Sermon by Fr Neil Traynor, Sunday 27 August 2017, St George's Church, Campden Hill

Sermon by Fr Neil Traynor, Sunday 27 August 2017, St George's Church, Campden Hill

Tu es Petrus

For reasons I will not bore you with, I found myself with a lot of time on my hands on Monday evening.  I was fortunate enough to have a good wifi connection, and I was able to use the BBC’s i-player.  There I came across a film I hadn’t been aware of called Pride. 

The film is one of those British films, in a genre similar to Brassed Off, which are acted so well.  As is often the case there were a number of overlapping themes – first of all the miners strike in 1984; secondly the story of Mark Ashton the founder of LGSM - Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners; and also the story of a young man, called Joe, but usually referred to as Bromley – if you watch the film it’s easily apparent why.

The film had some glorious one-liners and, as I’m hopeless at telling jokes, I won’t even try.  There were, though, moments of enormous pathos, one of the most memorable was a bingo game in the Miners’ Institute.  The prize was a tin of meat.

You might, though, be wondering what all of this has to do with today’s readings.  The point that springs immediately to mind for me is that of the joke.  Here, unfortunately, the translation into English does us no service, for the joke simply doesn’t work.  In the Greek, and the Vulgate, the play on words is clear:  tu es Petrus and super hanc petram meam ecclesiam aedificabo. The juxtaposition of Petrus and petram makes it clear – Peter is the rock on which Jesus will build his church.

At least, that wordplay is the joke on one level, for there is another more subtle one.  One which, for fairly obvious reasons is usually overlooked.  Think, for a moment, about what we know from the Gospels about Peter.  He’s the one most likely to ‘put his foot in it’; he continually gets the wrong end of the stick; he’s the one who denies Jesus in the courtyard;  the one who acted precisely as Jesus said he would.

And that’s part of the joke.  Is Peter the stable foundation that you would want to build your whole church on?  In modern terms, would he be a suitable choice for the CEO of a major international organisation?

For those of you with long enough memories, he’s more likely to be a Gerald Ratner than a modern day captain of industry. 

There is, though, a third aspect to all of this.  As well as the word play on Petrus  and petram, there is another subtler dig going on here too.  If you went to an old fashioned Sunday School you might well remember what is probably best termed a chorus – the wise man built his house upon the rock.  It contrasts the wise man who had sure foundations with the foolish man who built his house upon the sand.

We are, of course, expected to understand that Jesus is the wise man who built his house, his church, upon the sure rock of Peter.  Well, as I’ve already mentioned, Peter wasn’t the most stable of the disciples that Jesus gathered around him.  And there’s another problem too – petram, whilst meaning ‘rock’ doesn’t mean the solid sort of bedrock that would give a stable foundation.  Instead, it’s the term usually used for a rock on a hillside – a boulder. 

Boulders aren’t much use for building on, and, rather than stable, they are inherently unstable.  They can, and do, come loose, and when that happens they career down mountains or are carried on floods and can be highly destructive, breaking down walls and barriers, creating a huge amount of mess.

That, to me, seems like something that St Peter might well have been very good at.

You’ll recall that I began with some of my reflections on the film Pride.  I’ve been thinking about the film quite a bit this week, partly because I suspect that it’s much deeper that it appears at first sight.  Mark, the protagonist, has something of the Christ figure about him.  He’s the charismatic one who gathers a group of friends around him (there may even be twelve, but it didn’t occur to me to count at the time).  He’s the one who has the vision to support the miners.  He’s the one who faces the opposition, first of all from the gay community and then from the mining community in Wales. 

He’s the one who breaks down the opposition, who keeps things going, who changes hearts and minds because he sees that these two communities have more in common than things that divide them.  They’re both oppressed; they’re both at the mercy of the powerful and the establishment. 

He’s something of an unstoppable force – rather like a boulder – taking no prisoners in his mission to change the world.

That, really, is what the church is called to do.  Those of you familiar with evensong will know the phrase from the Magnificat:
He hath shewed strength with his arm: he hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts.
He hath put down the mighty from their seat: and hath exalted the humble and meek.
He hath filled the hungry with good things: and the rich he hath sent empty away.

Or again, if you know Handel’s Messiah, ‘every valley shall be exalted and every mountain and hill made low’.   

Fighting injustice, supporting the oppressed, helping the imprisoned, the widow and the orphan – all of these things the church is called to do, and each of them is difficult.  It requires people, like Mark in the film or St Peter, who will push through an agenda against the opposition, letting nothing stand in their way.   It might not be comfortable hearing, easy to do – it’s not an easy life, but that is what the church is called to do.

Tu es Petrus  is not about stability, grandeur or unshakeable foundations – it’s about Jesus building his church to change us and to change the world.