carpenter, makes one more move – he tells Simon to launch out into the deep water – convinces him to take a risk – tells him to do what makes no sense and try what has already been tried.
And Simon is transformed in every possible way by what happens. So many fish are caught that the boats are almost swamped. A miracle happens. But the miracle isn’t the fact that there are suddenly fish in the sea. The miracle is what happens to Simon. In pushing out into the deep water, Simon has made a decision to trust the word of a carpenter who knows nothing about fishing; he has acknowledged that he is standing in presence of a power he has no control over; he has realized that there comes a time when ordinary expertise and everyday hard work cannot provide true abundance.
And Simon’s first response is fear – he falls on his knees and says he is a sinful man. He is not confessing a series of wrongdoings so much as he is expressing the reality that next to God, no human can measure up; he has realized he is not God. But it turns out that realizing that he is not God, but that God’s power can pour through him to create a miracle, is all that is required to make miracles happen.
Simon knows that in response to the new truth of God’s presence with him, that everything must change. He leaves his boat and his business and his life behind, and he strikes out after Jesus on a life’s journey that will end upside down on a cross. Simon changes his life: Jesus tells him that from now on, he will be fishing for people.
Now this may not seem like an attractive mission – it may bring to mind the picture of people hooked and dragged up onto a deck against their will, gasping for breath. For Episcopalians, it may bring to mind the image of a sweaty televangelist on a platform scaring people with images of a fiery hell into swearing allegiance to a theology they don’t understand and a God who frightens them. But the word Jesus uses is not the same word as hauling dying fish out of the water that gives them life – the word Jesus uses means “Taking people alive.” Jesus is telling Simon that he will be rescuing people out of the life-denying water where they are drowning and bringing them into life-giving air, God’s air, God’s life.
Simon has allowed God to enter every part of his life, his personal life, his business life – Simon has trusted God to lead him into the risky deep water, and Simon has emerged with a new identity, through which God’s power will pour into the world, and from which many other people will be brought into new life.
So what does this mean for you and me? If we look at that boat of Simon’s, that boat he left behind, this whole story of Simon’s conversion could be kind of scary. A lot of us own big boats, a lot of us would have a hard time leaving them behind. But I am wondering whether that is what Jesus is calling us to do, after all. Jesus did ask Simon to leave everything behind, and he asks the same of some people today – but he didn’t ask everyone to leave the place where they were. I think today’s story shows us that God’s power can work in us in whatever boat we’re in. God can come to us in our ordinary personal lives, our homes; and God can come to us in the most prosaic of business occupations; and God’s power can call us into deep water to work through us to bring abundant life to all those around us.
If you’ve ever looked at yourself and thought – I’m not a saint, I’m not particularly holy, there aren’t great things I can accomplish for God – well, you’re in the same boat with Simon Peter. God comes to us where we are; and God makes it possible for us to bring life-transforming grace and love to those around us; and God keeps on changing, converting us throughout our lives. At the end of today’s story, Simon’s conversion is not complete. He will keep on making mistakes and doing things wrong. He has many changes ahead of him: Jesus will change his name, to Peter, and Jesus will change his outlook on life, completely on its head. Peter’s process of change will not end until his life ends – conversion is a lifelong process of reorienting himself to God and God’s hopes for him and for the world.
Which brings me back to the question: what is conversion for us? I can answer a couple things conversion is not: it’s not an emotional experience, necessarily – though it can be. It’s not something that takes sinful people and makes them perfect – sadly, we will keep on making mistakes throughout our lives.
What conversion is, is a different question – and I can’t answer what it feels like (which is different for everyone), but I might have an idea of what it looks like. Conversion is a process that can take a lifetime. Conversion means living our lives as though we expect God to show up any minute, displaying his stunning power to bring miracles to life. Conversion means cleaning our homes and doing our work and raising our children and doing our community activities – all with the same expectation – that God is going to show up too, and that God’s power will be at work in us and through us, every moment of the day.
Conversion means living with the realization that though we are sinful people, though we always fall short of the hopes God has for us, though we will never be so old and so good and so wise that we will stop making mistakes, that still through all our imperfections, God will be working through us, bring the power of the gospel to life in our lives. Conversion means that every day, we pray and work and discern and ask ourselves: how does God want to work through me today, right here, in the boat that I’m in right now?
