When I was ten years old I almost drown.  It was in the ocean at the Jersey Shore.  I did not know how to swim and I ventured out to deeper water.  Quickly, I discovered that I did not know what to do in deep water.  Panicking, my arms and legs flailed wildly and contributed nothing to keeping my head above water.  I remember looking up at the sun and seeing it become blurry as my face sunk beneath the waves.  Then I came up again and saw my mother running to the water’s edge.  Again I went under and thought to myself, am I going to die? 

Just then I felt someone grab me and lift me to surface.  It was one of my parent's friends, a middle-aged lifeguard on the beach at Ocean Grove.  He rescued me and brought me to the shore.  He told me it probably was not a good idea to get in over my head when I had no idea how to swim. 

In fact, I never learned to swim until I was about thirty years old.  To this day, I’m not very good at it.  I don’t know if it’s a buoyancy problem or what.   And to this day I am still uneasy around deep water.  Even though from the surface deep water and shallow water look alike, deep water gets my imagination working.  I fear the worst.  What’s under there?  How deep does it go?  What would happen if I fell in?

Many people have a fear of deep water.  It’s called hydrophobia.   M. Ellen Dash is the president of the Transpersonal Swimming Institute in Schenectady, NY.  The Institute  teaches something called Miracle Swimming.  It’s not a technique of what to do in the water, instead it is a way of being in the water.  Dash says, “You cannot learn what to do with your arms and legs if you’re afraid you might not live.”  She explains that the cause of panic in deep water is something different than what you would assume.  The panic and fear does not come from not being able to breathe, float, swim or reach a place to stand.  The panic comes from people losing their presence of mind and not having a sense of being in control.  That’s why people are afraid of deep water.  Deep down, they’re afraid of losing control

Simon Peter was a man who liked being in control.  He was a hard-working fisherman along the shores of the Sea of Galilee, two thousand years ago. Later on in the Gospels, Simon Peter is aggressive and impulsive.  He is always the one who asks the questions, volunteers first or claims the greatest allegiance to Jesus.  He likes being in control.  He knows what he is doing and always knows the best way to do it.

One day, Jesus is teaching the crowds along the Sea of Galilee.  The crowd gets so big that Jesus borrows Simon Peter’s boat, and goes out into the lake a little ways so the crowd can see him.  It is a place where small currents and waves rocked the boat.  But the crowd stays on land where things are steady, dry and secure.

We don’t know a lot about those crowds or their motivations.  Some people in the crowd were just intrigued by Jesus.  Some were entertained by his stories.  Some just liked seeing him stick it to those in authority.  One thing that many of them had in common though, was that at the end of the day, they could just walk away.  After hearing his message and teachings, they could just go home and return to their life as it was when they left their house that day.  After experiencing God through Jesus they could just say to their friends, “Well that was entertaining.  I feel better now.  Now let me get back to the real world.”

It’s tempting for us to act the same way.  We can settle for having real lives, and our spiritual lives.  We can settle for a shallow life of worrying about what we perceive as our real lives; jobs, office politics, money, school, our kids activities, our relationships, and our happiness.  Our spiritual lives then get relegated to the status of an add-on - God is just a little something extra we can add to it.  God is like a topping on a dessert. A theological Cool Whip. 

What if we have it all backwards?  What if the spiritual life, the life of following Jesus is the deep life and the things we exhaust so much of our time and effort on are the shallow stuff?

Jesus is not content to let people stand on the shoreline as idle spectators, although that is where we are most comfortable.  Instead Jesus invites us into deep water.  That day in Galilee, Jesus had borrowed Simon Peter’s boat for use as a preaching platform.  When Jesus finished speaking, Simon Peter probably thought, “Well those were some interesting stories.  I feel pretty good.  I met some nice people in the crowd.  I helped out a righteous religious man.  That’s gotta’ count for something.  I feel pretty good about myself.  I can get through my work week now.”

 At that point, the main thing on Simon Peter’s mind is to bring the boat back in, let the crowd clear out and head home.  He had been fishing all night.  However, Jesus is not ready to let Simon Peter go so fast.  For Jesus, hearing a story is not the end of the story.  It is only the beginning.  He tells Simon Peter, you’re not putting that boat away.  We’re going out into deeper water and we’re going to catch fish!

Simon Peter responds by being the expert.  After all, he’s the professional fisherman.  Jesus is just a carpenter.  Two different unions.  He tells Jesus, “Look.  I’ve been fishing all night and haven’t caught a thing.  There’s nothing to catch out there believe me.  I’ve tried everything.”

I’ve been out fishing all night and haven’t caught a thing.

Can you relate to that?  You have success in life, money, a nice home a family.  But something is missing.  There is no depth.  You have success but you long for significance. 

I’ve been out fishing all night and haven’t caught a thing.

You have spent you life trying out different spiritual paths or even different churches ­ and it is as if you never feel your relationship with God has deepened.  You have joined Bible studies and memorized countless verses.  You have joined book discussion groups and all they do is discuss, discuss, discuss. 

I’ve been out fishing all night and haven’t caught a thing.

