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Acts 1:15-26, I John 5:9-15, John 17:11b-19
St. Stephen's Episcopal Church, West Valley City, UT
The Rev. W. Lee Shaw
This past week I was on the annual clergy retreat. Our guest and presenter was Neil Alexander, Bishop of Atlanta, a former seminary professor of liturgics and homiletics. We spent three sessions with him talking about liturgy, about the tradition of the church and the shape of things to come in our liturgical life. It was a very rich weekend. He is one of the nominees for Presiding Bishop and I am fully convinced that he would be a wise choice of his colleagues to be chosen.
He made the oft-used comment that, “Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living and tradition is the living faith of the dead.” We are continually balancing our understanding of tradition with movement in church, be it in our liturgy, our theology, our church polity.
In our Acts reading we read how tradition was used to create a new dynamic for this band of believers. They needed to do something new: choose a replacement for Judas. But they relied on tradition, their past in making this innovation in their common life. It had to be someone who had “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.” The new person had to have a tradition with the community to be a first person “witness with us to his resurrection.”
We do not really have information on Matthias, the man chosen to continue that first person witness of the disciples. We can speculate, however, that he was deeply involved in the life of the community, respected, faithful, and acknowledged for gifts that are now hidden from us. I feel that there are a number of people, men and women, like Matthias in our midst; faithful and respected, but quiet with gifts too often hidden from us. I have a sense that it is these Matthias types of people that keep so much of the church going from day to day and age to age. These are the people who show up and get things done, quietly, faithfully, and too often unrecognized by the community.
So to all of those Matthiases out there: Thank you for your faithfulness and your ministry among us.
I do not think it is unreasonable to suppose that Matthias was one of the group gathered in the upper room with the rest of the community and heard what we now call the “High Priestly Prayer” of Jesus recorded in John 17. This is Jesus' prayer for his disciples, his friends.
We each are called to be disciples, followers of Christ and so in a very real way, this prayer can be read for us as well. It is not locked in time and place, rather we can hear it in our own lives as well.
“...that they may be one as we are one.” Jesus yearns for us to be one in love and relationship with one another. Recall his commandment to love. “One” is not one in doctrine and even belief, “One” is in relationship and love so that we see one another as connected to us, not as the “other.”
“...so that they may have my joy made complete in themselves.” Jesus wants us to have his joy to make us whole, make us fully who we are called to be. Sometimes we forget that one of the fruits of the Spirit is joy. That does not mean we always have a silly grin on our face. Rather, it does mean that we can live in the joy and gratitude that we are loved and forgiven so that we can be even more whole in our life in God and with each other.
“...I ask you to protect them from the evil one.” Jesus is concerned about our well being. I suspect there are more then one “evil one” in our lives. The “evil one” is anything that draws us from the love of God and others, takes us from our call to love one another.
“Sanctify them in truth; your word is truth.” This is a full and complex sentence. One way of approaching it is to acknowledge Jesus as the Word of God made manifest in our world. Jesus is the “way, the truth and the life.” We are sanctified, we are made holy, we are set apart from the world through the life and message of Jesus Christ.
Now, all of that sounds rather self-serving at times. It is about us. Until that is we get to the end: “As you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world.” We are sent into the world to build up the community of Christ one person at a time. We are sent into the world to make a difference to those around us by serving them in Christ's name. We are sent into the world to show by word and example, the Good News of God in Christ. And we are sent into the world to model how we can love one another and respect the innate dignity of every human being. As Bp. Alexander noted, “God has given us to each other in order to practice being with God.”