Oct 1976

COMMEMORATION SERMON By the Revd. Noel Kemp-Welch, M.A. I do hope I am not doing anyone an injustice when I say that I do not remember a Commemoration Sermon about St. Peter. It does seem odd, doesn't it? Has it seemed too obvious a theme? Or have Commemoration preachers in recent years thought that we would know all about St. Peter in any case?

A few weeks ago Roger Depledge gave us a series of week-day readings on the theme of Courage. After considering three courageous women, Joan of Arc, Edith Cavell and Ann Frank, he finished off with two events in the life of St. Peter.

The first was his burst of courage—in the heat of the moment and with the support of his fellow Apostles—when he slashed at the ear of the High Priest's servant: and then the contrast of his abject failure when he found himself alone and inactive, faced with a sudden challenge out of the blue.

So Roger Depledge set the Peterite ball rolling: let us follow it up for a few minutes this morning, for St. Peter is so typically the ordinary man who suddenly finds himself caught up in the influence of Jesus.

Let us think of three other incidents which represent three stages in St. Peter's spiritual growth—indeed in the normal spiritual development of any of us.

The first is the moment when Jesus borrowed Peter's boat as a sort of floating pulpit from which to address the crowd on the shore. Peter had been fishing all night without any success. Now he was cleaning his nets and was obviously very reluctant to push out again. When Jesus suggested the idea it seemed plain daft. But against his instincts he did as Jesus had insisted, and to his immense surprise he netted a large shoal of fish. He had the reward which comes when we respond to Jesus's pressure, and it was then that Jesus promised him the far more satisfying reward of catching men.

What about ourselves? Can we say, as Peter did, that we have toiled all night and caught nothing; that we have genuinely tried to let Jesus into our lives and yet do not seem to have got anywhere? Perhaps we have: though I suspect that a good many of us have not even begun to try. If we have tried, then Jesus says to us: "Push on; don't give up feebly. You may get fed up, but stick to it," and eventually—perhaps quite suddenly—there will be a break through.

In the past few years I have had a number of letters from O.P.'s who didn't seem to get much, if anything, out of their religious experience at School. Yet like Peter, doing his regular job as a fisherman, they had been picking up experience without realising it. When suddenly the influence of Jesus had become an unavoidable thing in their lives they felt, like Peter, so ashamed that they had resisted him in the past.

I can think of one O.P. who is now a lawyer in York, another who is a research scientist on the other side of the Pennines and another who qualified as a doctor and is now a lay evangelist in West Germany.

The second incident represents a new stage in Peter's growth toward maturity. At the moment when Jesus asked him who he thought him to be, Peter found himself making the whole-hearted statement that he believed Jesus to be the Christ, the Son of the living God. 12