Clothe yourselves, all of you, with humility toward one another, for God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.
1 Peter 5:5
In the calendar of the Episcopal Church, January 18th is the feast of the Confession of St. Peter. Today we remember when Peter responded to Jesus’s question, “Who do you say that I am?”, with those thrilling words, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Matthew 16:16).
Jesus’s question to Peter is one that he asks each of us every day. Who do you say that Jesus is? The way we live our lives says a lot about how we would answer.
One of the ways St. Peter has been significant in the history of the Church is as a representative of the Church’s call to unity. After Peter’s confession of faith, Jesus said that this faith of Peter (whose name means “rock”) would be the “rock” on which Jesus would build his Church (Matthew 16:18). This is one reason why Christians in the early 20th century designated the week following January 18th as the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. We pray this week that Christians everywhere would live into Jesus’s prayer that “they all may be one.”
We live in divisive times, and one of the great gifts that the Church can offer to the world is to exemplify a community that is committed to a mature and honest unity, even across disagreements about heavy matters. Unity doesn’t mean uniformity, but it does mean, for Christians, being eager to maintain the “unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” (Ephesians 4:3). Following Peter’s own counsel to Christians in his First Epistle, one way to practice that unity of the Spirit is to “clothe” ourselves “with humility” (1 Peter 5:5).
This means that I can be strong in my own convictions, while also maintaining a generous charity towards the convictions of my brothers and sisters – seeking as much to understand where they’re coming from as to share my own perspective. Part of humility is recognizing that I myself don’t know the full story for the world, or for anyone else (or even for myself, for that matter). Taking time to listen and learn from others might be one way we can imitate Peter’s confession, and declare Jesus as “the Christ, the Son of the living God.”
God bless you!
Fr. Mac
