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SS Peter & Paul
H o m i l y G r i t s
The Feast of St Peter and St Paul
June 29 2003
(© 2003 by Grant Gallup - permission given for free distribution in fair
use or quotation )
Almighty God, whose blessed apostles Peter and Paul glorified you by
their martyrdom: Grant that your Church, instructed by their teaching
and example, and knit together in unity by your spirit, may ever stand
firm upon one foundation, which is Jesus Christ our Lord; who lives and
reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for
ever. Amen.
¶ Book of Common Prayer Lectionary:
Ezekiel 34:11-16 I will feed them with justice
Psalm 87 Fundamenta ejus On the holy mountain stands the city he has
founded.
2 Timothy 4:1-8 Be persistent whether the time is favorable or
unfavorable: convince, rebuke, and encourage.
John 21:15-19 When they had finished breakfast, he said "Feed them".
After John the Baptist and Mary of Nazareth, perhaps the two most
prestigious saints are the ones we celebrate today, Simon/ Peter of
Galilee, and Saul/Paul of Tarsus. Each has his own feast, too--Paul on
January 25, when we celebrate his Conscientization, and Peter on January
18, when we celebrate his Confession of faith. Paul was not "converted"
from Judaism to Christianity--the latter didn't exist yet, to be
"converted" to, and to call it that confuses and sets a bad example.
Indeed, he never stopped being a Jew, or a Child of the Abrahamic faith
(nor do we) and didn't undergo the surgery that many did, to undo his
circumcision. Nor the mental surgery required to disown his Hebrew self.
Instead, Paul was "conscientizado", an awkward word for us in English
("conscientisized") --had his conscience brought to a new awareness of a
relationship, and the meaning of his sometime Enemy who is now his Friend
of the Damascus Road. And so with Peter, who recognized our Friend Jesus
not only as the Capernaum rabbi who made house calls, but as the eternal
Rock of Ages and the One who fulfills all our expectations of a
Liberator. Conversely, Jesus saw that Peter's faith was thus the
"fundamenta", as our Psalm's Latin tag title has it, the foundation stone
of his new "Church," our own Conversion to Restore the Earth, as Phil
Wheaton names it.
. (This fundament-alism is not Falwellian, fragmented, foolish, or
fragile--but is solidly based on an everlasting Friend, and our faith in
him and the God he taught us is our loving Paternal and Maternal Parent,
our Nurturer.
Peter is still the hardworking laborer of Galilee Fisheries, who sailed
out into the deep of the Mediterranean Sea, all the way to Rome, where he
became the Big Fisherman, the one who organized our still continuing
voyage into the midst of Empire and beyond it into the coming Human
Comunity. It was at Rome in the year 64 of our Common Era that Peter and
Paul probably met their deaths at the hands of Nero, who made even Gringo
Emperors look like pikers, until the present one. So unlike in their
lives, so different in style, skills, ability, upbringing, class origin,
they also had different "death-styles." Paul, university-educated, a
sophisticated, cosmopolitan person of the Diaspora, those Jews who for
centuries had lived outside Palestine. A C.I.A. "asset", hired to ferret
out disloyalty to Empire, he could not have been more different from
Simon Peter, an uneducated fisherman from the edge of Empire. They
argued, for Peter--like most working-class people in the States
today--before Easter was conservative, even against his own class
interests. Paul had been radicalized by a mystic and liberating
experience with the Risen Jesus, whom he probably never met except in
Visions, but who knows? He claimed to have done. But Paul's commitment to
his rabbi mentor constantly went deeper, and he even came to help
conscientisize the headstrong Peter--for even though he was a Paulos (a
"little guy") he bragged afterwards that he had huffed and puffed and
stood up to Peter on behalf of the Gentiles who wanted "in" to the Church
without cosmetic surgery.
Paul thought his way into his radicalism, and into Jesus' Revolution. His
intellectual commitment became far-reaching and to this day permeates any
theological discussion of the gospel he heard in Jerusalem and crossed
the known world to tell us Gentiles about. Paul had Peter's dreams to
help him, for Jesus came to both men in their hearts and minds to limn
the outlines of a world-transforming project. He wooed them into a Church
which is not ever to be sectarian or Shut In, but EKKLESIA--called out.
And so the rest of us are called out into the Vanguard--the scouting
party to explore a new and liberated future for the human family. The
Call led them both to Rome, the bloody heart of the bloody Empire, not
because it had been determined by market research to be the safest, most
congenial place for us, but because it was the riskiest, most dangerous,
and most important place to do the ministry of gospel.
They were both executed, according to their class status. Simon Peter,
after all a Jewish nobody, met a nobody's death--tortured to death by
crucifixion, like his nobody Jewish rabbi, Jesus. For sedition and
conspiracy. But Paul was a citizen of the city of Rome, with special
status, credentialed all over the world, as privileged as a Gringo in
Guatemala. Peter came to Rome to put the Empire on trial, whereas Paul
was brought to Rome that the Empire might put him on trial. They both
came a cropper there, and were judicially murdered by capitalist
punishment. Paul was beheaded, a merciful instantaneous death which was a
privilege for criminal citizens, quicker even than lethal injection,
Junior Bush could learn from Nero. Peter was tortured as a rebellious
slave, nailed to a cross in Nero's garden for the entertainment of an
upscale dinner party. Together, they lost their lives but ultimately won
their case, and ours, at Rome. And their martyr's crowns.
