Sermons from St. Paul’s Episcopal Church
The Feast of St. Peter and St. Paul: June 29, 2008
The Rev. Melissa Skelton
John 21:15-19
When they had finished breakfast, Jesus said to Simon Peter, “Simon son of John, do you love me more than these?” He said to him, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.” Jesus said to him, “Feed my lambs.” A second time he said to him, “Simon son of John, do you love me?” He said to him, “Yes, Lord; you know that I love you.” Jesus said to him, “Tend my sheep.” He said to him the third time, “Simon son of John, do you love me?” Peter felt hurt because he said to him the third time, “Do you love me?” And he said to him, “Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you.” Jesus said to him, “Feed my sheep. Very truly, I tell you, when you were younger, you used to fasten your own belt and to go wherever you wished. But 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.” (He said this to indicate the kind of death by which he would glorify God.) After this he said to him, “Follow me.”
Hot-headed, impulsive, mercurial: one of those “fire, ready, aim” sorts of people.
Arrogant, self-righteous, contentious: a man who loved the sound of his own voice.
These are one way of describing the two people our calendar invites us to celebrate today—Peter and Paul: the unlettered Jewish fisherman and the schooled Pharisaical thinker, the one who denied Christ and the one who persecuted Christians.
Peter and Paul.
We too must think that who they are—their stories and their legacy—are important, for here we all are on their day when we could be outside in the sun. Some of us are even wearing red wool vestments for the occasion, if you can believe it.
And so what are we to make of these two? How are we to think about them, to receive them as our own, to allow them to give us the good things, even the hard things that they have to give us? How do we allow their stories to inform our stories?
I have to confess that, thinking about the two of them together, that this is a bit of stretch of me. After all, we, Peter, Paul and I, are unalike in many ways—and perhaps you can relate to this. Peter and Paul were Jewish, and I am not Jewish. Peter and Paul were men, and I am not a man. Peter and Paul lived in the 1st century, and I live in the 21st century. Peter and Paul had powerful personal encounters with or dramatic visions of Jesus; I have never had such encounters or visions.
And yet as members of the Christian tribe here in Seattle in 2008 at the end of June in an election year, while the economy sputters, in the midst of all the complexity and sighing and uncertainties and joys of our lives, I want to believe that they are still our fathers in the faith in the same way that Mary is our mother in the faith.
This then (strangely) became, in this sermon preparation, and becomes even now a door for me. Our two summer festivals: the feasts of Peter, Paul and Mary, fisherman, persecutor and pregnant, unmarried teenager, put before us such a strange and unlikely trinity of forebears, that they and they alone can only be our parents in the faith. So different from one another and so different from us, they alone must have some commonality that transcends their differences with one another and has the power to leap across the years into our Christian lives today.
But what is that commonality and what is its relevance to us?
Akoloutheo. This I believe is something they share, something they bring to us.
It’s the Greek word that occurs at the very end of our gospel for today depicting a post-resurrection dialogue between Peter and Jesus. “Do you love me?” Jesus asks Peter three times. Peter says yes each time and is told each time to care for those who will be entrusted to his care.
Jesus then makes a comment to Peter that the author of John’s gospel says is related to the death that Peter will die. Jesus then concludes the entire exchange with “Akolouqei moi.” “Follow me.”
Akoloutheo— to follow. It’s the same word that Jesus uses with Peter the first time he meets him, when he calls Peter away and from his nets and into a life of fishing for people.
Follow me.
This sense of following is not just about coming over here from being over there. Rather, it means to accompany on a path in the sense of becoming a learner, to throw your lot in with a teacher, to in a sense become a kind an along a way. Peter is in this passage renewing his internship with Jesus—becoming a learner once again in Jesus’ way of walking with God and in his way of walking with others. Akoloutheo. Follow me, Jesus says to Peter: accompany me along the way as a learner, as an intern.
Many of us know about internships. In some sense, we enter them when we are not very qualified, when we do not think we have the skills to do what will be asked of us, when we are not exactly ready, when we do not have all our rough edges sanded away, when we don’t even know what we don’t know. Akoloutheo.
All we have to do is to be willing to follow.
This then, is what the three: our Peter, Paul and Mary, have in common as our parents in the faith. Bringing whoever they were, coming from wherever they might have been, each in his or her own way said yes to becoming an intern along Jesus’ way.
For Peter, of course, Scripture suggests that the invitation or imperative to follow was a direct one. For Paul our patron the invitation or imperative to follow came like an interrupting flash of light calling all that he was doing into question. For Mary, the invitation or imperative to follow began with her saying yes in the story of the annunciation, but must have grown in her awareness more gradually as it dawned on her what kind of internship she had signed onto.
And so it seems to me that these three different ways of coming at following, initiating our internships show us something of ourselves—that for some of us the invitation or the imperative seems to come with a direct voice, for others it comes as an interruption to something that we know is a destructive path, and for others of us it comes as a gradual dawning that claims us more and more as we and the implications of it grow. This is part of what out unlikely trinity of forbears who followed Jesus have to show us.
And they show us something else as well. They show us the nature of that internship, what will happen to us along the way.
A group of us spent yesterday morning reviewing and talking about adult formation here at St. Paul’s. We took some time to detail who’s in the parish right now. The list was long—people who’ve been here for years, couples with children, gay and lesbian people, younger and older singles, people from evangelical backgrounds, people from no religious background, people from Catholic backgrounds, émigrés from other parishes. “What did they have in common?” we asked ourselves? What we decided was a common characteristic of all these groups was a kind of passionate seeking that is evoked in our Anglo-Catholic way of being—a seeking that allows for many, many questions and grounds itself in a way of praying together that expresses a longing for the beauty, mystery and compassion that is the God. We are passionate seekers here whether we have been here a long time or have just arrived.
And so we wear red this morning on account of their and our own passionate seeking—red, the Church’s color, the hot color of spirit; red, the color of blood and wine, the color of sacrifice and celebration, red, the color of the pouring out of our lives in what is forever an internship in following the one who loved God passionately and all of God’s people with an equal and costly passion.
It will take us into places we had not counted on. It will cause us to celebrate, to sing and to suffer. It will break us open and make us whole in the way that belonging to God makes us whole.
