THE CHURCH OF GOD ON MARKET SQUARE

A Sermon by Rev. James D. Brown

Market Square Presbyterian Church

January 20, 2008

 

Scripture:  Isaiah 49:1-7 and 1 Corinthians 1:1-9

 

January is a month for taking stock, for looking back and looking ahead.  I say this during a time when we’re all a bit anxious as our economy shudders in the face of write-offs and meltdowns and lay-offs, and as our wild and wonderful political process for electing a president plays out one more time.

 

It is in this context that I’d like us to set the stage for next Sunday’s annual meeting of our congregation by taking stock of who we are as a congregation.   Congregations—like people—have personalities.  What is ours like?  And what does our profile suggest about our ministry in the days ahead.

 

A good place to begin is with the Church of God in Corinth about twenty-five years after the life and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth.  Think of it, a brief period of time just a bit over twice as long as I’ve been your pastor had elapsed, and Paul is now writing the young church he had helped plant in Corinth a letter. 

 

Richard Hays, who teaches New Testament at Duke University, makes the interesting observation that when we read Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, “we are literally reading someone else’s mail.”[i]  As we read mail intended for the Church of God in Corinth we will gain a glimpse of its personality.  This will certainly provoke reflections about us, about the Church of God on Market Square.  

 

First, a word about the city of Corinth.  In Paul’s time it was a great market place, a center of commerce.  If you look at a map today, you will find it on the Isthmus of Corinth in the south of Greece.  In the first century it overlooked two ports, Cenchreae and Lechaeum.  This was at the very heart of east-west travel in the Mediterranean world, for it connected the Ionian and Aegean seas.  Because the sea voyage around the Peloponnesian peninsula could be so daunting, merchants shipping goods between Italy and Asia usually off-loaded them at one of the two ports, hauled them 10 miles across dry land and, and then reloaded them onto another ship.  In some cases small vessels were actually dragged across the peninsula.  Doing this avoided a 200 mile voyage by sea.

 

When Paul first arrived in Corinth about the year 50 A.D. it was a bustling Roman colony.  Like other such cities in the Roman world, Corinth was the scene of numerous sites of pagan worship, and all sorts of statues of gods and goddesses could be found in the public places—including one of Athena in the agora, the main marketplace.  It was into such fertile soil that Paul planted the Church of God. 

 

In those early days, Christians had no public buildings of their own.  They gathered in the homes of their more affluent brothers and sisters.  Scholars have been able to estimate from the number of groups Paul mentions and the size of villas found in Corinth that there were somewhere between 150-200 Christians at the time of Paul’s writing.  An important sociological note is that they represented a wide spectrum of social and economic classes—including prosperous merchants, slaves, and freed men and women.  The word diverse barely does justice to this brand new mix of humanity making up the Body of Christ.  Rich and poor, slave and free, were being melded into “a network of mutual love and concern,” as Richard Hays puts it.

 

Paul’s letter to this wondrous hodgepodge of humanity is occasioned by two things:  members of the church had sent him a letter asking for advice about a number of things, and, secondly, he had heard from members of a house church headed by a woman named Chloe, that there was serious dissention in the community.  We will talk more about this next week under the heading of “Quarrelsome Christians.” 

 

Today we will look to Paul’s salutation to the Church of God in Corinth for insights about the basic character reflected by 150 or so members of the early church.  Then we will turn to Market Square.  I’ll emphasize two things that Paul says:  Christians are sanctified in Christ and are thereby saints, and the community as a whole is not lacking in any spiritual gifts—two amazing claims. 

 

Paul salutes the Christian community in Corinth as persons who are sanctified, made holy in Christ, and are set aside by God as saints, as God’s elect.  The word hagioi in Greek did not apply in Paul’s day to a handful of holy persons, but to “all the members of the community” who are gathered up in God’s call.  Holiness is God’s gift to the community of the elect.  Paul’s two points form a seamless whole.  All the members in Corinth are saints due to God’s call, and their sainthood is realized in their corporate life.  The church is made up of saints who are not lacking any spiritual gift when they live and work as one.  Incredible!

 

With this in mind, let’s now turn to the Church of God on the Square in the year of our Lord 2008.  I’m not sure just why it is, but in recent months I have been given several interesting gems out of our congregation’s past.  First I received in the mail a sermon preached here in 1884 by Rev. T.H. Robinson, the fourth pastor of Market Square, from which I’ll be quoting in the service being held here at four this afternoon commemorating the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity.

