Keeping Restoration
Keeping Restoration
As the mission of the Church is to “restore all people to unity with God and each other in Christ,” by implication that mission includes keeping the Church in unity with God and each other in Christ. And you can’t restore what you can’t keep.
I believe that my call to ordained ministry was to help spread the unity that I encountered in anglo-catholic churches where I saw people of diverse opinions holding those opinions more lightly when they worshiped God in the beauty of holiness. That was challenged from the moment I entered Virginia Theological Seminary in August 2004. Over my three years, my sponsoring diocese of Virginia was beset by disagreement over the ordination of the openly gay and partnered Bishop of New Hampshire, Gene Robinson. In my senior year, about ten parishes voted in mass to leave The Episcopal Church, one of them being my field education site, which made my continued internship there untenable, because I did not consider the question of LGBT people’s rightful place in the Church to be one that should break our communion as “living members” of Christ’s eucharistic body.
Sadly, both parishes that I pastored after my ordination in 2007 contained people of good conscience who couldn’t see that if two committed people are prepared to love each other as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, then their respective genders are not a moral issue. Some left, but others stayed and kept communion with me even though they respectfully disagreed with me. So, my continuing friendship with them continues to persuade me that our church must make a space for their good conscience so that they and I can hold our opinions with open hands, not fists, for the sake of Christian unity.
This is not the first time that the Church has had to balance unity and inclusion, new insights and traditional truths and has been criticized when seen as sacrificing one for the other. Peter and Paul’s unity was strained at times. Peter was the acknowledged leader of the Jewish disciples who followed Jesus of Nazareth for three years, who acclaimed him as the Christ the Messiah the Anointed King of Israel, and were trying to get the rest of their fellow Jews to join the movement. Paul was the Jew who tried to destroy the movement, but then had a mystical encounter with Jesus in a blinding light and voice, and on the turn of a dime began proclaiming Jesus as the Messiah. And then he proclaimed that Christians could no longer wait for all the Jewish people to get on board the Jesus Way, that no ceremonial laws could be allowed to stand between Gentiles and the God of Israel.
We know from his encounter with the Roman centurion Cornelius that Peter agreed with Paul about circumcision or eating unclean animals. But as the apostolic leader of the Christian community, Peter felt responsible for keeping unity between Gentile converts to the New Covenant with God given by Jesus, and Jews who saw the New Covenant as the fulfillment — not the abolition — of the Old Covenant given through Moses. So for instance, how could Jews and Gentiles break bread and fellowship if they couldn’t eat the same food? But according to Paul in his Letter to the Galatians, he called Peter a hypocrite for not eating with Gentile Christians in Antioch, when he had been willing to eat with Cornelius years earlier.
But strained as their unity was, they didn’t give up on each other. And during the first systematic persecution of Christians in Rome, they were together as witnesses to the one Lord, Christ Jesus, or in the original Greek, “martyrs.” They kept their unity in Christ as they were martyred together. They kept their unity in Christ as they were martyred together. Perhaps, tragically, some of their fellow Christians might have been responsible. According to Saint Clement the third Bishop of Rome, writing at the end of the first century, about thirty years later: “It was by sinful jealousy that Peter was subject to tribulation…it was in that way that he bore his witness,” his martyrdom, “And Paul, because of jealousy and contention, has become the very type of contention rewarded.”
For nearly two millennia, the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church has struggled to restore unity, and to keep it. This parish with two patron saints, two holy traditions, as old as their original foundings, yet as new as their recent joining, is a sign of that precious unity of the Body of Christ on witness. To quote our collect for Saint Peter and Saint Paul, both stood “firm upon the one foundation, which is Jesus Christ our Lord.” And today, they stand as one upon that one foundation, enriched by the prayers of both their patrons, and learning from both their traditions.
We keep unity to restore unity.
June 29th, 2025
3rd Sunday after Pentecost: Saint Peter & Saint Paul
The Rev. David Kendrick