I don’t particularly like shopping for shoes and in fact, unlike the former First Lady of the Philippines, Imelda Marcos, I don’t own many.  It was different as a child.  We were always taken to a lovely shoe shop in Leicester, where I was born – the city not the shoe shop!  It was called Robothams and it sold Clarks and Startrites and so a kind lady would measure our feet as maybe they still do.  But the really exciting thing was that in the shop they had a beautiful, large, dappled grey rocking horse with a lovely soft mane that we could ride on as a treat.  Maybe that would get me in shoe shops more often now!

But apart from the shoes that were bought for us we did like wearing mum’s shoes for some reason, trying them on and clomping, staggering round the house, clip clopping in someone else’s shoes.

Just over ten years ago the stonemasons here completed a copy of the statue of St Peter that sits above one of the great windows on the exterior of the Minister.  I saw some lovely pictures of it online, the Canon Precentor at the time, hard hatted, on the scaffolding, smiling at the amazing work that’d been done in recreating the eroded medieval statue.

In the photos you could see all the details that viewing it from street level you could never do.  It was and is beautiful.  St Peter is sat, enthroned, in priestly vestments, wearing the pallium, wearing the mitre, sitting as a papal figure, majestic, powerful, a prince, a pillar of the church, holding in his hand a model of the first church on this site.

It’s a powerful statement – but there was something not quite right.  It wasn’t to do with the workmanship at all – that was exemplary – but I looked at what could be seen of his feet and he was clearly wearing shoes and not sandals.

Peter has been arrested, he’s in prison.  King Herod was, as ever with capricious hot-headed rulers, in a vengeful mood.  James, the leader of the fledgling church had been beheaded.  The church was being persecuted and as part of that Peter was arrested and thrown into prison.  He must have thought his days were numbered and that he was on a sure path to martyrdom.  But then, as we heard in our First Reading, an angel appears, the cell is filled with light and his chains fall off. As we’re then told in the reading from the Acts of the Apostles

The angel said to him, ‘Fasten your belt and put on your sandals.’ He did so.

In the sandals of the fisherman, in the shoes of fisherfolk, Peter walks, miraculously from the prison to the safe house where his friends are gathered.

It was a stroke of genius to call Simon, Peter, as Jesus did, with no little irony in his voice as he did so, one suspects. Eyebrows amongst the other disciples, must have been raised.  Yes, Simon, Peter, was a great guy, one of the best, a skilled fisherman, someone they’d happily go out on the water with, but he could also be impetuous, unreliable, even frightened.  He was a skilled but simple man, who’d never been far from home, never been far from the shores of the lake, never really been happy in the deep water and yet here he was picked out, nicknamed the rock, told by Jesus in front of them all that he’d be the rock on which the church would be built, on which the church would stand, the community established and that it would withstand, he would withstand, whatever powers were unleashed against him.

Peter represents humanity, discipleship at its best and at its worst, strong yet weak, dependable whilst unreliable, brave yet fearful, present yet absent.  But we’re happy to represent him in our churches holding the keys, seated in majesty, showing nothing of that frailty, displaying nothing of the flakiness that in my mind makes him such an attractive and relatable figure.

Four years ago, General Synod was presented with a paper to consider that spoke of a new vision for the next season of our life as a church.  It was our own Archbishop who presented it.  It was easy to remember the central message of the paper because it boiled down to just three words ‘simpler, humbler, bolder’.  A simpler church, a humbler church, a bolder church.

Perhaps that’s what Jesus saw in Peter – a simple man, a man who’d jump in where angels fear to tread and name it, as he would name Jesus when he and the disciples were faced with that critical question of ‘Who do you say that I am?’  A humble man who’d prefer to wash his master’s feet than have his own washed and then recognise that it wasn’t just his feet that needed washing, but his whole self.  A bold man who’d step out of the boat to come across the water even though fear would then overwhelm him, a man who’d ultimately enter the lions’ den of Rome and receive the martyrdom that in the prison he feared would be his, at that moment.

Simpler, humbler, bolder – it’s a great vision and I happily signed up to it.  But how are we doing?  In all the turmoil that’s engulfed us in the last year have we been revealing any of this, simpler, humbler, bolder?

The angel said to him, ‘Fasten your belt and put on your sandals.’ He did so.

Peter sits there wearing the papal slippers but he should be wearing the shoes of the fisherman, the sandals that the angel directed him to.  We should have the humility to walk in his shoes, in his sandals, the sandals of the working man, the simple, humble yet bold sandals of the one who’ll leap from the boat as soon as he recognises the Lord standing and calling him.  The church needs to walk in the shoes of the fisherman.

And in walking in Peter’s shoes it walks also in Jesus’s.  As R S Thomas wrote in his poem ‘Via Negativa’

His are the echoes

We follow, the footprints he has just

Left.

For the calling to discipleship is the calling to walk where we’re led, on that humble journey that will lead us from the lakeside to the cross, from the locked room to the empty tomb, from the prisons we create to the freedom we find, where we can proclaim Jesus as the Christ, the Son of the Living God.

And that simpler, humbler, bolder journey begins here because we follow the call, the invitation this morning to walk, yes in our own shoes, to this altar where the Lord will feed us, not with the fisherman’s catch but with God’s own self, that sacramental food in which we recognise the Lord present, whose majesty is beyond imagining but who walks in the same dust as we do.  May we simply, humbly, boldly walk with Peter on the journey that leads to life and dare to step into his sandals.