Faithful plodding
Have you ever visited one of the great cathedrals of the world? I think of Washington National Cathedral and Notre Dame and even of Grace Cathedral in our own diocese. The space is soaring. The architecture draws your eyes up to heaven. And the windows are full of color, with stained glass depicting all the great heroes of the Church. The apostles are usually larger than life. St. Peter holds keys in his hand. St. James wears the scallop shell of a pilgrim. St. Bartholomew holds the flaying knives that tradition says were used to kill him. The artistry and care proclaim that these were no ordinary people.
We heard their names this morning. “Peter, and his brother Andrew; James son of Zebedee, and his brother John; Philip and Bartholomew; Thomas and Matthew the tax collector; James son of Alphaeus, and Thaddaeus; Simon the Cananaean, and Judas Iscariot, the one who betrayed Jesus.”
We’ve remembered these names for two thousand years. We name our churches after them. We depict them in works of art. They were no ordinary people. Or were they?
Let’s look at that list of names for a minute.
Matthew was a tax collector, a man who made a living extorting money from his neighbors to fund an occupying empire. Simon was a zealot, one of a group willing to expel Rome from Jerusalem by any means necessary — including violence. Thomas doubted. Peter denied. Judas betrayed.
They’re all still part of the Church’s story, all still depicted in statues and in stained glass. Even Judas makes the Gospel’s list of apostles — and makes it into at least a few stained glass windows.
But surely there were better-qualified people available in first-century Galilee. There were scribes and scholars who knew the law better than any fisherman. There were certainly hundreds if not thousands of kind, quiet, faithful people who held their families and communities together. And I’m sure Jesus could have assembled a group that worked better together. What sensible leader would put Matthew the Roman collaborator and Simon the anti-imperial insurgent on the same team?
But these are the people Jesus chose. They weren’t perfect. They weren’t saints when Jesus met them. But he sent them out, without provision or preparation, like sheep into the midst of wolves. He told them to be wise as serpents and gentle as doves. He warned them that they would suffer, that they would be hated by many they encountered.
They went anyway. Maybe it’s that that made them saints.
Their faithfulness didn’t gain them fame or fortune. Yes, we know their names. And we know the Church that they built. But we don’t know that much else about them. A few legends about Peter and James and John have come down to us, traditions about how they lived and died. Many of the other apostles didn’t even get that much. The second James in the Gospel’s list of apostles is known to history as James the Lesser — not a nickname anyone would seek out. Bartholomew and Nathanael might be the same person, but then again they might not. And Thaddaeus we know nothing about. The legacy of the apostles is just this: Jesus sent them, and they went.
Certainly, there was some drama in the apostles’ lives. Tradition tells us that Jesus’s warnings came true for many of them. Some of them were indeed dragged before governors and kings, forced to testify, imprisoned, and even killed.
But most of what even the most famous saints did was slower, more ordinary. They walked along dusty roads, traveled light, talked with those they met along the way.
And that’s what discipleship looks like most of the time, even today. Once in a long while, discipleship can be dramatic, even heroic. More often it’s ordinary. More often it looks like a tired but faithful follower of Jesus plodding along the road that’s in front of them.
It’s that sort of patient, faithful plodding that Paul talks about in Romans — although he says it more eloquently. “Suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope.”
That’s not the arc of a hero, rushing in to save the day against great odds. It’s the story of a plodder. It’s the story of the disciple who goes where he’s sent, who puts one foot in front of another, maybe for years, until he becomes something more than he was at the beginning. It’s the story of the disciple who trusts that the Holy Spirit will guide her voice when the time comes for her to speak. It’s the story of those loved by God even when they don’t deserve it.
And these sorts of plodding saints aren’t found only in stained glass windows, or only in the past. Many of you learned a hymn when you were children that tells this same truth in a different way. “I sing a song of the saints of God, patient and brave and true, who toiled and fought and lived and died for the Lord they loved and knew. And one was a doctor, and one was a queen, and one was a shepherdess on the green... You can meet them in school, or in lanes, or at sea, in church, or in trains, or in shops, or at tea, for the saints of God are just folk like me, and I mean to be one too.”
The sentiment is sweet, but think carefully about what that hymn is claiming. Jesus’s apostles and the other great saints of the Church were folk like us. And we can be folk like them. There probably aren’t stained glass windows enough for all of us. But that’s ok. We can all be the sort of plodding saints the apostles started out as. And through days and weeks and years of ordinary discipleship, endurance will become character, and character will become hope. “They were all of them saints of God, and I mean, God helping, to be one too.”
Cover image: A group of Ecuadorian women covers themselves up from the sun, while traveling a dusty road, leaving the town of Pucara, Ecuador. June 15, 2021. Source: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/6597383