Sermon preached for the Third Sunday after Trinity – 28th June 2020: SS Peter & Paul (Anticipated!)

Revd Canon Leonard Doolan – St Paul’s Athens

June is a month of what we might call ‘big hitters’. St. Barnabas, St. John the Baptist, St. Peter and St. Paul. All of these apostles of the Lord Jesus Christ – sent out to preach, share and live the new life as followers of the risen Jesus Christ – inspiring for their courage, their energy, and their faith despite hardship, persecution, imprisonment, and even death itself.

Our Lord tells us, as we heard in last week’s holy gospel, ‘whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever does not take the cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.’ (Matthew 10, 37-39).

These are deeply challenging words to us, and unless we study them deeply and understand them in our own context in our own generation, we would be tempted to give up and just stick with the comfort of our own family life. But we are called directly to be more than just this – called to be the family that gathers around the cross, the family that is called to be dispersed and to live the gospel life within our families and communities.

Among the June ‘big hitters’ of those who took up the challenge of living the life of the cross, we celebrate SS. Peter and Paul. Their feast day in our calendar is tomorrow, 29^th June, but we are ‘anticipating’ this by one day, so that we can be infected by their outstanding witness to the Church of Christ. These two martyr saints are truly twin foundations of the Church of Christ.

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