Peter and Paul, Roger and Midge: Church Builders, Solemnity of SS. Peter and Paul, June 29, 2019

Fr. Roger J. Landry
St. Michael’s Parish, Lowell, MA
Solemnity of SS. Peter and Paul
Mass of Thanksgiving for the Fiftieth Anniversary of Roger and Midge Landry
June 29, 2019
Acts 2:1-11, Ps 34, 2 Tim 4:6-8.17-18, Mt 16:13-19

To listen to an audio recording of today’s Mass, please click below: 

The following text guided today’s homily: 

Marriage and the Solemnity of SS. Peter and Paul

When Scot, Colleen, Greg and I began around Christmas looking for dates to have a Mass and a party to celebrate our parents’ fiftieth anniversary, the most convenient turned out to be the Saturday immediately before July 5th, their actual anniversary. But I informed my siblings that if June 29th prevailed, then, unlike most wedding Masses or typical anniversary Masses, we would not be able to choose the readings and the prayers of the Mass, because June 29th is the Solemnity of SS. Peter and Paul and whenever a Mass is celebrated on a solemnity, the readings and prayers for that feast always take precedence. That’s why today’s readings and prayers are about Saint Peter and Paul, rather than about the Sacrament of Marriage in the Divine Plan.

Upon deeper examination, however, there is great fittingness to celebrating what God has been doing in Roger and Midge Landry over this past half-century from the perspective of what he did in the lives of the two greatest apostles. Peter and Paul have much to teach Roger and Midge, every couple and the whole Church about the meaning of marriage and how to live it faithfully.

Peter’s and Paul’s Advice to Married Couples

In the reception after mom’s and dad’s wedding fifty years ago, Roger’s older brother Paul gave a speech as the best man. Today we almost have Peter and Paul present as “friends of the bridegroom” (Jn 3:29), the Biblical expression for best men, to give their own advice. St. Peter wrote to Christian wives in his first letter, that they should live in a way that their husbands “may be won over without a word by their wives’ conduct when they observe your reverent and chaste behavior.  Your adornment,” he continues, “should not be an external one: braiding the hair, wearing gold jewelry, or dressing in fine clothes, but rather the hidden character of the heart, expressed in the imperishable beauty of a gentle and calm disposition, which is precious in the sight of God. For this is also how the holy women who hoped in God once used to adorn themselves.” St. Peter instructs husbands that they should “live with your wives in understanding, showing honor to [them], since we are joint heirs of the gift of life, so that your prayers may not be hindered.” He tells them both to “be of one mind, sympathetic, loving toward one another, compassionate, humble. Do not return evil for evil, or insult for insult; but, on the contrary, [return] a blessing, because to this you were called, that you might inherit a blessing” (1 Pet 3:9).

St. Paul likewise has encouraging and challenging advice. The “great mystery” of marriage, he says in his Letter to the Ephesians, is that the union between a man and a woman is ultimately based on Christ’s spousal union to the Church. He tells husbands and wives, therefore, to revere and serve each other out of reverence for Christ. He calls husbands to “love your wives, even as Christ loved the church and handed himself over for her to sanctify her.” He wants husbands to be willing to die for their wives out of love, just like Christ did for the Church. He asks wives to try to love their husbands the way they would love the Lord Jesus, with a willingness to die for him just as Peter and Paul would, like so many saints and martyrs have throughout the centuries. In his Letter to the Corinthians, St. Paul emphasized again this dimension of sacrificial, not sentimental, love, that is at the heart of marriage. He said that love is patient, kind, not jealous, arrogant, rude, or quick-tempered, that it doesn’t brood over injuries or wrongdoing but rejoices with the truth, bearing, enduring all things, never failing to believe and hope in God and in each other (1 Cor 13:1-8). It takes sacrifice to be patient and kind for better and worse, in sickness and health, in poverty and prosperity all ones days. It takes real love never to be rude or brood over injury. It requires a capacity to die to oneself for the sake of another to never fail. But we rejoice that over these last fifty years, in the school of Christian marriage, Roger and Midge have tried to grow in loving each other by that Christian standard to which Peter and Paul summon every couple.

