Sermon: The Very Rev. Andrew McGowan

In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Please be seated.

Mr. Dean, thank you for that welcome earlier, and I bring you all greetings from Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, and from the Berkeley Divinity School at Yale in particular, which is the Episcopal Seminary at Yale. You can tell from my thick Connecticut accent that I’ve spent quite a bit of time there. The truth in fact is that I’m an Australian and came to the other side of the world in order to take part in the great privilege of leading theological education there and to have people like Dean Hollerith among my alumni and, and indeed also the Reverend Patrick Keyser. It’s a great privilege. If you have any complaints about either of them, you can find my email online, I’m sure . But I want you to go with me, as it were, in your mind’s eye to a different place altogether. To Rome.

Now, I actually suspect you probably spent a bit of time visually and tele-visually in Rome in recent weeks and days anyway, you know what I mean? It’s going to be in people’s minds in the week ahead just as it was in the last couple of weeks. A pope’s death then, a pope’s election soon, lots of pageantry, first for mourning and soon for celebration. Plenty of ecclesiastical tourism going on apparently. And even those of us who aren’t literally going to be tourists there, will be continuing to travel there in some sense as we watch the news or as we, according to sources, continue to download Conclave from Netflix at remarkable rates. And if we weren’t already perhaps getting the sense that there’s something a little bit off about turning this profound and holy moment into a matter of entertainment, perhaps I should just say that, the less said the better, about recent A-I images combining the faces of presidents and popes.

But you know that one of the things you’re going to hear, even if you don’t necessarily pay attention to it, but the idea is because I’m telling you, you will, you will hear lots of references to St. Peter, right? The Chair of Peter is a way of talking about the office of Pope. The Keys of Peter, a way of talking about the authority of the Pope. Peter referred to as “The Rock”. That’s actually what the name Peter means, because Jesus gave him that name saying, ‘Peter, you’re a rock, the rock on which the church will be built’. And so Peter will come up again and again, his historical example, because of the idea that the pope is in some sense the successor or a successor of Peter. The Roman Church has a very long and deep and proud association with that apostle. And of course, the apostle was the subject of at least the second half of our gospel reading this morning.

Now, in some versions of that story, depending upon which school you went to and what kind of religious education you got, you may have been told that Peter himself was the first bishop of Rome. Now, I’m being generally very ecumenical here today, but I’m afraid that you’ve brought an early church historian into the pulpit. So I’m also gonna mention a couple of home truths. It is unlikely that anyone was quite a bishop in Rome at the time that Peter was alive. And if there was then, Peter wasn’t it? And he certainly wasn’t the Pope because there wasn’t an office like that. But I’m not telling you this because the connection between Peter and Rome isn’t important so much as to say that we need to understand how and why it was important. Peter was honored and remembered in the church in Rome from very, very early times, not because of institutional leadership, and not because of ecclesiastical tourism or entertainment, but because of martyrdom. The most ancient tradition about Peter in Rome is not that he went there in order to attend the first Diocesan Convention or to draft the canons. He went there to die.

And providentially, perhaps given these events going on in Rome today, the New Testament text that is most concerned with that notion of Peter’s eventual fate and what it tells us about the nature of Christian ministry and leadership, is indeed this gospel today. And it’s being read today in Roman Catholic churches around the world and in many other Protestant churches, just as it has been by us. We’re all thinking about this. So as you heard, and you heard it twice, in Spanish and in English, so no excuse, but all right, I will remind you. The risen Christ meets Peter by a Galilean lake. Now, you will remember that this is a somewhat fraught moment in their relationship, or at least let me remind you, the last time we’d really heard anything about Peter in this story was when Peter had denied his association with Jesus. You remember this? That he’s hanging out around the trial and people come up to him and say, “Aren’t you with this guy?”

