St Peter and St Paul
By Mark Oakley, Sunday 29th June, 2008
St Peter and St Paul, 2008
I was told the other day of the ten things you´ll never hear said in church. They include: ”Hey! It’s my turn to sit in the front pew” and ”Oh I love singing new hymns that we´ve never heard of”, ”Vicar, we´d love to send you to that theology conference in the Caribbean” and ”I can´t wait for the fete and to put those tents up again”. It might also, perhaps, include ”I always love sermons about psycotheraputic theories of the last mid-century”…Well, that´s what you´ve got today.
I wonder how many of you are familiar with the work of Carl Jung? When I was a curate my Vicar often used to preach about Jung and his theories and I developed quite a thirst to understand more. I used to say he was “Jung in heart”. One of Jung´s ideas, of course, concerns what he calls ”the shadow”. Now forgive me for being simplistic but I have to brief. Basically, Jung believed that the human self as it grows up and learns to socialise and keep people happy (parents, siblings, school, work etc) develops a persona, a mask, a face to present to the outer world like a shop window showing off our best wares. But this persona, says Jung, is that which in reality you are not but which yourself as well as others think you are – and so to be acceptable and fit expectations in day to day life the self also represses, pushes down a whole heap of stuff that is an essential part of who we are but which we don’t want seen because they don´t go with the mask. The more we invest in a certain image for ourselves, the more we push parts of us down out of view, out of conscious, and this forms the shadow. This shadow can be recognised and explored and used for creativity or it can be ignored. Either way it will always out, whether in our unconscious acts, our projections onto others, depression, unreasonable outbursts or somatic illness. It ticks away like a time bomb in us.Whatever we ignore for the sake of ambition, says Jung, will always come back knife in hand to take its revenge. The shadow embodies all the life in us which has not been allowed expression. It is not only individuals that have shadows but nations, communities, groups – and churches (by the way, clergy have BIG shadows because we are always trying to be nice!)
Jung believed that human beings have an appointment to keep with their shadow, usually around mid-life, the time when one sees that the image you´ve been working on in life doesn’t add up to much and you need to make amendments. To look at your shadow will mean things such as examining what we envy or dislike in others and acknowledge those very things in ourselves. This helps to prevent our blaming or envying others for what we have not done ourselves. It encourages us to see that only a small part of our potential for life has been tapped and that we are often overly smug. It reveals other sources of energy and creativity for personal development. By conversing honestly with our shadow we lift enormous projections of animosity or envy off of others and life becomes freer and richer.
Now, why do I mention all this today? Well, naturally one of the complex ingredients in the shadowland is guilt and both the men we celebrate today would have had it. These two very different men. Peter, a fisherman from a lakeside village with little or no formal education, a man who spent three years walking around Galilee, Samaria and Judea with Jesus. And Paul – a Greek-educated Pharisee from Tarsus, bright and conscientiously working to root out the followers of Jesus (followers of ”The Way”), like Peter, from local synagogues. Peter was the energetic one, the keen one who often got it wrong as well as right and who ended up denying his friend and master three times. He had promised everything and had let Jesus down more than anyone else. And Paul, the man who didn´t know Jesus the man but who was blinded on the road after Jesus´s resurrection and saw that the people he was out to get were the ones following the truth. He became a follower of Christ himself and had to live with the fact that he had been cruel and hardest to those who he now knew to be his brothers and sisters. These men with flawed pasts and regrets were the ones used by God to establish his church. You can imagine, human beings what they are, that they might have wanted to cover up their past once they had pivotal parts in leading the early Christian communities (a bit of spin doctoring) but no . These men knew what they were capable of, knew what they had done, knew who they had been and, and this is where Christian faith saved them, they knew that they were still valued and believed in by God, that they had a journey yet to make. They knew that if the Church was to have a future it was not in trying to preach about their faith, their abilities, their skills. It was to be rooted rather in God’s faithfulness towards them, even in his full knowledge of their past. And God does not ignore their shadow. He does not ask them to ignore it. He asks them to confront it, learn from it and use it to be free for him and the work of the Gospel (the resurrection stories take us back to the places where the disciples had first been (shore, upper room, fire), it leads them through what they had said (Peter asked to declare his love three times to balance his threefold denial), memories had to be recognised before new life could be lived). The theologian Paul Tillich decribed God’s grace in this way: ”accept the fact that you are accepted, despite the fact that you are unacceptable”. In other words we are loved as we are and loved so much that we are not to stay like this but to be taken further on a journey of transformation, resurrection to new life in Christ (new names!). St Augustine sums it up nicely when he says that it was divine love that untied the knot that Peter had wrapped himself into.
It is exactly 15 years since I was ordained and, as a priest, I am conscious of the many ways I have failed my calling but I have to preach to myself as I do to you today that we are still being called, called to move out of the past and into new life with Christ each and every day, to stand and face what has happened in the past, to face the hurts, to see where we have pushed down the things we thought unacceptable, to question the true nature of our feelings of guilt and shame, and then to let Christ meet us on the shore and follow him on a new road, like Peter and Paul. The poet Edwin Muir wrote this:
Friend, I have lost the way.
The way leads on.
Is there another way?
The way is one.
I must retrace the track.
It’s lost and gone.
Back, I must travel back!
None goes there, none.
Then I’ll make here my place,
(The road leads on),
Stand still and set my face,
(The road leaps on),
Stay here, for ever stay.
None stays here, none.
I cannot find the way.
The way leads on.
Oh places I have passed!
That journey’s done.
And what will come at last?
The road leads on.
