Apostolic Photo-Op

July 9, 2007 by djackson.

Everything in this post comes from a sermon called “A Tale of Two Pillars” by Burt Burleson.  He preached it at DaySpring Baptist Church in Waco, Texas on April 22, 2007.  You can read it at http://www.ourdayspring.org/documents/sermons/2007.04.22_A_Tale_Of_Two_Pillars.pdf.  The lectionary readings for that day included John 21, where Jesus invites Peter for a stroll along a seaside path, and Acts 9 where Jesus kicks sand in Paul’s face along the Damascus Road.  Pastor Burleson used the juxtaposition to talk about the very different characters of the two men God used to lead his church in the earliest days of her life.

The two weren’t very much alike - Paul with his patrician background, always wanting to talk about how his family came over on the antediluvian Mayflower, how he could trace his roots right back to the mud puddle from which God molded Adam, pointing to his diploma from Jerusalem Seminary with Gamaliel’s signature at the bottom; Peter, with his calloused working-class paws and Galilean accent anticipating Melville with the boast that a fishing boat was his Harvard and Yale.  Paul, who read the great Greek poets; Peter, whose language was as salty as his trade and who probably knew little poetry beyond some limericks that you couldn’t repeat in the synagogue.  They’d never have been friends - well, they’d never have met - under any other circumstances than the coming of the Kingdom.

But even once they found themselves in agreement - fundamental agreement about the central truth of both their lives; once they became Christians, they went about living out their mutual faith in ways that were almost mutually exclusive.  The differences between them were basic personal construction.  Even when they did the same thing, they would do it in radically different ways.

Pastor Burleson imagines Paul as the archetypal straight-A nerd.  “You know the type…just obnoxiously squeaky clean.  Made his bed before he was ever asked.  Never got in trouble down at the synagogue.”  Peter on the other hand could be obnoxious but never squeaky-clean.  He’s the kid who always argued that there was no point to making the bed since you were only going to sleep on it again. 

If they’d both played baseball, Paul would have been the scientist, keeping notes on every hitter he faced, mixing up his pitches and careful to stay ahead of the count.  Peter would have been the big left-hander with the lazy motion who has nothing but a fastball and brings heat regardless of the score or who’s on base.  He wouldn’t be above throwing the spitter or at least scuffing the horsehide with a hidden fishhook.  Paul, who would never dream of juicing the pill, would react with such pale chagrin to these tactics that you’d want to slap him.  If you caught Peter in the very act he’d respond wtih such a disarming grin and nonchalant shrug that you’d laugh in spite of yourself.

If they’d both coached football, Paul would think like Woody Hays and Darrel Royal - keep it between the tackles, three yards and a cloud of dust, three things can happen when you pass and two of them are bad.  Peter would run the triple-reverse tackle-eligible flea-flicker on third and short from his own six.

Put it this way:  in John’s account of the post-resurrection encounter with Christ, Peter starts off naked in his bass boat.  Paul probably didn’t get naked in the shower.

What they both did was ministry, but it worked the same way.  They agreed on the big theological issue of the day:  gentiles could be Christians without being kosher.  This put them both in a tiny minority when the convention met in Jerusalem that year to propose revisions to the Nazarene Faith and Message.  You’d think that kind of pressure would meld their respective lumps of coal into an indivisible diamond.  But the thing was, they’d come to their shared position by their usual mutually exclusive methods.

It took Paul three years in the desert with an interlinear copy of the Septaugint and his Hebrew/Greek lexicon to determine that God had intended all along to extend salvation to those outside Israel.  He had a solid theological platform from which to download the various features and functions of an inclusive Christianity.  He had a Power Point presentation on pork and slides on circumcision and a full-color chart complete with an end-times cookbook featuring recipes for rabbit and shrimp.

Peter decided it was okay to crack a cold one with non-Baptists when, on the blue edge of a diabetic coma he thought he saw a bedsheet full of brewskis and heard the Eternal Barman holler “Last call!”  What took Paul three years of prayer and fasting, Peter accomplished in a half-hour because supper was late.

The genius of Dr. Burleson’s sermon lies in the observation that for both men these strengths inevitably slopped over into weaknesses. 

With Peter, openness quickly became impulsivity; “easy-come” translated readily into “easy-go.”  From promising to die to being quick to deny, from slashing off ears to saving his rear, from busting into the empty tomb without waiting to rushing out without understanding, Peter’s personality was so nimble he could be downright schizophrenic.  So when the brass from Jerusalem came to inspect the emergent work at Antioch, Peter went from laissez faire to legalist so fast he had to Heimlich himself to keep from choking on a scrap of undigested exegesis.

