Year B, Easter 7: Flipping Coins

Year B, Easter 7
Acts 1:15-17, 21-26
Psalm 1
1 John 5:9-13
John 17:6-19

"Happy are they whose delight is in the law of the Lord.
They are like trees planted by streams of water,
Bearing fruit in due season, with leaves that do not wither;
Everything they do shall prosper."

-From Psalm 1, and from the Acts of the Apostles:

"[The disciples] 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.' And they cast lots for them, and the lot fell on Matthais."

In the name of God, who made us, saves us, and will not leave us alone, AMEN.

How do we discern the will of God?
How do we know what God wants from us?
What God wants us to do in the world?
We ask ourselves this question frequently
And for good reason.
Every day when Christians pray
Our Father in Heaven
Hallowed be your Name
it comes quickly followed by the words
Your kingdom come
You WILL be done.
Not OUR will, God, but yours.
The idea that we are acting on behalf of,
or at least in tandem with the will of God
weaves itself in and out of our everyday decision making.
Not only at the highest Church level
Where our meetings convene with prayer
And elaborate committee systems are constructed
To ensure some kind of divine consensus
But at the individual level as well.
Who hasn’t stood at the brink of a big decision
A job offer, A new home, A medical choice
Without wishing to know if this is what God wants for us.
Hell, some of us can’t make it through the grocery store
Without wondering if God wouldn’t prefer it
If we purchased the paper products with the highest
post-consumer waste percentages for the sake of
greening God’s good Earth.
Most of us are just lucky if we don’t go so far as to take it upon
ourselves to determine what God wants for others too,
But the risk is there, and real-
Because we Christians consider ourselves
To be veritable experts on discerning the will of God.

In fact, when we gather together we make discerning
the will of God one of our greatest priorities.
In less than two months the national Episcopal Church
will gather for its triennial General Convention
And representatives from all over the country and beyond
Will gather
To try and discern collectively
What God wants for the Episcopal Church.

How do we do it?
How do we know what God wants?
How do we discern the will of God?

Most of us pray
When we have a big decision to make.
We might read scripture
We might consult our friends and advisors
And listen to them carefully for the
right-sounding path to emerge.
But this entirely rational sounding method of discernment
Is occasionally replaced by what we might call more
hasty approaches.
“Give me a sign!” our people have been known to cry
Perhaps when faced with a dining room table full of bills
Unsure of which one will garner our resources first.
And in those moments
Something as chance as the flicker of the light overhead
Might be readily snatched up as the “sign” we needed
To know that the electric will take prirority this month.
We all know the logic.
God obviously wanted me to go shopping today
Because this parking space just happened to appear up front.
God has obviously ordained his blessing on the young man
I met last week, because we both drive the same car
And so on.

Once, when I was fifteen,
I was trying to discern whether or not God had made me gay.
It was starting to become apparent
That there was something about my growing body and mind
That did not fit in with the expectations I had been raised with
And I was terrified.
One afternoon, I closed myself into my room and prayed:
“Dear God,
Please don’t make me gay.
There is so much work I want to do in this world
So many good things that I want to do for you
And if I’m gay, that will just be one more thing
that will get in my way and mess everything up.”
Then, I got out a quarter and said,
“So God, I’m going to flip this coin,
And if its heads, I’ll know that you want me to be gay,
And if its tails, I’ll know that you haven’t made me this way.”

When the coin landed on tails
I decided that God wanted to speak through the best out of three.

While this may seem like an almost endearing way
For an adolescent to determine God’s will for him
Its a little more disconcerting to us modern readers
When essentially the same method of discernment shows up
In our reading from Acts this morning.

This morning we find the disciples
having just returned to Jerusalem from their last earthly
parting with Jesus, who,
After commissioning them to continue his work
in the world, then departed from it by means no less grand
than flight.

The newly minted Apostles have a great amount of work
before them
And first on their agenda is replacing Judas among the twelve.
In other words, the Apostolic Church is not yet days old
And already there are issues of polity and hierarchy to be
dealt with:
Who will be IN the inner circle of leadership
And who will be OUT.
The choice is between Joseph called Barsabbas also known as
Justus; and- Matthais.
(If you ask me, any candidate alternately known by any one
Of three names at any given time
kind of has the cards stacked against him from the outset.)
Both men nominated for the job seem to be equally qualified.
We are told that both were present for each stage of
Christ’s earthly ministry, all the way from
John’s baptism to Christ’s ascension.
So who would it be?
We, the modern readers, are left to wonder
If there wasn’t enough time for panel interviews
Or at least some background reference checks;
Because ultimately, instead,
the Apostles make their choice by praying to God
to make his will known,
and then casting lots: throwing dice.
The first major decision of our infant church
Is here embarrassingly reduced to what we might see
As a matter of chance at least
And a heretical use of divination at the worst.
Incidentally, neither of the two men are heard from again
in the Bible,
Matthais at least is granted his own feast day
in our calender of saints
As for Joseph, called Barsabbas, known as Justus-

I would propose that he be appointed as the patron saint
Of anyone who has ever gotten the short end
Of a Church discernment process.

It would be funnier if there weren’t such a gruesome ring
of truth to it:
For while the mission of these disciples
would lay the groundwork for a global church
And while many and diverse means of discernment
Would be employed in that process
At times, it seems,
When it comes to discerning the will of God. we as a Church
Act with little more finesse and grace
Than a couple of adolescents in an attic
Hovering over a Ouija board.
As a corporate body that claims to carry out the will of God in the world, our discernment of that will has been at times as chance an encounter as rolling dice-
as arbitrary as casting lots.