In ancient Rome this feast day of Peter and Paul was celebrated with a
degree of solemnity approaching that of Christmas, for they had come to
replace Romulus and Remus as the fathers of the city. Remember these
twins, suckled by a Mother Wolf? They entered into the founding myth of
the entire civilization. Peter and Paul won over the very mythology of
this town, its empire, its might, into the service of the Church. But
within a few hundred years it had itself become an Empire, and from the
Rock of faith a mountain of imperial religion was built, in which we can
now see the Church as part of the problem.
In Washington D.C. the Episcopal church got Congress to charter an
official church for the American empire, back in the 1920's of the last
century. It's called "the National Cathedral" and that couldn't be done
nowadays, for sure. West Point was the other hand of that, with its
Episcopal chapel and State Church, a training ground for generals and
proconsuls for the world. But it's real name is the Cathdral of St. Peter
and St. Paul--and it is set upon Mount Saint Alban, the highest hill in
the new Rome, above the imperial architecture of Capitol hill. And named
for the Saints who long ago began to call a Church out of an Empire. That
a human community might emerge from a place where emperors fiddle and set
fire to the world around them.
The lessons today are all about nourishing people for that project. Seek
out the sheep. Feed them with justice. Be urgent, be persistent, be
insistent. We will back up the pericope to "just after daybreak," at
verse 4 in chapter 12, which is itself an appendix to the gospel.
At daybreak, the bereft and hungry disciples, desanimado and downhearted
in their grief, disappointed in their empty nets, find at the lakeshore a
Stranger whom they do not recognize, who addresses them as "Children" and
asks, "You have no fish, have you?" They say, "No." And he bids them cast
the nets to the right side (the lucky side) of the boat, and assures them
that there they will find some. Not necessarily magical--someone standing
on the shore can often see a school of fish not visible from the boat
itself. So they do that, and now they take so many fish that they can't
handle the catch. It is John the beloved, "who trimmed the flapping sail"
who knows at once it is rabboni, their KYRIOS, for abundance has always
been a Sign that He is with them, in bread on the hillside, with the wine
at Cana, in the water at Jacob's well in Samaria, and when he "poured out
the Spirit without measure" while he was himself baptizing in Judea.
Simon, abashed at being found in the buff, now puts on his baptismal
garment and wades in, to help the others ashore, and then they find a
charcoal fire, with fish roasting on the coals. The KYRIOS has already
set out the breakfast on the beach. This mysterious stranger bids them
bring some of their own fish to his meal. And it is Simon Peter who hauls
the Church's net ashore, and they count out one hundred fifty three fish.
St. Jerome said zoologists told him this was the total of species of
fish, and so they symbolize all who will come into the Church. Augustine
cited numerology, but I was never good at math, and so am glad for
Jerome's simpler scoring. Another wizard (H. Kruse, cited in the Jerome
Bible Commentary) says it is a numerologic code in Hebrew that spells out
"the Church of Love."
But it is only now, after their own catch is hauled ashore and presented
to him in an un torn net, reminiscent of his seamless robe, that Jesus
makes the Eucharist, gives them all the Communion, himself thereby fully
present to them, and to us. And now the Risen Jesus at this table of
forgiveness, gives Peter a chance to undo his three denials of the
Crucified one, and catechizes him into a renewal of discipleship, along
with John the beloved, to leave behind a Church which is a community of
Love, with Peter as "Prince" (i.e., first, or the principal one) of the
Apostles.
There is no doubt about Peter's Primacy, nor that of the ancient Roman
see which he founded with his blood. It is not a primacy of power, but a
primacy of Love and service that Jesus leaves him in John's gospel. His
successors' arrogance cannot undo the promises of Christ. The Risen Jesus
here promises Peter a primacy of witness as well--a death like his own.
The compiler of the evangel then notes the martyrdom of Peter when he has
Jesus prophesy "the kind of death by which he would glorify God," for he
said to him, "when you grow old you will stretch out your hands and
someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not
wish to go." And in spite of that warning, "After this he said to him,
'Follow me'". Eusebius, following Origen, records that Peter was
crucified, head down, in penance for having denied the Lord.
René Girard, in his "I See Satan Fall Like Lightning", describes the
'mimetic contagion' whereby we all learn denial of our deepest loyalties,
when we go with the crowd. Peter is not distinguished from the other
disciples in his volatile character, for "they all forsook Jesus and
fled."
Pilate, remember, suffered from it too and strangled his sympathies and
the better angels of his nature, as most of us do, at the sight of the
'snowballing' violence of the majority, which intimidates us, as war
intimidates all into patriotism, which Samuel Johnson called the refuge
of scoundrels. Peter, the Rock, became the Skandalon, the Stone of
Stumbling, and himself tripped on it. But unlike Judas he was rescued by
the Risen One, restored, and invited to share the Table forever with the
Church throughout the ages, and to feed the flock. Invited to that Table
too is Paul, who himself found Peter's denial a skandalon, and said so
"to his face." They are joined together with us in this day of mutual
forgiveness and our celebration of the founders of the City of God, so
broad and far.
GRANT GALLUP
Apartado RP-10
CASA AVE MARIA
Managua, Nicaragua C.A.
Tel. 011-505-2662165
gallup@tmx.com.ni
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