The Fifth Sunday after Trinity

“When they had brought their boats to shore, they left everything and followed him.”

The name Ann Russell Miller may not mean anything to you – it didn’t mean anything to me before I read about her, but Anne Russel Miller (born 1928) was an American socialite from the west coast.

She came from a well-off household, her father a chief executive of a western railroad company; and when she married a man named Richard Miller, she began to live a life of greater luxury from the money her husband inherited as the heir of the Folger’s coffee fortune and that of Pacific Gas and Electric.

Ann’s life was spectacular.

She was gregarious, charming, and beautiful, sitting on two dozen charitable committees in San Francisco, yachting in the Mediterranean for much of the year, owned separate pairs of glasses to match countless different outfits she owned, and regularly hosted parties in their nine-bedroom mansion, otherwise spending her days in leisure smoking, drinking champagne, travelling, and playing cards. Sounds good to me.

Ann and Richard had 10 children but also lived according to a rather odd pact, an agreement – that if one of them should die early the other would become a monastic, a monk or a nun.

In 1984, Richard died of cancer. Over the next few years Ann was proposed to by at least one other man, but by that time had made up her mind that she would remain true to the pact she had made with Richard. In what must have been a fantastic and odd party, Ann – on her 61st birthday – invited 800 friends to the Hilton hotel for a party before she entered the convent, and not just any convent, but a Carmelite convent, one of the strictest orders when it comes to silence and isolation. At the end of her party she said to her friends, “I gave the first two thirds of my life to the world, the last third will be devoted to my soul.”

In the time leading up to this she had already begun to divest herself of every material possession she owned – expensive Hermes clothing, jewels, money, and anything her 10 children wanted before the rest was sold in an garage sale. Even the house itself was sold to one of the members of the band Metallica.

The day following the party Ann, now owning nothing but what was on her back, boarded a plane and flew to Illinois, entering the convent. About five years later she took her final vows, consecrating her life to God. She maintained some contact with her family, and many friends reported her seeming more aglow in the monastery. She died there as Sister Mary Joseph of the Holy Trinity, only a few years ago in her early 90s.

But why in the world am I telling you this?

Well, in part because of the story that the Gospel offers us today of that well known encounter of Jesus at the lake of Gennesaret.

With the crowds pressing on him, Jesus sees boats resting on the shore as the fishermen wash their nets. He climbs into Simon’s boat and asks that they might put out a bit from the shore, so that He could teach the crowds at arms length from the clamour and press of people.

It’s interesting how many moments in Jesus’ ministry, moments that are often about the testing of faith or the seeing of the miraculous, happen on the water: here today with the fish, the storm that he calms, his walking on water, the broiled fish by the sea-shore, the calling of Andrew, Christ’s own baptism, and so on.

In scripture as here in the church and our rituals, water has a kind of cleansing symbolism – the washing away of sins in baptism, the priest who ritually washes fingers before the Eucharist, or comingles water with wine. But in many of these other places water seems to be something to be feared, not – as I said a little while ago – as we fear a bear, but as we fear God, not in terror but in awe. When we stand before the ocean we stand before something whose breadth and depth we cannot comprehend, something we cannot see in its entirety, there is something fearful in its power but moving in its beauty. To know it, truly, means we must have faith. Just so with God.

The fishermen that day had worked tirelessly all night and so they scoffed when Jesus asked them to put down their nets. Sore, tired, discouraged, they protested yet relented and came up with so many that their nets began to break, a moment that opens them to knowing who is standing before them, and falling to their knees in humility.

As with every miracle that Jesus performs that we hear about in the Gospels there is the miracle and the truth that we perceive outwardly: this is of course a miracle – just as he has command over the wind and sea, so has he command over what swims beneath – he can simply say ‘fish’ and you will catch, ‘open your nets’ and they will be filled. But there is also the truth and miracle that is happening inwardly, the one that is harder to perceive, because this nice story about fish is telling us so much more about who he is and what he offers. And however simple the message may be, it’s one we often need to have retold to us.

Look at the fishermen – tired, weary, discouraged, plugging away without reward under their own steam.

But the presence of Jesus changes all of that. The presence of Jesus gives them not just what they need, nor does it give them what they might have expected to get on a good day, it gives them far more than they could even have imagined catching. And this in itself is a fine message for us today – to remember that with Him and in His presence we always receive more than we would otherwise.

But yet a little caution is needed, because what if we did all of this and thought that our whole purpose and end of our relationship with Him, of inviting Him into our life and entering into that presence is simply about what we get here and now, and about our happiness in this life. Jesus makes this much clear in the Gospel when he points the disciples away from the fish and towards people, “from now on you will be catching people.”

His kingdom, our happiness, our end is not this world but the next; the grace given to the disciples is not that they will always catch nets full of fish, but now they can do even better and cast spiritual nets for people. It’s not a promise that they – or we - will never be hungry physically, but that they – and we - will never hunger spiritually.

Even in prayer, you down there or the priest at the altar opens hands in prayer as if waiting to catch something – and indeed we are, opening ourselves as empty vessels, tired, weary, and discouraged, to be filled as the disciples and their nets were that day.

And their response to this? Exactly what we saw with Anne Russell Miller – when one knows His presence, when Christ is welcomed into our lives, everything else becomes secondary and surrenderable. Nothing else would cause Miller to give up such a life of luxury and comfort, nor the disciples their possessions and livelihoods, but something that offered a greater sense of fulfillment, a greater feeling of purpose, and a greater knowledge of hope – Himself.

May we all be able and willing to open our own selves to His presence, that we might become like the nets.

Amen.