Grace Presbyterian Church
May 17, 2015, Easter 7B
Acts 1:15-17, 20-26
The Minutes of the Church’s First-Ever Business Meeting
One of my favorite
writers of any sort is the science-fiction and fantasy author Ray Bradbury. The
author of such renowned works as Fahrenheit
451 (my personal favorite), The
Martian Chronicles, and Dandelion
Wine had, to me, a knack for finding just the right words to express the
particular moment of the story, no matter how expansive or how pithy. One of the prime examples of this knack
is found in Chapter 31 of another of his most popular novels, Something Wicked This Way Comes. Because
it is so precisely worded and so particular to its moment in the story, I feel
that I must quote the chapter in full:
"Nothing much
else happened, all the rest of that night."
Yes, that’s the whole chapter.
In today’s reading from the Book of Acts, the remaining
disciples find themselves in Chapter 31. You may remember from last week that
the disciples were instructed by Jesus, just before he ascended and was taken
up to the presence of God the Father, that they would soon be “baptized with the Holy Spirit,” but
that in the meantime they were to go back into Jerusalem and wait. It’s been a
few days now since that ascension and that promise, and…the disciples are still
waiting. And nothing much else is happening, all the rest of that day or night.
When we last left the disciples they were being chided by
the two men in white for staring up into the sky, which seems unfair to us; a
person being lifted up and disappearing into the clouds seems stare-worthy to
me, at least. The intervening scriptures tell us that the disciples then
returned to Jerusalem, to the upper room where they had been staying (possibly
the same upper room where Jesus had had his last supper with them? Possibly).
We learn that their days were occupied with prayer, along with “certain women”
and also members of Jesus’s family, who haven’t been part of the story for a
while now. We also get a roll call of the disciples, all eleven of them.
Ah, there’s the rub. Eleven. It was the elephant in the
room; their number was reduced by one, and the one was about as painful a
subject as possible. The traitor. The one who went beyond denying Jesus (like
Peter) or running away at the first sign of danger (like the rest of the
disciples). The one who collaborated with the ones who wanted Jesus out of the
way. Judas Iscariot. One has to feel sorry for the “other Judas,” the disciple
listed with the others in verse 13.
Luke had, in an act of blatant foreshadowing, identified
Judas Iscariot as the one “who became a
traitor” all the way back in the gospel of Luke; now the author slips in a
rather gruesome account of Judas Iscariot’s demise, as if to reinforce that the
betrayer’s absence was permanent. There would be no chance either for any kind
of reconciliation or for holding Judas to account. He was gone, and his crimes
would live on well after his death, even to this day. The name “Judas” still
works as a shorthand for a betrayer or traitor.
Besides Judas’s act of betrayal, though, there is another
factor nagging at the disciples, though. “The Twelve” aren’t twelve anymore.
The original disciples, reminiscent of the ancient twelve tribes of Israel, are
no longer whole. Eleven just doesn’t have the same impact or historical heft.
Already feeling a bit cut off with Jesus departed, the disciples seem to be
cognizant of their incompleteness and perhaps of their seeming loss of
connection to their heritage.
At least this seems to be part of what motivates Peter
when he begins to address the gathering of Jesus’s followers in verse 15. It’s as if he can’t go any longer with
this specter of the traitor hanging over the group. Not surprisingly, he turns
to the scripture to back up his idea; verse 20 mostly consists of two different
citations from the Psalms. As Peter quotes them, Psalm 69, verse 25 and Psalm 109,
verse 8 respectively, they sound quite respectable and important and certainly
appropriate to the situation; when read in their context, as parts of Psalm 69
and Psalm 109, however, their citation by Peter here seems to be a stretch at
best. Psalm 109:8 seems to be particularly inappropriate, as the psalmist is
decrying the actions of his enemies against him, accusing them of seeking to
bring a false accusation against him and to have another take his position. Still,
Peter is moving on, and armed with these conveniently picked verses he moves
forward with his agenda item; choosing a new apostle to replace the traitor
Judas.
Aside from his psalm verses Peter doesn’t really get
into why he is so eager to get a replacement in place, aside from the idea that
someone “must become a witness with us
to his resurrection” as expressed in verse 22. It’s possible that he’s
really hung up on the idea that the twelve apostles should somehow mirror or
replicate those twelve tribes of Israel as recorded in the Torah. Maybe he’s
just determined to get over Judas Iscariot’s betrayal and move on somehow. Maybe it’s just his well-established and
often-demonstrated impulsive personality that can’t sit still.
For whatever reason Peter makes his proposal and the
group, numbering around 120 in all, goes along. Two names are proposed, or at
least two individuals – one of them, “Joseph
called Barsabbas, who was also known as Justus” was a three-named monster –
and one was chosen by casting lots. This no doubt sounds bizarre to us, and is
not a recommended course of action for nominating committees, so don’t get any
ideas. It did, though, have a fairly extensive place in Hebrew tradition as a
way of removing the human element and leaving a choice entirely up to God. The
lot fell on the man with a simpler name, Matthias, and he was from then on
numbered with the apostles.
If Matthias is of particular interest to you, you’re
out of luck; he is never mentioned again in the Bible. But he is hardly alone;
most of the other, “original” apostles don’t show up again either. Peter and
John make appearances in the early chapters of Acts, some of which have been
heard in sermons in recent weeks. Peter in fact manages to maintain some
visibility throughout much of Acts.