There are several other important lessons that Saints Peter and Paul teach us.

The vocation to marriage

They show us the importance of the vocational aspect of human life. Peter’s life changed when Jesus called him from his fishing boats after the greatest catch of his life and told him he would become therefore a fisher of men. Paul’s life was totally altered after he had journey 117 miles on foot from Jerusalem to Damascus, Syria, in order to continue his persecution of the early Church, but Jesus appeared to him outside the city gates and called him from a life of massacring Christians to making them. Just as much as they had received vocations as disciples and apostles, so Roger and Midge have received a joint calling to follow the Lord and bring others to follow him. They have helped each other grow in faith — praying together at home and in Church, doing charity together, loving and honoring each other. And they have helped each other to spread the faith. There is a missionary aspect to Christian marriage. Mom has lived it in a particular way through her work as a member of the Legion of Mary, bringing Holy Communion to the sick, and many other ways. Dad has done it in a quieter way by living a good Christian life, but I always loved to see him do his thing with the manly men on the pilgrimages I would lead to Rome, other places in Europe and the Holy Land, where he would sit in the back of the bus or in the hotel bar at the end of the day, hearing other men tell them that they never thought when they were signing up for a trip that they would be visiting so many Churches or going to Mass every day, and having my dad help them refocus on the beauty of what we were seeing and the privilege we have to have Mass in so many incredible places. Midge and Roger have lived their marriage as the Church has asked, as a sacred calling, to help each other and others grow to know the love of God and live it.

Building the Church and the Domestic Church

Peter and Paul were, moreover, great Church builders. In today’s Gospel, Jesus announces his architectural plans for the Church, changing Simon’s name to Peter, which means “rock,” and saying, “On this rock, I will build my Church.” Jesus built his Church on Peter, on his faith in the Lord, on his love for the Lord, on his capacity to let the Lord work through him. Likewise, Saint Paul crisscrossed the ancient world to found and strengthen Churches in modern day Syria, Crete, Turkey, Macedonia, Greece, Italy and some ancient extra-Biblical traditions say also Spain.

Roger and Midge as a married couple were also called to be church-builders. The main image to understand marriage in the early centuries of Christianity was as a “domestic Church.” Saint John Chrysostom, the patron saint of Christian preachers who died in 407, wrote, “The Church is, as it were, a small household, and … indeed a house is a little Church. Thus it is possible for us by becoming good husbands and wives, to surpass all others. … Let the man, as soon as he has risen from his bed, seek after nothing else, but how he may do and say something whereby he may render his whole house more reverent. The woman again, let her be indeed a good housekeeper; but before attending to this, let her have another more needful care, that the whole household may work the works of Heaven.” The Second Vatican Council said, five years before Roger’s and Midge’s marriage, almost as marching orders, “The family is, so to speak, the domestic church. In it parents should, by their word and example, be the first preachers of the faith to their children; they should encourage them in the vocation that is proper to each of them, fostering with special care vocation to a sacred state.”

Just as in a Church God is adored, so a Christian family must be centered on God. How grateful we are to you, Mom and Dad, for making 48 Dana Street for all of us a house of prayer, with the Rosary each day as we were growing up. Just as the Word of God is proclaimed in Church, so it should echo in home. Thank you, Mom, for teaching us how to read by reading to us and having us read to you children’s bible stories. Just like in a Church there should be charity toward the other members of the family as well as to those in the surrounding community, so you trained us in charity. As kids you would take us, and some times drag us, out to play concerts in nursing homes, to help our relatives who were senior citizens, to take part in many of the charitable outreaches here at St. Michael’s and other things, training us in being Good Samaritans and how to be our brothers’ keepers. That charity continues every Sunday morning as the two of you go out to bring food to the poor.

Just like Saints Peter and Paul were great Church builders for Christ, you are both exemplary domestic Church builders, through prayer, the Word of God, charity.

