Feast of the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul

Acts 12:1-11
Galatians 1:11-20
Matthew 16:13-19

+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

Later this week we'll celebrate Independence Day and give thanks for our country and pray for her. We'll thank God for our freedom. I use the word 'freedom' cautiously because the way I often hear it used makes me nervous. Politicians and advertisers especially have a way of being sloppy with this word, this grand idea. We allow them to use this great ideal and responsibility to appeal to our baser instincts.

We can think of there being two types of liberty. First, there is the freedom to do whatever you wish. This is not what our Founding Fathers had in mind. The concept of freedom as merely allowing us to pursue our own desires is emotive, capricious, and puerile. Healthy, godly societies can not be built upon that idea; it leads to anarchy; it promotes selfishness and is anti-civic. James Madison argued that if an individual can't control and govern himself in private affairs, then how could we expect public government to be any better, how could we expect the government to allow freedom.

The other type of freedom is the freedom to do what you ought to do. True freedom is proportional to responsibility; true freedom is moral. This freedom is rational, responsible, and adult. Madison said that public institutions in a free society depend upon this second kind of liberty, that is people who do not habitually cheat, lie, shirk responsibility and difficulties; people who do not ignore the law or are contemptuous of it; people who are conscientious and assume responsibility. Incidentally, this agrees with what the Church has to say about freedom. Thomas a Kempis said: "Unless you deny yourself, you shalt not have liberty." The Church teaches us that we have perfect freedom in God's service, in having the freedom to do what we ought to do.

Although we are far from perfect, we are extremely fortunate to live in a society that largely values this real freedom. Over the years, I am increasingly struck by America's uniqueness in history. We are blessed to be part of the so-called 'American experiment.' The United States has been, and has the potential to remain for generations, a place of freedom, and so of hope and opportunity. Our greatest sin, perhaps our original sin, has been our failure to live up to our ideals, to allow freedom for some, but to enslave African Americans, to chase Native Americans off their land, to detain Japanese Americans, to refuse the franchise to women. We can never make up for that suffering, injustice, and horror, and as we move into the future we still have a mighty task of mending our ways and healing our wounds.

Nevertheless, we have many reasons to be hopeful that our future will be brighter, that our values, our high ideals, will be better realized. If you want to be cynical and pessimistic, you can find lots of justification. But there is also reason for hope and optimism, and hope and optimism is far more constructive, far more godly. The hope of our country is seen in that, as much as ever, people from all over the world want to make their lives here. This has contributed greatly to making us a great country, a nation of incredible diversity and energy and yet one of relative peace and unity. No other society in history looks like us. And increasingly the Washington area itself is the model of a diverse society.

Most people think of New York, L.A., and Miami as the primary location of immigrants; and for decades, Washington has been seen as the quintessential model of a black city living in tension with white suburbs. That's changing. Old tensions still exist, but a new dynamic is taking hold. Those other cities have large numbers of new Americans, but not the diversity of new Americans found in the Washington area. According to some experts, our area may have more diversity than any other city. "Nearly two hundred countries are represented" in our area, with the top ten including - and not in order of numbers: El Salvador, Peru, Vietnam, China, South Korea, Ethiopia, Iran, the Philippines, India, and Pakistan. ⁽¹⁾ Think of a globe. Those countries represent Central America, South America, Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Oceania, and the Subcontinent. That's incredible diversity. It's sort of reversing the Tower of Babel - unifying humanity. And there's something else encouraging about this new wave of immigration here.

Each of the ten metropolitan Washington zip codes with the most new immigrants draws from more than a hundred countries. In other words, instead of settling into separate ethnic neighborhoods, as Italian and Irish and Jews and Chinese did a century ago, the new arrivals scatter. In yet other words, they integrate. They work beside native-born Americans, they live beside them. . . ⁽²⁾

America isn't Shangri-La, or the New Jerusalem, but in the big picture we've probably made gradual progress in living up to our ideals. We increasingly allow for and respect ethnic, racial, and religious differences; we increasingly celebrate them, whereas in many other places in the world diversity results in indifference at best, or more likely hostility and violence, even extreme violence. When America is at her best, we reflect the very nature of God, the Holy Trinity, who is diversity in unity. That is also when the Church looks her best, holding diversity in unity. And diversity in unity is one of the themes of the Feast of SS. Peter and Paul.

