Acts 1:15-17, 21-26
First, in full disclosure, I feel I should be honest enough to say that I'm very tired of these John readings. I like that gospel, I really do, but this endless lingering over abiding and love and abiding and love and abiding and . . . I just don't find it interesting at the moment. Or perhaps, I found it interesting four weeks ago, the first time we heard it. I would say this doesn't feel like a great lectionary decision: eliminate the Old Testament lesson, and read very slowly the twisting and repetitive rhetoric of John for the whole of Easter.
But, onward to an active idea.
The book of Acts is wacky generally, and this is true for many reasons. Jesus fades out, and Paul becomes the main hero. Everyone thinks that the Roman Empire and civilization will embrace the coming reign of God. Bowels fall out of people. It's a wacky book.
This story is wacky specifically. Imagine: we all get together, you and me and a hundred of our closest friends. We were inspired to start a whole new movement by the life and death of our friend. We used to have a kind of executive board who oversaw the functioning of our group, and with the exit of our friend into the clouds--an awkward moment, that--perhaps we might even say our CEO levitated away. At any rate, the executive board has a vacancy. So, all of us shareholders get together at someone's house--let's say, Joseph of Arimathea's house, because at least it was big--and we talk about who should be elected to the executive board. We don't want to replace the CEO--in fact, we all have this fascinating idea that there will be some kind of oversight from the heavens, and the "spirit" of that CEO will still govern the organization until its fulfilled its mission statement.
But there is a vacancy on the board because on of its members, well, no nice way to put it, went all "Enron" on the organization. Misappropriation of funds, or so John accused him, but the bigger problem came with his defecting from the organization so someone else could buy us out, handing over his shares. This act was apparently so evil that his bowels simply fell out of him and onto the ground, thereby killing him, apparently symbolizing how his body couldn't even take that kind of evil anymore. Some people think their shit don't stink, and others have shit so stinky it just explodes from their abdomen. Totally biblical.
So, to fill that empty post, we decide we'll pick some qualified people, which makes sense. We interview, we listen, we talk amongst ourselves, and we all pretty much agree that we have two leading candidates: Joseph and Matthias. So, how should we choose between them? I know: let's pray, and then flip a coin!
Who would actually do that? Our early church leaders did.
It sounds totally nuts. We don't flip for members of executive boards, or CEOs, or leaders of armies, or presidents. We flip to see who rides shotgun, or who has to be designated driver, or who has to take the dog out. Maybe, best two outta three. But for important things? Definitely not. At the least we'd have them arm wrestle, so maybe the strong one would get it. But nope--they just flip for it, trusting that God will be at work in the random chance of what lot is drawn.
There is a history, here. Ancient Israel used to use the urim and thummim to determine what God wanted--those being fancy names, as far as we can tell, for drawing lots, or flipping a coin, or throwing chicken neck bones on the ground to see what shape they make, or reading tea leaves. We're not exactly sure how it worked--lengths of sticks and lots, or some such. But the priests of ancient Israel took it very seriously. As seriously as the Roman pagans took their bird entrails as speaking of what the gods wanted.
So, they didn't just make this up as a deliberative process. But would we choose a leader this way? Should we? Some Christian denominations still do.
But I think what we might draw from this lesson is something else instead. We don't use the Bible for its geography--we've gotten better at drawing maps, and parts of the Bible were written by people who cared more about names and symbols than cartography. For the same reason, we shouldn't use it for choosing leadership--at least, not directly importing the methods they used for ours.
Instead, perhaps, we should notice the truly wacky thing about this lesson: these people took God seriously. Very seriously. So much so, that they knew that their choices and preferences only mattered so much. God was a working force for them, one who could determine who should be leader.
It's interesting: they take God so seriously that they know that God must be at the heart of what they do. But, on the other hand, they don't expect God to do it for them. They could have waited for God to fix things for them. Instead, they steer a narrow course: God is the reason for the organization's existence, and nothing can happen outside of that. And: God is not expected to do all the work.
What I'd emphasize briefly here that at its beginning, the church remembered something that, two millenia later, we've found it easy to forget. God is the beginning, middle, and end of our work. Nothing we choose, no leader we pick, no snacks chosen for coffee hour, no hymn sung, no ministry engage in, is separate from God. We, being humans, tend to forget that. These people in Acts did not. They built it into the fabric of their first leadership choice.
God is not ancillary to our work. God is not the optional piece at the end. God is not part of the original mission statement. In discerning our leadership, in discerning our direction, we have no agenda but a spiritual one: how can we witness to God's redeeming work in the world? Or, even shorter: how can we witness to God?
Our call is not to create and join church communities that build gyms, or invent answers to hard questions, or encourage us to watch Fox news, or include the wealthiest people in town, or anything like that. Our call is to create communities that both work to tell of God's work in the world and deepen that relationship with God, and we can do this in any way that reflects where God found us: our culture, our location, our language, our politics.
Maybe we shouldn't flip for leadership, but we sure could learn from our ancestor's determination to know who we were serving at every moment.
