This Sunday I have been invited to preach at St Martin’s Church, East Woodhay at 8am and at St Thomas’ Church, Woolton Hill at 9.30am. I have been warned that there will be no heating at St Martin’s, however I am sure the welcome at both churches will be wonderfully warm.

Welcome to ‘Ordinary Time’, or as I like to call it ‘God is with us All-the-Time’, and a friend and colleague refers to it as ‘Ordinary Season, ‘Extra-ordinary God.’ The term originally comes from the Latin word ‘ordinal’ which means numbered or counted. Each week in the church calendar is ordered: we have the four weeks of advent leading into the six weeks of Christmas, and then… well everything goes a bit ordinary until we start the six weeks of Lent. So we are now in that ordinary time of getting on with life, cementing our faith in the every day.

Today’s gospel passage starts out very ordinarily. We are at the lake of Genneserat and in the background, or off to one side are a couple of moored fishing boats, the fishermen alongside them finishing off their night’s work by washing the nets. There is a rabbi nearby who has caused a bit of a commotion. The fishermen, one whose name we learn is Simon, are aware of the new preacher who has been causing a bit of a stir, now being crowded by a large group of people pressing in on him, wanting to hear what he has to say. The fishermen are aware, but remain where they are, there are nets to be washed after all, and these are practical hardworking me after all, or are they?

Just as they are aware of the preacher, he is aware of them, and seeing their boats, commandeers them to be used as floating pulpits. Suddenly the ordinary becomes a little less ordinary, a little more extraordinary. It is not recorded what the preacher, Jesus, says during his waterborne sermon, I would imagine something along the lines of ‘the Kingdom of God is near’. What is recorded, however, is the private conversation between Jesus and Simon, the preacher and the fisherman. Jesus tells the fisherman who has been out all night and is ready to return home for some food and rest, to go back out onto where the water is deep and to cast his freshly cleaned nets!

What madness is this? Simon tries to explain that he has been doing that all night long and there just aren’t any fish to be caught, but something about the way the preacher looks at him makes him do it anyway. Unbelievably, when Simon hauls the nets back up they are overflowing with fish, the haul of his life! If he is able to sell all this fish at this point in the day he will eat well for weeks. The haul is so large and so heavy that the nets are beginning to tear and break and help is called in from their partners, a second boat is needed.

Of course there’s a catch to this catch: Jesus then calls these fishermen to give up what they are comfortable with, to give up what they are skilled at doing, to risk everything to follow Jesus in a new adventure. If they agree, they will be pushed out of their comfort zones time and again, they will be forced to say goodbye to their favourite customs and traditions. They have a choice: to carry on with the ordinary and get ordinary and even less than ordinary results, or to follow Jesus in his bizarre callings and experience the extraordinary.

Rural ministry isn’t easy, We often have large buildings with small congregations. The population that would have once filled them no longer exists. Farm labourers have been replaced by modern machinery and the farm hands that are still employed are now paid by BACS rather than in cash handed out after the Sunday service. The faithful are few, and it is only in the traditions and customs that we see pews begin to fill. So we hold on tight to those and daren’t try new things. What if Simon hadn’t risked the new thing?

What if seeing those overflowing nets, as we might see overflowing pews at Midnight Mass once a year, he had decided to keep on doing the same thing? What if he and Andrew, James and John, had said ‘no thank you’ when Jesus invited them to come and follow him?

I think what is at the heart of this passage is not the sermon Jesus gave that day, or the massive haul of fish, or even Jesus’ call to the fishermen, but their recognition of just who Jesus is. Simon fell to his knees in humility and servility and found the courage to do things differently. Where does our courage come from? We need to know Jesus, we need to be willing to listen to him and be guided by him, so that when something really rather abstract and seemingly counter intuitive comes our way, such as, I don’t know, removing the pews from the church to create a more flexible space, or changing service times so that those who work on Sundays can worship, we find ourselves able to follow Jesus’ lead rather than stick to what we are comfortable with.

Being a Christian isn’t static, it is following a call to movement, to willingly go where Jesus leads. It is being willing to give up anything which may hinder, even if it is a perfectly good thing or something which has served us well in the past. Jesus tells Simon ‘Do not be afraid.’ Jesus knows that change can be scary, frightening even, but there are times when we need to be daring, courageous and live as though the Kingdom of God is near.