Patronal Feast sermon - Tamara Yates

(Editor's note: Sermon by Tamara Yates for our Patronal Feast)

Today we celebrate the lives and the witness of the patron saints of this community – Peter and Paul. But when we look at the lectionary texts for today that speak of these men, we find ourselves invited to celebrate their deaths. I wasn’t here last Sunday, but I read Phil’s sermon on our sermon blog, and I was momentarily shocked to realize that I was planning to say much the same thing as he did last week. Only momentarily, because then I remembered that the scriptures are really saying the same thing in 16,000 different ways. This is the heart of the gospel, folks. It is the essential message in the cross and the central truth that emerges from the lives and deaths of Jesus and his followers. You have to lose your life in order to save it.
The resurrected Christ tells Peter: “Very truly I tell you when you were young 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.” Paul writes to Timothy, and he has already written the same words to the church in Phillipi, “I am being poured out as a libation.” Both these texts associate these images with the deaths of these two men, and yes, they did in fact each die a martyr’s death. But neither of them would have been capable of accepting those physical deaths if they hadn’t already died many times over.
I think Peter grew old in the days leading up to this encounter with Jesus on the beach. It started with the utter humiliation of the cock crowing just after his third denial. Then there was the dawning realization that Jesus has meant what he said about dying and returning. And moving swiftly from youth to old age, Peter died to his false self, to his egoic ideas of what a Savior could mean, of what he was so sure it should mean for the oppressed people of Israel. He let go of the justice he had imagined for the poor, like himself—a fisherman. And from this point on, he will stretch out his hands. He will reach toward what is his most deeply felt call and let himself be led to it, even while his ego screams in protest. I like the image of stretching out the hands, because it will feel like you are blind—and in truth you are. You have for so long bought into the images of yourself that your ego and the complicit society have fed you, that you cannot see the truth of who you are. The deepest, truest you, that longs to be born, to emerge into the world. So you have to be led by others, and I hate to tell you, but they’ll probably be others you wouldn’t necessarily choose to hang out with, much less be guided by! But these others and their needs will pull you through your resistance, through your pain, through your rage, through your irritation and probably through some amount of humiliation into your very self. The self you only glimpse in dreams, the self you are meant to be.
It happened to Peter –and it also happened to Paul. Paul’s younger self looks more overtly problematic to us, since he persecuted Christians. He seems to have participated, if indirectly in the execution of Stephen. But his zeal was still for his understanding of God and faith. He was a Jew and saw himself as fighting the good fight. We all think we’re fighting the good fight. We’ve got kids for goodness sake. And those kids need to be fed, and they need to be clothed and they need to be educated and how could we not be called to provide for our families? We go to church after all, we might even tithe. What more do they want? What more does he want, this Jesus? Everything. He wants everything and in return, he’ll give you the pearl worth everything – he’ll give you yourself. Paul got struck blind on the road to Damascus and he stretched out his hands and let himself be led, for the rest of his life. He let himself be poured out like a libation. These two men, our patron saints, model for us the very human way of Christ. They weren’t perfect from then on – no way. But they had a singleness of vision to which they could return again and again and it was on surrender. Peter and Paul were both intensely willful men, they had to be to do the work that was theirs to do. And yet they turned that intensity toward surrender –they lost their lives in order to save them. And in doing so they saved many more besides.
They were also very different men. This surrender to Christ does not mean that you lose yourself and become more like Jesus or even like Peter or Paul. Not at all. Peter became more like Peter and Paul became more like Paul and the truth that lay at the heart of each of these men was revealed to the world and changed it. Not because they were saints, but because they said yes and they were willing to die every day. They let go of their own grandiose images of their lives, to let go of their fear, to let go of their resentment, and their need to be right, to be superior. When we hold onto these things, we cheat ourselves and the entire world. We refuse the unique expression of the image of god in us. Only once are we here as we are in this flesh. And each person has Christ burning inside, yearning to find expression through your body, through your mind, through your life.
But how do we get to those true selves? How do we die? This is a paradox that cannot be said. How can you exercise your will toward the losing of your will? How do we live into this mystery of intending toward surrender? Well, for one, we take it day by day, little by little. We stretch out our arms and we ask to be led. I guarantee you that if you do this, if you pray with as much sincerity as you can muster (and it doesn’t take a lot), asking to be led to your truest self, you will be shown little ways to die each day and you will be given the courage to accept them. And the best part of dying is the resurrection that comes after. It’ll blow our hair back—and not just ours, but the whole world’s.
One of my favorite essays by Annie Dillard says much more beautifully what I’ve been trying to say this morning. In it Dillard reflects on an encounter she had with a weasel. She talks about the singleminded focus of this creature, and illustrates with a story she heard about a man who found an eagle with the skull of a weasel socketed to its throat. She imagines the fight that must have raged between bird and mammal, and the relentless grip of the weasel. Did the eagle fly off with its dead opponent attached at the neck like a fur pendant? Or did it clean its bones on the ground?
Dillard wonders whether we, as humans, could ever live with the same singleness of purpose as the weasel, and (as I would add) we see in the lives of Sts. Peter and Paul. She concludes the essay with these words, which I think get at what we can take from our patrons Peter and Paul on this their Sunday: We could [do it] you know. We can live any way we want. People take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience--even of silence--by choice. The thing is to stalk your calling in a certain skilled and supple way, to locate the most tender and live spot and plug into that pulse. This is yielding, not fighting. A weasel doesn't "attack" anything; a weasel lives as he's meant to, yielding at every moment to the perfect freedom of single necessity. I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. Then even death, where you're going no matter how you live, cannot you part. Seize it and let it seize you up aloft even, till your eyes burn out and drop; let your musky flesh fall off in shreds, and let your very bones unhinge and scatter, loosened over fields, over fields and woods, lightly, thoughtless, from any height at all, from as high as eagles.