Greatest Miracle

The greatest miracles in the New Testament, in my humble opinion, do not have to do with loaves and fishes, with healings and exorcisms, impressive though they may be. The greatest miracles are the changing of human hearts and firmly-held views. Nothing in this world is more difficult.

Today, we celebrate our parish patrons, Peter and Paul, and we remember that very miracle that is portrayed on the round medallion-style icon on our altar today: Peter and Paul embracing in love and respect. I am not sure if this ever literally happened. What I do know is that it is the most unlikely thing to have happened.

No two men from the ancient Middle East could have been more different. Peter, a working-class man from backwater Galilee, Jewish fisherman, most probably illiterate, portrayed as a waffling sort of man; Paul, an intellectual more like a university-type, intense and somewhat aristocratic and very learned, with strong opinions that he rarely changed, willing to do violence for his views before his life-transforming encounter with Jesus. Peter represented the Palestinian, inland Jewish community, who saw the message of Jesus as a Jewish message meant for observant Jews who would await his coming by keeping the Jewish Law more perfectly than the Pharisees; Paul represented the cosmopolitan view of the coastal cities of the Levant, who experienced the Good News as something more radical and more startling and the encompassing love of God as reaching out to a far larger, formerly alien and rejected Gentile world, Gentiles who would not be expected to become Jewish in order to embraced by the God of the Jews. Peter, quick to enthusiasm yet quick to waver; Paul, never changing his single-minded vision unless struck down and struck blind on the open road by nothing less than God.

They were once opponents. "I opposed Peter to his face" brags Paul in Galatians, when Peter tried to walk a cautious middle road between Gentiles and the older Jewish Christian believers.

But something changed, both in that meeting and in the vision they lived afterwards. Each gave a little, each opened their eyes to see the possibility that God was doing something important in the ministry and communities of the other. Each was willing to embrace, to put down something, in order to pick up something together. And in that messy, unresolved, humbling moment, something was born from the roots of a small, obscure messianic Jewish sect. The Church was born.

That's how the Church is always born: when we who have received a mission and a blessing see one another, and are willing to put something down that we may value, embrace, admit future possibilities that we may not fully understand, and walk together. That's how we grow. That's how this present parish of Saints Peter and Paul came to be. There were two churches--St. Peter's, St. Paul's. Each congregation put something aside, however unwillingly, and came to see in their embrace of one another and in their journey together the possibility of something new that they did not yet fully understand.

That is how the church is born.

And how are we called to give birth to the church today? How are we called to be most authentically that community of unlikely embrace, the church of Peter and of Paul? Who are we called upon to look upon, both within our midst and without, those whom we know and those whom we do not yet know? What are we called to put down that we may think precious? And how are we meant to walk with one another, and with others we do not yet imagine?

For that is how the church is born.