God Calls the Least Likely (Us) to Love

May 4, 2025 - The Third Sunday of Easter

My friends, I speak to you today in the name of one God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen. Please be seated.

Happy Easter, Church of the Epiphany! This is the third Sunday of Easter, we’re on day sixteen of Easter’s “Great Fifty Days.” This is an especially busy and beautiful time in the life of this church; we finished our Holy Week services not long ago, and as you’ll see in the insert, we have quite a bit going on this month. I myself have preached eight sermons in the last six weeks, with Maundy Thursday and Joan’s funeral added to my usual plate of Sundays. Next week, Pastor Bob Linstrom will be here in this pulpit as my family drives back from my final seminary graduation in Tennessee. Thank you, Bob.

Preaching sermons week after week requires a few things from me, skills that I’m still developing. It requires a week spent in the Word and in the lectionary texts that we’re given. It requires close consultation with scholars and commentators and current theologians. It requires being up to date on current events and concerns, both local and global, so that I can connect what I’m reading with our real lives. There are plenty of requirements for good preaching, like a life of prayer and good sleep and voice projection and more, but perhaps most obviously, this role requires that I be comfortable with public speaking. And that’s a tough one, right? If you had told shy, middle school math nerd Johnny Wakefield (or his parents) that he would be in this vocation as a 40-year-old, there would be healthy amounts of skepticism. My dad even wrote this on a seminary graduation card: of all the careers he’d imagined for me, this seemed among the least likely. Therapist, sportswriter, engineer? Sure. Priest? Pretty unlikely.

This morning, in our lectionary texts, we have two of the most unlikely saints of the early church, Paul and Peter, both getting their close-ups. (Don’t worry, I won’t be petitioning for my own sainthood in this sermon.) These two first-century men, Paul and Peter, they are often celebrated together in the church: both the Episcopal and Catholic churches celebrate the Confession of St. Peter on January 18th and the Conversion of St. Paul on January 25th. The eight days between January 18 and January 25 are celebrated as a period of ecumenical togetherness, the “Week of Prayer for Christian Unity.” They also literally share another feast day on both traditions’ calendars: June 29th. They share that day because Christian tradition holds that they were both executed for the faith, they both died as martyrs during Nero’s persecution in 64 AD. (See why I’m not petitioning for sainthood today?) Paul was granted Roman citizenship so that he could be beheaded under Roman law, with a sword. Peter was crucified, like Jesus, but upside down.

What made these two men, like Jesus, like many other Christians in the first century, such a threat to Roman rule that they were executed? What made the Pharisee and the fisherman into enemies of the state? Well, we have the answer in our text today.

Our Pharisee, Paul, was walking on the road to Damascus, looking for Christians to persecute, to bring “them bound to Jerusalem.” He is the bad guy at this point in the story, one of the people who caused the disciples to hide in fear in last week’s gospel reading. He is looking for men and women who are following the Way to arrest them and to bring them to the Jewish authorities. But then he has an encounter with God. He has an encounter with God. A bright light blinds him, a voice asks him why he’s doing what he’s doing, a disciple lays hands on him, the scales fall from his eyes, and then he gets baptized. Paul gets a bad rap in some circles today because of his cultural blind spots, but he is the foremost figure in the early church’s move to embrace the Gentiles who were seen as unworthy by some Jewish Christians. He pushes the boundaries, he encourages churches through countless letters, he preaches the good news of “God with us” from hilltops and in major urban centers. He gets arrested for suggesting that Jesus, not Caesar, is King for leading people to the goodness of Christ, for building the kingdom of God.

Peter was never the bad guy in the story, though maybe he was a bit slow to pick up on what Jesus was saying at times, and he did deny him three times during his crucifixion. But Peter and his brother were simple fishermen when they were called, there at Jesus’s side from the very beginning. In the gospel of Luke, Jesus helps them catch so many fish that their nets began to break, and the miracle was enough to convince Peter to sign up on the spot, the first disciple Jesus called. In today’s reading, after the resurrection in the final chapter of John’s gospel, Peter again catches some miraculous fish, and then he has breakfast with Jesus. After all that has happened, these fishermen are back at it on the lake, not quite building churches yet, but in need of another encounter with Jesus. “Do you love me?” Jesus asks Peter three times around a charcoal fire, reversing his three denials that came around a charcoal fire just a few weeks prior. “You know I do love you,” Peter replies three times. Peter becomes the father of the church; he is held up as the first Pope by our Catholic friends. He writes letters, he leads, he performs miracles, he says that Jesus is King, worthy of worship, and eventually, he too is crucified for it.

