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A sermon preached in Salisbury Cathedral on 29 June 2010
"THE FEAST OF ST PETER AND ST PAUL"
For some of us this feast of St Peter and St Paul has particular personal significance for it marks the date of our ordination as deacons and priests. In my own case it is 39 years ago today that I was ordained deacon by Bishop Trevor Huddleston in All Saints Poplar, and it is 38 years since the same remarkable bishop ordained us as priests in Upper Clapton – in a church that burned down soon afterwards, though there is not thought to be any connection between the two events!
A wonderful feast day on which to be consecrated for ministry – not least because it yokes together two unlikely candidates for Christian discipleship, who were themselves at odds with one another about the scope, direction and priorities of the Christian mission in their day, as they tried to shape the future on the basis of their common recognition of the presence of Christ and the power of his Holy Spirit. There may have been huge personal differences between these two men but they were as one in acknowledging the transformation in their lives wrought by the love of Christ. And by tradition they were one in the place of their death and one in the martyrdom by which they glorified God. They are thought to have died in Rome in 64 AD at the time of Emperor Nero's persecution, and their shrine in Rome has remained a place of pilgrimage for almost 2,000 years.
And so on this day we should celebrate two great saints and celebrate the inclusiveness of a church which was able to include within the divine economy two such entirely different personalities and without either of whom the Church, and indeed humanity, would have been the poorer. But I'm not at all sure that we can confidently celebrate as we would like the inclusiveness of the Church as a model of the way in which God accepts us, loves us, forgives us and heals us, and invites us to sit down and feast with him in a kingdom where all, without exception, are accepted, loved, forgiven and healed. I'm afraid to say the Church does not model that kind of compassionate generosity, even though we may indeed recognise the figure of Christ in an unexpected moment through the kindness or self-sacrifice of this man or woman, sometimes indeed within the Church community, but very often outside the community of faith. The Church trumpets its credentials, its passion for the poor and its spiritual values, but the Church – and I am not just talking about the Church of England – is actually interested in power, in status, in the baubles of the earthly kingdom, which our statements but not our actions suggest we are looking beyond.
Last Sunday we sang here in the Cathedral Cardinal Newman's fine but heretical hymn 'Firmly I believe and truly/ God is three and God is one': nothing heretical about that. But I did say to my fellow clergy and administrants as we left the vestry that I didn't mind if they lah-lah-lah-ed Newman's fourth verse, which reads
And I hold in veneration
For the love of him alone,
Holy Church as his creation
And her teaching as his own.
The Church may indeed be God's creation, since Christ is its Lord and we are his body: and into it are called not only those great giants of flawed humanity, Peter and Paul, but equally flawed pygmies like you and me, out of which God by his grace and love makes something new with which to restore our human kind. But I am afraid Newman's assertion that the Church's teaching is God's teaching sticks in my gullet – since the Church's teaching, even buttressed by notions of papal infallibility, doctrinal inerrancy or fundamentalist readings of the bible, has so palpably been wrong, wrong, wrong down the ages: and will continue to be so while it clings arrogantly to the power and riches and zeitgeist of this world. It will continue to undermine the teaching of Christ while it pursues its agenda of being in the right at someone else's expense, when it points at the beam in the eyes of others, and fails to recognise the mote in its own, when it cloaks its inhumanity with a veneer of doctrinal purity while Jews die in holocausts (helped there by Christian doctrine), gay people and women are demeaned in the Church's official teaching, while millions die of Aids, not helped by a so-called natural theology crafted in the 14th century, and the vulnerable are at risk from those who would exploit them – some of them Christians.
Peter and Paul had to learn the hard way how to be disciples of Jesus. Paul, sprawling in the dust on the road to Damascus, was confronted with the demanding reality of God's love and, as he picked himself up, blind, he saw for the first time the grace which alone gave meaning and purpose to his life. He learned about inclusiveness because he saw that even he was included in God's love, accepted into the kingdom and given a place in God's purposes.
And Peter had to go on humbly learning what it means to be a rock (and not, as his first Epistle suggests, just a stumbling block for others to trip over). He had to learn what it means to feed Christ's flock. As the chains fell from Peter in prison and he walked free past his guards, he knew the power of God to transform human life. And as he dreamt, the vision of the sheet from heaven falling full of food – all of it untouchable to a devout Jew observing Kosher laws – and was bidden to eat of it, he recognised that God's thoughts are not our thoughts and his ways are not our ways. There are no untouchables in the kingdom of God and therefore Peter went over to Caesarea, as the gentile strangers had pleaded, and preached the gospel to them, pagans though they were, and baptized them.
The Church, despite its extraordinary inability to receive the grace it proclaims in word and sacrament, has the opportunity each day to celebrate that divine inclusiveness by which even we are included. But it requires humility, the recognition that we may possibly be wrong and the willingness to listen to and respect the views of others with whom we may at the moment disagree. In a word, we have to disavow that hubris that equates the Church's teaching with God's will.
I end with words not of St Peter or St Paul but from the wisdom of one who drew deeply on the teaching of the two saints we celebrate today. Michael Ramsey, the 100th Archbishop of Canterbury, upon whose finger Pope Paul VI placed his own episcopal ring, wrote this in his finest book The Gospel and the Catholic Church in a chapter entitled 'Ecclesia Anglicana':
The Anglican Church is vindicated by its place in history … through which it points to something of which it is a fragment. Its credentials are its incompleteness with the tension and the travail in its soul. It is clumsy and untidy, it baffles neatness and logic. For it is sent not to commend itself as "the best kind of Christianity" but by its very brokenness to point to the universal Church wherein all have died. Hence its story can never differ from the story of the Corinth to which the Apostle Paul wrote … like Corinth it has nothing that it has not received; like Corinth it learns of unity through its nothingness before the cross of Christ; and like Corinth it sees in the apostolate its dependence upon the one people of God, and the death by which every member and every Church bears witness to the Body which is one.
