Month: May 2025

Acts 16.16-34, John 17.20-26

The Seventh Sunday of Easter, 1 June 2025, Eldroth, Clapham

Today’s amazing episode from the Acts of the Apostles, I call the story of the Three Spirits of Philippi. 

You can visit Philippi today – the ruins of the once-great Macedonian city are a UNESCO World Heritage site, on a hill near the river Angista, overlooking a plain that leads down to the Ægean coast. In the time of the visit of Paul and Silas, Philippi had become a colony of the Roman empire, a ‘miniature Rome’, under Roman municipal law, and governed by two military officers appointed directly from Rome. Today’s tourists walk through the remains of the city’s exceptional Roman architecture, its streets having being modelled on Rome itself. [1]

Who were the Three Spirits of Philippi? I call them the spirits of the enslaver, the enslaved, and the saved. 

The saved were Paul and Silas and their companions, including Luke the writer of the Acts of the Apostles, who by today’s account was clearly an eyewitness to the events of that day. They had given themselves completely over to the spirit of the living, resurrected and ascended Christ – God’s Holy Spirit – to guide them on their missionary tour of the Mediterranean, to empower them to preach the good news of Jesus in the public places of this Roman-occupied world, to challenge the pre-eminence of the Roman gods with the gospel of the salvation of Christ.

On this occasion they encounter a woman who was, in body, mind and spirit, enslaved. The spirit which possessed her was a familiar spirit in the Greco-Roman world. It was known as a python spirit, emanating from The Oracle at Delphi, the most trusted pagan oracle on earth. So the woman was a ‘reputable’ psychic, as it were, no mere circus palm reader. This dark power which possessed her, this occult power, which knew that the missionaries were sent from the ‘Most High God’, was more often used to make predictions which could help people set the course of their lives, and their livelihoods; it served the ruling system, and was thus in popular demand. [2]

Which brings us to the third Spirit of Philippi: the spirit of the enslaver. The enslavers were those who took this woman into forced labour, exploiting her prophetic powers for their own financial gain. The enslaving spirit extended its influence over all the ruling powers of the region, so that when the slave woman’s ‘owners’ saw that Paul’s exorcism removed their means of making money from her, they got the authorities, the magistrates, and the crowd involved, all combining to have the missionaries flogged and thrown into jail. The enslaving spirit extended its influence even into the bowels of this prison, where the jailer clearly feared the magistrates so much that he would rather have taken his own life than face their punishment had the prisoners escaped.

So, spirits abound in Philippi, the same spirits which still abound today, the spirits of the enslaver, the enslaved, and the saved. 

We might think that slavery is a thing of the past. But right now, almost 50 million people are trapped in slavery worldwide. It’s a problem that affects every country on earth –  including ours. Modern slavery is all around us, often hidden in plain sight. People can become enslaved making our clothes, serving our food, picking our crops, working in factories, or working in houses as cooks, cleaners or nannies. Victims of modern slavery might face violence or threats, be forced into inescapable debt, or have their passport taken away and face being threatened with deportation. 49.6 million people live in modern slavery – in forced labour and forced marriage; and roughly a quarter of all victims of modern slavery are children. [3]

On that fateful day in Philippi Paul and Silas freed the enslaved woman from the spirit which bound her; and in the aftermath of the remarkable prison earthquake – a powerful sign of God’s liberating spirit – they freed the jailer from his fears, to rejoice that he had become a believer in God.

It’s a given that, with those first missionaries, and with the great Christian social reformers of old, we must share with people of goodwill the mission ‘to stop slavery, to secure freedom for everyone, everywhere, always’. [4]

But when the spirit of the enslaver persists, as it does today, we have to ask: can the enslaved still be saved? After all, from what we can tell in the story, the woman exorcised from the power of the python spirit nevertheless remained enslaved by her masters; and the jailer, whilst now spiritually  liberated through his new-found faith and baptism, nevertheless remained a jailer, continuing to serve the enslaving powers-that-be. 

Even in their enslavement, can the enslaved still be saved? Grappling with this question, Howard Thurman, the influential theologian of the black civil rights movement, often thought of his grandmother, who would occasionally talk about her life as a slave on a plantation in north Florida. 