Now, what do Paul and Peter... and me... and you... What do we all have in common this morning? The comparison is laughable, right? St. Paul and St. Peter aren’t like us; they’re saints. They were leaders, they were brave, they were killed as enemies of the state for goodness’ sake, we’re not doing that. We’re nervous about a busy calendar or this week’s sermon or the headlines we read from a distance or about making sure we pull off our brunch week duties well. We do what we can where we can, maybe, but we’re not saints. But the funny thing, the reassuring and wonderful and beautiful and important thing about Paul and Peter is that they were not always saints. They were men, just normal men. And then they encountered God. They encountered something so radical and loving and life-changing that they could not stop talking about it, they could not stop living it, they could not stop sharing what they had found and how it would change the world.

Friends, Jesus did not call Paul and Peter because he saw them in a stained-glass window and knew they’d be perfect for the job. He called a Pharisee and a fisherman and showed them a better way. He met them where they were, on a road to Damascus and in a fishing boat, and he invited them to the way of love, both to be loved and to go and love others.

He calls us just the same.

This week at our Last Wednesday book club, we discussed what it is to be called. Audible voices from the clouds are rare these days, though some swear they hear God’s voice, and I’m not one to put limits on what God may be up to in this world. For others, there’s a sense of being led in a certain direction, usually during times of prayer, a sense of life only making sense, only being right, if you do this thing you feel like God is asking you to do. I’ve shared that I felt that sense of a call during a Maundy Thursday prayer vigil, and it has led me and our family here to South Haven eight years later. But feeling called doesn’t have to mean a life of ordained ministry either, it may just be that you are in tune with the Spirit and you are listening, you are open, to what God may be asking you to do. That may be specific, it may not be. Or even if you don’t feel a sense of call like that at all, maybe those words don’t fit your life of faith, which is fine; we do know that we are called as Christians to love. We don’t always succeed at that; Christians have a bad track record throughout history of being more judging than loving. But we are still called, invited, like Paul and Peter, to love, for the good of the world. 

And knowing that we are called to love, Peter is probably the best example we could have been given, not because he is especially loving, but because he was especially slow to grasp what Jesus was saying, because he stumbles through all of the gospels. If the whole reversing the denials part wasn’t there, you could read Jesus asking Peter the same question three times as condescending, or as treating Peter like he was a child. But Peter, the very head of the first-century church, he didn’t always understand what Jesus was telling him. He doesn’t always get it. But man, does he want to. Peter jumped out of the boat to become a fisher of men, he jumped out of another boat to walk on water to Jesus, he jumps out of this boat to get to Jesus today... he offered to build tents for spirits at the transfiguration, he told Jesus he should wash his feet instead, he swore he’d protect Jesus with his life when that wasn’t the plan... Peter deeply wants to follow. He wants to love.

And friends, that’s what we’re called to as well. We do not need to have everything together, we do not need to understand everything. We may not know exactly how to do it either. We may end up being like baby birds jumping out of the nest to learn to fly, having never read the proper flight instruction manuals. But we are called to love.

We may see ourselves as the least likely to do just that. We may be too busy. We may think we have other, more important responsibilities. We may be afraid of public speaking. We may not know where we are going. We may feel like we aren’t as educated or as qualified as others. But loving does not require a PhD or a clear calendar or a public speaking course or a full understanding of all the ramifications of every decision we decide to make. Loving just requires a desire to start, a desire to follow, a desire to try.

Every decision we make can be made in love. Every conversation we have can be held in love. Every opinion we hold can be made with love for the other at its center. Like Paul and Peter in our readings today, we can choose love over hate, love over fear, love over indifference. It is easy for all of us to choose otherwise; we see examples of other choices in our lives and in the news every single day. But if God can use a first-century Pharisee and a fisherman to start building the kingdom of God, to help announce the way of love in this world, the way of love that will change everything, God can certainly use us to do the same.

Amen.