Sermon preached at the Sung Eucharist on the Third Sunday of Epiphany 2026

When Pope Leo and Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople celebrated the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea together at Iznik, in modern day Turkey, last November, there was an atmosphere akin to a family reunion. Leaders of other Christian churches were there, too. They were gathered to celebrate Nicaea as a great cornerstone of ecumenical togetherness – the faith we shall proclaim together in the Creed, united with the whole Church, in a few moments time. They were all brought together by Peter and Andrew, those two brothers who were the first-called in today’s Gospel. Pope Leo, successor of St Peter, by tradition the founder of the See of Rome, and Patriarch Bartholomew, successor of St Andrew, by tradition the founder of the See of Constantinople. The symbolism of Pope and Patriarch of Constantinople side-by-side, representing East and West, reminds us that Christian disunity is schism within a family. St Augustine wrote, “although we Christians are many, in the one Christ we are one.” And yet, so often in Christian history, instead of using our metaphorical fishing nets to work in profound harmony, each of our individual churches have frequently pressed on as if they are the only ones capable of navigating the deep waters.

Today marks the conclusion of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. Over the last century or so, the ecumenical movement has achieved both momentum and results which would have been totally impossible just a generation earlier. We have some genuinely extraordinary common theological statements including on some previously extremely contested material, we use liturgical texts which bear the likeness not only of our own traditions but also one another’s, we have seen the lifting of anathemas, and perhaps most importantly, there are several profound full communion agreements of reconciliation, not least our own Church of England’s celebration of full communion with the Nordic and Baltic Lutheran churches in the Porvoo family. Underneath all these substantial healings of Christian history, has pulsated the counterpoint of another language, that of symbolic gesture which beats just under the surface of things. For Anglicans and Roman Catholics, Pope St Paul VI’s giving of his episcopal ring to Archbishop Michael Ramsey of Canterbury sixty years ago stands out, as does the installation of HM The King as Royal Confrater in the Papal Basilica of St Paul in Rome, last autumn. Sometimes, actions really do speak louder than words. We Christians share a common baptism, we are initiated into one family. And yet, even as we emerge from waters of the font, we discover that the family we have entered remains divided. We agree on so many essentials, and yet our churches frequently continue to be separated at the Eucharist, the very sacrament which is intended to draw us and bind us together in Christ.

Today’s Gospel takes us right to the beginning of Jesus’s ministry on the shores of the Sea of Galilee. There, following the example of his arrested relative John the Baptist, he calls people to repent and be transformed, and walking along the coast he gathers together those first people who will assist him in that ministry, choosing ‘the illiterate, unskilled and untutored, so that the Saviour’s grace might be open’, as the fourth century Church Father St Chromatius put it. Andrew and Peter, came first, followed by James and John, fishing and mending their nets. So this is a summons given to individuals, a call of conversion, who immediately begin to make up something of a body, a group gathering around Jesus who learn from his teaching and his actions, and who therefore begin to share his ministry. Here is the very beginning of the Church’s life, individuals called by Jesus, magnetised by his person and his message, gathered around him alongside others who share his ministry.

Tonight, in the Basilica of St Paul Outside the Walls in Rome Pope Leo will again gather Christian leaders (including our former colleague Bishop Anthony Ball, as director of the Anglican Centre in Rome) to conclude this Week of Prayer. They meet at the tomb of St Paul, the author of today’s second reading, who thunders across the ages, ‘Has Christ been divided? Was Paul crucified for you?’ The church in Corinth to which Paul was writing perhaps only twenty years or so after Christ’s resurrection was already experiencing the human tendency to fall out rather than to fall in. Groups were emerging, people claiming to belong to Apollos, or Cephas: factions, divided perhaps by taste, or class, or particular loyalties. It would take another sermon or a longer lecture to explain precisely what was going on in Corinth! But that Paul should choose to begin his first letter to the Corinthians with this admonition shows its central importance to his overall message. We all belong to Christ, because there is one Christ. There is one baptism, one ministry, one Eucharist, one Church: but divided by us, who frequently preferred our versions of Apollos or Cephas to Christ and his relentlessly creative gift of life and reconciliation. The journey of Christian unity is not a search for some kind of mystical, pure, undivided Church, a ‘true’ Church which has somehow preserved everything intact. That ends in a kind of madness. Rather, it is to notice and celebrate a wholeness in Christian discipleship which tends towards communion despite difference, and which yearns for the One Body in faith and action. Our church structures should follow and enable that dynamic. And if they do not, then they will need to change. Peter and Andrew leave their nets to follow Christ, and yet as we see later in the Gospel, they also return to them later, transformed by their relationship with Jesus and his mission, returning even to their daily work in a new light. Nothing remains unchanged in a gospel underpinned by the call to continual conversion. We will all need to change, as individuals and as churches, if we are to learn how to receive Christ’s gift.

When preaching on this passage, St Gregory the Great, who sent St Augustine from Rome to England to be the first archbishop of Canterbury, said, ‘The Kingdom of Heaven has no price tag on it. It is worth as much as you have… For Peter and Andrew it was worth the nets and vessel they had left behind; for the widow it was worth two copper coins… So, as we said, the Kingdom of Heaven is worth as much as you have.’

In the call to Christian unity, we may often need to leave our nets behind for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven: all those lethargic day-to-day patterns and habits we engage in which get in the way of discipleship and deeper fellowship with one another. But one very early metaphor for the Church is that of the boat on the Sea of Galilee, navigating tough waters, drawing in great catches of fish. We may need to leave our individual, privatised nets, in order to be back in the boat, rowing together across the deep, throwing our nets out once more for the sake of the world. An unstable and fractured global community desperately needs that witness of love and solidarity in the one Christ, as each vessel navigates the tempestuous and unpredictable waters of our age.

I began by referring to Pope Leo’s visit to Patriarch Bartholomew. I want to end by mentioning another Pope’s time in Constantinople. Pope St John XXIII, as he became, was a great pioneer of Christian unity, and worked in Turkey before his election as pope. One night, whilst looking out at the fishermen busy with their boats and nets on the Bosphorus, he wrote in his journal, ‘The sight moves me. The other night, around one in the morning, it was pouring with rain, yet the fishermen were there, undaunted in their hard labour… To imitate the fishermen of the Bosporus — working day and night with their torches lit, each on his small boat… this is our serious and sacred duty.’

Throughout our Christian lives, as we work in our boats, we should notice other vessels next to us pulling in the same direction, and help each another to keep our torches alight. Navigating the waters of the world, we will need the same encouragement, the same sustenance, which Christ gives us in his Body and Blood. This life is life given which the deep waters of death could not finally swallow up. We taste it here today in bread and wine, and pray that we may truly become what we eat. Siblings in Christ’s one body, given for the life of the world.