The Feast of Ss. Peter & Paul

“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, which according to his abundant mercy hath begotten us again unto a lively hope by the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance incorruptible, and undefiled, and that fadeth not away.”

It is not often, in our church calendar, that we have the opportunity to celebrate festival days of the Apostles on a the Sunday on which it lands; occasionally we transfer the day from its normal time in the week to the Sunday, but today we are blessed that the 29th of June (Feast of Peter & Paul) occurs on a Sunday, and not just a Sunday but a Sunday early in the Trinity Season.

As I often point out there’s a beautiful coherence in the logic of our church calendar, in its layout and progression of holy days through the year: the day after Christmas, for example, the first full day of our Saviour’s life on earth we celebrate the very first Christian who was martyred for their faith in this saviour – St. Stephen; last week we celebrated the Nativity of John the Baptist just at the turning point of the year when the days are the longest…John the Baptist who proclaims that he must decrease so that Christ can increase, as the light begins to fade until St. Thomas’ day in December – the darkest day of the year - when the darkness of his doubt turns to joy at recognizing his Lord, as the days once again begin to lengthen. 

The Feast of St. Peter & St. Paul lands, at the beginning of the Trinity season this long and instructive season of the church’s year into which we entered two weeks ago and is meant to be a time not of focus on the particular fruits of Jesus’ life and ministry (as we do from his birth to the sending of the Holy Spirit), but on the fruits of the spirit which we are meant to bear in the living out of our faith; how lovely then that so soon into this season we celebrate faith and witness of two in whom there was so much growth of that same fruit. But the day also lands just past the middle of the entire church year; it is a day that we celebrate faith itself, reminding us that it is on this virtue of faith that our lives and relationship to God hinges or turns.

But today is also unique for the fact that it is one of only three days of our year on which two persons are commemorated as one celebration: The Feast of Philip and James; the Feast of Simon & Jude; and today, Peter and Paul. Simon and Jude, for example, are celebrated together because of their shared missionary work in Persia and their relics being enshrined in the same place; Philip and James are celebrated together because their relics – their remains – were translated to Rome on the same day, but Peter and Paul stand apart from these two. Neither were likely martyred on the same day, or even the same year, they didn’t work closely together as did Simon and Jude, and while their skulls reside together at the church of St. John Lateran in Rome and their remains were moved there perhaps around the same time, the feast isn’t really about their bones.

Rather, they are celebrated together because it is their faith and their witness that are seen to be pillars of the church – Peter, the chief of the Apostles, and Paul the one called to preach to the Gentiles. Peter and Paul came from radically different backgrounds, but yet the two – and their faith – have for millennia been viewed as inseparable. St. Augustine wrote in a sermon concerning this that

 “Both apostles share the same feast day, for these two were one; and even though they suffered on different days, they were as one. Peter went first, and Paul followed. And so we celebrate this day made holy for us by the apostles’ blood. Let us embrace what they believed, their life, their labors, their sufferings, their preaching, and their confession of faith” (Augustine, Sermon 295).

 But we should remember that both Peter and Paul were disciples who found a new identity in and through Christ: Saul, the great persecutor of the church is struck blind by light on his way to Damascus, and was given the name Paul, and the other – Simon – called Cephas or Petrus, the rock, after Jesus asks today in the Gospel who it is that the disciples proclaim him to be, “you are the Messiah,” says Peter, “the Son of the Living God.” And it is the rock of Peter’s faith in and confession of the Son of God upon which Christ will establish his church.

And while we sometimes like to imagine our own faith in Christ as being like that of Peter’s – like the great mounds of granite around Peggy’s Cove that hold out against the unceasing battering of sea and storm, I think our faith can sometimes be more akin to the sandstone we have lining our coasts here in PEI: maybe in places a bit flat, crumbly, prone to erosion, and if you use it to build anything – needing frequent maintenance.

But remember too that even for Peter and for Paul their great faith was not only confessed at a cost, but a price was paid for the continual upkeep and confession of that faith; Peter, who made this confession and earned his name would come to do the very thing which he swore he would never do, the thing he said he’d die before he did – deny knowing Christ, and the cost of this was seen in his bitter tears. How many times and in how many ways has our own faith, our own trust, folded under the same pressures? At the conference I attended last week, on Hope, speakers spoke in various ways about how the chaos and confusions of our contemporary world, and the chaos and confusions of our own church place a great pressure on us, things that cause us a despair that threatens our hope and shakes our faith.

But we were reminded throughout the conference by these same speakers and other teachers who’ve gone before that faith has always faced such trials, the church quite often existed in the context of chaotic and confused society hostile to the gospel, and that the answer to the trials that we face – be they church, financial, spiritual, the trials of our health, or any thing that threatens to shake our faith – we need only to think of that question asked of the disciples and recall Peter’s answer and allow it to be our own, “Who do you say that I am?...You are the Messiah, the Son of the Living God.”

This is the answer that turns sandstone to granite, this is the answer, the faith, on which the church stands. It’s not that we will not face trials and temptations – Peter and Paul, even if only by their martyrdom show us that there is no easy Christian faith, but that these things perhaps even belong to what it means to have faith, as one of our speakers reminded us at the conference. That it is actually through the testing and trying of our faith like gold in a furnace, as Peter tells us in the Epistle, that it is purified, that it becomes what it is meant to be in us. We aren’t destroyed by trials and struggles in our lives if we know the answer to that important question, but we do risk destruction if we find ourselves indifferent to the trials, not caring whether we are purified like gold, or burnt up like chaff.

[Today we pray for Theodore on this, the day of his baptism, and we pray that as he is marked as Christ’s own forever and incorporated into this body of Christ, his Church, that the the same unshakeable faith which led St. Peter and St. Paul, the Apostles, and Martyrs through every fiery trial will be the bedrock and foundation of his life all his days, and that he can find comfort in the hope of that inheritance reserved in heaven for him.]

And so we give thanks today for the lives, the faith, the witness – and indeed the trials – of Ss. Peter & Paul, and we pray that Peter’s answer to Christ’s question may be our answer to the same, that we may ever hold fast to our hope and faith in that incorruptible and undefiled inheritance that cannot fade away.