There Is Nothing Pedestrian About Being Presbyterian

There Is Nothing Pedestrian About Being Presbyterian
2 Thessalonians 1:1-12; Psalm 119:137-144; Luke 10:1-10

I grew up in another Ohio county seat town, which in those days had twice as many people as all of Pike County. It was founded before 1800. The town was laid out around a square block on which sat the Court House. It dated from just before 1900, having replaced one which had burned down, which was the lot of many early court houses.

Opposite the west side of the court house square was a piece of parkland which ran along the river bank. It was the site of a number of war monuments and other historical items. Across the southwest corner was the Second National Bank building, about 12 storeys high with the local radio station’s studios on the top floor. The south side of Market Street had several shops including a Thrift Drug and an S. S. Kressge store and finished with the Strouss Department store on the corner. Then opposite the southeast corner was the Union Savings and Trust Company bank. The east side of Park Avenue was shops and offices. Then opposite the northeast corner was the Trumbull Savings and Loan Company. On the north, on High Street, across from the Court House main entrance was the Public Library, the then new county administration building, the YMCA and the Elks’ club in an old mansion of a house.

The southwest, southeast and northeast corners of the square were standard cross-street intersections. The northwest corner had only one street going out of it at a 45 degree angle. Three streets met for the intersection. In those days the traffic light was on concrete platform in the middle. Because of the traffic pattern, the crosswalks were  marked with walk lights and signs.

What you need to know is that at this three street corner stood the Presbyterian Church, a handsome brick and stained glass building with a very tall spire. It couldn’t be missed.

I was entering high school when I finally realized that the crosswalk signs said “Pedestrian Crossing” and not “Presbyterian Crossing.”

When we here the word pedestrian, most of the time we think of walking and people who walk – like me, frequently spotted on foot around town. The word comes from Latin, pes, foot, and we have a host of related words: pedestal, podiatry, pedal, paw, pedicure. My Merriam-Webster Dictionary actually lists that definition second. The first definition is: “commonplace, unimaginative.”

The author of the second Thessalonian letter doesn’t use the word pedestrian. Yet it is very clear from the wording that the writer is definitely convinced that faith in God and in God’s Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, is anything but commonplace, unimaginative, prosaic, dull, pedestrian.

People don’t brag about the ordinary or the mediocre. The letter writer says that he and his fellow believers are “bragging” about the Thessalonian church people to all the churches they visit. “We tell about your endurance and faithfulness in all the harassments and trouble that you have put up with.” When was the last time someone bragged about you?

We forget that being Christian was an oddity. People and governors were afraid of Christians. They were perceived to be the terrorists of the first century. There is nothing pedestrian about that. What if you had to skulk around to come to church? What if you had to go to an unmarked door on a nondescript street and tap a secret code, and answer with a password? It would be just like going a speakeasy during Prohibition. Christian’s didn’t want to live that way, but they often had to for safety’s sake.

The Christian calling is seldom to a vocation of ease and comfort, but to a unity with Christ in suffering. As Paul wrote the Roman believers,

Don't you know that all who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore we were buried together with him through baptism into his death, so that just as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, we too can walk in newness of life. If we were united together in a death like his, we will also be united together in a resurrection like his. (Romans 6:3-5)

Many of us may actually be troubled by such a statement. Our culture is one of seems to do everything it can to avoid suffering and deny death. Our sister and brother Christians who live marginally in our own country or in less developed countries of the world find Paul’s words a source of comfort. It is the same as Jesus speaking to Zacchaeus and inviting himself to the tax collector’s house for lunch, an act which totally transforms Zacchaeus by bringing him to repentance and to Jesus’ affirmation: “Today, salvation has come to this household.”

The Thessalonian letter writer says that the people’s faithfulness under duress “shows that God's judgment is right, and that you will be considered worthy of God's kingdom for which you are suffering.”

Suffering is suffering. Except for a few people who seem to groove on dark linings to silver clouds and almost seem to thrive on being put upon, we don’t take easily to suffering. Our general rule is to innoculate ourselves against suffering. And if that doesn’t work, then we over-medicate. Alcohol, shopping, gambling, legal drugs, illegal drugs, pornography, arrogant authoritarian ego power trips, to name just few. People in the world suffer horrible physical, mental, economic trauma as Christians. We cannot pray enough for our Christian brothers and sisters in Middle East, in Iran, Iraq, Syria, Egypt and Sudan in particular. Suffering for the faith is not isolated to that part of the world. Wherever there are Christians, there will be suffering.

We suffer – not brutally – but we do suffer. We suffer because we want people to join us in knowing Christ, yet few come. We suffer because we feel guilty because we don’t know how to speak of Christ’s love to others. We suffer because we live in ghettos of our own making and we interact less and less with people we don’t know and have little reason to know. We suffer because we feel as if the world is closing in on us and we are developing a pessimism that is like a polarized lens preventing Christ’s light to shine powerfully into our lives. We suffer because we are clinging so desperately to what little we think we have that we cannot open our hands to receive the vast quantities of Spirit gifts that a gracious, inviting, merciful, forgiving, saving God is seeking to heap into our individual lives and the life of our community.

Jesus said, “Whoever comes to me and doesn’t hate father and mother, spouse and children, and brothers and sisters — yes, even one’s own life — cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26). Psychotherapist Carl Jung said that a lot of unnecessary suffering comes into the world because people will not accept the “legitimate suffering” that comes from being human. Father Richard Rohr, a Franciscan priest, suggests that life is a crucible, a vessel that holds molten metal in one place long enough to be purified and clarified. We work very hard trying to lower the temperatures of our lives so that we never get molten enough, long enough, to let God’s grace purify and clarify us. Jesus said that the truth will set you free. Rohr says that “before the truth ‘sets you free,’ it tends to make you miserable.

Rohr goes on to say that creation itself already believes the gospel and lives the pattern of death and resurrection, even if unknowingly. Necessary suffering is the daily cycle of day and night, the changing seasons, the lives of predators and prey.

The letter writer and his friends pray for the Thessalonian believers. They pray for their endurance. By its very nature, endurance is not something that we can develop in a hurry. It takes a lifetime, and even then we are only partly on the way. Through endurance we can gain a unique relationship with God, see God’s imprint on the world and on our lives, and move on to transcend deadly despair on the one hand or naive optimism on the other as we move in faith to an abundant joy, an enduring hope, a faithfulness in little, with much, with all.

On this All Saints Sunday, we remember not just the friends and family members who died in the last twelve months. We remember all the faithful believers who directly or indirectly have made it possible for us to believe and to act on our belief. Salvation has come to our lives. We are children of faithful Abraham and Sarah. We believe in a loving, sovereign God who rules with grace and with justice. There is nothing pedestrian about being Presbyterian. Christians are out of the ordinary.

Thanks be to God!

Unless noted otherwise, all scripture references are from The Common English Bible, © 2011 www.commonenglishbible.com 
Copyright 2013 First Presbyterian Church of Waverly, Ohio. Reprinted by permission.