Peter and Paul

Scripture: Sts. Peter and Paul, A.D. 2014 A

Sermon:

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.  AMEN.

You’d be hard-pressed to find a more unlikely pair of heroes than Sts. Peter and Paul.

Peter was a fisherman, a blue-collar fellow, tall and strong and impulsive, always rushing into everything with great zeal, to both his credit and his folly. Peter was Jesus’ right-hand man, the Prince of the Apostles, who gained his new name—Peter, mind you, means “rock”—when Jesus proclaimed him to be “the rock” upon which He would build His Church.

Paul, we are told, was a smaller, balder, wilier man, a well-educated intellectual with deep passion for religious Law. Far from Jesus’ right-hand man, Paul was actually the archenemy of the early Church, tasked with dragging the first Christians out of their synagogues for judgment. It took a miraculous vision from Jesus, and something like fish scales falling from his eyes, to convert Paul from the Church’s ardent foe to her greatest missionary.

The one thing that Peter and Paul did have in common was that they—like Jesus, like Mary, and like all their fellow Apostles—were devout and loyal Jews. They did not understand “Christianity” as some new and novel religion. They believed in the promises given by God to their ancestor Abraham some 2,000 years before: that Abraham’s family would become a priestly nation, God’s special Chosen People, through whom God would bless all the peoples of the earth. The Lord had kept His promises through thick and thin, through Exodus and Exile, through the reigns of Egypt and Babylon and Persia and Greece. God had just fulfilled all prophecies regarding the Messiah through Jesus Christ Himself; obviously the good Lord wasn’t about to start breaking promises now.

Yet this left the early Church with an interesting conundrum. Clearly God was loyal to the people of Israel, but what about everybody else?

For centuries Judaism had attracted the attention and curiosity of non-Jewish, Gentile peoples. Some converted fully to the Jewish faith, becoming proselytes. Others honored the Hebrew God without shouldering the full weight of the Hebrew Law; the Bible remembers such people as God-Fearers. Jesus attracted even more attention, from Judeans and Galileans, from half-Jewish Samaritans and the African Jews of Ethiopia, even from Greek pagans and Roman soldiers. The nations clambered to learn more about this Jewish Jesus. And so the early Church had to decide: could someone be Christian without being Jewish? Could a convert enter the Church without first entering Judaism?

Peter and Paul both came to realize that God was telling them yes. Here was how Israel would become the promised blessing to all the nations of the earth: through Jesus. By Baptism into the Holy Spirit of Christ, and by sharing in Holy Communion, Gentiles became spiritually adopted into the family of Abraham, adopted into a new tribe of Israelites—what the Church Fathers called the “Tribe of Christians.” Jewish Christians did not cease to be Jewish, but Gentile Christians, Greeks and Arabs and Assyrians, could come to Christ apart from Israelite customs and laws.

This meant that the Gospel could, and indeed should, be carried outside the land of Israel, outside even the religion of Judaism, to all peoples, be they Jews or pagans or God-Fearers or philosophers or what-have-you. Christ indeed was the Messiah promised to the Jews, but He was also the Savior of the entire world, and so the entire world had a right to learn of His blessings and open themselves to His promises. The Risen Christ sent out His Apostles to all nations.

Thus did the Apostle James remain to lead the Jewish Christian Church in Jerusalem while Peter and Paul set off on missionary journeys throughout the known world. Paul in particular seems to have been well-suited to his task, as he was both an upstanding Israelite and a bona fide Roman citizen; he had a foot in both the Jewish and Gentile worlds, able to discuss both Mosaic Law and Greek philosophy with equal ease.

Both men traversed Europe and the Middle East for nearly 30 years following Jesus’ Resurrection, until Peter and Paul alike ended up at the very heart of the Empire: the Eternal City of Rome. There both men were executed for preaching the Gospel, for you see, in their acceptance of Gentile believers, these two devoutly Jewish men had been accused of no longer being Jewish. This meant that Rome no longer considered Christianity as a fulfillment of Judaism, but as some new and untested faith. In Rome, that was illegal. Peter was crucified upside-down. Paul, as a citizen, retained the privilege of being more honorably beheaded before the mad emperor Nero.

