Thursday, July 3, 2014

Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul






In a Peanuts cartoon Lucy demanded that Linus change TV channels, threatening him with her fist if he didn’t.
“What makes you think you can walk right in here and take over?” asks Linus. 
“These five fingers,” says Lucy. “Individually they’re nothing but when I curl them together like this into a single unit, they form a weapon that is terrible to behold.”
“Which channel do you want?” asks Linus.
Turning away, he looks at his fingers and says, “Why can’t you guys get organized like that?”
Unity is strength.

That is the main thought on our minds as we come together today to give God thanks for the two great apostles, Peter and Paul.
In their lifetime Peter and Paul did not work so closely together.
Peter was called directly by Jesus and given “the keys of the kingdom” (Matthew 16:16-18).
He is portrayed in icons carrying the keys.
Paul, on the other hand, probably never met Jesus face to face.
Once a persecutor of the church, his conversion came about through a vision on the road to Damascus.
His inspiration and his style of presenting the gospel came from visions and charismatic experiences.
He is portrayed in icons carrying either a sword or a book. Peter and Paul were so different that Peter was surnamed the Apostle of the Jews and Paul the Apostle of the Gentiles.
Paul once had a public disagreement with Peter on whether Jewish Christians could eat together with Gentile Christians. (Galatians 2).

If Peter and Paul did not agree in life, they did agree in death.
Both suffered the same kind of death, martyrdom, in the same city, Rome, at about the same time, 64-67 a.d. 
The early church recognized Peter and Paul as the two pillars of the church of Christ.
This is depicted in an ancient icon with Peter on the right and Paul on the left, each extending a hand with which they bear up the church.
By placing two of them together in one icon, united in lifting up the church, the church is sending a message to all her children that they all likewise should be united, in spite of individual and local differences, in building up the one church of God.

In the early church there was a tendency to splinter into various factions, each faction claiming to follow the leadership of one of the chief apostles or missionaries.
This was one of the reasons why Paul wrote the first letter to the Corinthians.
The Corinthians were breaking up into followers of Paul, followers of Peter, and followers of Apollos.
Paul reminds them strongly that these human leaders are all equally servants of the one Christ.
Christ, therefore, should be their focus and not the human leaders.

If division among believers was a problem in the days of Paul, it is even more so today.
Like the Christians of Corinth, Christians today are divided, variously recognizing the absolute authority of John Calvin, John Wesley or John Paul.
We are like the weak fingers of Linus that cannot embrace one another and unite into a formidable punch. Disunity of Christians is a scandal that weakens the Christian witness to the world.
How can Christian churches preach love and unity, forgiveness and reconciliation to the world when they themselves are living in disunity, unable to forgive and reconcile themselves?
Even within the walls of the same church, there are visible cracks of disunity.

Today, the faithful are quick to label themselves either as conservatives or liberals.
Conservatives, who often identify with the institutional authority of Peter, wage war against liberals; and liberals, who identify with the charismatic vision of Paul, wage war against conservatives.
By combining the feasts of the apostles Peter and Paul, the church is inviting all her children to look beyond the conservative-liberal divide and discover a deeper level of unity in Christ.
The church of Christ needs the rock of Peter’s institutional leadership as well as the vitality of Paul’s charismatic vision.
Christian unity, like the unity of Peter and Paul, is not a unity in uniformity but a unity in diversity.

Today the church reminds us that, even though as individuals and local communities some will prefer the style of Peter and others that of Paul, we should not let that divide us since we are all, first and foremost, followers of the one Lord Jesus Christ and children of one Father, God

The Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ (Corpus Christi)





On this feast of the body of Christ, let's talk a little about what it might mean to be a body.
Not to have a body, but to be a body.

We have a certain amount of difficulty with this key concept of the Bible because we don't think in biblical terms.
Biblical language does not divide people into body and soul;
it sees us as simple units-
as enfleshed spirits or inspirited bodies.
That is why the Old Testament strikes us as being earthy-
why circumcision is a religious rite, and why menstruation rendered a woman ritually
The Old Testament is a rollicking, real, vibrant view of humanity in which flesh is given its due­ --
where sin was punished by bodily suffering, and goodness was rewarded by long physical life.

The same zest for blood-and guts living continued into the New Testament times.
They made no fine distinctions between body and soul, inside and outside, and thought and action.
Whatever you thought and did was who you were.
Jesus was never more Jewish than when He said "If you hate your brother you're a murderer-
if you lust after your sister you're an adulterer."
Being more finicky-or more philosophical-
we divide ourselves into body and soul.
So we experience ourselves as split in half, dichotomized, made of two parts that have to be brought back together.
But we never quite make the match, and our bodies always come off second best.


We may pamper our bodies, like spoiled children,
but we don't take them seriously-like spoiled children.
We play with them, we use and misuse them,
but we don't let them in our highest and lowest experiences­ B
precisely those experiences that make us human.
We do not cry over our sins nor do we dance before the tabernacle.

Our language belies our theory at every turn.
We say, 'My stomach hurts," but that is not entirely accurate.
My stomach does not hurt the way my car is broken.
My stomach is me, so I hurt.
This is not a medical nicety;
it is also the way we experience ourselves on the spiritual level.

We say, "I stole something," the same way we recite, "The cow jumped over the moon."
But it is not the same thing.
When I steal something, I am a thief.
Or we say, "I told a lie," as if that lie were lost somewhere in the universe far away from us.
No, that lie is lodged in my craw.
I didn=t tell a lie: I am a liar.

My body is not something separate from me that I may use or not use,
recognize or disown as I choose.
Whatever I do with my body, that is what I AM.
Of course, that also includes the good that I do.
When I do a kind deed, I AM kind.
When I have patience, I AM a patient person.

To appreciate fully what this means, it might be a good experiment next week to pay attention to the way we speak.
Instead of saying, "I did this or that," try saying, "I am this or that."
It ought to give intensity to our lives.

Enough said about our bodies-
what about the body of Christ?
His body is just like yours and mine-
whatever he does with his body is who HE IS.
Only there is so much more to him.
His divinity is so much bigger than his humanity that he cannot fully express himself through one physical body.
So he makes all of us parts of his body.

And because we are his body, whatever we do, we force him to do.
If we laugh, he laughs; if we cry, he cries;
if we do good, he does;
and if we sin, he sins.

Is that a little strong?
Don't listen to me -Read Corinthians, where it clearly says that if you lie with a whore, you make the body of Christ lie with a whore.
Paul may be a prude, but he is not squeamish.

We started by talking about language, and ended by talking about body language.
Both are very delicate things, so we should be careful.
It is true that there is a difference between the body of Christ and our own bodies.
But it is equally true that the connection between him and us is so close that God calls us his body.
If words mean anything at all, that surely means that whatever we do to any member of the body we do to him.
So be good to your bodies-
they don't belong to you.
They ARE you.
And they are CHRIST.