Holy Church asks us, on this day, to meditate on the witness of her two pre-eminent apostles and martyrs, Saints Peter and Paul. It is a rare opportunity celebrate this feast on a Sunday, and it is especially meaningful for me and for many of my brother priests in the Ordinariate, since this is the day when many of us were ordained to the priesthood. It is a fitting day to remember and celebrate our unity with the apostolic Church.
Our own parish celebrated our feast of title this past week (the Nativity of St. John the Baptist), and it occurs to me that this whole habit of naming churches after saints and apostles is itself an interesting sign of the way apostolic tradition works. Compare this custom with the naming conventions of our separated brethren in mainstream Protestantism. There, it isn’t unusual to find simple descriptive names: First Church, Second Church, Bridgeport Lutheran, etc. These are adequate in their own way, but as you move along the spectrum of what we used to call “churchmanship,” you see more references to the saints. Back in Anglicanism, you could often tell a community’s sense of relationship with tradition merely based on its name—the many, many iterations of “Christ Church” were often from a more low-church Protestant perspective, whereas if you saw a church named something like “St. Alphege and the Transfiguration,” you knew you were more likely to find smells and bells and the Angelus.
As Catholics, we don’t see a competition among the apostles and the saints and Christ. The custom of naming and patronage isn’t just a matter of convenience and preference; it is a way of grounding identity in a specific awareness of tradition, of reminding ourselves that the gospel of Christ was not something that shot out of the sky into our brains, but something handed down by witnesses through the ages. This is often hard to remember in our modern age of individual choice, where we are supposed to believe that there is no story that determines us except the story that we choose for ourselves. But even the Bible, that book where Christians believe that people can encounter God’s word, whether or not they are looking for it—even the Bible is in our hands now only because it has been given to us by others. (The idea of sola scriptura relies on the fantasy that we can somehow access Scripture on its own.) So we create unnecessary hazards for ourselves if we think we can read the scriptures in a way unaffected by and detached from that history in which we have received them.
Our collect for Ss. Peter and Paul prays that we might follow the precepts of those “through whom [we] have received the beginning of religion.” It is one of my more cantankerous tendencies to take special delight in this use of “religion,” because so many people think “religion” is opposed to a relationship with Jesus. I’ll mostly avoid that soapbox, but “religion” here means fundamentally an ordered way of life based on natural justice. In other words, to say that Peter and Paul gave us the beginning of religion is to say that they passed down to us the way of true discipleship, the way of following Jesus. There is no separating the witness of these two apostles from the faith we have received.
In preparing for today, I found another old collect that some of us may remember from Anglicanism, because in fact it was composed for the first Book of Common Prayer in 1549 for the feasts of Ss. Simon and Jude, and from there makes it into our missal for that same feast. In 1979, it was transposed to the Sunday nearest June 29, hence its association in my mind with the two holy apostles:
O Almighty God, who hast built thy Church upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the head cornerstone: Grant us so to be joined together in unity of spirit by their doctrine, that we may be made an holy temple acceptable unto thee.
Say what you will about Cranmer, but that’s a good prayer. Yet the obvious question is this: how can both the apostles and Jesus be the foundation? The answer is found in the striking architectural image of the Church—the people of God—being built up as a temple. This is a familiar image from the first letter of Peter (2:4-6), and one that gives us an insight into the nature of tradition.
If the people of God are like a building, imagine it as a church not unlike this one. Every piece has its place. There is a foundation, which is Christ. There are some stones, then, that stand only on the foundation, and on nothing else. These are the apostles, the direct witnesses to Christ and his resurrection. There are others, going all the way up, which stand on these lower pieces. In the whole building, there are some stones that support more than others, some that are supported more than others, and some that both are supported and support in equal measure. None stands alone.
This is an incomplete allegory for Christian tradition, but it is a helpful one, I think, that we can remember every time we set foot in church. Someone may protest here that the Church is the people, not the building, which is partly true—certainly the people are more truly and fully what Christian teaching means by ecclesia—but we consecrate buildings and treat them like persons precisely so that in the assembly of people we can take on an identity that is more than just the sum of our collective parts. So it is not right to say that the building isn’t a church; rather, it is a church for the sake of the Church.
The consecration and dedication of a church isn’t, in the technical language of the Latin tradition, a sacrament properly so called, but certainly it is one of the higher sacramentals, reserved as it is to the bishop, for it is through this sacramental sign—a building baptized and anointed for the glory of God—that we remember we are a people who have been called into a common structure, a common story, that we did not invent.
It is this common foundation of Jesus Christ, inextricable from the apostolic tradition, that grounds our unity with one another as Christians. Though the apostles remind us that there is no approach to God that allows us to escape our own location in history, they also show us by example the necessity of personal sacrifice. We depend, in all sorts of ways, on the witness and the tradition of the apostles—but this does not free us from responsibility.
So the holy apostles, as the ones who support our faith in God’s Church, encourage us to the same patient repentance and responsibility that they themselves experienced. Repentance, as we see with both Peter and Paul in their respective stories, is hard work. It’s not just acknowledging that God forgives us and acting as if sin had no lasting consequences. It’s actively committing ourselves to the renewal that Jesus offers, submitting ourselves to the task that he gives us.
What that commitment looks like, in Peter and Paul, is, in the end, martyrdom. Both literally gave away their lives for the sake of Christ, in witness to his resurrection, and for the sake of the Church.
Today’s passage from 2 Timothy is often remembered for its more positive parts: I have fought the good fight; I have finished the race; I have kept the faith. It sounds like a spiritual pep rally. But just before this, Paul writes, “I am already on the point of being sacrificed; the time of my departure has come.” Paul’s life is being poured out like a sacrificial cup on an altar. His stunningly confident assessment of his life, then, is grounded in this self-sacrifice.
Peter and Paul, and their deaths, are signs of unity, first for the Roman church, and then for the universal Church, which finds her unity in Rome, the church of the holy apostles. They didn’t see eye to eye at every moment, but they saw clearly the goal. They remind us that the most crucial unity as God’s people is not found in how successful we can be in mission, or in how much we can agree with one another, but in how fully we can in offer ourselves up as a living sacrifice to God.
This is exactly what we intend to do each week in Holy Mass. Though it is not inappropriate for Christians to speak of being spiritually filled, or getting recharged, through the sacraments, the central thing that we do is offer. We offer bread and wine; we offer ourselves; finally, we offer back to God the gift of himself that he has offered for us. We offer not because God needs something that he lacks, but because we do. We offer so that everything about us will be united with the sacrifice that alone unites us to God and to one another. To approach this altar and receive the body of Christ is not a light thing; it is to say, like Paul, that our lives can be poured out in offering, that God can make us witnesses to his power in the world—even if that means, as it does in the end for Peter, being carried where we do not wish to go.