“Two of her stories I never tired of,” he wrote. “The first: sometimes the plantation owner’s minister would be permitted to hold a religious service for the slaves, and he always preached from the same text: ‘Slaves, be obedient to your masters, for this is right in the Lord.’ My grandmother said that she made up her mind then and there that if she ever learned to read or if freedom ever came she would never read that part of the Bible.”

His grandmother’s second story was even more important to Thurman, he said, “but in a different way. She would talk about the times when a slave preacher was permitted to hold services for the slaves of her master’s and all the neighbouring plantations. She would say: ‘It didn’t matter what the text was, the minister always ended up at the same place.’ He always ended up at Calvary. ‘He would stand up, start very quietly and then look around to all of us in the room and then he would say, ‘You are not slaves, you are not niggers – you are God’s children.’” And you know,” Thurman continues, “when my grandmother said that, she would unconsciously straighten up, head high and chest out, and a faraway look would come on her face. 

“Now that transmitted an idiom to me,” he said. “And there was nothing that could happen in my environment that could ever touch this. It gave me my identity, so I didn’t have to wait for the revolution.” [5]

Ephesus was another Greek city colonised by Rome in Paul’s time, and in his letter to the Ephesian believers he wrote that “our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” [6]

Sadly, the spirit of enslavement persists in our world. But what we can learn from the woman with the python spirit and the jailer, as affirmed by Howard Thurman and his grandmother, is that those who are enslaved may nevertheless encounter, and be liberated by, the spirit of salvation.

Notes

[1] Wikipedia: Philippi; Delphi.

[2] RDG Stout, The girl with the python spirit. Grimly Optimistic blog, 5 May 2016.

[3] What is modern slavery? Anti-Slavery International, accessed 28 May 2025; quoting statistics sourced from Global Estimates of Modern Slavery: Forced Labour and Forced Marriage, International Labour Organisation, Geneva, September 2022.

[4] What is modern slavery? Anti-Slavery International, accessed 28 May 2025.

[5] Mary E. Goodwin, Racial Roots and Religion: An Interview with Howard Thurman. Genius.com, accessed 28 May 2025.

[6] Ephesians 6.12.

The prayers and cartoons of Michael Leunig, who died last year, I've carried with me for decades and always will. Particularly The Plodder, who I don’t see myself as; but who is someone I would like to become. Not before time, this Sunday I'm giving my first ever "The Plodder" sermon. My tribute of sorts to Leunig, The Plodder, Mr Curly, and all his other quirky contemplatives: Anxious about many things? Consider The Plodder.

Acts 16:9-15, John 14:22-29

 The Sixth Sunday of Easter, 25 May 2025

Austwick, Clapham, Eldroth

I love Michael Leunig’s cartoon The Plodder. The veteran Australian cartoonist and philosopher of everyday life died last year, but my framed print of The Plodder continues to adorn my wall, as it has done for the past, probably, 35 years or more. I don’t see myself as The Plodder. He’s someone I would like to become. [1]

I love The Plodder because he is a man at ease with himself. He’s not interested in joining in the rush to be recognised or successful, he has no desire to show off his intelligence or flaunt his knowledge; he’s not concerned about how he looks to others, and he’s not bothered about keeping up with the village gossip or the worldwide news. He’s happy to be outside of all that fuss. He’s content to have removed himself from all that pressure.

I love The Plodder because he’s a rare human creature who seems to have truly embraced the teaching of Jesus when he said, “Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.” 

I’m not sure if The Plodder is a Christian, I’m guessing he’d be unconcerned about whether or not he belongs to any particular tribe. And his creator Michael Leunig is similarly relaxed about his spirituality, though he does lean in that direction, as in the cartoon he published of two Roman soldiers at the crucifixion, one saying to the other, “Look at that! Brilliant! You kill the leader and you nip the whole movement in the bud!”

Without doubt, we can see The Plodder’s joyful, slow and carefree jaunt through life as a living-out of someone who has the peace of God at their heart. Jesus tells his friends and followers, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives…” 

How we long for that peace; for the world does not give peace. The world makes us anxious: we are anxious about many things. I have a friend whose job is to make people anxious. He’s an advertising copywriter. Every day he goes into work and sits in a room with two or three others plotting about how they can sell products to people. Whatever the product, the method is the same – make the people worry that without that product there’s something wrong with them; there’s something lacking in them. The anxiety will compel them to buy it. 

