There is much to celebrate and to be thankful for today. The festival of the apostles Peter and Paul is now the most usual time for ordinations to the diaconate and priesthood.  So we celebrate and give thanks for those courageous men and women being ordained today as they embark on a life of service and leadership in the mission and ministry of the Church.    I was ordained at this time, firstly as a deacon 42 years ago and a year later as a priest.  It is a time to be thankful and to reflect on the varied and valuable experiences over these years including, of course, the almost nine years here, all of which have helped me forward to an ever-deeper vision and conviction of what it means to be a follower of Jesus Christ.

So perhaps it is ironic that today, a festival of new beginnings for many, I am officially bidding farewell to you all.  That’s life, all things come to an end, all things change as they must.  I am very grateful for the love, friendship, support and prayers of so many of you during my time in Tenerife.  Rosemary and I will certainly keep a keen but sensibly detached interest in how things progress here and will keep you all in our prayers.  I pray that you may remain as one united, hopeful, faithful, loving and joyful Christian community that I hope I have been of some help in encouraging you to be, and that you must continue to be in the months of vacancy that now begin.  Such a state of living and being church is not meant to be tongue in cheek, because the reality is that there can be no alternative structure, vision, or relationships in a community that calls itself a church of Jesus Christ.  

Today, we consider how much we can learn about being church, being Christ-followers, as we think of our first predecessors in the apostolic career:  Peter, the Galilean fisherman who became chief among the ‘fishers of men’ or ‘catchers for Christ.’  And Paul, the erudite Pharisee, who through his teaching and letters to the churches first started to make theological sense of the impact of Jesus Christ, following his dramatic conversion and after a brief career as a persecutor of the new Jesus movement, referred to in our second reading today.

Both men were seized by the person and message of Jesus, and they dedicated and finally gave up their lives in following the Jesus Way.  It is the people of the Way (capital W) that the first Christians were known.  The Way was essentially a Jewish renewal movement with its central focus on building the kingdom of God that Jesus had proclaimed so that it would become a reality for the earth.  Those who joined the Way were baptised, signifying that they were dying and rising again with and into Christ, dying to an old way and rising to a new way of living.  

The Way also meant a new exodus, liberation from bondage or slavery to sin and the worst ways of the world.  Its Jewish followers understood the sacrifice and victory of Christ to be a new Passover, expressed most of all in their gatherings for the breaking of bread, the Eucharist, the thanksgiving for all that God had done for them in Christ.   The Way was a Spirit-led community whose members sought to grow more and more to reveal in their own lives the likeness of God in Christ, God’s character and passion, God’s agenda of love, peace and justice for the world.

Probably the biggest challenge for the Church of today, especially for those called to the apostolate of ordained ministry, is how to call the Church as an institution, with its various structures, its local parishes, communities, and individual members:  how to call them back to the excitement, the vision and the radical message of the movement of Jesus and the subsequent network of communities founded by Peter and Paul.  It involves teaching and demonstrating that being a Christian makes a significant difference to your life and lifestyle, your world view, and the way you relate to your fellow Christians, and to others, neighbours and strangers alike, whoever and whatever they may be.  Being a follower of Christ is about embracing a way of life that is often at odds with the status quos, the conventions, and the cultural norms of the secular world. It is a life that seeks to unite people, to welcome people in from across the humanly created distinctions and divisions of the world, those states of corporate and personal sin which not only separate us from one another but from God.  

The two chief apostles had the enormous task of enabling and guiding the Jewish Jesus movement to evolve into an open and inclusive community that embraced both Jew and Gentile.  Although it was a huge challenge, sadly, it has not proved to be unique to those times and circumstances.   We, the Church, or certain parts of it, have not always lived up to Paul’s radical declaration to the Galatians and Romans, that in Christ we are all children of God and are all equal, an equality signified by our common faith and baptism.  Just to mention in passing that the word ‘radical’ is used a lot in the media today, and always erroneously when referring to extreme left- or right-wing people and opinions, and religious extremists.  ‘Radical’ comes from the Latin word ‘radix’ meaning ‘root.’  A ‘radical Christian,’ sometimes also misnamed a ‘born again’ Christian, or in my language, a healthily renewed or reconstructed Christian, is simply one whose life is rooted in Christ and is faithful to Christ, hopefully what everyone who calls themselves Christian either is or sincerely desires to become.  ‘Radical,’ when applied to our faith should mean normal, natural, or obvious.

One of Paul’s root or radical Christian declarations was that in Christ there is no longer Jew or Gentile, no longer slave or free, no longer male or female; no longer, that is, any distinction which creates superiority or inferiority, inclusion or exclusion.  And we should not be tempted to think that Paul’s three examples from his own time are an exhaustive list of distinctions that are to be disregarded by Christians.  For like Peter and Paul, once we recognise and confess that Jesus is Lord, the Christ, then whatever our human distinctions and identities, we are all one people, called to be in solidarity with one another, committed to a common life and values.

If life in Christ means anything at all, it means freedom; freedom from selfishness, freedom from the need to control, freedom to become outward looking, able and willing to share God’s love and passion for the world in all its diversity and all its fragility, and to work to create a new world in which all are free, all are fed, all are treated with dignity and respect, and all can live together without fear. If we can embrace that huge vision, we will show it most of all by the way we live, work and worship together as Christians locally, and by the way we relate to others in our day to day lives.  Paul’s fruits of the Spirit list, also in Galatians, are a useful guide for how as Spirit-led people we should live together and with the world:  with love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, trustfulness, gentleness and self-control.

How much we need to embrace and live out this vision and commitment as we consider the fractious and unequal world and societies we live in still today.  We need to pray and work earnestly for the values and growth of that Way for which Jesus lived and gave up his life, and for which Peter and Paul sought to make reality in the Christ communities, the churches, they founded, and for which they too paid the ultimate price as they promoted the values and vision of God and the Lordship of Christ in the face of the idolatry, corruption and violence of the imperial power that ruled their world.  Strengthened by their prayers and fellowship with us today within the body of Christ, may we be inspired to share their cause and commitment as we face the challenges of the world and our own small part of it today.