June 29, 2008 at Saint Mark in Norman, OK
Acts 12: 1-11 + Psalm 34 + Timothy 4: 6-8, 17-18 + Matthew 16:13-19
A fisherman and a tent maker are put before us by the universal church on this date every year. They are an “odd couple” just as unlikely a pair as the characters portrayed by Walter Matthau and Jack Lemon in that film, “The Odd Couple” that came out in 1968, forty years ago! One is a neat-freak and the other a slob. Separated from their wives and families, they end up sharing an apartment together. At the risk of trivializing Peter and Paul, it strikes me that the two of them are in some ways quite like the characters in that film. Peter, the neat freak wants everything done by the book and according to the rules. In a conflict overrule keeping, he appeals to James in Jerusalem to settle a dispute. It’s a classic conflict: keep the letter of the law or bend the letter to discover the spirit and purpose of the law. Then there is Paul, who in some ways is the other character. He stirs up things, brings in gentiles and gets everything confused for those who liked things neat and orderly.
It strikes me that the two of them a still a good image of our church today: a people who are both Peter and Paul, a people who need things neat and yet a people who can live with a little mess; a people who lean to the right and lean to the left; rule keepers and makers, and rule benders or breakers. Regardless of those differences, there is a fidelity to Jesus Christ and His mission that is indistinguishable, and we find in them both a passion for the Gospel’s Good News, and the Kingdom of God as Jesus proclaimed it and as they experienced with him; a kingdom of forgiveness and mercy, of justice and peace.
They are real people, this fisherman and this tent maker. They both spent time in prison, but as Paul points out in one of his epistles, “nothing can imprison the Word of the Lord.” So, in spite of the extra ordinary precautions of double chains and a large contingent of guards, Peter gets out. No force of this world is stronger than the force of the church at prayer says the story we’ve just read in Acts of the Apostles. What we see here is that the prayer of a Spirit filled community is greater than Herod’s soldiers. Perhaps Luke in recording this incident would want us to get that point.
It also occurs to me that there is much of Peter and Paul in each of us as well as in our church. We are, every one of us, a people not terribly consistent nor perfectly tuned to the mission to which we have been called in faith. Peter with his denials, his inattentive dozing while Jesus is in agony, and Paul with his outright persecution of believers fairly well describe the kind of people who have been entrusted with the mission of Christ so powerfully suggested by the image of the keys. Neither Peter nor Paul got off to a great start, but it’s how they ended that matters. We find in their story the truth that it is never too late to change, there is nothing we have done that is so awful or unfaithful that God’s grace cannot help us move beyond, and when we do wonderful things can happen in and through us.
Peter and Paul are in the end, nothing more than you and me. Human beings, graced, touched by God’s hand. Like Peter, we sleep too much, and sometimes we have to shaken awake. Who knows, it might well be an angel that does so: an angel that looks like a tragedy or a near calamity, or maybe just a sudden insight and moment of clarity. The truth we proclaim here is not about historical figures of Peter and Paul; but about you and me, called and chosen by God formed by the blood of Christ into church for the sake of sacrifice and service, reconciliation and healing.
God is at work in us no less than in Paul and in Peter. These men call us today to make their lives and their deaths worthwhile by continuing the mission for which they gave all. We are the Timothy Paul so treasures and instructs. We testify to the world and to one another. We speak always for the holiness of life – of all life even in a world where it often seems impossible to effect much change.
If we have even a portion of the same Spirit that filled these two, we do not and cannot be silent in the face of injustice. Our deeds must match our words, and our values must match our vision. The Spirit of the Risen Christ will break any chain and open the door of anything that imprisons us. By that Spirit, we can and we must become attentive to the consequences of our decisions every minute of every day. Our lives will be the sermon we preach. We shall begin to question and cry out when price of gasoline takes food away from hungry children whose parents work hard while oil companies post record incomes and pay dividends from their profits leaving out those who have nothing with which to buy the stock and share the profit. We shall pass up cheap shirts that put others out of work, and we shall pay attention when people like animals are exploited for the profit of those who need no more profit. The unemployed and the uninsured are the concern of everyone when the Spirit of the Risen Christ has seized the hearts and minds of faithful people who are awake and not held captive by the powerful of this world.
A fisherman and a tent maker stand before us today as the freest people on the face of this earth. They were not rich, and they had no power. Yet they did not succumb to feelings of helplessness, and they never found silence convenient. It should be so for us: a people who share their faith, their humble beginnings and stumbling efforts. They lived and died in Rome – the seat of all earthly power. It was the most powerful and most wealthy nation on earth. They stood in the face of that power, and two thousand year later all that power is gone but the Spirit they shared, that unlikely pair still lives in you and me regardless of the superficial differences we may have about what’s neat and what’s messy, what is good and what is better.
There is a power that can change the world in us, and it will do so even as it changes us from within. For that Spirit we should give thanks, and then be set free.