Sermon for Petertide 2025

 

Acts 12:1-11 and Matthew 16:13-19 

“You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”

It’s a good thing, I think, that the Church of England wasn’t around 2000 years ago to interfere with the appointment process of the first leaders of God’s Church. As much as I love our institution, with all her failings, I have a feeling that the line up of candidates might have resulted in a rather different appointment.

There were the sons of Zebedee, James, and John, whom Jesus nicknamed the ‘sons of thunder’; the glory-hungry boys, who achieve absolutely nothing, but do so very loudly, and who famously petition Jesus to give them thrones on either side of his in heaven and then flippantly state that they can share his cup and his sufferings. One of them in particular, John, the beautiful beloved, and the favourite, or so John’s gospel says, would have brought charisma and charm, and looked great in the stained glass windows.

There are Judas Iscariot and Matthew Levi, both apparently great with money, who might ensure the financial stability of the kingdom of God on earth, whilst also allowing a small part of the funds to go into small, but highly publicised, acts of mission or generosity. Thomas would have brought a critical and strategic approach…

And so the list continues.

But instead, Jesus chooses Peter. The unstable, fragile, ‘rock’, with his foot stuck permanently in his mouth. At one moment he’s the foundation stone on which Christ will build his church, in the next he’s the stumbling block, as Jesus cries ‘get behind me Satan’, all because Peter didn’t want Jesus to die: Peter who is the first to identify Jesus as the Christ, the son of God, but then denies Jesus three times when there’s a hint of consequence; Peter who almost drowns because he leaps over the side of a boat and tries to run across the waves to Jesus, before he looks down and sees only water; Peter who spends most of his time after the resurrection arguing with St Paul, and then, in a beautiful turn of churchy irony, has to share a feast day with him ‘til kingdom come.

Peter would never have made it through a Church of England selection process, and yet he is the first leader that holy mother church needed. Because a vocation has nothing to do with brilliance, or charisma, or charm, or intelligence, a vocation is simply a call that requires a response, and in Peter’s chaotic example, no one is excluded from the possibility of hearing that same call over their life. The word Amateur sums up a person with a vocation. Amateur, from the Latin ‘Amare’, meaning to love, is quite simply someone who loves what they do, and the one for whom they do it.

Peter is a bit of an amateur, and often haphazard, apostle. In our reading from Acts we see him escaping from prison without realising it, thinking himself to be dreaming until he finds himself in the middle of a path outside; nothing quite as dramatic as the hymn we sang for our gradual. But in his story, and in his great proclamations of faith and much greater stumblings along the way, we see a man who quite simply responds ‘yes’ to God’s call.

A vocation is not necessarily a profound spiritual gear change, nor is it usually a sudden moment that takes over your life, at least not for most people. A vocation is just an invitation to step into God’s presence, and to let God’s love pour out through those quirks that make you who you are. For some, saying yes to God means putting on a dog collar, or a cassock and blue scarf, and standing in pulpits trying desperately to preach a sermon that isn’t as boring as the one we preached the week before. It means sitting with the dying, hearing whispered confessions, or standing at the altar and feeding God’s people with Christ’s body and blood. For some especially brave souls, it means moving into a convent or monastery and living a life of prayer and discipline, being formed by community. But for all of us Christian amateurs, regardless of what shape our vocation takes, it means simply loving what we do and the God for whom we do it, knowing that nothing, no failure, nor doubt, nor grand presumptions  can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.

Peter’s vocation was to lead, and in him God chose a leader who had walked through failure, whose companions knew him at his very worst, and whose Saviour knew him at his best. Over time, he grew into a resilient and mature leader. Paul of Tarsus, whom we celebrate as well today, ended up ministering among those who knew him to be a murderer and persecutor of God’s people, becoming a touring missionary. Thomas, who needed proof of Jesus’ resurrection, travelled to India, to Kerala, as a missionary, and was martyred by being stabbed for refusing to worship an idol, taking on himself the very wound that he had needed to touch in order to believe. When we say yes to God, the gentle but transformative power of God will equip us for whatever we face.

God calls us, as the hymn says ‘o’er the tumult’ of life, and through the haphazard path of discipleship, like Peter, to be those who love what we do, and the one for whom we do it.