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 called 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.