Paul, by contrast, took so long to reach a conclusion that by the time he did it had calcified.  True, he bore up where Peter had buckled.  The strength of his convictions arose from the slow process by which he had reached his conclusions.  But when it came to grace of another kind, his fixed and formulated framework tended to fossilize into inflexibility.  John Mark bailed on the first missionary expedition then asked for a second chance.  Peter would have let the whole thing go with no more penalty than a couple of noogies but Paul just couldn’t get past it.

The point here is not that each man was flawed, but that God used them both and thus saved the church from being at the mercy of either’s individual weakness or - more frightening still - either’s individual strength. 

Pastor Burleson concludes his sermon with reference to a famous ikon that shows Peter giving Paul a hug.  He speculates that this might represent one of those playground detentes of which parents are so fond:  “Okay now, Peter and Paul…put your arms around each other…Come on.”  I went online and checked the image.  Sure enough, there the two are, their bulbous ikonic bobble-heads bumping against one another in an awkward embrace.  They may be embracing; they may be looking for an opening.  I was a high school wrestler and this looks to me an awful lot like what is known in the sport as “tying up”. 

But the whole idea made me think of another famous photo of more recent vintage.  On April 22, 1947, during Jackie Robinson’s rookie season in the Big Show and America’s rookie season in desegregation, his Brooklyn Dodgers played Philadelphia.  The Phillies, perhaps in an effort to rattle a dangerous opponent, harrassed Robinson each time he came to bat, bellowing racial slurs that would probably have been banned at a Klan rally.  Their white uniforms might have been so many bedsheets.  Leading the charge was their manager, Ben Chapman.  Later, league commissioner Happy Chandler insisted that the two meet for a PR photo-op in an effort to control the damage.  The resulting image, which Robinson rightly described as a travesty, seems to show two men laughing amiably as they hold a Louisville Slugger between them.  A closer look hints that Chandler, with both fists wrapped around the handle, seems intent on laming Robinson over the head with it and that Robinson grips the barrel only to prevent anything of the sort from taking place.

And this thought drew me to a final image.  Along with the make-nice-for-the-camera image of Peter and Paul, I found another ikon in which the two saints stand side-by-side holding between them a sort of cardboard cutout of an eastern Bassilica. http://www.catholicposters.com/shop/product.php?prodId=1129&cat=32+ The idea, as I understand it, is that between them they are holding up the church.  But look at their faces.  They’re turned sort of three-quarters from one another.  Peter looks askance at Paul, who gazes awkwardly down, avoiding direct eye-contact.  Peter holds a few loose pages of parchment, probably the rough-draft of his first epistle.  Paul clutches a jeweled, gilt-edged copy of his collected works.  It doesn’t have a zippered cover but looks as if it should, and you can bet there are no three-month-old copies of church bulletins sticking out between the pages.  Significantly, Paul grips the church with his right hand while Peter remains the ultimate southpaw.  They look an awful lot like Robinson and Chapman!

One has to wonder who put ‘em up to this.  Probably Barnabas, Aramaic for “Mr. Encouragement.” His nickname recalls the “Happy” handle born by the hapless head of MLB who tried to slap a smiley face over a big-league boo-boo because, when you get right down to it, that’s about the only option he had.  Paul later found himself in similar shape when he heard that two head honchos in the Philippian congregation had gotten sideways with one another.  “Get Euodia and Syntyche together,” he orders the poor pastor caught between these two high-powered cogs.  “They’re upsetting everybody.  Tell ‘em to make nice for crying out loud.”  And everybody did, because sometimes that’s all you can do.

This is where Pastor Burleson leaves us with his sermon.  “It could happen!!  It can happen!!  It does…all the time in and through the Church.  Someone’s impulsivity meets up with grace and it becomes the gift it was meant to be.  Someone’s neurotic compulsivity gets forgiven enough that that person becomes a blessing to the Church.  Or, at the very least, what once drove us crazy becomes an occasion to practice all we’ve preached.”

There is a wonderful petition in the Book of Common Prayer which goes like this:

 O God, the Father of all, whose Son commanded us to love
our enemies: Lead them and us from prejudice to truth:
deliver them and us from hatred, cruelty, and revenge; and in
your good time enable us all to stand reconciled before you,
through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

What I like best about this prayer is that it insists that I include myself along with the other.  It is a good prayer to pray for our enemies - maybe even a better one to pray for my friends, and best of all for my brothers and sisters in Christ.  It is a good way to remember that even if I cling to Christ’s church only out of sheer self-defense, I owe a debt of gratitude to the one who motivates me to cling.

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