Rev. Kevin M. Pleas

Acts 1:15-17, 21-26 May 24, 2009

In those days Peter stood up among the believers (together the crowd numbered about one hundred twenty persons) and said, "Friends, the scripture had to be fulfilled, which the Holy Spirit through David foretold concerning Judas, who became a guide for those who arrested Jesus - for he was numbered among us and was allotted his share in this ministry."

So one of the men who have accompanied us during all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, beginning from the baptism of John until the day when he was taken up from us - one of these must become a witness with us to his resurrection." So they proposed two, Joseph called Barsabbas, who was also known as Justus, and Matthias. Then they prayed and said, "Lord, you know everyone's heart. Show us which one of these two you have chosen to take the place in this ministry and apostleship from which Judas turned aside to go to his own place." And they cast lots for them, and the lot fell on Matthias; and he was added to the eleven apostles.

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For my sermon this morning I'd like to do a little deeper than usual bible study. Knowing that, I wanted to give those of you who would take this opportunity to get some well needed rest a chance to get comfortable. I'll try not to disturb you by talking too loud or passionately. (Laughter)

Sometimes I get to wondering why a particular passage of scripture ended up in the Bible. Did you ever wonder that? Some people, of course, believe that everything in the Bible is there because God put it there. Personally, I think the process was a lot messier than that suggests. Did you know, for instance, that it took over three hundred years for a consensus to emerge in the church about which books should and should not be included in the Bible? Three, Hundred, Years. It's true. The earliest writing we know of that gives a complete list of exactly those twenty-seven books that make up our New Testament, comes from a man named Athanasius, who wrote up that list in the year 367 CE. Just imagine, they needed to decide what to include among the most important writings of our Christian faith, but they took three hundred years to do it. Amazing.

I don't usually bother with details like that in my sermons because most of the time it's a little hard to see what difference it could possibly make to us. But, as I said, sometimes I get to wondering why some passages made the cut and some didn't. Today's story, as it happens, is a really good example.

I imagine, in the early days of the emerging Christian church, there must have been a lot going on that could have been put in the book of Acts. The book is only 28 chapters long. In my Bible that works out to about 32 pages. It's not a big book by our standards. Paper was terribly expensive back then. Even so, I think we have to assume that when Luke was doing the writing - Luke, some of you may not know, wrote both the gospel and the book of Acts - out of all the things he could have included, he must have picked out those he thought were the most important. Makes sense, right?

The question is, what makes this story, the choosing of an apostle to replace Judas, so important that he decided to include it? The setting, we're told, is Jerusalem after the resurrection of Jesus. "After his suffering," it says in an earlier verse, "[Jesus] presented himself alive to them by many convincing proofs, appearing to them during forty days and speaking about the kingdom of God." Jesus tells them that they are soon to receive the gift of the Holy Spirit, after which they are to begin their ministry. Then, accompanied by two angels, he ascends into heaven on a white cloud. That's the story told in the first fourteen verses of the book of Acts.

We know that Pentecost is coming up next week. We call it the birthday of the church. It's when that gift of the Holy Spirit came rushing down on everyone like a mighty wind and created such havoc. But between these two events, as Luke tells it, between Jesus' ascension into heaven and the day of Pentecost, we have ten days where the disciples were left to their own devices. And during that period, during those ten days, the one story that needed to be told, the one story Luke felt needed to be preserved in the limited space he had, is about the choosing of a new apostle to take the place of Judas as one of the twelve.

Now, if you're not a student of the Bible you might be thinking, "Well, so what?" What's in there is in there and what isn't, isn't, right? But you have to understand that nothing, absolutely nothing, got into the Bible willy-nilly. It is all there for some reason; every bit of it. We might not like the reasons or necessarily agree with them. There are certainly some passages of scripture I would have left out, if it were up to me. But the point is, for every passage of scripture, somebody, somewhere believed it was important enough to include, and it can be very interesting to ask yourself why.

We can't always know the answer, of course, but in the case of today's story, the "why" seems to be this: structure matters. Structure is important. How the church is structured that is, how it's organized, is a matter of great importance. At least, that's apparently what Luke believed. Jesus chose twelve disciples to be apostles and told them that "When the Son of Man is seated on the throne of his glory, you who have followed me will also sit on twelve thrones, judging the twelve tribes of Israel." (Matthew 19:28) This seemed to mean that Jesus had pre-ordained that his church was to be organized around those twelve apostles he himself had chosen. But then, when Judas betrayed Jesus, it threw them all into a crisis. Suddenly it seemed that the whole notion of "Apostolic Succession" was in jeopardy.

