Every few years, when the feast of Saints Peter and St. Paul happens to fall on a Sunday, it takes over the usual Sunday feast we would be celebrating. Peter and Paul are linked together like this because tradition says they both died as martyrs in Rome, at just about the same time in the first century.
But despite the fact that in so many early Christian drawings they are often shown in an embrace, like brothers, in fact they are two very different people, and very real people. So today let’s think about them as people, and we’ll take three things about them as people that matter to lives like the ones we have.
First is something we always need to remember about every saint, which is that as people they were both dramatically imperfect. To start with, Peter the ex-fisherman was uneducated, perhaps not able to read or write, and from his conversations with Jesus we all know that he was impulsive and rushed to judgment, and was someone who often missed the point of something not so subtle that Jesus was saying. More damaging than any of that, he was probably haunted his whole life by some life-changing moments of personal failure and cowardice, especially by that moment when there was danger, and someone asked him if he knew Jesus, and he answered, “I do not know the man.” Even today, if we remember one story about Peter, unfortunately for him, it might be that one. It is pretty unlikely he would ever be chosen today to lead any church, much less ours.
Paul on the other hand was the learned one of the two, a brilliant writer, but a little arrogant and rigid, actually maybe a lot arrogant and rigid. Even when he’s telling you about his unworthiness, you still get the sense of someone maybe too proud about his own humility, and a little tiresome bragging about how hard he works. And like Peter he could easily have been overwhelmed by remembering his own spectacular sinfulness, because he was a fierce and even violent persecutor of the early church, standing there on the sidelines possibly cheering them on when Stephen was stoned to death. Few people had a stronger sense of how much he needed to be saved from sin than Paul did.
But the second thing that strikes us about these men who were so flawed is how they somehow allowed themselves to be forgiven. Peter was forgiven by the risen Christ without words even having to be said about it, all Peter had to do was say that he loved him, and it was almost as if his betrayal had never happened. And Paul too couldn’t believe how overwhelming the love of God was, that a persecutor could become an apostle to the whole world. No one wrote more powerfully than Paul did about how love can transform us without our deserving it.
Let’s remember today that the only reason these two are saints is that any sense they had of their own failures and unworthiness and flaws was not nearly as strong as their awareness of forgiveness and acceptance. They would have had every reason in the world to lose faith in themselves, or to become so confused that they would lose faith in there being a God at all. They could have turned aside from trying to understand that relationship with God, living their lives doing something else, trying not to think too much about what God wanted. And yet they allowed God to push them back into this life of service, still human, still flawed but forgiven. Being forgiven and liberated back into life doing the work of God sounds great, but it isn’t easy. Paul said a life serving Christ was a race, it was hard work that took training and effort, but a race that he wanted to win no matter what it took, and somehow that overwhelming sense of being forgiven by God was what kept him running. Both these forgiven sinners ran that race until they literally had nothing left to give. As we might say today, they both wanted to leave it all out on the field, and they did.
And that is the third point for us today. If you’re like me, you are frequently prone to feeling as if you are not quite the people that saints and martyrs are made of. And yet there isn’t really any other kind of people besides us, all there are in this world are people who have tried and failed, who have lost focus, people who put their energies into the wrong things, people who are weighed down by a sense of not being top-drawer material. We are all slaves to something, our past, our discouragement, maybe just our habit of thinking that the race to serve God is for other better people to run. But that is why we have saints like these two to remind us how God works. They were people who were on the ground but were picked up, who did things worse than we’ll ever do, who were healed of their sins, maybe not their flaws, but who were pushed by God to use their strengths. Forgiveness gave them life in abundance, so much life that they could afford to give it away. That forgiveness is a gift, sometimes a gift we’re not sure we want, but it is there for the asking, anytime we want to put aside whatever is preventing us from getting back into the race God wants us to run.