 

More recently Nancy Motter handed me a clipping from our local newspaper dated 1969.  That was the year we celebrated our 175^th anniversary, and Paul Beers, in his Reporter at Large column, had some very interesting things to say about our character as a congregation.  By the way, Paul has been a good friend of Market Square over the years, and until he recently moved into Homeland Retirement Center, he would sometimes worship with us.

 

Paul Beers placed great stress on our Scotch-Irish roots.  A significant number of our forebears in the Presbyterian Church had their roots among Scots who settled in Ireland in the early years of the 17^th century on land confiscated from Irish who rebelled against the English crown.  Over the ensuing years Ulster was the scene of an expanding Scotch-Irish population within an Irish community that was predominately Catholic.  More than once the Scotch-Irish had to flee to places like America.  Things are finally simmering down 400 years later!

 

Paul Beers makes a great deal of our Scotch-Irish roots as a congregation.  Perhaps with tongue in cheek, he observes:

 

It is a common mistake to give all the credit and all the blame

to the Pennsylvania Germans, the stubborn Deutsch, for the

founding of Harrisburg.  Actually a lot of God-fearing,

argumentative Scotch-Irish were involved.

 

He then notes that this Church is the oldest fortress of Scotch-Irishdom in town.  It’s no wonder that Rose Magee was led to our doors by the Holy Spirit to be our seminary intern!  He tells some delightful stories on our ancestors, including one in which a nearby Presbyterian pastor “suggested to his flock that they convert their distilleries into dairies [and] they fired him.”  He also shares an old saying that has it: 

 

The Scotch-Irishman is one who keeps the commandments

     of God and every other thing he can get his hands on. 

 

Paul Beers cites Phil Klein at Penn State who catalogued how these Ulster Scots “took over early Pennsylvania politics, dominating the Legislature, running the courts and bossing everybody.”  What might all this suggest about our personality as a congregation?

 

Paul Beers reminded his readers in 1969 that the official name for our congregation was—and still it—The English Presbyterian Congregation of Harrisburg, as counterpart to the German Salem Church across the way on Chestnut Street.  He then concluded:

 

The ethnic distinction of the Scotch-Irish faded 100 years ago.

Their contemporary reputation for politics, imbibing, revolution

and other vices is no worse than anybody else’s.  But their

dedication to religion, education and individualism remains as

strong as ever.

 

This all too human and very delightful rendition of our character as a congregation points us back to another Paul—the Apostle to Corinth—and his declaration that all of us are saints, and that our sainthood is bound up in a collective—in a community in which our gifts are used for the common good.

 

Let’s think about our sainthood for just a minute.  What is a saint?  Leonard Cohen, in his book, Beautiful Losers, paints an arresting picture:

 

A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human

possibility.  It is impossible to say what that possibility

is.  I think it has something to do with the energy of

love.  Contact with this energy results in the exercise of

a kind of balance in the chaos of existence….

 

It is a kind of balance that is a saint’s glory.  He rides the

drifts like an escaped ski.  His course is the caress of the

hill.  His track is a drawing of the snow in a moment of

its particular arrangement with wind and rock.  Something

in him so loves the world that he gives  himself to the

laws of gravity and chance.  Far from flying with the

angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph

needle the state of the solid bloody landscape.  His house

is dangerous and finite, but he is at home in the world.

He can love the shape of human beings, the fine and

twisted shapes of the heart.  It is good to have among us

such men [and women], such balancing monsters of love.[ii]

 

When Paul salutes us as those who are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints, he is grounding our sainthood in the grace of God that has been given us in Jesus Christ.  Jesus is the one whose balance reveals a saint’s glory, the one who loves the fine and twisted shapes of our hearts, who loves us as we are as children of God.  Our sainthood is God’s gift to us as part of Market Square Church.

 

Here I want to part ways with the other Paul—Paul Beers—on just one point.  In his closing words he says that our “individualism remains as strong as ever.”  I hope he’s wrong, for if Paul the Apostle is correct in saying that we do not lack any spiritual gifts, it is because the gifts are scattered among us and are not the prized possession of any one individual.

 

I hope a distinguishing mark of our personality is that we are so bound together that our gifts, distinct and different though they may be, add up to the collective of sainthood about which Paul speaks so eloquently in his letters to the Corinthian Church.  I believe this is so, and I hope it was so in 1969 and in 1794 as well.  The passing of several of the saints among us these past few weeks, and the outpouring of love and affection for those who grieve the loss of loved ones, is proof positive that God has bound us up within the Body of Christ, so that we are no longer best described only as individuals, but as members of Christ’s body in the world—saints one and all, bound together in love.

 

MARKET SQUARE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH

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