Sermon for the Feast of St. Matthew the Apostle
Fr. David Curry delivered this sermon at the King’s College Chapel on 23 September 2001, shortly after 9/11.
“And he arose and followed him”
The call of Matthew from “the receipt of custom” – what a wonderful phrase! – seems rather disturbing and disquieting. It is so abrupt and apparently arbitrary. Jesus says “follow me” and “he arose and followed him.” At best, it suggests a crisis to which there seems to be but one response.
We are, of course, greatly disturbed and, no doubt, disquieted about other things than the seemingly arbitrary actions of a Jewish tax-collector over two millennia ago. The events in New York and Washington and elsewhere are deeply disturbing (9/11). Suddenly we realise that the Global Village means that terrorism isn’t just “over there” in some far off remote corner of the world. Suddenly it is very close at hand. There is a crisis, only we may not be quite so sure about the response. Indeed, that may very well be what disturbs and disquiets us most in the aftermath of these terrible acts of terrorism. What kind of response will there be?
Now it is not my place nor my business to offer advice on matters of foreign policy and international affairs whether brilliant or banal, whether wise or foolish. But here is a crisis which should recall us to the spiritual principles which underlie our moral, social, political, and economic lives and which alone enable a respectable dialogue with other spiritual traditions that are different from our own. To recall such things, perhaps in the face of their having been forgotten or denied, is surely the business of the Church. Even an obscure publican who became an Apostle and Evangelist may actually be able to help our thinking.
And if so, then the Global Village will in some sense have become more truly global in the discovery of how the communities of the past belong to our present rather than being cavalierly rejected, ignored or destroyed. “Innovation replaces tradition” after all, is the slogan of globalisation. The position of the defining economists of globalisation, Joseph Schumpeter and Andy Grove, is summed up this way: “the present – or perhaps the future – replaces the past. Nothing matters so much as what will come next, and what will come next can only arrive if what is here now gets overturned.” The super fast-track into the cyber future means that there is no here; it is always sliding into a past which is forever being overturned. “Daddy, are we there yet?” takes on a whole new horror of meaning.