I cannot stress the importance of these men enough. We live in a society descended from the Roman Empire. We are Gentiles: Finns, Norwegians, Germans, Irish. Few if any of us have much in the way of Jewish ancestry. Were it not for the mercy of God at work through Peter, Paul, and their companions, we would not be Christians. No one outside of Israel would be. Rome would still be throwing prisoners to the lions, Greece would still embrace pedophilia, the Germans would still be hanging human sacrifices from trees, and the Celts would still be decorating their houses with the heads of conquered foes.

The Light of Jesus Christ brought us mercy and forgiveness and salvation. It brought us dignity and hope. More than that, the Church and the Church alone birthed the scientific method, the notion of human rights, the laws of just war, the university, the hospital, representative democracy, and the end of slavery. We would still live in darkness and chaos, in a world in which women and children were treated as subhuman, in which slavery remained the economic standard and human sacrifice a religious virtue, were it not for the selfless love of strangers willing to die for us, just so that we could learn about the One Who died for all.

It is a humbling thing, to be adopted into the family of God through no merit of our own—adopted into promises and covenants prepared for a Chosen People thousands of years before the clans of Europe appeared upon the world stage. Humbling and inspiring. For you see, brothers and sisters, the gifts of God are given freely to the point of overflowing, with no strings attached save that we embrace them and live them and share them with others.

It has been 2,000 years since the witness of Sts. Peter and Paul, a fisherman and a bookworm through whom God has transformed the world. Now you and I find ourselves standing in a position bizarrely similar to their own. Ancient Rome was a society that suffered from having everything and nothing at the same time. They had a military stronger than any in history; they had food overflowing, wealth piled up, and the best transportation ever known; they were stronger, lived longer, ate more, and traveled farther than anyone before them. And they were sick to death from it! They were bored. They had lost faith in government and in religious institutions. They didn’t believe in anything higher anymore: not ideals, not gods, not anything beyond the evening’s entertainment and the novelty of the next meal. They had all this stuff and none of it meant anything.

Bread and circuses, that was ancient Rome at the fall of the Republic. It was an entire sprawling empire aching, yearning, for authenticity, for truth, for things good and true and beautiful over things distracting and anesthetizing. Sound familiar? Peter and Paul couldn’t go and scold the peoples of the empire for their sins, because Romans didn’t know what sins were. They couldn’t exhort them to keep their covenants with God, because covenants were unknown outside of the Jews. They couldn’t even say, “You naughty, naughty Romans,” because Rome didn’t even know the difference between good and evil anymore. O, brave new world.

Instead, what Peter and Paul did was to offer the Roman world what it lacked: hope; purpose; a reason, a meaning, to go on living beyond the theater and the buffet. They offered Rome a vision of holiness, of transcendence, of higher things. And Rome fell in love with this beauty, this truth for which the Gentiles had yearned. It took centuries, but Christ won out, converting the very empire that had crucified Him. Peter and Paul did not scold the world for her sins; they simply witnessed to holiness, to godliness. Only after Rome discovered holiness could she then repent and strive for tikkun olam—the Jewish notion of building a better world.

And that, brothers and sisters, is our job today. We live in a jaded, tired world, a world that doesn’t really believe in God because it doesn’t really believe in holiness, in having more to life than a paycheck and satellite television and fried food. We live in a world that wants reality, that wants truth, that wants Jesus. It will do no good for Christians to wag our fingers at society and say, “You naughty, naughty folk.” But it will do a world of good when we simply proclaim in word and in deed: “There is so very much more to life. Come. Let’s explore it all together.”

Thanks be to Christ, Who raises dying men. In Jesus’ Name. AMEN.