And he says, three times, “I am not”. Simple and dreadful words. “I am not with that man”. And so as that horrifying story had had a threefold structure, today we have a story of a threefold healing and renewal of the relationship between Jesus and Peter. It’s quite clearly parallel to it. Jesus asks Peter three times, I love you, so that Peter has the chance to say back three times, to take the three steps back to Jesus that he’d taken away from him in that other dreadful story. And each time though, it’s interesting, Jesus doesn’t say, you know, “Do you love me Simon, son of John?” “Yes Lord, you know I love you”. But the punchline isn’t, “Great. One”. Each time he says, he varies it a little bit, but the point’s pretty clear. “Feed my lambs, tend my sheep, feed my sheep”.

The point of the reconstitution of their relationship isn’t just about them and about them being besties again, the point is that the relationship that Jesus has called Peter into again, is one of service. It’s gonna be one of leadership and ministry. And Peter we know did indeed travel around the Mediterranean, engage in preaching the gospel, but Jesus finishes this exchange with another, well on the face of it, perhaps a gloomier part of the story, but not really if we hear it properly. He says, “Very truly, I tell you, when you were younger, you used to fasten your own belt and go wherever you wish, but when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands and someone else will pass in a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go”. “He said this”, the gospel author tells us, “He said this to indicate the kind of death by which he would glorify God”.

Now, the truth is we have to pause and swallow at the point where the idea of death glorifying God gets juxtaposed. ‘Cause that really wasn’t what we came for, was it? That’s really the kind of reason, of course, that it led Peter to those ‘I am nots’ back a few days earlier, because he didn’t want the consequences of his relationship with Jesus to include the possibility that his own life might be on the line. He was up for the notion that he might grow spiritually or that, you know, he might get better as a person and then he might come closer to God. But really, what’s all this stuff about dying Jesus? Have we really got this story correct? Jesus said this to indicate the kind of death by which he would glorify God. And after this, he said to him, “Follow me”.

It’s not in scripture, but the evangelist knows the story of Peter’s martyrdom and death. It’s clearly alluded to here. And this story is what led the Roman church to claim Peter as a member of its own tradition, Peter’s death in Rome. The fact that it was there that his faithfulness unto death, his following Jesus, his loving Jesus, actually came to that point where he was imitating Jesus’ own faith, in faith and love and hope, having met the risen Jesus by the Galilee and seashore, knowing that that wasn’t gonna be the end of the story. And that it may actually be worth following those you love, even to the point of material loss and even to the point of death, because there are some things that are more powerful than death. And love, above all, is more powerful than death.

Now, the Church of Rome lest it, at the risk of perhaps making it seem greedy, actually has another apostle that it claims for its own historically. And that is St. Paul. Now, if you have undertaken any ecclesiastical tourism in Rome, literally, you will know that there is not only that great church for St. Peter, which is by the way above the place of his notional, martyrdom and burial, not the place where he set up any kind of institutional structure. But on the other side of Rome, there is a church of St. Paul. St. Paul’s- Outside-theWalls, which is also the notional place of Paul’s martyrdom. And intriguingly enough, the Acts reading today was chosen to provide this kind of parallel between Peter’s and Paul’s stories because we heard what Paul’s call, or Saul’s call as he originally was, and he encounters the risen Jesus as well.

Someone as far as we know, he hadn’t met during Jesus’ lifetime, as we understand it. And Jesus says to him, too, “follow me”. And in that Acts reading, there is also a reference that says, “this was to show how he must suffer for the sake of the gospel’. The Acts of the Apostles, the whole of the narrative follows the story of Paul to where he’s arrested and taken to Rome in chains because he’s appealed to Caesar. And the story just stops in a funny anticlimactic kind of way. Perhaps because the readers are again supposed to know about Paul, what the readers of John’s gospel are supposed to know about Peter, which is that he also was martyred there.

Now some of you know this place well. Okay, quick test. I bet the acolytes and the choir members and the others who are volunteers know this. The Patronal dedication of this national cathedral church is to? They got it. The people, I think it’s the North Transept wins today. You can note that, Mr. Dean, for any future rewards and performance incentives that need to be remembered. This is a church, the Cathedral Church of Saints Peter and Paul. And it is a tradition that we find of a number of churches around the world, including cathedral churches in England, but also in many other places where that exact same pair of dedications pops up. Where Peter and Paul represent according to the vision of the founders of this place, what it really means when we talk about apostolic leadership and ministry. Here, every time we walk into this building dedicated to those two apostles, we are joining in the Roman Church’s acclimation of those two as telling us what leadership really means, what ministry really means, what discipleship really means. Not about getting the votes in the Conclave or anywhere else, but about tending the sheep, but knowing that tending the sheep authentically has consequences, because it’s not always going to be easy to tend the sheep.

