A number of years ago I had a great colleague
who became my most effective writing partner.
After authoring a few articles together,
we produced a book that, 26 years later, is still going strong
both in English and Korean.
Part of the surprise of this success is that Herbert and I
are such very different people.
He is a married Lutheran Pastor
and I am a celibate Roman Catholic priest;
he has children and grandchildren
and I have an 18-month-old yellow lab;
his specialty is pastoral care
and mine is worship.
I am obsessively neat, and compulsively orderly
and let’s just say that Herbert is the opposite:
we were in so many ways an academic odd couple.
Yet, as we have admitted in print, these differences
were part of the formula for the book’s success
and for our own friendship now stretching over 4 decades.
The so-called “odd couple formula” was popularized
by Neil Simon’s 1965 play of that name, and its many adaptations.
But well before 1965 was the TV series the “Honeymooners”
with Ralph Kramden always wanting to send Alice to the moon.
Then there was what some considered
the greatest comedy duo of all time: Abbot and Costello.
Variations of the formula are repeated in innumerable shows,
pairing unlikely characters
like Hot Lips and Frank Burns on MASH,
or Frasier and Lilith in Cheers,
and then there’s the entire cast of Big Bang Theory,
except for maybe Raj and his dog.
You probably recognize variations of the odd couple in your life:
the extroverted relative with the introverted partner,
a generous friend dating a selfish narcissist,
or the religiously pious in love with a happy agnostic.
Not to be outdone, the church today invites us to what might be dubbed
“Odd Couple” Sunday”:
an unusual interruption of the Sunday cycle of ordinary time
with these two extraordinary
and extraordinarily different disciples.
First there was Peter, the rough-edged fisherman from Galilee,
whose faith was not unlike the sea where he labored:
sometimes calm and generous, sometimes stormy and unforgiving,
who shouted his confession like wind gust,
then faltered in the night when confronted with his discipleship,
subsequently battered by wave after wave of guilt,
and ultimately transformed into a bold yet humbled
fisher of men.
The British journalist William Norman Ewer once wrote,
“how odd of God to choose the Jews.”
Similarly, we might say of Jesus,
“how rare to dare, choosing Peter as Leader.”
Revered as the first pope,
the so-called Prince of the Apostles is the only person
in the New testament that Jesus actually calls “Satan.”
Then, there was Saul transmuted into Paul,
not a fisherman but a seafaring visionary
whose restless mind was as tumultuous as the waters he crossed;
fierce in zeal and sharp in judgment,
a voice first vehemently raised against the church,
then zealously raised in its defense;
an ardent son of Israel riding high on certainty, he was
then knocked off his high horse by the crucified.
The hunter was turned into hunted,
whose letters burned with fire and mercy alike,
fashioned out of hardship, shipwreck, and prison;
both scholar and tentmaker,
he embodied the paradox of strength and vulnerability.
His relentless journeys carried the Jesus movement
beyond its local beginnings
into worlds both welcoming and hostile,
and his boldness in words and travels,
letters and living,
ultimately cost him his life.
So, we have these two alpha males,
each critical for shaping the origins of Christianity,
sitting somewhat uncomfortably side by side
on the same feast day … in the same liturgy.
Peter is apparently the more important of the two:
after all, his name comes first,
he was the sidekick of the historical Jesus,
the divinely designated rock,
the progenitor of the Roman Catholic Papacy.
On the other hand, multiple scholars contend
that it was Paul … not Peter … not even Jesus
who founded Christianity[i] and Christian Theology.[ii]
Remember, Paul was writing his letters
decades before Mark invented the genre we call gospel,
or any other New Testament author
got into the act.
To push the comparison a little further,
their competing roles, personalities, and influences
actually clashed in real time – though there is no evidence
that they came to blows.
Twenty years or so after the death of Jesus,
with the growing number of Gentile converts
largely because of the efforts of Paul,
the question arose as to whether these non-Jewish believers
should be required to be circumcised
and follow other key directives of Mosaic Law.
This came to a head at the so-called Council of Jerusalem.
