Scripture describes
God’s relationship to God’s people…
people…
messy people like you and like me.
Sometimes
we forget that, we forget that the Bible reports fallible people being loved by
a persistent God. We so easily miss the humanness of things.
These people working out God’s desire that we might be one as Father and
Son are one,
working out the Spirit’s holy calling to love one another,
working out the strange reality of belonging to God and being in the
World.
I imagine many of the
experiences of the early church, feel more like the experiences of the present
church, than we would like to allow.
Prayer
I imagine we separate out
and sacralize the experiences of the early church—distancing them from our own
lives, because doing so is easier than hearing how those experiences might hit
home.
Might tickle our ears—echo and mirror our own realities
today.
Imagine what Peter is going through here in the first
chapter of Acts.
Imagine what those 120
people are saying to him:
“Pastor Peter! Pastor
Peter! We feel so betrayed by Judas—we thought he was one of us… we thought he
would lead us with the 11.
“Pastor Peter! Pastor
Peter! Jesus has ascended and has promised the Spirit. What now? How will we
know when the Spirit is acting? Is it already active? Why do we keep WAITING
and PRAYING… we need to DO something!
“Pastor Peter! Pastor
Peter! Judas is dead! I mean, we didn’t particularly like ‘em, but he’s dead.
Look at his empty seat, there is a hole where he used to be, we’re not whole anymore!
Do something!
“Pastor Peter! Pastor
Peter! That empty spot is killing us! It feels like everything is unraveling… how
can we continue? Will there even be a church in a few years?”
Poor Peter. He does
what he can, everyone prays together, scour the scriptures until they shine. And
then, in his coffee induced delirium he lifts up a chunk of psalm 69 and
another chunk from psalm 108, the first is about the guilty being disinherited,
the second is about appointing a new person to take the position of the guilty…
“AHAH!” Poor Peter says, “We need to replace Judas, so that there will be
12 again.”
So, he recommends this
to the 120 people gathered together—and they go for it… what do they got to
lose?
Despite there being
both men and women who followed Jesus, who witnessed the resurrection
—the first witness to the resurrection, in fact,
Jesus’ own mother, in fact,
Both present there
—Peter grabs two men, and says, “Let’s choose one of these to replace
Judas. Let’s cast lots.”
And they do.
And we never hear from
either Justus or Matthias again.
They fade away.
Instead the Spirit
comes and shakes everything up: Greeks, Eunuchs, Sorcerers, and Women all are
moved into this community, to preach the Gospel, to become like the 12.
More amazing still, a
great persecutor of the Church, one as bad and dishonorable as Judas—Paul—fills
that space left empty by Judas’ betrayal and death.
Paul is grafted into
this league of Apostles… like a wild branch grafted onto a tame tree
—he weighs so heavy that he splits open the tree, creating a branch so
wide and green that no one knows what to do with it—not least Paul himself… (that’s why he writes so much, right!)
I imagine Peter, in
those quiet moments, at night unable to get to sleep, would ask himself, “How did
we get here? What’s God up to? How have we got through all this, despite God
acting in places, and ways, and with people, who the 12 apostles found impossible?”
And I imagine too, he might,
on one of those tired, questioning, contemplative nights, have an AHAH moment,
find the answer that he should already have known:
“Did I not eat with
Jesus, and after supper, did he not pray, that:
The invisible God, the Great I AM, be made known in him, and him in us.
That Jesus protected us with a fierce motherly love despite being opposed
by the world.
That we would testify to God’s goodness found in Christ Jesus.
That some would be set aside and sent to be little Christs in the world,
for the sake of the world.”
“I suppose,” he would finish, “Jesus did pray for us, and Jesus’ prayers
for his people are continually answered—not as his people might wish or expect,
but as His Holy Spirit wills.”
And here today, as you
say, “Pastor, look at that empty seat where my friend once sat” and “My own
grandchild has abandoned the church, it is a betrayal!”
Where our Bishop sees the present church as being in the
midst of a great unraveling, where the yarn is lovingly preserved, that it
might be re-used and made into something new and grand, the nature of which we
have not yet seen!
Where our neighbors, and closest partner in ministry, Cross
of Life, has voted to close their doors.
Where the ELCA, in a two-day period, has made history by
electing our first and second female African-descent Bishops, first in Philly
then in Madison, Wisconsin.
Here today, with peril and promise balanced upon a
needle point
—like Peter and his crew, like the early church
—we act,
we pray
we dive into scripture,
and do the work of the Church as we most faithfully know how…
we pray
we dive into scripture,
and do the work of the Church as we most faithfully know how…
—but we also trust that Jesus prayed for us—we know not
how or where the Spirit shall move, but she shall
—Jesus prayed for us and surely his prayers shall not
fall upon deaf ears.
Jesus prayed for us—Unity, Witness, Sanctity, the great
revealing of the I AM’s love for us and our participation in it…
—Jesus prayed for us!
Amen and Alleluia.