Now, you might not immediately think that engaging in pastoral leadership or you know, standing for office as a bishop in the Episcopal church or for Pope in the Roman Catholic Church, sounds much like a means towards martyrdom. But in fact, there have been many bishops in the Anglican Communion and in the Roman Catholic Communion, of course, who did undergo martyrdom for the sake of their faithful witness to Christ. And I suspect that in 2025, we may be on the point of becoming better acquainted again than we have for some time with the cost of what it means to undertake an authentic Christian witness. You see, we are at this strange moment in history, even in this country, which has historically been so religious where religion has been a normal part of the social fabric. But as you many of you know, that over the past 30 or 40 years that somehow fallen off. That there’s a couple of generations now of younger people who haven’t thought that belonging to a church or another religious institution was necessarily a normal part of their existence within U.S. society.

So while we are in this glorious place, the inheritance of a grand tradition, we cannot afford to use the glory and the grandeur of this space as an excuse for not facing up to the fact that we are doing this work of Christian discipleship in a world that on a given day is assessing us somewhere between indifference and hostility. And that that’s going to be more the case, rather than less. Christians face a return to the place of a minority whose faith is distinctive and counter-cultural as it was for Peter and Paul. Now, of course, there are those in our wider sort of social sphere who are stepping up and saying, well, yes, there’s all this anti-Christian bias now going on, and there’s all this anti-religious sort of culture. If you’re like me, you might find some of the moves to create task forces and commissions about those things, a little suspicious.

I say this partly because of a particular event that took place, I think really just a week ago. Two of my Yale Divinity School colleagues, William Barber and Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, were praying in the Rotunda of the Capitol building, and they were praying on behalf of those who are least well supported and equipped in our society. They were praying because of their concern against cuts that might be undertaken to social services and to social welfare. And they prayed repeatedly again and again: “Against the conspiracy of cruelty, we plead the power of your mercy. Against the conspiracy of cruelty, we plead the power of your mercy.” And Dr. Barber and the Reverend Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove were both arrested for their troubles in the Rotunda of the Capitol, thus perhaps giving us a clearer indication than some of the window dressing going on about what the place of authentic Christian witnesses gonna be like as we go forward.

In his first encyclical in 2013, Pope Francis wrote this,” The disciple is ready to put his or her whole life on the line, even to accepting martyrdom, in bearing witness to Jesus Christ. Yet the goal is not to make enemies, but to see God’s word accepted and its capacity for liberation and renewal revealed.” But Francis, my colleagues William and Jonathan, Peter and Paul, Francis himself of blessed memory, all witness to us about what it might mean to say back to Jesus when he asks, “Lord, you know that I love you. Lord, you know that I love you”.

The gospel, though, is not ecclesiastical tourism. The gospel is not placing a bet on who’s gonna win in the Conclave next week, or thinking that we should have costumes that have a bit more red in them here because of all those gorgeous colors on Netflix, right? The gospel is not about the institutions that foster the life of the church or the people who had them. Inevitable and important as they may be, the gospel is about the faithful witness that Peter and Paul exhibited as Jesus’ followers. The gospel is about what Francis was willing to say, unflinchingly, whether or not it made him popular with Roman Catholics or with others. The gospel is about what my colleague, William Barber, is saying and witnessing about the nature of Christian witness, in this moment of great challenge that we face. The call to all of us is an urgent one. Jesus offers to meet every one of us by the lake now, every one of us, and we may recognize him and he’ll ask each of us, “do you love me?” again and again. And when the point has got through, and we understand that because he’s risen, his love is more powerful than death and even more powerful than our own death. He says now, as He did then, “Follow me”. Amen.