On the other hand, the apostle James is only named one
more time, in Acts 12, when he becomes the first of the apostles to be
martyred. A man named Philip appears preaching in Samaria and then witnessing
to the Ethiopian treasurer in Acts 8, but it is not Philip the apostle but
Philip the deacon, one of the seven appointed in Acts 6. Otherwise, none of the
apostles names in verse 12 appear again in the history of the church recorded
in Acts.
This is not to say that they are somehow “failures” by
any means. But it is to point out that the church – such as it was at this
point – was not going to stay under the control or leadership of this
particular group of twelve. It was going to grow, and expand, and branch out in
ways that could not be managed or controlled by this structure that they had
known for so many years.
Instead, the figures who become increasingly important
as the book of Acts unfolds are people like Stephen, one of the seven deacons
appointed in chapter six and a very early martyr for the faith; the aforementioned
Philip, possibly also one of the seven; and of course Paul, the unlikely
persecutor-turned-apostle. Then individuals like Paul’s missionary partners,
first Barnabas and then Silas; James, the brother of Jesus, who eventually
becomes the head of the church at Jerusalem; and “foreign-born” missionary
partners like Timothy, the wife-and-husband preaching team Priscilla and
Aquila, and individual figures like Lydia, the “God-worshiper” who housed the
missionaries Paul and Silas in Thyatira.
The point is not to denigrate the “original twelve.”
The point is, however, that no matter how much they had devoted themselves to
prayer, they hadn’t necessarily caught on to the kind of transformation that
was coming to them. While they were busy preserving or recreating the structure
in which they had worked and lived for their years in Christ, the Holy Spirit
was getting ready to blow through that structure and break down the barriers
the little group of believers had unwittingly built up around themselves. They
had yet to truly grasp the truth of Jesus’s words in verse eight, about being
witnesses “in all Judea and Samaria, and
to the ends of the earth.”
The book of Acts illustrates this progress remarkably
well. The group of believers in Jerusalem remains the focus through the first
seven chapters of the book, before the believers begin to be scattered in a
wave of persecution after Stephen’s death. Even though the disciples (we’re
starting to call them “apostles” now) remained in Jerusalem for the time, the
Holy Spirit didn’t remain confined to Jerusalem. As Philip the deacon (not the
apostle) found himself in Samaria he began to witness to the resurrected
Christ, and they began to believe and be baptized. Peter and John were sent out
from Jerusalem to check out the story, but returned to Jerusalem after. In the
meantime Philip the deacon was sent out by the Lord to witness to that
Ethiopian treasurer, sending the faith even further along to an even more
distant people.
In the meantime the newly-converted Paul stirs up
trouble with his preaching, and Peter learns a hard lesson about God’s
wide-open arms in his encounter with the centurion Cornelius and his family,
having to process the fact that even (shudder!)
Gentiles are receiving salvation, something with which the church at Jerusalem
never fully makes peace. While Paul and Barnabas are sent out by the Holy
Spirit to “the ends of the earth,” the church at Jerusalem, to the very end of
the book, still remains deeply uncomfortable the idea that Gentiles can go
straight to faith in Christ without becoming “Judaized” by undergoing
circumcision or some other similar rite. And it’s hard to imagine what the
Jerusalem church, which after all had gone along with Peter’s decree that only
a man could fill the role of Apostle #12, would have made of such preachers and
leaders as Priscilla and Lydia.
In short, the little group of believers really didn’t
know what was coming. They would be faithful, to be sure, as we may recall from
the experiences of Peter and John in the Temple. But the Church just wasn’t
going to continue to be what they had known. The Holy Spirit wasn’t going to be
contained in the ways they had known. That Jesus had ascended and gone to the
right hand of God the Father did not mean “the
restoration of the kingdom to Israel,” as they asked in verse six, nor did
it mean the life that they had known with Jesus in person was going to be
restored or restarted.
Yes, this might well be a cautionary warning to us here
in this place; if we are truly seeking the guidance of the Holy Spirit for the
future of this church we had better be prepared for the possibility that it
might be something we currently can’t imagine. But it’s also a warning to each
of us in much the same way. If you had told me eight years ago, when I was
accepting a job offer at the University of Kansas, that I would end up back in
Florida as pastor of a church in Hogto--, er Gainesville, I’d have laughed at
you so hard.
And yet as a church this is all we can do. We cannot
recreate what was before. We cannot grow this church, in numbers or in
faithfulness or in spiritual maturity, only by replicating ourselves. We can
keep doing what we do, and simple demographics state we will be gone in ten or
twenty or fifty years – whether we speak of this church by itself, or our
denomination, or the church more broadly.
But if we truly submit to the guidance of the Holy
Spirit, there is the threat of change. It might not look familiar to us. It
might involve people we don’t like or don’t trust. It’s scary. And yet, if we
truly want to be the people of God, the body of Christ, we really have no
choice.
Pentecost is coming. The Holy Spirit will come in like
a rushing wind. Are we ready?
Hymns (PH ’90): “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” (260), “The One
Is Blest” (158), “Arise, Your Light Is Come” (411)
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