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.

There are many descriptive words of these two saints that we could consider in greater detail, but I chose to think about one in particular. The characteristic of sacrifice.

When we consider the saints and martyrs of the church, we might all think it is all well and good to reflect on their deaths, and to consider that only death is what Jesus wants from us – or as one hymn says, ‘the supreme sacrifice’. It is perfectly reasonable for us all to think that we don’t really want to die physically and before our time because of our faith in Jesus. Equally we might feel that our faith is weak because we feel this – even something of a failure compared to the martyrs of the church.

Let me be honest – I hope that I am never beheaded for my love of Jesus because I am in a hostile environment. I would guess I have all of you with me on this – none of us would voluntarily seek for this to happen to any of us. We remember though, all too vividly, that in parts of the world, not too far from where we are now, followers of Jesus will be dismissed from their jobs, turned out of their businesses and local communities, in some places imprisoned, tortured, and even brutally slaughtered. Christianity is the most highly persecuted faith in the world at present – and we all know the history of the Greeks and their persecutions in the last 200 years.

So let’s not concentrate too much on the physical death side of our witnessing, our martyrdom, because martyr means witness, but on other forms of sacrificial witnessing. To do this we will in particular consider the lives, not the deaths, of St. Peter and St. Paul.

Both made great sacrifice in their lives. Peter was a fisherman – that is how he and his family made a living. He fished the waters of the Sea of Galilee. To this day there is a fish in those waters called St. Peter’s fish, and it is a popular meal in Israel. When Jesus called him to follow him, he was a busy man. Fishing is a demanding task. Peter was working on his nets, sorting them out from any entanglements and no doubt hanging them up on a some sort of frame to dry out properly. Apart from the changeability of the weather, and the dangers of working on the waters, Peter had a secure job. It ran in the family – how many generations before him had done exactly what his daily routine involved. Early mornings, long shifts, physical labour, dangers at sea – coming home to his wife, smelling every day of fish. Jesus said to him – follow – so he left all that familiarity without even a question. It wasn’t just his work he left behind.

 

Peter was married, and no doubt he had children, or assumed that he would have a family with his wife. We know he was married, because we are told of an occasion when his mother-in- law had a fever, and Jesus healed her. So Peter left his family and followed Jesus, and his faith led him all the way to Rome. He has second thoughts in Rome and turns around – it is then we here of the tradition of an encounter on the Via Appia, where he sees Christ. ‘Quo vadis, Domine’ – ‘where are you going, Lord.’ In this vision the Lord says, ‘to Rome, to be crucified all over again’. At this Peter turns back to Rome to witness to his faith. Peter’s sacrifice was great in his life – not just in his death. It is his sacrifice in life from which we nowadays may well learn great lessons, rather than from concentrating just on his death. We could say so much more about Peter’s life of self-sacrifice.

Paul is a very different person to Peter. They both met and knew each other when Paul made visits to the early church community in Jerusalem of which Peter was the leader. Paul was intellectually adept, well educated, schooled in the tradition of the Pharisees, and had one of the best teachers around at the time, whose name was Gamaliel.

Paul was an adversary of the Christian faith – a persecutor, who oversaw the death of St. Stephen. He had a famous conversion on the way to Damascus. He sacrificed all of his religious past – who was willing to work through initial suspicions that the early Christians showed towards him. He endured beatings, shipwreck, insult, and so forth. Paul comes across as a strong-willed individual, but his letters and the Acts of the Apostles show that he was willing to work with others, and to part company with others but in Christian terms. In mission he did not get his own way, for in Jerusalem he had to contend with Peter’s understanding of the faith, and his own. They agreed to do things differently.

Paul sacrificed his religious convictions in Judaism, his intellect was turned upside down, and his life was altered forever. Like Peter, he too ended up being killed in Rome.

 

Both died for their faith, yet both also lived for their faith, and it is in the living of their faith that we can see the example for our own faith and witness – sacrificing our deeply held views, ways of life, expectations, comfort and so on for the sake of Christ.

If Peter and Paul can teach us anything about life in Christ, it is that we have to be sacrificial in order to follow Jesus. Each of us in our own way must take up the cross and follow him who has called Peter, Paul and all the saints of God, you and me, to live the faith until such time as we die in the faith.

In this month of ‘big hitters’ we might all consider what sacrifices are being demanded of us, as we each respond to the invitation of Christ – ‘Follow me’.