Faith is not just an easy nod to God. It does not simply
verify our life as it is and let us move on. Its intent is to change us in ways
we may not expect until the change is well underway.
While "conversion" may come in a sudden insight or may be a
slow progression over years, conversion is not the exception but the rule of
faith. We may be kind people. We may see ourselves as good people. We may
have bought into moral principles early and sought to live by honesty and
integrity but that is not enough in the Christian walk. Why is that?
Simply put, because we have the capacity for enlargement,
conversion. Simply put, we are designed to reflect the core of God to each
other and back to God and that core is compassion.
If or when or as we yield to God's compassion we will be
changed and it will cost us our very selves. The self we loose is what some
call the false self, the polite or defensive shell we build to protect our true
and deeply alive self.
While this image, this dichotomy of true and false self, was
born in the field of psychology in the work of D. W. Winnicott, it is useful
here. As we trust God not only to have created us once but to continue to
enlighten and enlarge us, we let go this false shell. We allow compassion to
fill us and remove our defensiveness. We hear one another, we hear Christ, we
hear self, all in conversation and we change. We are progressively converted.
Little pieces of us are born again and again and again, to reapply and
open up fundamentalist language.
Today we celebrate the life, witness and martyrdom of St.
Peter and St. Paul, not because they were martyred together. They were not. But
because they exemplify this progressive conversion, set it and its cost as a
central image of the Christian walk. They will die for its primacy in Christian
formation and being. They were errant men who allowed themselves to grow and
become after the example of Christ that they might know their true selves. They
worked to the same end from a distance.
We witnessed this in part in today's reading from Acts. A
great controversy was afoot between Jewish and Gentile believers. Simply put, it
had to do with what God required to join the Church, to be a follower of Jesus,
Messiah. Was one required to journey as a Jew, simultaneously with following
Christ Jesus? The parts of Jewish custom both foreign and repugnant to
Gentiles, was it required that these be assumed and practiced to receive the
salvation and care and forgiveness and new life available in Jesus? Paul came
to understand "No" as he witnessed the growth of faith in new converts form
outside Judaism.
Peter on the other hand struggled. He, like Paul, had received
the revelation of God working through and in Jesus from within Judaism. The two
faith walks were connected for him, but there remained the question, was this to
be true for all. He had a natural predilection for his own experience from
within Judaism.
As he struggles he has a dream and in the dream all the
forbidden foods of Judaism are placed before him to consume and he is ordered by
the voice of God to do so. Three times he says "No" and three times he is
ordered.
"What God has made clean, you must not call
profane."
Then he is called to go and witness the conversions among the
Gentiles. He sees the same fruit of faithful lives growing in community and
charity, compassion before him.
He reports back to the Jerusalem Church:
If then God gave them the same gift that he gave us when
we believed in the Lord Jesus Christ, who was I that I could hinder God?
When they heard this, they were silenced. And they praised God, saying, Then God
has given even to the Gentiles the repentance that leads to life. (Acts
11:17-18)
One must wonder what conversations we are missing as they
settled into this new understanding. Compassion and understanding do most often
win in us when we talk though our defenses so we can yield to God. Thus our true
selves are progressively born by progressive conversion.
This compassion, this ever opening desire to truly understand
what God is doing in another life that we may not easily see is key to our own
continual conversion. When we find ourselves standing in judgment, over against
another life as to whether that life is lived in God's fullness, we do best
to test our compassion, our desire to understand. Are there defenses I need to
lower? Have I made unclean what to God may not be? Has my faith tradition? How
does compassion move me deeper here?
Saint Augustine writes (Sermon 295):
Both apostles share the same feast day, for
these two were one; and even though they suffered on different days, they were
as one. Peter went first, and Paul followed. And so we celebrate this day made
holy for us by the apostles' blood. Let us embrace what they believed, their
life, their labors, their sufferings, their preaching, and their confession of
faith.
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