Sermon for the Fifth Sunday after Trinity
“It came to pass that as the people pressed upon him to hear the word of God,
Jesus stood by the lake of Gennesaret”
“It came to pass.” Something happened. It seems almost like the beginning of a fairy tale ‘long ago and far away,’ or ‘once upon a time,’ as it were. Yet this is no ordinary event but something extraordinary communicated through the quotidian, every day events of human lives. This story speaks wonderfully and directly to the deepest concerns of our contemporary world and day, namely, the sense of nothingness, the meaninglessness of our lives, what is properly called nihilism. The nothingness of life.
“If you live today, you breathe in nihilism,” the American writer Flannery O’Connor observed. It is “the very gas you breath,” whether you are “religious” or “secular” as the publishing venture “Interventions” notes in promoting works aimed at providing an alternative to the nihilisms of our day theologically and philosophically through a thorough-going and “genuinely interdisciplinary” approach. The challenge and the task is about rethinking everything, we might say.
Such an approach might be said to have a kind of Scriptural beginning with this Gospel story along with the Epistle from 1 Peter. We read these anciently appointed readings this year in what is traditionally and anciently known as Petertide, referring to the Feast of St. Peter to which is also added the figure of St. Paul. Both were martyred in Rome albeit at different times and buried originally at different places. Their common commemoration arises from the translation of their remains to a common place of burial during a time of persecution in 258; subsequently, their remains were returned to what is thought to have been their original places of burial.
As Fr. Park reminded us at his 30th anniversary celebration of his ordination to the Priesthood this week, both Peter and Paul were missionaries and both Peter and Paul spoke to both Jew and Gentile communities alike. There is an intercultural engagement that belongs to the emergence and the development of the Christian Faith. Add to the picture that their joint commemoration has very much to do with Rome, with the way in which, through both, the Gospel of Jesus Christ engages the Graeco-Roman world of law and philosophy, and one begins to see the necessary nature of the interdisciplinary and intercultural aspects of our thinking and believing.