So … Worried your teeth will fall out? – Well, I wasn’t, until I heard about this fancy toothpaste, approved by a handsome dentist with an unnaturally gleaming smile. 

Anxious about your credit rating? – I am now I’m not sure I even understand what that is: best sign up to this broker, who say they’ll turn my miserable debt into the right kind of debt. 

No wonder we’re anxious, assaulted by all these messages every hour, every day. And my friend the copywriter – do you know how this makes him feel? Yes – he feels anxious about his work, he worries about it because he knows it’s a terribly manipulative job, but like many other people he feels stuck in it, he’s no idea what else he could do instead if he left, or if he was laid off. 

Jesus tells his friends and followers, “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives…” 

How we long for that peace; for the world does not give peace. The world thrives on conflict: we are embattled, embroiled in other people’s battles. 

Imagine if our avaricious heads of states and multinational CEOs behaved like The Plodder: they’d be uninterested in grasping after other people’s territories or natural resources, and they’d leave them alone, to enjoy them in peace. And the children of Gaza, Kiev, and Sudan could play safely in their streets; and the apprentices and engineers of Barrow-in-Furness could be happy developing medical equipment rather than weapons of mass destruction.

Those people anxious for wealth, success or power are driven by their fears of not achieving them; their anxieties diminish them and cause them to damage the world around them. I once heard the Liverpudlian community worker Ann Morisy speak on this subject; I think she’s a real sage, and she said a memorable thing: HURT PEOPLE HURT PEOPLE. [2] Anxious people spread anxiety; but the other side of this is the beautiful revelation that people at peace with themselves spread peace. 

When Jesus said, “Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid,” he was giving clear advice about a particular way we should act: he was saying very plainly that we can cultivate peace of mind, intentionally. By paying attention more to those things which lead us towards peace, and less to those which increase our anxiety. It’s a discipline. It’s good, hard, work.

I had a friend called Brother Bernard, a Franciscan who had been Guardian of Hilfield Friary, a retreat house in deepest rural Dorset, but when I knew him, he had relocated to somewhere quite different: a Franciscan townhouse in East London, just off the bustling Whitechapel Road. I once asked him how he could concentrate on his prayers: with all the sounds of the city going on around him, wouldn’t they distract him? He said, with time and practice you learn to embrace them: to attune your rhythm to the rhythm of the hammer drill at the roadworks; to allow the shrieks and cries of passers-by combine with the cries of your heart for those same people, for whom you pray.

From Bernard I learned that being a person of peace is a discipline, forged in the fiercest furnaces of life. After all, Hilfield Friary is a home of refuge for displaced men tramping rural English roads, and he had devoted his time there giving hospitality to men in rehabilitation. [3]

Spend time with The Plodder, contemplating his state of heart and mind, and I guarantee it will ease your soul and spirit too. Spend time with God in prayer, contemplating his love, and reflecting on his words, and I guarantee you will find his peace growing within you. 

The activists among us may resist this way of thinking, saying, isn’t all this contemplation just an escape from the realities of life? Doesn’t it avoid or ignore the difficulties? It’s a conversation I have within myself often. It makes me ask questions like: 

• Will searching for peace make me more or less well prepared to face life’s challenges? 
• Will learning to overcome my fears give me strength for the struggle ahead? 
• Will growing my reverence for life empower me to resist those things which diminish it?

I look at The Plodder again, for he’s someone I would like to become. I admire the strength in his simplicity; the secureness in his serenity, the assertiveness in his quite disarming passivity.

Notes

This talk draws from my Anxious about many things, preached in Croxteth, 2004.

[1] Wikipedia: Michael Leunig. 

[2] Ann Morisy and Phil Stone, Anxious about many things. Greenbelt Festival 2002; John Davies, Anne and anxiety, Notes from a Small Vicar, 19 October 2002.

[3] Hilfield Friary, About Hilfield.

