Seventh Sunday of Easter, May 24, 2009

Lessons designated by the Common Lectionary include: Acts 1: 15-17, 21-26, Psalm 1, I John 5: 9-13, John 17: 6-19

My determination to follow the lectionary readings and hopefully to add interesting and helpful comments on them is receiving a test this week. With the exception of Psalm 1, I find them at least initially neither inspiring nor helpful. (Praise God the United Church of Christ takes the lectionary seriously but doesn’t legalistically mandate following it every week!)

The reading from Acts describes the process of replacing Judas with Matthias. There was one other contender in the running, someone named “Joseph, called Barsabbas,…also known as Justus.” (1:23) Apparently even prayer couldn’t help Peter and the other disciples to choose one over the other, so they cast lots and the winner was Matthias. What does the lesson teach us? That we choose leaders by casting lots? That chance points the way to effectiveness? Or that by casting lots God magically intervenes and determines the outcome? Maybe the lesson is about bringing the number of disciples back to the original twelve in keeping with the traditional twelve tribes of their Hebrew ancestry. Or maybe it’s about how to be a good loser. What did happen to Joseph, called Barsabbas…also known as Justus? Or to the winner Matthias for that matter?

What we know is that neither of them attracted much attention. There was a now-lost Gospel of Matthias that was condemned as a Gnostic heresy. One legend about Barsabbas was that he was able to drink poison and come to no harm. Both seem pretty irrelevant bits of information and not preaching material. A positive spin, however, is put on both of them by Biblical scholars. They tell us that the two spent the rest of their lives witnessing to Jesus and to the power of the Resurrection in unheralded and persistent ways winning much of the Roman world to Christ. Paul simply got most of the credit. Maybe so, but no one really knows. Again, perhaps what’s most helpful is that there were clearly many witnesses and laborers in the early church we know nothing about whose character and whose faith provided a great gift to a cruel world. And when thinking about it, that’s still the case, isn’t it? The contemporary Matthias’s and Barabbas’s still hold it all together — thanks be to God!

In reading a commentary by Walter Breuggemann, the lessons from I John and John’s gospel also challenge my usual homiletical interest. He and his colleagues write that both the Gospel and the epistle “castigate those who are unable to make a decision about Jesus.” There’s a harshness about the demand for faith in these passages that is “off-putting” and “otherworldly.” Are honest doubt and the struggle for understanding to be condemned? In the high-priestly prayers John puts into the mouth of Jesus he seems Gnostic-like and demonstrates a radical otherworldliness that other accounts of Jesus’ life contradict. While that otherworldliness may indeed protect a person from the corruption and distortion of contemporary values, we should also recognize that in this world for every terrorist, torturer and thief, there are a thousand people willing to risk their lives to help and act with justice and love. It is within the worldly struggle that we are saved and not a part from it.

These are the kind of passages from scripture that need a group discussion in which such ideas expressed above can be challenged and perhaps better insights than my own can be gained.

Among the lections assigned for this Sunday, if we read only Psalm 1, we’d be well fed. It’s been and continues to be sage counsel that offers perspectives on how to effectively and faithfully form ourselves in life. The Civil Rights song so often sung about a tree planted by the waters that provides such sustenance that we shall not be moved in our quest for justice comes, of course, from this Psalm. It deserves our attention and reflection.

Happy are those
who do not follow the advice of the wicked,
or take the path that sinners tread,
or sit in the seat of scoffers;
but their delight is in the law of the Lord,
and on his law they meditate day and night.
They are like trees
planted by streams of water,
which yield their fruit in its season,
and their leaves do not wither.
In all that they do, they prosper.
The wicked are not so,
but are like chaff that the wind drives away.
Therefore the wicked will not stand in the judgment,
nor sinners in the congregation of he righteous,
but the way of the wicked will perish.
Psalm 1

Ralph Ahlberg

~ by Immanuel Congregational Church on May 18, 2009.