What else can you call the selective reading of scripture
That has put our Church in a position
Where we claim to embrace the broad reach of Christ’s
welcome to the world
But fall short of consecrating bishops
Or blessing unions that pose a threat to the broader
global culture we are aligned with?
What else but an arbitrary condescension to the ties
we have chosen to maintain.
What else can we call the news that came out this week
Of the Church run schools in Ireland over the past century
Residential schools in which tens of thousands of
Irish children were sexually, physically, and emotionally
abused by priests, nuns and the laity

Where, the report states, “A climate of fear, created by
pervasive, excessive, and ARBITRARY punishment
permeated most of the institutions
where sexual abuse was endemic.”
What else but a Church whose moral alignment in the past
century has been capricious even as it pretends to be
absolute.
There are less extreme examples of course, which in the end
are no less harmful.
There is the level of commitment we as a Western Church
Are willing to make to serve our brothers and sisters
in Africa, in South America, at home.
Any work that falls short of the extreme example of Christs
complete solidarity with the poor
But allows us to give what we feel we are able--
Allows us to maintain the arbitrary balance we’ve determined for ourselves
Between what we are willing to part with
And the degree to which we wish to staunch the swell of
poverty, pollution, war, and other by-products of the
capitalist system that keeps us secure.
What is the line between feeling like we are contributing
As much as we can
between FEELING like we are GROWING as much as we can
And what God really wants of us
What, but a line drawn by chance encounters
along the path of least resistance.

We would like to think better of ourselves.
We would like to think that we are making these decisions
That we are moving forward as a Church and as individuals
By prayerfully considering the will of God.

But the truth is that we are human and deeply flawed-
Even with the Spirit of God surging through us.
And at times we are as fearful as those first disciples must
have been
When their master finally left them to make all the big decisions
alone.
And the truth is that it doesn’t take a popular, virulent atheist
To see that in fumbling through discernment
our Church has been responsible for some of
the most egregious offenses to human dignity our world
has known.

But the amazing thing
The unbelievable thing,
is that God in Christ founded this feeble, flawed, institution of ours,
to be the earthly body of his word and work ANYWAY.
Knowing that the disciples who had followed him in all his
earthly travels were faulty in their own right,
simple fishermen trying their best to grasp at
the mystery shared in Christs presence:
Peter with his doubts
And the rest with their misunderstanding
KNOWING these disciples as human complete with human
faults
Jesus prays ANYWAY in the Gospel we read
To send them into the world as he himself has been sent by God.

Given the flawed and failing nature which the disciples have
demonstrated thus far in the narrative
THIS is a remarkable trust.
“Holy Father” Jesus prays in the Gospel
“protect them in your name that you have given me
so that they may be one, as we are one.”

Every year at Advent and Christmas, we marvel at the mystery
Of the incarnation
The mystery that God would make his presence known
In the vulnerability of human flesh, a child no less.
But the mystery,
the AUDACITY, of God’s incarnation continues here as well
In this prayer of Jesus, in his commissioning of the disciples
In his willing departure from the work which he began.

Some handful of back broken human souls
Who, for all the breadth of their mission to the world
Stood, for a moment at least, around a game of dice
To determine the direction of their next steps.
This is who Christ chose to make his mission to the world incarnate- enshrined yet again in the vulnerable flesh of humanity- us, the Church.

And how then are we, the Church, to choose what is right
To discern the will of God in our work.
How are we to participate in the inbreaking of God’s kingdom
Rather than the theologically sanctioned violence which
is so easy for us to slip complicity into?

With closeness to God, Jesus invites.
May they be one, as we are one, Jesus prays for the disciples
and prays for us.

In this prayer, Jesus does not speak of discernment
But of the closeness with which he experienced God
whom he called Father.
As close as two that in reality are only one.
May they be one as we are one.
As close as Jesus is to God
As close as the tree is to the stream of water which gives it life
In the Psalm we sang this morning
As close as we are called to be to in Christ with God.
In Christ’s incarnation,
God showed God’s own closeness, and oneness
With the suffering of our sin and fallen state
And in inviting the disciples into that very closeness in turn
Christ establishes a second Incarnation just as reckless
as the first:
An incarnation of God’s word and work among the world
At the hands of normal human beings
Infused with the Spirit of God incarnate
Left to discern where that closeness might lead
For better, and as we have seen all to well at times, for worse.

How do we discern the will of God?
I would suggest that we do not discern the will of God
Any better than the tree discerns that its life is in the river it is
planted by.
This tree that we hear of in Psalm One
This tree that we are invited to BE
By planting our own lives close to the streaming wisdom
Of the Torah of God, of the Psalms of God, of the Word of God.
The tree does not discern what quality of water it is
Saturating the ground beneath its roots
The tree does not even choose for itself
What method might be best to bring that water to the world.
The tree is simply fed by the water which sustains it
And GROWS
As it is MADE to do.
Take, eat.
This is what God wants.
To be our food
To be our sustentation.
To be as close to us as water in a tree
Pressing out against our fruit in its due season.
Pressing out in the fullness of our being
In the fullness of Christ’s joy made complete.

Perhaps in the chance encounters we stumble through
In the greatest glory and the darkest pain
In all our strained attempts to hear what God is calling for
As often as our hasty leaps of faith
Perhaps even in lots cast by the disciples in the first days of their mission
We can work to see a radical faith
That not only because, but also in spite of our greatest efforts
God will continue to be revealed.

So here we are: casting lots and calling committees,
busying ourselves with the business of determining
how much of God’s will we are willing to work with

And here too is the Grace of God-
pulsing through our lives, through our words, through our touch
in spite of ourselves,
weaving inbetween our good and bad decisions,
striking out for the new kingdom of God’s redeeming love
all the while.