The Convocation of Episcopal Churches in Europe

June 29, 2021  •  Saint Peter and Saint Paul, Apostles

The Anglican Center in Rome

Text: John 21:15: “Feed my lambs.”

For those of us who did not grow up in this city—and I think it is probably safe to imagine that is most of us—there is something especially poignant on being here in the city of Rome on this day, the feast of Peter and Paul. Being raised, as I was, in the middle of a  country in a different hemisphere, the stories of the ancient church were little more to me than abstractions, things that seemed more in the province of fiction than the stuff of history.

But here we are, worshiping together in the city in which both of them were executed, among the first of the martyrs of our faith. And not just them; countless others, across centuries, perished in this place because of the faith they had found, and refused to surrender—a faith in a God of love and reconciliation, made real in the resurrected Christ.

To be here in Rome, at least if you have any historical perspective at all, is to be humbled. The city has a way of reminding you how insignificant are your concerns and your worries in the vast sweep of human history.

And if you are a person who, like me, has a job that obliges you to be thinking always about preserving and strengthening an institution, living in Rome is a daily cautionary tale. Lots of people before you did the same. Even the popes who put their names over the portals and the emperors who built the triumphal arches are largely forgotten.

On this day of all days it is worth reflecting deeply on the church God longs for, the church Christ prayed for, the church Peter and Paul died for, and the church we have built. And as Anglicans, sharing a tradition with an incarnational theology but an institutional infatuation, that reflection necessarily involves the spiritual work of self-examination.

I have walked here this morning from a church dedicated to Saint Paul, but nowhere in its beautiful artworks would you sense how problematic a figure Paul was in the early church. For many whose whole experience of the church was to be ridiculed and hounded and persecuted, Paul’s first life as a leader of the persecutors was never far from memory. Could he be trusted? What was he really up to?

There was a sense of suspicion around Peter, too. At least he had been one of those closest to Jesus. But it wasn’t at all certain how much of a rock he really was. My old New Testament professor, the Jesuit scholar Dan Harrington, used to speak of Peter as the imperfect man perfectly suited to build a church for imperfect people. He was hotheaded. In the moment of decision, he had denied Jesus. What good would come of him?

Those of us who come to a place like this to gather in worship are likely to speak of Peter and Paul on this day in terms of the church they built. But it is by no means clear that they would recognize that church in the church we have built. 

We think in institutional terms—about structures, and committees, and boards of governors, and ordination requirements and safeguarding rules and pension plans. We speak in terms of the ways that our traditions have trained us to speak, using a glossary of spiritual language to talk about the structuring and distribution of power. 

But Peter and Paul were effectively powerless, at least in the measures of this world. This city made that plainly obvious by killing them as easily as snapping a finger. Rather than thinking in terms of institutions, they were absolutely on fire with ideas, ideas they wanted urgently to share with anyone who would listen: 

• That the God of wrath and judgment had been revealed in Christ to be instead a God who works through the power of love to transform hearts and reconcile people divided by hatred, suspicion, and prejudice. 
• That all people are imperfect, especially those whose rise through institutions beguiles them into believing that the institutions are more worth defending than ideas they are supposed to cherish. 
• That just like Peter and Paul, we are still capable of persecuting our own and denying our Lord, even in the very church we now hold responsibility for; 
• And that only Christ’s love can help us, as it helped them, see past our deepest convictions of our own righteousness and glimpse the justice of the kingdom God intends.

 

I see in myself how beguiling our institutional challenge can be. I see how easy it is for those of us elected to the episcopate in my church to become persuaded that of course this institution that has elevated us must be preserved, because if it has elevated us to this role there must be something wonderful about it. 

I see how much easier it is for us in our life together as Anglicans to be far more worried about our grasping small advantages or feeling small slights than it is for us to dream about the missional response we could make to God here, and everywhere, if we worked and worshiped together.

As we know, Peter and Paul argued, too, and sometimes bitterly. Whether because they came from different cultures or were guided by vastly different personalities, agreement was not their natural state. 

But in the end, what is most dramatic about their story and most powerful about their example is not that they disagreed, but that they were reconciled. 

The cover of our leaflet today is a very Western take on the two of them; but I’ll bet all of us can bring to mind the icon that the Orthodox faithful gaze upon today, an image that always depicts them embracing in reconciliation. You know, just maybe the rock Jesus spoke about was reconciliation itself.

My sisters and brothers, we live on the threshold of an age in which our institutions will not matter unless they genuinely reflect the ideas that the God revealed in the risen Christ has unleashed on the world.

We live in days in which those ideas—about the dignity and worth of all people, about the sacredness of life, about a God who is revealed in and through love, and who works through love and not force to accomplish justice—all those ideas are now challenged and questioned. 

Our institutions will be useless to defend them if they are first designed to preserve our privileges and not to reveal that God. So let us always seek first to be reconciled to each other, that we may more eagerly preach and more effectively build the church Christ prayed we would be. Amen.