Acts 11.1-18, John 13.31-35

The Fifth Sunday of Easter, 18 May 2025, Austwick

Malak Mattar: My Skin is Not a Sin. MalakArtStore: Etsy

“What God has made clean, you must not call profane”

This week, we have been troubled by the thought of being affected by uncleanness. By unclean water, that is. Reports that local people were being advised to boil their water before drinking it, rised anxiety for many. For those in the area affected, and for the rest of us living uncomfortably close by, we stopped taking for granted water, that most fundamental thing in our lives, and started treating it with suspicion and taking extra care around it.

This situation may have unsettled us, but it may have helped us to understand what life is like every day for those many people in the world who live with the problem of unclean water all the time.

In a recent school assembly we looked at a film about Uqueque School, in South Africa, which has 320 students but doesn’t have its own water supply. A student called Kwenele explained that the area around the school has a few boreholes but not enough for everyone, and the waterways are often polluted or dry. In the school, sanitation is poor, and sickness is common, affecting students’ learning. A Salvation Army project is providing Uqueque with a borehole pump and toilet block. Kwenele said, “Clean, reliable water will change our lives”. [1]

In situations like Kwenele’s, and like this week’s Yorkshire Water Bentham ‘boil alert’, our understanding of uncleanness is determined by the science of public health, by testing and analysis. But some of our ideas about what is clean and what is not, come to us in other ways.

What would you drink, and what would you never drink? We cringe at those celebrities in the jungle forced by Ant and Dec to down cocktails blended from mealworms, crocodile anus, or vomit fruit. That’s an extreme example of course, designed for TV entertainment. But we all have our own preferences: my mostly teetotal Nan would never have a Snowball at Christmas because she once got giddy on one, but instead she’d insist on having a gin, which of course was far more potent, but, as she thought, it looked ‘clean’. I love green tea – visits to Japan nurtured my appreciation of that – but I understand others who turn up their noses at it, and say, it’s like drinking grass. And while I’ll drink coffee if kindly offered it, it’s never my first choice; the taste, the whole culture around it, I just don’t get. What would you drink, and what would you never drink?

These choices come down to our personal tastes. And many of our ideas about what we should put inside us come from our culture and from religion. Some branches of Christianity insist on abstinence from alcohol, for instance; likewise, Islamic teachings strictly prohibit its consumption; most Hindu religious texts generally discourage it.

All of this helps us understand what is behind Peter’s strange dream about four-footed animals, beasts of prey, reptiles, and birds of the air. It’s a dream which plays on the very strict food laws of Peter’s people the Jews: and which addresses the issue he was facing as a leader of the Jewish Christians who were beginning to see Gentiles also come to faith in Christ. This caused the Jewish Christians to have to change the way they saw these erstwhile outsiders. They had to learn to share their faith with them. They had to learn to share their food with them. They even had to learn to eat the Gentiles’ food.

The Gentiles had their different ways, their different eating and drinking habits, and different other habits, which Peter’s people would have regarded as being unclean, profane.

But when the voice in his dream told him, “What God has made clean, you must not call profane,” Peter’s heart opened to what God was now doing in the world. He realised that the food wasn’t the real issue. The food symbolised the real issue: which was that, in God’s eyes, people of a different culture were clean, and pure, and good, and loved, and that he, Peter, must open his arms, and share his faith – and his table – with them. [2]

It was for Peter, as it may be for us, a hard lesson to learn – that in God’s eyes there are no ‘strangers’; only neighbours; that in the way of Christ outsiders must be “treated as equal, welcomed with love and accepted as neighbour.” [3]

We’ve moved beyond food and drink now, into the area of human relationships. And in this moment, when our political leaders are intent on exaggerating the differences between peoples, fostering our fear of others, building distrust, increasing division, it goes against the grain to say that everyone, of every colour, race or creed, is equally loved and valued in God’s heart, and that “What God has made clean, you must not call profane”.

