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
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