These two apostles symbolize the unity of the Church's complimentary missions. S. Peter is largely associated with the mission to Israel. For most of his life after Jesus, he evangelized the Holy Land: Caesaria, Samaria, Joppa, and Lydda, and especially Jerusalem. Often facing angry opposition to the most senior members of the Church, S. Paul became the chief apostle to the Gentiles. Paul struck out beyond Israel and established churches around the Mediterranean. Without him, the Church would not have become the crux of Western civilisation.

Peter, however, made Paul's mission possible. Initially it must have looked as if Christianity would have just become another type of Judaism, a sect within Judaism. But God gave Peter a vision of the four-footed beasts of the earth, and Peter heard a voice saying, "Rise, Peter, kill and eat." Peter responded, "By no means, Lord, because food which is common or unclean has never entered my mouth." The voice from heaven spoke, "What God has cleansed do not reckon as common or unclean." (Acts 10, 11) From this experience, Peter learned that God wants the gospel to go to the Gentiles, that Jesus came to give life to everyone, not just Israel, that God's love has no boundaries. Peter's vision is a vision of unity, of inclusion, and naturally he received a lot of criticism from his fellow Jews and Jewish Christians in Jerusalem. Indeed, they put Peter on trial, but Peter wins. Led by the Holy Spirit, and the words of Peter, the Jewish Christians recognize that God's life-giving repentance has come to the Gentiles.

Peter became the focal point of unity for the Church. The Jerusalem Judaisers, those Jewish Christians committed to retaining the law and circumcision, fiercely fought with Paul, and Peter as much as possible played mediator and peacemaker between them. While fully convinced of his position, while being poorly treated by the Jerusalem party, Paul still sought unity with the Jerusalem party. During his missions, he raised money to send back to the Church in Jerusalem, in particular when there was a famine there. Paul understood that the unity of the Church required her various members to help those in need, that the wealthy should assist the less fortunate. The early Church was not congregational. Each locality understood themselves part of a larger whole, part of the Body of Christ.

Toward the end of his ministry, Paul returned to Jerusalem, brought alms from his mission churches, and reported to the Jerusalem elders his tremendous successes. The elders, such as S. James, came to recognize God's work in Paul's ministry, but many of the Jerusalem Christians suspected that Paul had flaunted the Jewish Law and taught others to ignore it. Paul and the Jerusalem elders wanted harmony, and so they conceived a "plan to have Paul show his loyalty to Judaism by purifying himself and going to the Temple, [but this plan] fails when fanatics start a riot, claiming that [Paul] has defiled the holy place by bringing Gentiles into it." ⁽³⁾ That riot of fanatics leads to Paul's arrest, and eventually to his transfer to Rome to stand trial for fomenting civil unrest. That's the irony. Paul had gone to the Temple as an act of compromise, to try to unite the Church and to promote the union of Jews and Christians, but his act did not have a conciliating, unifying effect because of fanatics. It's an old story, not only in the Middle East, but in our own society.

Peter and Paul were the Apostolic Church's premier missionaries. They welcomed all people to enjoy God's life. Both of them understood that God's love and mercy has no bounds, that it is not exclusive, but always reaching out to gather us in. They knew that because if the old understanding of God was right, then they were lost. Peter had denied Jesus. Paul had persecuted Jesus. Both of them knew that they were sinners, and yet God loved them and welcomed them into his Church. They knew God's mercy, his purpose, his life, and it changed them and made them saints.

Peter and Paul lived in a world tolerant of far fewer personal freedoms, but they knew a deeper freedom, the perfect freedom from serving God. Their service to God eventually cost them their lives. The civil authorities wouldn't tolerate them, and they suffered martyrdom. Yet, Peter and Paul remained truly free, even unto captivity and death. We enjoy the great blessing of a free society, a blessing for which we are enormously grateful, a blessing which makes it easier to be Christians, but we are only truly free in serving God.

+ In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

1. Jonathan Rauch, 'Coming to America,' The Atlantic Monthly, July/August 2003, p. 30.

2. Ibid.

3. Raymond E. Brown, An Introduction to the New Testament, Doubleday (1997), p. 314.