Initially, Peter agreed with James and other traditionalists
that Gentiles should follow the Torah,
but Paul vehemently disagreed.
And, even though Peter was the rock,
his position crumbled and Paul’s argument prevailed.
So we might wonder who is the real rock?
When my family needs a happy diversion
because of some new trauma on the horizon,
and there are many,
we often turn to trusted and true movies
that inevitably make us laugh and remind us that life goes on,
even if in strange and unexpected ways.
One of these perennial favorites is My Big Fat Greek Wedding.
One memorable line from that movie,
when Tula wants to go to school but her father is against it,
is when her mother reminds her
that the man is the head, but the woman is the neck,
and she can turn the head
any way she wants.
So is Peter the head and Paul the neck?
Peter the Rock and Paul the hydraulic hammer?
Peter the winner and Paul the contentious runner up?
Or maybe we need to reimagine
any apostolic competition here,
any founder’s tournament,
and reassess this apostolic brotherhood
not only for the sake of history,
but also for the sake of the church today:
in a world in which competition can devolve
into a dangerous virus,
where losers are shunned and degraded,
and martyrs are mocked as failures.
Over the years, I have often had the chance to fly
over amazing mountain ranges:
The Alps, the Andes, and our own Rocky Mountains.
Inevitably, each is populated with impressive rock formations
huge boulders and massive stones.
Interestingly enough,
none of these geological outcroppings are alone:
some may soar skyward, dwarfing their surroundings,
but each such giant is embedded in communities of stone.
Largely because of today’s gospel reading,
we tend to see Peter as a singular rock
as an isolated corner stone,
like the only leg on a three-legged stool …
and you know how that is going to turn out.
However, rather than imagining a lone apostle
as a solitary corner stone,
what happens if we reconsidered that rock
not as a lonely placard holding up one name,
but as an admittedly notable peak in a rugged mountain range-
a crest created by many stones pushed together-
the result of tectonic plates colliding
like Jesus, Peter, and Paul,
a religious Everest that reshapes the world
with its love ethic and call to radical inclusivity.
The church was never meant to rest on the shoulders of one person.
From the very start it emerged from a community:
a brace of like-minded friends,
a mountain range of believers
composed of a myriad of diverse outcroppings,
pressed together in the tectonic upheaval we call faith,
and that, here, we call Old St. Pat’s.
A couple of years ago, I had the privilege
of presiding at a baptism
of the first male son
born to either side of the family for two generations
… of course he was destined to become a little prince.
Right before the baptism, the proud maternal grandmother
who had lost her husband some years before
said to her daughter, “He is so beautiful,
I think he looks like your father.”
The daughter, who never knew her birth father gently said,
“Mom … that can’t be … remember I am adopted.”
The Mother, at first a little taken back, shook her head and said,
“I’m sorry, I always forget.”
Sometimes we forget, in this age of singularity,
that we were adopted into a community grounded in granite,
and that this church of Peter and Paul
still needs rocks and jackhammers-
still needs committed odd couples-
still needs bold, impulsive, even problematic disciples-
to move the tectonic plates of justice in a world
that resists the gifts of Christianity’s preternatural odd couple,
Peter and Paul.
On this their feast, we accept again their commission
that, as bombs are turning cities into rubble,
to be an unshakeable foundation for peace;
that, as human dignity in all of its diversity is under assault,
to be a mountain range of justice;
and as our society and the world
are prone to placing boulders of exclusion
to block the progress of those the elite deem unworthy,
to become jackhammers of liberation,
removing every obstacle that hinders the way of the Lord.
If we do so, then, like Peter, the Lord can say to us,
upon you, this fresh outcropping of faith,
this 21st century rock, I will build my church
and the powers of hell will not prevail against it.
Through Christ our Lord.
[i] A. N. Wilson, Paul: The Mind of the Apostle (W. W. Norton, 1997); Gerd Lüdemann, Paul the Founder of Christianity (Prometheus Books, 2002), etc.
[ii] Rudolf Bultmann, Theology of the New Testament (Baylor University Press, 1951), p 187.
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