The Hope for Us All: a Sermon on the Feast Day of Apostles Peter and Paul
None of us can tell the story of our lives without
pointing to particular persons we have known and who have shaped us. In our families and friendships, people are
not interchangeable, for we are all unique in our relationships with one
another and with God. We play particular
roles that are colored by our character, personal history, and distinctive
blend of strengths and weaknesses. That
is also how it is in the life of the Church.
Particular people matter.
Today we celebrate two of the most glorious Saints
of the Christian faith. They are both
pillars of the Church, apostles, and martyrs whose unique personalities and
experiences have made decisive and permanent contributions to the Body of
Christ. Saint Peter was the head
disciple whose confession, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God,” is
the rock on which Christ, our true foundation, has built His Church. The gospels describe Peter’s presence at so
many crucial moments in the ministry of the Lord, including at His arrest when
Peter, who had so clearly confessed Him earlier and vowed never to abandon Him,
denied Him three times. Of course, the
risen Christ restored Peter by asking him three times if he loved Him and
giving him the command to feed His sheep as a shepherd of the flock of
Christians. And in the book of Acts, we
see Peter boldly proclaiming the good news, performing miracles, and playing a
key role in welcoming Gentiles into the Church. After serving as the first bishop of
Antioch, where the disciples were first call0ed Christians, then he went to
serve in Rome. Peter was crucified there
upside down for his faith in Jesus Christ, for by Peter’s own request he was
unworthy to die in the same way as His Savior.
That St. Paul plays a glorious role in the
formation of the faith is obvious to anyone who knows the New Testament, for he
wrote so much of it. He traveled for
decades founding and supporting churches, especially among Gentiles. Paul himself was Jewish and had been a strict
Pharisee who had persecuted Christians.
But on the road to Damascus, the risen Lord appeared to Him in a
blinding light and called him to repentance and the shocking ministry of
bringing Gentiles into the Body of Christ through faith, not circumcision and
obedience to the Old Testament law.
Perhaps more than anyone else, Paul made clear that the Christian faith
is not a sect of Judaism primarily for people of a particular ethnic and
religious heritage, but instead good news for all people, regardless of their
ancestry.
As today’s epistle passage reminds us, Paul’s
ministry was not easy by any stretch of the imagination. He was beaten, imprisoned, humiliated, and
ultimately martyred in Rome for his faith in Jesus Christ. He knew both the heights of spiritual ecstasy
and the chronic challenge of a “thorn in the flesh” that God did not remove,
despite his three-fold request. Whatever
that thorn may have been, Paul learned through his sufferings the sufficiency
of God’s strength for him. God’s
“strength is made perfect in (Paul’s) weakness.“ As the apostle said of himself, “For when I
am weak, then I am strong.”
When we study the lives of these two great saints,
we do not see people who made no mistakes or who were rich, famous, or without
problems. These were real human beings
who fell short, repented, grew over time in their understanding, and faced such
opposition that both suffered capital punishment at the hands of the pagan
Romans. They gained absolutely no
worldly advantages by their faithful ministry, but their selfless service
strengthened the Church in ways too numerous to count. We are here today as Orthodox Christians
because of what God did through them and so many other lesser known apostles,
martyrs, and evangelists across the ages.
In order to celebrate worthily the feast day of
Sts. Peter and Paul, we must go beyond praising them with our words. We must participate personally in the
holiness so evident in them. In other
words, we must become like them in a way appropriate to our particular calling
and location. For just as God used a
fisherman and a Pharisee with given sets of strengths and weaknesses to His
glory, He intends to do likewise with each of us. The first century is long gone, but there is
plenty of time left in the twenty-first century for us to hear and respond to
the same risen Lord who called Peter to feed His sheep and Paul to become a
missionary to the Gentiles. Like the
Ephesians to whom Paul wrote, we too have become “fellow citizens with the
saints and members of the household of God, having been built on the foundation
of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ Himself being the chief
cornerstone…” (Eph. 2:19-20)
Each generation is like a new story added to the
building or a new branch growing on a tree.
Even as we find our personal history in the previous generations of our
families, we take our spiritual life from the living history of what the Holy
Spirit has done through each generation in the life of the Church. We are called to make present in our day the
same faithfulness that we see in those who have gone before us, but we do so as
unique, unrepeatable persons called to grow in the divine likeness and to find
the fullness of our identity through union with the Lord like an iron left in
the fire. Just as a fisherman and a
Pharisee became radiant with the divine energies through their repentance and
steadfast dedication to Christ, the same can be true of us.
We may think, however, that we are simply too
sinful to achieve such spiritual heights.
We know that we fall short and may be ashamed even to think of becoming
like these great saints. Remember for
just a moment, however, that Peter denied Christ three times at His arrest and
Paul persecuted Christians to the point of death. If they can repent, follow Jesus Christ
faithfully, and have such exalted roles in the life of the Church, who are we
to excuse ourselves from whatever God wants of us in our families, our parish,
our work, or whatever it might be? In
all likelihood, we will live and serve in obscurity and face obstacles much
smaller than the brutal persecution these great saints endured.
As well, we may be tempted to think that they were
so much stronger than we are. Remember
that St. Paul found God’s strength precisely in his weakness, in his
infirmities and pains that opened his life to the gracious power of God. St. Peter must have felt weak when the Lord
said “Get behind me, Satan” to him when he tried to explain to Christ that He
would not be rejected and killed. And
could there be any greater moment of weakness than when the disciple who
boasted that he would never abandon the Savior did so at his arrest by denying
Him three times?
Our moments of weakness are probably less
dramatic, but they are no less real. We
find it hard to do the basics of the Christian life: forgive our enemies; pray
each day and fast regularly; attend the Divine Liturgy and other services of
the Church whenever possible; take Confession on a regular basis and especially
when we have a guilty conscience about a grave sin; give generously to the
poor; visit the sick and lonely; and guard our hearts and minds from the moral
decay that permeates our culture.
When we are aware of our weaknesses, we are in the
perfect place to follow in the way of the fisherman and the Pharisee who in
humble repentance found a strength that makes up what is lacking, heals
infirmities, and even conquers sin and death.
Let us not use a false sense of humility to excuse ourselves from true
discipleship as we celebrate the Feast of Sts. Peter and Paul. Instead, we must follow their example as the unique
people we are, with all our strengths, failings, and peculiarities, for from
the very beginning of the faith, that is the only way that anyone has become a
saint.
By Fr.
Philip LeMasters
Source: http://easternchristianinsights.blogspot.com/2014/06/there-is-hope-for-us-all-homily-for.html
