The Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul, Apostles

June 29, 2008

Homily for the Anglican Usage Mass

of the

St. Thomas More Society

celebrated at

St. Anthony of Padua Roman Catholic Church , 1013 Wood Street

Scranton, PA

Matthew 16:13-19

Acts 12:1-11

            In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.  Amen

            Acts 15 describes the first time the Apostles get together to resolve an issue of pressing concern.  It happened that some Jewish Christians insisted that Gentile Christians had to be circumcised in order for them to be saved.   In chapter 10, St. Luke tells us that Peter had received a revelation that the disciples could preach to the Gentiles, and in chapter 15, Peter came through again.  In reference to requiring Gentiles to observe the Jewish Law, he asked all those assembled, “Why do you make a trial of God by putting a yoke upon the neck of the disciples which neither our fathers nor we have been able to bear?” (Acts 15:10).  In other words, Peter, the chief of the Apostles, decided the issue for everyone: one need not be circumcised to be saved.

            We know that this wisdom was from God, but it was given first to Peter.  As the rock upon whom Jesus built His Church, it was Peter’s role from the beginning to resolve disputes, having been given a special dispensation of the Holy Spirit.  Indeed, we see this in today’s Gospel where this unique power given to Peter originated.

            It seems there were many opinions circulating about who Jesus was.  The disciples said that some said He was Elijah, others John the Baptist, and still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.  So when Jesus asked the disciples who they thought He was, it was Peter who answered, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”  Jesus indicates that flesh and blood had not revealed this to him, but that God the Father had.  Henceforth, he would have this role of receiving and communicating God’s wisdom even as the wisdom of the world looked in the opposite direction.

            So often the successor to St. Peter, our Holy Father, the Pope, confounds the world with his wisdom.  In 1938, Adolf Hitler was able to hoodwink the English and the French, as they acceded to Germany’s conquest of Czechoslovakia.  Neville Chamberlain, the Prime Minister of Great Britain, came back home waving a piece of paper and pronouncing he had secured peace in our time.  A year before, in 1937, Pope Pius XI had issued the encyclical Mit Brennender Sorge (With Burning Anxiety), written in German so that it could immediately be read in every German Catholic Church, and the only encyclical ever written in German.  In it he denounced the Nazis as untrustworthy.  The Pope’s insight was ignored, and World War II was the result.

            I will give another example of more recent memory.  In 1979, the Chinese Communist government instituted their one-child policy to limit population growth.  Part of this program, still in force today, includes forced abortions for those women who dare get pregnant with a second child.  Another chilling feature is the skewed female to male ratio in China since the policy went into effect:  for every 100 girls born, there are 118 boys born.  That’s how many girls are being killed before or shortly after their births, for the boy/girl ratio should be one to one.  Eleven years before this tragedy began, Pope Paul VI warned in 1968 in Humanae Vitae that if the use of contraception became widespread, governments would enforce contraceptive practices on their populations.  Too few listened to the wisdom of the Pope, preferring the wisdom of the world.  Contraception use became common, and we now confront the problem of not too many people in the world, but too few.

            Peter has the wisdom, and it is given by God in the context of an assault on the gates of hell.  Jesus says in today’s Gospel that He will build His Church upon the rock of St. Peter and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.  This means that the Church is on the offense, a force for good, invading the realm of wickedness and thereby transforming it.  How easily we forget how barbaric this world was while St. Peter walked the earth.  If we take for granted the good the Church has accomplished through its frontal assault on the gates of hell, if we fail to heed the wisdom of St. Peter’s successors, then we will be doomed to return to the barbarism that once ruled the world.

            What was needed back then to undertake this assault on the gates of hell were fighters.  And God raised up the greatest of all fighters when He called St. Paul.  In our epistle today, St. Paul makes clear that he understood himself to be in combat.  He writes to Timothy, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.” His use of competitive terms was no accident.  In order to get the Truth out, he had to fight those who were preaching lies and heresy.  His biggest rivals were those same people who Peter had to rebuke in Acts 15.  Peter shared his wisdom, but it was up to Paul to fight them.  In his letter to the Galatians, he offers a theological argument to articulate why Gentiles need not be circumcised to be saved, and in chapter 5 he adds this gem, “I wish those who unsettle you would mutilate themselves!” (Galatians 5:12).  St. Paul knew that there are some people we just cannot get along with, with whom there can be no compromise, whom we just need to fight.  St. Paul knew that sometimes to do the right thing is not to get along.

            As we celebrate this Feast of Sts. Peter and Paul, we need to do two things.  First, we need to give thanks for our Holy Father, who so clearly has been blessed with the wisdom of St. Peter.  He is a true inheritor of the keys, one whose articulation of the wisdom of God confounds the wisdom of the world.  Pope Benedict will continue to communicate the truth by the special dispensation of the Holy Spirit that he receives as the successor to St. Peter and the Vicar of Christ.

            Which brings me to the second thing we need to do.  As we begin this Year of St. Paul, we need to pray that the Lord will raise up fighters like St. Paul who will be ready and willing to preach the Word of God even when it means they won’t get along very well with the world around them.  We need to pray for the Lord to raise up men of courage who are willing to suffer insult, financial insecurity and even battery in order to continue in our own age the Church’s assault on the gates of hell.

            We already know the outcome of the fight.  God Himself has told us that the Church is going to win.  So even as we pray for the Lord to raise up soldiers, we can commit ourselves to enlisting in the victorious army.  We can be the men and women of courage who take St. Peter’s wisdom and run headlong into combat with it.  This way, even as we recognize that each of us cannot be St. Peter—we cannot each be the Pope—we can all do our best to be like the fighter St. Paul, who in sharing God’s wisdom, cared more about saving souls than saving face.