Preached in the Green Gardens, Poulshot
Readings – Acts 12.1-11; Matthew 16.13-19
The chickenhawk and the oddball.
Peter and Paul! We know these two names go together, but we tend to forget they were real people. Our image of them is, when we think about them at all, is like the image on the front of your order of service— two-dimensional men from a vanished era with stern faces and beards that would put a Hoxton hipster to shame. If we’re a bit less religious we tend to dismiss them as irrelevant, and if we’re a bit more religious we can turn them into plasterboard saints, beyond critique and therefore not really human at all.
But the Peter and Paul the Bible writes of are very real people, with strong personalities, and some real faults. Both of them could be quite hot headed for starters! Beyond that, they were very different.
Paul could be difficult to deal with. He seems to have been quite socially awkward and a little bit obsessive—maybe, to use the modern phrase, quite far out on the spectrum. Even his best friends found Paul hard to take sometimes. Yet this awkward, annoying, obsessive nature was possibly also why Paul had so much determination, stickability, and raw courage.
Peter was very different. He was a natural leader of men, and a man’s man . It’s easy to imagine the young Peter sitting in a tavern in a port on the Sea of Galilee holding court, surrounded by his hired men. He was no sophisticated thinker, but Peter could be as sharp as a tack—this morning’s Gospel reading shows him being the first person to work out that Jesus was more than just a wandering teacher and healer. But although he liked to talk big and lead from the front, when the chips were down he wasn’t always so good at following through—at least not at first, but we’ll come back to that.
Peter and Paul didn’t even like one another. Both of them left letters that survive into the present day, and in those letters each of them throws a certain amount of shade on the other. The Bible records them having at least one massive stand-up row, in public, about one of the vital strategic decisions of the early Church.
God doesn’t work through plasterboard saints. God works through real people with the mix of gifts and faults that real people always have. In fact we often find our most annoying personality ticks are also the things that make us valuable. God doesn’t just work through real people but often through unlikely people. That hasn’t changed to this day.
The Green Gardens in Poulshot was a lovely place to celebrate the Eucharist, especially using the BCP, with the birds chirping away during the many quiet periods.
God also works his purposes out in unlikely places. These figures, of such historical significance that we remember them thousands of miles from where they came from, 2,000 years after they died, weren’t princes or rich men. They didn’t live in the great imperial capital of Rome, or a great centre of learning like Alexandria, or one of the great cities of Persia or China; they were members of an awkward religious minority, one not always well liked, and even if Paul was a citizen of no mean city, Peter came from the back of beyond.
And God often works in ways that are unnoticed by the world. If you had asked the scholars of Alexandria, or the political fixers of Rome, who were the most important people of their day – well they’d never even have heard of Peter and Paul. Just like then, God is still working his purposes out in the world today in ways few people are paying attention to. When future historians look back on the first quarter of the 21st century some of what they understand to be the most important people of our times will be people none of us here have even heard of, from places we pay little attention to.
So, God works often works unnoticed by the world through unlikely people in unfashionable places—is there anything else we can draw out from this? Yes! Look at our first reading and how Peter handles a horrendous situation with absolute calm and self-assurance. We all know the story of Peter denying Jesus three times after Herod had Him arrested. So, Peter hadn’t always been a paragon of bravery and trust in God. That was something that had to develop in him. God works to build people up, to bring good out of them that they didn’t even know they possessed—and, yes, to set them free from whatever chains bind them.
When I work in these little villages few people have heard of, preaching to congregations that are often largely elderly, I remind myself that this is how God works. God takes unlikely people with plenty of faults in out-of-the-way places and builds them up to greatness in ways they couldn’t have imagined.
And remember that in the Kingdom of God, it is often small and intimate things that are truly great. God may not be calling you to change the course of human history—but He is calling you to change the lives of those around you for the better. He is certainly calling you to do things for Him that nobody else can do, perhaps in your own street or your own sch0ol or workplace in ways that don’t seem obviously ‘religious’. That’s true even if you don’t think of yourself as particularly religious, even if this is a very rare attendance at public worship for you: God has things that He wants you to achieve for Him, and if you trust Him, He will surprise you in what He can achieve through you. After all, Peter and Paul, the chickenhawk and the oddball, couldn’t have imagined that they would still be remembered in a place and a time like this. Amen
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