You have come here and you and your heart feel strangely warmed.  You have been at Vision for a while but you are still getting your feet wet.  You have a million reasons not to dive in to the deeper water of joining this church, or joining a Vision group or getting baptized.  So now the experience here seems to be getting a little old and tiresome.

I’ve been out fishing all night and haven’t caught a thing.

Still, we hear the voice of Jesus who calls, “Put out for deeper water.”

You’ve been standing at the shore hearing God’s Word in your life and it intrigues you.  The person of Jesus calls you to go deeper in your spiritual journey. We have an inkling that going deeper might be wondrous, but going deeper seems so scary.

Simon Peter had an inkling that in Jesus there was someone present that could only be described as holy, and wondrous; someone whose origin could have only been in God.  He had crossed paths with Jesus before.  Jesus was going around Galilee healing people ­ making them whole, physically, emotionally and spiritually.  One of the people he healed was Simon Peter’s mother-in-law.  Let me add here, for those who claim none of the disciples were married, how does an unmarried man have a mother-in-law?

In any case, that experience, that little glimpse of God, led Simon Peter to think that there might be something a little different about Jesus.  Those little glimpses of grace are glimpses of God.  We’ve all had them.  Little moments where we suspect there might be something more to life than the obvious, the surface, the shallow. At a deeper level, those moments are the grace of God working in our lives before we are even aware of it.  Like Simon Peter, we have a choice.  We can respond by shaking our head, rubbing our eyes, dismissing it and just staying in the shallow water.  Or we can have faith and trust that maybe, just maybe, there is something deeper way of being in life.

Simon Peter chose the latter.   When Jesus beckons, “Put out for deeper water and let your nets down for a haul, “ he responds, “If you say so, I will go out into the deep water and let down my nets.”  He is not sure what will happen.  He is giving up control.  There is no guarantee of safety or success from Jesus, just a call to head out for deep water.  Nothing is sure.  Nothing is certain.  He could wind up looking like a fool.  But Simon Peter trusts that if he follows Jesus’ instruction, Jesus will lead him in the right direction.  So he heads out from shallow water to the deep water and lets down his nets.

That is what the life of a real follower of Jesus looks like.  Not standing on the shore playing it safe.  Not closed up and withdrawn.  But out in the deep water casting out our nets wide, taking in all that God wants to bless us with. As God’s people, we are not to be found hiding in our churches for protection, but out in the depths of life, with our nets cast, expecting the big catch.  Open to the depths of joy and depths of despair that life offers. 

Paul Tillich, a famous 20^th century theologian, proposed that we replace all of our height language for God with depth language.  God, he said, was not “up there” but deep in here. The author of the letter to the church in Ephesus prays that, “Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love. I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is its breadth and length and height and depth.” Christians grow by putting out for deep water.

As a kid, I used to love watching “The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau.”  Those TV specials featured Cousteau and his crew diving and exploring the world’s deepest oceans, living in an undersea base for a month, swimming with dolphins and whales.  It was an adventure.  Those shows would not have been so inspiring if they merely featured Jacques strolling the beach, picking up shells, and making excuses not to go in the water.

I want to be clear about what I am saying here.  Some of you are going to come to me this week and say, “Don, your sermon inspired me so much.  So I decided to take the plunge and take swimming lessons.”  Or  “I’m going to start scuba diving” or “I’m going to start my own business.”  Those may be wonderful things but that is not what I am talking about.

As we begin a new year at Vision, I am asking you to make a decision today on how you are going go deeper in your journey with Jesus this year.  It may mean deciding to join our church by taking a membership class when it is offered this fall.  It may mean joining a Vision group.  It may mean being baptized if you never have been.  It may mean stepping up your giving to this church.  If you already are serving in the ministries of this church, it may mean going deeper into leading and taking responsibility for a ministry of this church.  In the coming weeks, you are going to hear specific ways you can do all those things.

It may mean reaching out to the community around us through this church to transform lives ­ not through a civic organization, your karate school, or kid’s dance class.  Those are wonderful things and I am glad other organizations do those things. I am not putting them down.  But those are businesses ­ not churches.  Businesses do not reach out with the love of God in the name of Jesus Christ.  Churches do.  Following Jesus means constantly venturing into the deeper water with other believers, as a church.

That deep water scares us.  It scares us because, like ancient mariners with their myths and misconceptions about sea monsters and mermaids, we have misconceptions about a deeper Christian life.  We mistakenly think it means being a brainwashed religious zombie - a Kool-aid drinker.  That is why this fall, we will explore what Jesus really taught.  We will discover together the surprise of what it means to be a deep Christian.

One can’t dabble in following Jesus.  One can’t just get their feet wet and wonder why life still feels so dry.  The only way to follow Jesus is all the way, completely, out in the deep water. When we live that kind of life, we are going to be distinct and different from the world around us.  People may even say, “You’ve gone off the deep end!”

They said the same thing about Jesus.  They will say the same thing about us.  They have gone off the deep end.  I don’t know about you, but I’ll take the deep end over the kiddy pool any day.

There are no Olympic medals awarded in the kiddy pool.  No history books written about those who stay behind on shore and no great explorers who made great discoveries in shallow water.

And there are no true disciples of Jesus who haven’t gone off the deep end.