Sermon given Feast of Saint Peter and Saint Paul, Apostles (transferred) by Mark Lloyd Taylor, Ph.D.
Ezekiel 34:11-16; Psalm 87; 2 Timothy 4:1-8; John 21:15-19
Auslӓnder!
All these years later, I can still hear the irritation, contempt even, in her voice. Auslӓnder. Foreigners. She was an attendant at the Pergamon Museum in East Berlin – back when Germany was divided by the Iron Curtain and there still was an East Berlin. It’s true, my little family and I had arrived thirty minutes before closing. But we really wanted to catch a glimpse of those treasures of the ancient world: the bust of Nefertiti, the Ishtar Gate that once led into Babylon. Just when the attendant was ready to be done for the day. Can you hear it even in the German word she used? Auslӓnder. Out-landers. Outsiders. Foreigners. I held my tongue, but felt like responding: “Ja, aber kann ich ziemlich gut Deutsch sprechen. / Yes, but I can speak reasonably good German.” After years of study and eight months of making myself at home – at least a little bit – in that foreign country. Of course, there’s the deeper issue of why an American graduate student with spouse and two young daughters would be able to view the wonders of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia in a museum in central Europe. We’ll come back to that later. For now, let the attendant’s word ring in your ears as it does in mine: Auslӓnder!
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A second century document known as the Letter to Diognetus speaks of Christians as foreigners. Back at a time when they were a tiny, non-conformist minority within the Roman Empire, the anonymous author defends Christians against the charge that they live off somewhere in cities of their own, speaking some different language, and describes their paradoxical citizenship. They dwell in their own countries, the Letter asserts, but only as sojourners. For to the follower of Jesus, “every foreign country is a homeland, and every homeland is a foreign country.” In other words, there’s something odd socially and politically about being a Christian. Christians can and should be at home, can and should be active participants in any society; for the Christian calling is always and everywhere to love God with one’s whole being and to love one’s neighbor as oneself. And yet the Christian will never be fully at home in any society or under any form of government, because each and every human political system falls short of the reign of God’s justice and peace. Every homeland a foreign country and every foreign country a homeland.
Now the Letter to Diognetus could well have cited Saint Peter and Saint Paul – who we commemorate today – as examples of this odd citizenship, this paradoxical stance toward society and government. Both apostles end up in Rome during the corrupt, brutal, and chaotic reign of emperor Nero and are put to death for following a different Lord, the Lord Jesus. But Peter and Paul negotiate foreign country and homeland in different ways.
Peter was a backwater Galilean fisherman from the edge of the Roman empire, while Paul was a cosmopolitan rabbi and Roman citizen. Some might have dismissed Peter as a hick or a yahoo. Others, in turn, might have despised Paul as one of those coastal elites. Despite their different social locations, however, Peter and Paul shared a common Hebrew heritage of moving back and forth between homeland and foreign country. Their ancestors Abraham and Sarah just picked up and left home in Haran and set off for a foreign country God promised to show them. Then later, Jacob and Leah and Rachel and all their children were forced to flee that promised land of Canaan for Egypt during a time of famine. Over the years, guests became slaves. Until Moses led them out of bondage and back home again. For a while, at least, until the cycle repeats – next time with defeat and displacement by the Babylonian Empire. Exodus and exile. Return and restoration. From foreign countries and to foreign countries. Leaving home behind and making a new home. But always guided by the promise we heard from Ezekiel: that God would seek out the people and rescue them from all the countries to which they had been scattered and bring them once more to their own land. That God will search for the lost, bring back the strayed, bind up the injured, and strengthen the weak (34:11-16).
Peter was settled in his Galilean homeland only to find it a foreign country under Roman occupation. Paul had made the Greco-Roman world, in all of its cultural foreign-ness, a homeland; even though that didn’t prevent him from being brought in chains to the heart of the empire of which he was a citizen.
Peter teaches how to negotiate homeland as foreign country by gracefully letting go. Peter returns home to Galilee after Jesus’ crucifixion and takes up fishing again. And there, just as Jesus promised, Peter reunites with Jesus. Jesus has breakfast ready on the seashore and a thrice-repeated question: Simon son of John, do you love me? Jesus continues: “Very truly, I tell you, when you were younger, you used to fasten your own belt and go wherever you wished. But when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go” (John 21:15-19). Letting go, when age or change or circumstance re-makes the one who was once at home and in control; re-makes Peter such that he can no longer dress himself and choose where to go and what to do.