The artist Malak Mattar entitles one of her paintings, “My Skin is Not a Sin”. It is a beautiful study of five women of different colour dancing together with a garland of flowers in the company of a dove of peace. Malak is a young Palestinian artist, and so she knows what it means to belong to a people who others call ‘profane’. A recent documentary on the Israeli settlers featured a rabbi who calls Palestinians “savages”; and another settler who refuses to even accept that they exist. [4]

When a people regard another people in this way then they can do anything to them, however inhumane. They can deprive them of water, for instance. The Israel authorities re-route 83 per cent of the water under the Palestinian West Bank to benefit Israeli cities and settlements, leaving West Bank Palestinians just the remaining 17 percent, so that they receive only limited amounts of water irregularly. According to the United Nations, in 2017 some 180 Palestinian communities in rural areas in the occupied West Bank had no access to running water. That was eight years ago: the situation is likely to be worse today. [5]

“I’ve always tried to be a citizen of the world,” said Malak Mattar in a recent interview, “But then I’m always reminded that I’m stateless.” So to create a work of beauty like “My Skin is Not a Sin” is an act of hope, as well as defiance. [6]

This hopeful defiance is shared by Jenna Fischer, who volunteers with the Center for Jewish Nonviolence, protecting Palestinian shepherding communities from settler violence. She says, “Israel says it’s doing what it is in Gaza and the occupied territories in my name, because I’m Jewish and because they want to maintain a Jewish homeland. Everything I have learned from being Jewish says that this is not the way that you treat people, and that we can do better.” [7]

Jenna says that she follows the Jewish concept of Tikkun Olam, or “repairing the world”, which means living with our neighbours in peace. This is a work to which people of goodwill from every faith are called. We begin to play our part in “repairing the world” when, like Peter, we pay heed to the voice which tells us, “What God has made clean, you must not call profane”.

Notes

[1] Salvation Army, Self Denial Appeal 2019 – Be the Change – Week 5 South Africa – Kwenele’s Story. Salvos Studios / YouTube.

[2] See my 2019 talk, Peter’s funny picnic – disbelieving the ‘disgusting’ lie.

[3] Amelia Braddick, Bishop of Chelmsford criticises Starmer over ‘island of strangers’ immigration speech. Church Times, 15 May 2025.

[4] Stuart Heritage, The Settlers review – this vital film forces Louis Theroux to do something he’s never done before. Guardian, 27 April 2025; Louis Theroux, If you were shocked by my film on Israeli settlers in the West Bank, you haven’t been paying attention. Guardian, 10 May 2025.

[5] Eyal Weizman, Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation, p.19; Wikipedia: Jordan River; Amnesty International, The Occupation of Water. 29 November 2017. Referenced in my 2017 talk, On Jordan’s bank: crossing over from distrust to understanding.

[6] Hakim Bishara, Gazan Artist Speaks About a Lifetime of Trauma and War. Hyperallergic, 26 May 2021.

[7] Liam Syed, Israeli Settlers are Erasing the West Bank. Tribune, 13 May 2025.

Acts 9.36-43, John 10.22-30

The Fourth Sunday of Easter, 11 May 2025, Austwick, Keasden  

Tabitha was a maker. Tabitha, which in Greek is Dorcas, was devoted to good works and acts of charity. She made tunics and other clothing for the widows of Joppa. When she died, the widows of that port town turned out in numbers, in grief. And their menfolk set out in search of a healer.

So Peter the fisherman-disciple knelt down and prayed beside her. He turned to her body and said, ‘Tabitha, get up.’ Then she opened her eyes, and seeing Peter, she sat up. He gave her his hand and helped her to her feet. Tabitha was a maker reborn. She continued to make clothes for the widows of Joppa. 

And because of Tabitha, today let us celebrate those who make things with others in mind; let us give thanks for those who use their creative gifts for the wellbeing of others. For the knitters of tiny hats for newborn babies; for the embroiderers of quilts for the homeless; for the cross-stitchers and the watercolour painters whose gifts adorn the living-room walls of friends and loved ones’ homes – we give thanks.

This week Diana and I have been delighted to become grandparents again, twice: to one boy in Ormskirk on Tuesday and to another in Airedale on Wednesday: and in the first photos of them which pinged onto our phones on each of those days both infants were wearing woolly hats, knitted gifts of love from someone’s home, passed on to them by the hospital. Their tiny exposed heads kept warm through the kindness of strangers.