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A wonderful feast day on which to be consecrated for ministry – not least because it yokes together two unlikely candidates for Christian discipleship, who were themselves at odds with one another about the scope, direction and priorities of the Christian mission in their day, as they tried to shape the future on the basis of their common recognition of the presence of Christ and the power of his Holy Spirit. There may have been huge personal differences between these two men but they were as one in acknowledging the transformation in their lives wrought by the love of Christ. And by tradition they were one in the place of their death and one in the martyrdom by which they glorified God. They are thought to have died in Rome in 64 AD at the time of Emperor Nero's persecution, and their shrine in Rome has remained a place of pilgrimage for almost 2,000 years.
And so on this day we should celebrate two great saints and celebrate the inclusiveness of a church which was able to include within the divine economy two such entirely different personalities and without either of whom the Church, and indeed humanity, would have been the poorer. But I'm not at all sure that we can confidently celebrate as we would like the inclusiveness of the Church as a model of the way in which God accepts us, loves us, forgives us and heals us, and invites us to sit down and feast with him in a kingdom where all, without exception, are accepted, loved, forgiven and healed. I'm afraid to say the Church does not model that kind of compassionate generosity, even though we may indeed recognise the figure of Christ in an unexpected moment through the kindness or self-sacrifice of this man or woman, sometimes indeed within the Church community, but very often outside the community of faith. The Church trumpets its credentials, its passion for the poor and its spiritual values, but the Church – and I am not just talking about the Church of England – is actually interested in power, in status, in the baubles of the earthly kingdom, which our statements but not our actions suggest we are looking beyond.
Last Sunday we sang here in the Cathedral Cardinal Newman's fine but heretical hymn 'Firmly I believe and truly/ God is three and God is one': nothing heretical about that. But I did say to my fellow clergy and administrants as we left the vestry that I didn't mind if they lah-lah-lah-ed Newman's fourth verse, which reads
And I hold in veneration
For the love of him alone,
Holy Church as his creation
And her teaching as his own.
The Church may indeed be God's creation, since Christ is its Lord and we are his body: and into it are called not only those great giants of flawed humanity, Peter and Paul, but equally flawed pygmies like you and me, out of which God by his grace and love makes something new with which to restore our human kind. But I am afraid Newman's assertion that the Church's teaching is God's teaching sticks in my gullet – since the Church's teaching, even buttressed by notions of papal infallibility, doctrinal inerrancy or fundamentalist readings of the bible, has so palpably been wrong, wrong, wrong down the ages: and will continue to be so while it clings arrogantly to the power and riches and zeitgeist of this world. It will continue to undermine the teaching of Christ while it pursues its agenda of being in the right at someone else's expense, when it points at the beam in the eyes of others, and fails to recognise the mote in its own, when it cloaks its inhumanity with a veneer of doctrinal purity while Jews die in holocausts (helped there by Christian doctrine), gay people and women are demeaned in the Church's official teaching, while millions die of Aids, not helped by a so-called natural theology crafted in the 14th century, and the vulnerable are at risk from those who would exploit them – some of them Christians.
Peter and Paul had to learn the hard way how to be disciples of Jesus. Paul, sprawling in the dust on the road to Damascus, was confronted with the demanding reality of God's love and, as he picked himself up, blind, he saw for the first time the grace which alone gave meaning and purpose to his life. He learned about inclusiveness because he saw that even he was included in God's love, accepted into the kingdom and given a place in God's purposes.
And Peter had to go on humbly learning what it means to be a rock (and not, as his first Epistle suggests, just a stumbling block for others to trip over). He had to learn what it means to feed Christ's flock. As the chains fell from Peter in prison and he walked free past his guards, he knew the power of God to transform human life. And as he dreamt, the vision of the sheet from heaven falling full of food – all of it untouchable to a devout Jew observing Kosher laws – and was bidden to eat of it, he recognised that God's thoughts are not our thoughts and his ways are not our ways. There are no untouchables in the kingdom of God and therefore Peter went over to Caesarea, as the gentile strangers had pleaded, and preached the gospel to them, pagans though they were, and baptized them.
The Church, despite its extraordinary inability to receive the grace it proclaims in word and sacrament, has the opportunity each day to celebrate that divine inclusiveness by which even we are included. But it requires humility, the recognition that we may possibly be wrong and the willingness to listen to and respect the views of others with whom we may at the moment disagree. In a word, we have to disavow that hubris that equates the Church's teaching with God's will.
I end with words not of St Peter or St Paul but from the wisdom of one who drew deeply on the teaching of the two saints we celebrate today. Michael Ramsey, the 100th Archbishop of Canterbury, upon whose finger Pope Paul VI placed his own episcopal ring, wrote this in his finest book The Gospel and the Catholic Church in a chapter entitled 'Ecclesia Anglicana':
The Anglican Church is vindicated by its place in history … through which it points to something of which it is a fragment. Its credentials are its incompleteness with the tension and the travail in its soul. It is clumsy and untidy, it baffles neatness and logic. For it is sent not to commend itself as "the best kind of Christianity" but by its very brokenness to point to the universal Church wherein all have died. Hence its story can never differ from the story of the Corinth to which the Apostle Paul wrote … like Corinth it has nothing that it has not received; like Corinth it learns of unity through its nothingness before the cross of Christ; and like Corinth it sees in the apostolate its dependence upon the one people of God, and the death by which every member and every Church bears witness to the Body which is one.