Paul teaches how to hold on tenaciously in order to negotiate foreign country as homeland. “Proclaim the message,” Paul writes Timothy from his prison cell. “Be persistent whether the time is favorable or unfavorable. Convince. Rebuke. Encourage….I have fought the good fight. I have finished the race. I have kept the faith” (2 Timothy 4:2, 7).
But both Peter and Paul’s citizenship remains paradoxical. By letting go, Peter closes the distance between himself and those people he’d rather avoid: Jesus on trial for his life; Cornelius the Roman centurion and his Gentile household; even Paul the apostle to the Gentiles. Peter once knew how to keep his distance and stay ritually pure. He was good at fastening his own belt. But distance made for denial. When someone else fastens the belt around him, a path, a road appears – not to where Peter planned to go, but to a foreign country Jesus will show him. A road that leads to other people, to difference, to love.
By holding on, Paul safeguards something he can then offer others. “As for me,” he confides, “I am already being poured out as a libation, and the time of my departure has come” (2 Timothy 4:6). A libation. A cup of wine, a chalice, ritually presented to God or the gods by ancient Hebrews and Romans. If Paul, if Paul’s very life, is poured out as a libation, then it is not being squandered. Instead, Paul bestows his life upon other people as a precious and unexpected gift. And just as unexpectedly, the same Jesus who once turned water into wine, promises to transform the executioner’s sword awaiting Paul into “a crown of righteousness” (4:8).
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Debra and I just returned home from a week-long trip to Olathe, Kansas. It often felt like a foreign country, far from Seattle and St. Paul’s. There were lots of white guys wearing t-shirts, many with interwoven religious and political messages. One read: “Jesus loves me and my guns.” Debra quipped: “Well, he’s half right.” Another: “Jesus is my savior. Trump is my president. Biden is just a resident.” I don’t speak that foreign language. But, at the same time, our adopted Starbucks coffee shop – at 135th Street and Black Bob Road (yes, Black Bob Road, that’s its name) – had a chalk drawing on its welcome board celebrating Pride Month with lots of little colorful balloons, and there was an active American Sign Language table for the deaf and an employee who could communicate by signing. That made us feel more at home for an hour or so each day.
And at first, the assisted living facility where my soon-to-be 95 year old father with his late onset Alzheimer’s lives, hardly felt like home – even though the primary reason for the trip was to be with Dad again. My siblings and I with our spouses worried that we shouldn’t go visit him all at the same time because it might just confuse him. It turned out, the more we were with him, all together, interacting with each other, day by day, the more alert he became, more engaged, more fully himself – so that as we were saying our good-byes that last afternoon, he was able to volunteer: “Thank you so much for coming here to see me. Bless you.”
On the wider stage of world history, why were those antiquities from Egypt and Babylon on display in that museum in Berlin rather than in Cairo or Baghdad? Because of centuries of European colonialism, of course, and its many forms of theft of other peoples’ homelands. In North America, truly native born, indigenous folk have become a tiny minority, pushed to the brink of disappearance by the rapacious behavior of millions of white settlers, including my own ancestors. Native Americans marginalized by the outsiders who displaced them, put them down and in their place alongside black and brown people removed from their homelands physically or economically. Maybe all it takes to make us feel like we’re in a foreign country is to follow the daily news about our supposedly democratic institutions or take a walk through this neighborhood around St. Paul’s. What happened to our sense of the common good?
But here’s the hope I cling to. That the God of Jesus and Ezekiel does still seek the lost, bring back the strayed, bind up the injured, and strengthen the weak. That Jesus incarnates both Peter’s belt and Paul’s chalice, closing the distance and pouring out his very life for us. That as both Auslӓnder and native born, Jesus makes his home in our lives and in our world. Ancient and timely words from the Letter to Diognetus again: “Do you think that Jesus was sent by God to establish some sort of political tyranny, to inspire fear and terror? Not so….Therefore, Christians are not distinguished from the rest of humanity either in locality or in speech or in customs….Every foreign country is a homeland to them, and every homeland is a foreign country.”
Resource:
Jaroslav Pelikan discusses and quotes from the “Letter to Diognetus” in his book “Jesus Through the Centuries: His Place in the History of Culture” (Yale University Press, 1985), pages 49-50.