You may recall the last time I preached about Tabitha, also called Dorcas, the maker of clothes, [1]  I mentioned the so-called Dorcas Clubs or Dorcas Societies, which began in the 19th century in the front rooms of middle-class women, meeting to make textiles to distribute to the poor in the parish, the materials paid for with money they’d each raised themselves. Later, Christian missionary women introduced Dorcas groups to the Caribbean, and then as women from the Caribbean moved to the UK in the 1950s and ‘60s, the clubs moved with them, and they continue in various forms today. [2]

I also recalled a woman I know who lost her son in a road crash some years back and who now devotes time to knitting shawls to give to other mothers who have been through the same sort of bereavement. Praying blessings as she knits, and offering the shawl as a gift, is her way of reaching out to those in need of comfort and solace, with empathy and in celebration and joy. [3]

Like so many New Testament stories, the raising of Tabitha is a tale of ordinary people so enthralled by their newly-found understanding that in Jesus they are valued and loved, that they respond in acts of grace and generosity towards others. Peter the humble fisherman here recalling the day he saw Jesus heal Jairus’s daughter in similar circumstances, and from that memory finding the prayers and the words and the way to lift Tabitha from her death-bed. Simon the tanner, here opening his home to the travelling missionary disciples. And Tabitha, the maker so beloved of her community – why? Because this disciple devoted her time and talents to making gifts for the widows: an act of compassion towards some of her poorest, most vulnerable neighbours. 

Her handicrafts aren’t to be sentimentalised – in a society which generally ignored women and abandoned widows to poverty, Tabitha’s tunics were a radical act of righteous grace towards them.

In our throwaway society handicrafts tend to be looked down on somewhat, if they’re the sorts of things that grannies make out of love for the embarrassed teenagers in their family; or they’re the sorts of things only available as high-end designer goods in rather niche – by which I mean, expensive, exclusive – outlets. But if they’re made with love, and if they’re created with skill, then they have a value beyond money. And if they’re made with justice in mind, justice for the workers who create them and for those who will receive them, that increases their value once again.

Our local resident and campaigning clothes designer Patrick Grant has published a book called ‘Less: Stop Buying So Much Rubbish’, in which he says that “Thirty per cent of all clothes made are never sold, two-thirds of the clothes we own we never wear, and new clothes are now so cheap they’re often thrown away rather than being washed and worn again.”

In a world where “the equivalent of one bin lorry full of clothing is dumped in landfill or burned every single second,” in our fast-fashion world which exploits those who produce the clothes we buy but never wear, Grant takes time to ask, “why do we keep buying more?” and considers “how we might make ourselves happier by rediscovering the joy of living with fewer, better-quality things”.  [4]

And so today we can give thanks for Community Clothing, Patrick Grant’s business which began in 2015 when he bought out Cookson & Clegg, a Blackburn clothing manufacturing established in 1860, and one of his most valued suppliers, which was going to be shut for good, thus saving it from closure, saving 60 people’s jobs, and taking a stand against social and economic decline in that textile community. Now working with over 45 partner factories, employing a total of almost two thousand staff, Community Clothing offers good quality clothes, keeps great manufacturing businesses alive, and sees more skilled jobs created in often struggling post-industrial towns. [5]

And we can also give thanks for the project called Bag2School, which Austwick School are inviting you and me to take part in this month – as you’ll read in your Newsletter.

Bag2School takes the clothes collected from your school “to be baled into big ‘botany bales’ and then loaded onto trucks for export. The clothing will make journeys all over the world starting their new life. This can be a purpose built second hand store in Eastern Europe or South America, or a market stall in East or West Africa, providing valuable employment for importers, warehouse staff, transport companies and stall holders as well as affordable clothes for local people. And back here, the school benefits from a payment based on the weight of the clothes they’ve donated, at the best market price available.” [6] 

I would say that all of these activities channel the generous spirit of Tabitha, who made things with others in mind; that all this is an encouragement for any of us who want to use our creative gifts for the wellbeing of others.

Notes

[1] My 2019 talk The fisherman, the tanner and the garment-maker – being ourselves with God.

[2] Rose Sinclair, New research explores how women used textile clubs as networks for social and economic change. Goldsmiths, University of London, 11 November 2015. 

[3] Meet Anna Briggs: hymn writer and knitter (Part 2). Methodst Church Resource Hub; also see the Prayer Shawl Ministry Home Page.

[4] Patrick Grant, Less: Stop Buying So Much Rubbish: How Having Fewer, Better Things Can Make Us Happier.

