St Martin's & St Paul's
Parish Canterbury
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This weekend nine men and women have been ordained Deacon and this morning seven men and women are being ordained Priest in the Diocese of Canterbury. It is wonderful occasion for them, their families and parishes and a fulfilment of all that they have been working and praying towards for many years.
Petertide is one of the two traditional dates of the Liturgical year for ordination, the other being Michaelmas. Reading our Gospel today it is quite clear why Peter is a patron of ordination: he is effectively ordained by Jesus and given quite significant authority - the power it seems to admit and deny admittance to the Kingdom of Heaven, as a result of the breakthrough, the moment of communication, of revelation given and received. Who do you say that I am? said Jesus and Peter replies, "You are the Messiah, the Son of the Living God". This vision, this faith, is the rock on which Jesus perceives the common life of those who gather around his name will be built.
Then along comes Paul. Tradition has placed these two Apostles side by side, the one who knew Christ from his first days of ministry, who was with him throughout his journeys in Israel and Samaria, who saw him arrested and, fearful for his own safety and family, denied him, only to be forgiven and welcomed back after the resurrection; and the one who began as a persecutor of the Church and then met the risen Christ on the road to Damascus and thereafter lived for him.
There were many differences between Peter and Paul, in their background, their education, their experience. They had their personal differences too. It was not that Peter was unwilling to recognise that Jesus was calling the Gentiles as well as the Jews; he had a vision when visiting the Roman Cornelius, revealing to him that these Gentile Christians were clearly receiving the Spirit of God and should therefore be baptised and confirmed in that Spirit without other conditions. Paul however seems to have required no such revelation: notwithstanding his Pharisee past he argued the case for the gentile Christians not having to accept Jewish traditions first. He was also clearly quite impatient about anyone who hesitated over this. That may help us to understand ourselves as a Church today. Total agreement on everything was always going to be difficult. Not because of that disagreement itself, but because of the human element, the inability to tolerate variance, driven by a sense of the need for action. And action now, not at some point in the future. It is this that has always driven division and drives it still.
But by putting Peter and Paul together the Church clearly wanted to affirm these two people: one called by the pre-crucified Jesus and the other called by the risen Lord. Peter was prepared to follow when he saw Christ leading him to embrace Cornelius and his companions as already filled with the Spirit of God, whatever Church rules said; Paul followed the success of missionary work with the establishment of a Church community overseen by Presbyters or elders and his epistles frequently deal with issues of order and conduct within the Church. But somehow we see them as different: the one set apart under the first revelation of Jesus and his disciples, the other challenged and called out to join the post-Pentecost church.
In these two great men of faith we can see perhaps that it was never going to be easy, it was never going to be about everyone always agreeing and staying together, certainly not with the changing external pressures that the church would have to bear and respond to. But it is perhaps also very significant that as far as we can tell Peter and Paul shared the same fate - dying in the persecutions in Rome, probably dying in great pain, but holding the torch of faith to the very end, a flame first lit so many years before in a far off place where the events they witnessed and were caught up in changed the world - and of course the destiny of those 16 people ordained at Petertide in Canterbury yesterday and today.
Amen.