Peter, all by himself, decides he has to fix it. He has them carefully select two candidates who are both a) male, and b) people who'd been with Jesus from the beginning, and then, essentially, after a bit of prayer, he flips a coin. It's a strange story isn't it? But it gets even stranger when you know that, after this story, the guy who won the toss, Matthais, is not ever mentioned again, anywhere. Not once. He simply fades into the mists of history. Luke thought it was important enough to tell this story, but then never says another word about it, and neither does anyone else. And if that isn't weird enough, after this story, nothing is ever said again, in all of Christian history as far as I know, about the importance of having twelve apostles as any kind of ongoing part of the structure of the church. Fascinating.

The story was important enough for Luke to put it in, but then it just stopped being important, apparently, and we don't know why. It's like a branch of a family tree that simply died out. It's like finding an old copy of church bi-laws with a section in it about a committee that no longer exists. No one ever bothered to re-write them and take the section out because, well, after all, they're just bi-laws. Church people hardly ever care about the bi-laws, unless they're mad about something that's going on in the church. Most of the time, they're just there in the background and we don't very often bother to bring them up to date. So you end up with passages that were important once upon a time, but just aren't anymore. But this isn't church bi-laws we're talking about. It's the Bible. You would think there would be more concern.

The story Luke tells is interesting, historically speaking. It gives us a glimpse into one of the earliest moments of the church after Jesus, trying to figure out what it was supposed to be. It could be that this story was told because the early church wanted to make the point that there were to be no women in positions of authority. That's possible. Or maybe, because the replacement apostles had to have been with Jesus from the beginning, it could be that Luke was trying to build a case that the "Apostle Paul" wasn't really an apostle at all and never could be. That's also possible. But all of this is just guess-work. The simple fact is, this story represents a moment in history of the church that has come down to us, almost accidentally it seems, as part of our sacred scriptures, and we don't know why.

Well, if that's the case, the obvious question is, why bother talking about it at all? Well, I'm glad you asked. I've been thinking about this story a lot this week. There are several points I thought I could try to make out of this. Pam actually came into my office yesterday when I was about half way through writing. When she asked me how it was going I said, "Well, I've managed to get some things written, but I still have no idea where it's going to end up." Sometimes that happens. Finally though, what really hit me over the head was not so much the story itself, but the whole story behind the story; the importance Luke seems to have attached to this story, followed by the seeming lack of importance. It all just seems so familiar to me. Let me ask you, how often in our lives do we become completely wrapped up in something that seems so earth-shakingly important at the time, but later proves to have been no big deal at all?

It happens all the time doesn't it. We really invest ourselves in the importance of a particular moment; in the importance of an election or a particular piece of legislation, in the importance of how a church is structured or how well our children are doing. We invest ourselves deeply in what we believe to be the critically important things of our lives. That's part of what it means to be human; to be invested in the things we consider important. And then, what we experience, sometimes, not always, is that these important things turn out not to be important in the grand scheme of things. But until we figure that out, we go about our lives, spending a lot of time, energy, anxiety, sleepless nights and tension in our jaws (which is what kept me out of church last week) over things that really aren't all that important at all, as it turns out. We don't know that in advance of course. What we know is that we have to respond to the moment and we do the best we can to sort out what's important from what isn't.

In the process, we get so wrapped up in the way we think things just have to be. We become so bound by our need to control our lives, to put just the right structures in place so that we can live in the illusion that everything is going to go according our plans. Nothing unexpected or unwanted will ever be able to sneak up on us or catch us with our pants down. We want so much to believe we have enough power over our lives to make things work out the way we want them to, when the truth is, much of the time, we're just kidding ourselves. Much of the time we don't know what's coming and we can't know what's coming. But we don't want to believe it because then we would have to face the reality that life is uncertain, and uncertainty drives us crazy.

I have to say, honestly, it's probably better to live in the illusion of control than it is to be consumed by our fears and anxieties. But the good news is, illusion and fear are not our only two choices. We could take a lesson here from Luke, though maybe not the lesson he intended. Jesus told the disciples to wait for Pentecost, to wait until they were being guided by the Spirit of God. He knew that once that happened, the disciples would know what to do. They wouldn't have to flip coins. But apparently, just sitting around waiting was starting to get to them, and Peter decided to take things into his own hands; unnecessarily, as it turned out. It's not that Peter was doing anything wrong. He was just trying to take care of something he thought was important and needed to be nailed down. What he didn't know was, in the wisdom of the Spirit, that whole business of twelve male apostles just didn't matter anymore.

For us, maybe what we can learn here is that, while there isn't anything wrong with our making plans, we need to leave room for the Spirit to change our plans when the need arises and perhaps meet those changes with a bit of grace. Maybe what we can learn is a greater measure of trust, that even when we don't know how the future is going to play itself out, what we can know is that God does know, and we are in God's hands, and the Spirit of God is with us, even to the end of the age.

Amen.