[5] Community Clothing: Our story.

[6] Bag2school.com: How it works.

Acts 9.1-20, John 21.1-19

The Third Sunday of Easter, 4 May 2025, Eldroth, Clapham

Their stories are well-told, how Simon and Saul became Peter and Paul.

How fisherman Simon, journeyman of the waters of Galilee, became Peter, first leader of the Christian Church in Jerusalem and the archetypal Pope, the first bishop of Rome.

And how Saul, a zealot on a mission to annihilate as many followers of Jesus as possible, became Jesus’ greatest ambassador, a much travelled missionary establishing churches throughout the Mediterranean.

The stories we know of Simon and Saul tell how both men changed after meeting Jesus first-hand: 

Remember Jesus calling Simon from his fishing nets to become a fisher of people; setting Peter on a slow journey of change in which, bit by bit, he grew in understanding of the role which Jesus had chosen for him, and, stage by stage, he grew in stature as a leader of the people of the Jesus Way. 

Saul’s transformation was far more instant, as we’ve heard again today. In just three days,  beginning with a blinding flash of light, Saul went from breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, to joining those disciples in Damascus, proclaiming Jesus in the synagogues as ‘the Son of God.’

Now, these two men may seem very different from ourselves, separated as they are from us by centuries, by differences in culture, and quite possibly also by temperament: for even before they encountered Jesus they were each in their own ways zealous for God – Simon keenly anticipating the coming of the messiah who would save the people, Saul applying the full force of the law to keep those same people from drifting into heresy.

But despite our differences, we share with them, and every other follower of Jesus, a common calling: which is, in Jesus’ words, to ‘go and make followers of all people in the world; to baptise them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and to teach them to obey everything that he has taught us’.  [1]

This calling – to take the Gospel to the nations – is yours and mine just as it was Simon’s and Saul’s. It is something we do, and something we say. We’re called to talk about the gospel message, and to show it to people by our actions.

Now, the practical part of this may come easier to us – you respond to the good news of Jesus by being kind and generous and helpful to people in need. 

The other bit – talking about the difference which Jesus makes to you, and to the world – some of us may find that that doesn’t come so naturally. All very well for bold characters and born leaders like Simon and Saul to transform into missionary evangelists and preach the message to all and sundry wherever they went. Less easy for us to find the words to describe to others something which may be hidden quite deeply in our heart.

Is the gap between Peter and Paul, and ourselves, too wide to breach? Or is there common ground?

There’s one small detail in both the stories we heard today, and it’s one which I love: that after the encounter with Jesus which transformed each of these men, and before launching off into their missionary activities – they both sat down for breakfast.

The risen Jesus cooking fish for his followers by the lakeside is a lovely scene: picture it, smell it, taste it, in your imagination, if you can. It was one of the very many meals which Jesus hosted to bring together those who sought to learn from him, to follow in his way. And it is where Jesus commissioned Peter to ‘Feed my sheep’ – by which he meant, to nurture the disciples, to build the church.

And in an almost throwaway line in the story of Saul’s Damascus conversion, we read that, having had his sight restored, he got up and was baptised, and after taking some food, he regained his strength. He was with the disciples in Damascus when he did this, which means that his mission to proclaim Jesus as the Son of God, began around a meal table with them.

And right there is the common ground which we share with Simon and Saul who became Peter and Paul. The help and strength they needed to go out and spread the good news, they gained around a meal table they shared with the other followers in their community. And week by week or month by month, this is what we do too: we gather around this meal table with the other followers in our community, opening our hearts and minds for God to strengthen us in our own task of going out and sharing his good news with the world outside.

Simon and Saul became Peter and Paul at breakfast-time. That well-known philosopher of the TV kitchen Jamie Oliver, once said, “Breakfast is a beautiful, elegant thing; a meal to be savoured and embraced.” [2]

We become the people God wants us to be for the week ahead, when we eat together at the communion table. It’s a meal in which God’s Holy Spirit fuels us for our gospel work. That’s a beautiful, elegant thing, too; that is something we can savour and embrace.

Notes

[1] Matthew 28.16-18. 

[2] Amanda McNamara, 75 Best Breakfast Quotes and Captions. Toast online.