Perseverance in One’s Vocation

Peter and Paul were also great saints of perseverance. After St. Peter had betrayed Jesus on Holy Thursday, strengthened by Christ’s forgiveness and by the power of the Holy Spirit, he faithfully preached him until death, upside down on a Cross in a Roman circus. In the same chapter of his First Letter in which he wrote to Christian spouses, Peter also spoke about perseverance through suffering, physical suffering and suffering on account of the faith. “Even if you should suffer,” he writes, “blessed are you. Do not be afraid or terrified with fear…,but sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts.” A little later he continues, “Do not be surprised that a trial by fire is occurring among you, as if something strange were happening to you.  But rejoice to the extent that you share in the sufferings of Christ, so that when his glory is revealed you may also rejoice exultantly” (1 Pet 3:14-15; 1 Pet 4:12-13). St. Paul, in today’s second reading, writes from a prison cell to his young spiritual son Saint Timothy to encourage him toward perseverance. He knew he was near the end and he was able to exult, “I have fought the good fight. I have finished the race. I have kept the faith.” He was urging Timothy, and through him the whole Church, to continue battling against all obstacles for the sake of God, to keep heading toward the finish line with urgency, to maintain the faith by treasuring it and passing it on.

Mom and Dad, we rejoice that your race is not over! You may not be able to run as quickly as you once did. You may not have the same stamina and strength in the boxing ring of life. But we rejoice that although you may not be as physically vigorous as before, you are spiritually stronger, as each day you draw closer to that finish line, hand-in-hand, as each other’s chief inspiration. Keep your sights on that imperishable wreath St. Paul describes that awaits at the finish line all of those who long for Christ.

The Eucharist and Marriage

The last thing we can mention is that Peter and Paul were men who drew their life from Jesus Christ in the Holy Eucharist. St. Peter was present at the first Mass when Jesus gave us his flesh and blood for the first time. It was Peter who stood up, a year before the Last Supper, after Jesus had said that to have eternal life we must eat his flesh and drink his blood and had seen many of his disciples, those who had been following him for two years and had heard him preach live and had seen so many of his miracles, wander away from him because they thought his words were too difficult to endure. Jesus asked the apostles whether they, too, wanted to abandon him over his teaching about the Eucharist, but Peter said, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.” Peter had confessed him earlier, in today’s Gospel, as the Messiah and Son of the Living God. There Peter was confessing that he believed in him enough to believe in what he said, and if Jesus were communicating that we had to eat his flesh and drink his blood, he was willing to stake his life on that truth. What he was committing to would only become clearer a year later when Jesus would take bread and wine into his hands and totally change it into his Body and Blood, but Peter was in faith willing to commit to living a Eucharistic life before he understood how.

St. Paul, likewise, lived this Eucharistic life and challenged the early Christians to do the same. He wrote to the Corinthians, “For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus, on the night he was handed over, took bread,and, after he had given thanks, broke it and said, ‘This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’ In the same way also the cup, after supper, saying, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.’For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the death of the Lord until he comes.”

We rejoice, Mom and Dad, that you have sought to live your life with Jesus in the Holy Eucharist as your source and summit. Your marriage began with a nuptial Mass, in which you inserted your love for each other within Christ’s love for the Church, consummated on the marriage bed of the altar as we, the Bride of Christ, receive within the Body and Blood of Jesus the Bridegroom. Today, on your fiftieth anniversary, you celebrate in the greatest way possible, by coming here to thank God and to receive God within. And throughout your marriage, every Sunday and Holy Day, and so many days during the week, you have come to receive from Christ in Christ on the altar his own spousal outpouring of love so that you can love each other as he has loved you.

Today as your children and grandchildren, extended family and so many friends join you here at Mass to thank God for his blessings to you over the past fifty years of marriage, we pray to God with you, through the intercession of SS. Peter and Paul and St. Michael, that God may continue to bless you with every spiritual blessing in the heavens, and through you and your Christian spousal love, continue to bless us all.

The readings for today’s Mass were: