Hi Friends,
As some of you already know, we celebrated my associate’s final Sunday in our parish. Peter Kwon has served at Annandale UMC for the past nine years and, starting in July, he will be the preacher at Macedonia UMC in Winchester, Virginia. For the occasion I deviated from both the lectionary and our summer study of the Farewell Discourse.
Ephesians 2.1-10 & Acts 1.15-26 — A Service of Farewell
In praying about our benediction to Pastor Peter Kwon, the Holy Spirit initially led me to the apostle’s great gospel summation, the so-called locus classicus, in his epistle to the Ephesians. What better passage with which to bless Peter’s farewell, I discerned, than the Pauline pericope with which I began my own time at Annandale United Methodist Church? All those years ago, on the basis of Ephesians 2, I greeted both you and Peter with a pledge. Come what may— no matter what culture wars, ecclesial schisms, or political issues raged around us, I promised that I would endeavor always to make the main thing the main thing. And indeed after all these years and memories, after all the trials and laughs, headaches and grounds for trust, what Peter and I share most deeply still is our common conviction that the gospel about Mary’s boy and Pilate’s victim must abide as the church’s only word. Or we are— of all people— the most to be pitied.
Come what may— no matter what culture wars, ecclesial schisms, or political issues raged around us, I promised that I would endeavor always to make the main thing the main thing.
But then the Holy Spirit, in his circuitous manner, led me to reckon with a second text for today, a passage to which the church seldom gives attention. Just so, hear the word of God as it comes to us in Saint Luke’s Book of Acts, chapter one, wherein the eleven disciples seek the LORD’s election of a twelfth to succeed the dearly departed Judas:
“For it is written in the Book of Psalms, “May his camp become desolate, and let there be no one to dwell in it”; and “Let another take his office.” So one of the men who have 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—one of these men must become with us a witness to his resurrection.” And they put forward two, Joseph called Barsabbas, who was also called Justus, and Matthias. And they prayed and said, “You, Lord, who know the hearts of all, show which one of these two you have chosen to take the place in this ministry and apostleship from which Judas turned aside to go to his own place.” And they cast lots for them, and the lot fell on Matthias, and he was numbered with the eleven apostles.”
The word of the LORD.
Thanks be to God.
Now that you have heard what Luke has to tell about Matthias, you know absolutely everything about him that anyone knows. Which is not much. And which is about the same amount of information as we possess about the members of the church in Ephesus. In fact, Luke tells us more about the other candidate than he does about Matthias. Every year the Protestant Church celebrates Saint Matthias’ feast day on February 24, which you may find odd considering you know now as much about Matthias as anyone else. We are short even on legends. About Peter, the apostle on whom Christ builds his Bride, the church remembers where he preached and how he was martyred and where he is buried, and most of that is probably even true. Peter was obviously an impressive character to leave so much talk behind. But about Matthias, however, there is only one obscure reference suggesting he witnessed in Palestine and was martyred there. Another reference suggests it was in Ethiopia. There is also a tantalizing story that cannibals were about to eat Matthias when he was rescued by Andreas, which of course makes Andreas not Matthias the hero.
And that is it. Matthias evidently made very little impression on anyone, except perhaps on those cannibals, supposing they existed.
And yet.
The church commemorates Matthias for no other reason than why the Jerusalem congregation picked him to replace Judas: because Matthias fit a certain description. Quite simply, Matthias was one of those who were around when “the LORD Jesus went in and out among us,” and who had been there also during the days when Jesus showed himself to have been resurrected by his Father.
To be one of those “Apostles” with a capital A, who guided the primal church and whom the church counts now as its final authorities, only two things were necessary.
You had to have known Jesus through his ministry.
You had to have met the risen Christ and be able to testify to the event.
You didn’t need to be spiritually sensitive or theologically sophisticated. You didn’t need to be religious or pious or heroic. Indeed the paucity of legends gathered around Matthias suggests that he was not very remarkable. To be a capital-A Apostle in the ancient church, you merely had to know— first hand— what Paul proclaims to the Ephesians, and then win a coin toss. Not only are there no legends about Saint Matthias, the story in Acts of his election to apostleship is hardly the stuff of legends.
It is rather mundane.
Which is the point.
For this, you see, is the great difference between the Christian gospel and all the religions within the history of which the gospel appears. Religion is humanity’s most creative enterprise. There are goddesses and gods and demigods of a thousand kinds; there are yogas and spiritualities and wellness practices, social causes and political movements, for every conceivable variety of seeking after ultimate meaning. A silicon valley guru recently claimed that through Artificial Intelligence we are doing nothing less than “creating God.” And even if that fails, we can still download an app to help us pray. Human religion is infinitely complex and endlessly creative in its attempts to satisfy our spiritual appetites and to sate our existential dread.
According to the standards of human religion, the gospel, by contrast, is nothing so grand.
A Matthias can preach it.
The task is not really so great.
Matthias did not need to be a savvy organizational leader. Matthias did not need to be a persuasive fundraiser. Matthias did not need to have a mission statement or a three-to-five year plan. Matthias did not need to possess a unique gift for youth and young adults. Matthias needed only to have been encountered by the crucified LORD, to know himself as one for whom the deadness of his sins had been lifted, and therefore whose future had been opened up as gift rather than threat. So knowing, Matthias merely had to say so— in Palestine or Ethiopia or wherever the lot took him— to whomever would hear him out. We possess not one word from Matthias; nevertheless, we know his approximate utterance, “This Jesus whom I met— the friend of publicans and sinners, the purifier of lives and the prophet of a peculiarly righteous God— he and not someone else is risen to be LORD of the universe.”
That is the Matthias-message.
And it is also the only message by which the church stands or falls.
Though nothing much is remembered about Matthias, Matthias is a reminder to us that the gospel works very differently from religion, and indeed for the most part works backwards to it. Instead of calling us to a spiritual journeys on a wide-open horizon, the gospel directs our attention to one particular alleged set of facts. The gospel limits us to one particular place and to one particular time, to one specific nation and to one single human individual therein.
As my teacher Robert Jenson writes:
“The gospel directs our religious passion and ingenuity to a first-century Jewish unordained rabbi and itinerant prophet out of Galilee, who was put to death by Jewish and Roman officials of an all too familiar type. This individual, this Jesus of Nazareth, like each of us, was who he was and did what he did and said what he said and suffered what he suffered, and didn’t do what he didn’t do and didn’t say what he didn’t say and wasn’t who he wasn’t. He has his own story, like each of us will, and he, and we, are stuck with it, whether his story turns us on or not.
He is a Jew, and a Palestinian, and a male with a mother named Mary— whatever we feel about Jews or Palestinians or men or motherhood. He is a prophet who promised the imminent fulfillment of a certain God’s promises to his particular people of Israel, whether Israel and its Scripture are what our religious quests were working with or not. He promised, as the goal of life, an encompassing human community shaped by the kind of “righteousness” about which the LORD instructed Moses, and so by duties and responsibilities and self-giving love; whether or not we might have something more self-fulfilling or mystical or empathetic in mind.
And he is a rabbi who enforced the Ten Commandments with unequalled strictness, whether that fits our life-style or not. And when he judges he— in apparent paradox— turns out to be a judge who forgave sin and was utterly unimpressed by religious success stories.”
If you are a preacher unsure what will come in the next place the Spirit sends you, or if you are a church wishing “Godspeed” and wondering what (or who) the Spirit will bring next, this Matthias-message is a great relief. For Matthias reminds us that our task is not to make history come out right. Neither is our task to transform hearts and minds, nor is to influence policy, politics, or even our local communities. And our task is most definitely not to serve the imperatives issued by our denominational leaders.
Our commission— Peter’s charge— is limited by the gospel.
1) We need only to know the risen Jesus.
2) And, so knowing, testify about him to others.
Mercifully, this is our only undertaking.
All we have to do is say to someone else:
“Our fellow particular human from Galilee, is the great clue to our lives and our world, because he is risen to be in charge of it. Do you want to know what it is all about? Who God is and what he is like? What to expect from life or just from tomorrow? Read the Gospels, for they tell this one person’s story.”
Paul wrote those luminous, dense sentences to the Ephesians (“You were dead in your trespasses, by grace you have been saved, this is not your own doing, it is the gift of God…”), yet we do not know anything about any of the saints who first received them. Paul’s letter outlasted every single Ephesian, and we cannot name a single recipient. Which, again, is the point. Evidently they took Paul’s words as the risen LORD’s own word to them and passed that promise along to others; otherwise, we would not be here today.
Like Matthias, that’s all the Ephesians had to do. Just know Jesus. And say so. We need leave no legends behind.
This is Peter’s last Sunday with us.
Peter and I are different in more ways than I can count, and I suspect he would happily provide the full accounting. But we share this: neither of us is here because we have to be. A decade ago, my oncologist asked me if I wanted to return to work. “If you want,” he said, “I can make it so you never have to work again.” I considered it. Turns out, I like my job. Every day feels like Ash Wednesday for Peter too. Neither of us speaks this Matthias message because circumstances leave us no other option. We are here because we have met the risen Jesus and so must tell others about him. This is not a small thing to share with a colleague. And frankly, it is depressingly rare in our denomination. Which is to say, I give God thanks for Peter not because Peter is theologically articulate, though he is, and not because Peter is a gifted pastor, though he is that too. I give God thanks for Peter and I have trusted Peter these many years because I know Peter can be relied upon to keep the main thing the main thing. To put it more specifically, Peter can be relied upon to have that particular word on his lips when faced with someone sitting on their own ash heap or lost in the outer darkness.
When my youngest son Gabriel was a sophomore in high school, a girl in his class bullied him relentlessly. After weeks and months, we met with the counselors et al at his school. “I’m concerned she’s trying to get him to commit suicide,” I said to his principal. “That’s our concern too,” he replied. The rest of the story is not mine to share. Suffice it to say, my son needed not advice but promises and resurrection. That is, he needed someone— not named Dad— who had been met by the risen Jesus, someone who could tell another about him.
I could entrust him to Peter. Or rather, I could trust Peter with the Matthias message. My son is exhibit A for why we cannot afford to do anything but make the main thing the main thing.
And now Peter goes to be a Matthias for another congregation. They do not know yet what they are receiving. They will find out. We, in turn, will receive our own Matthias, someone who fits this mundane job description— someone who knows who Jesus is and that he is risen and will say so. David will not be Peter just as Peter will not be Larry, the pastor who preceded him. And that is exactly right, for the gospel is not religion. Even a Matthias can preach the gospel.
The gospel does not require holiness or giftedness or ingenuity.
It requires only witness.
Which means this is the moment to do what Matthias did. To hand over the goods. To speak not about Jesus but for him.
Peter, in the name of Jesus Christ, you are forgiven.
For every sermon that missed the mark.
For every pastoral visit where you said the wrong thing or nothing at all.
For every frustration you have carried about a bishop’s decision.
On Christ’s account and for his sake alone, you are forgiven.
For all the occasions when you caused our insurance policy premium to increase.
For the inappropriate jokes and photoshopped memes I can’t utter here.
For the several times your computer got hacked, causing us to pay not you but some off shore account and requiring us thus to double pay you.
For not noticing for six months (?!) that you were not receiving your paychecks.
You are forgiven.
For crashing into the rental van in a golf cart, you are absolved.
For filing a worker’s comp claim after the Dodge Ball Tournament you organized, you are forgiven.
For instructing me not say anything when I greeted your father’s denominational gathering only to be asked by them to say a few words, there is nothing but grace for you.
I can promise you that. Because I have met Jesus. He is alive. And he is the friend of sinners like you.
The same goes for this congregation. To any of you who may have made Peter’s years here harder than they needed to be, for every unspoken grievance, for any unsolicited advice, for all withheld encouragement, for every occasion you evaluated his ministry by criteria that had nothing to do with the gospel— in the name of Jesus Christ, you are forgiven too.
This is neither sentiment nor manners.
This is the Matthias-message.
This is the only thing we are here to say.
And this Matthias-message is also a great deliverance.
The gods and goddesses we fashion in our image and to whom we give our fealty are very often straightforward tyrants and monsters. More importantly, human religion— all the spiritual questing and enoughness-seeking of ours— is finally, after all, about power, about our need for importance and fulfillment. In the end, religion is about our willingness, as Martin Luther said, to try to use even deity for our own ends and desires. And if human religion is really about power, then it is finally about violence— the very violence that hammered Jesus on a cross. Matthias, in his obscurity and near anonymity, is there to let us down to God’s earth. Religion is the chief beauty and chief horror of human life. We are permitted to purify its beauty and exorcize its horror by directing it to his friend Jesus.
Religion is the chief beauty and chief horror of human life. We are permitted to purify its beauty and exorcize its horror by directing it to his friend Jesus.
Which is all Matthias did.
Which is all Peter has done here, these years, in this place.
Which is all any of us are asked to do going forth.
Though it is grand indeed, our task is really quite modest. After all, there is not much left up to us, for we are not alone. Like God disguising himself as three strangers at Abraham’s and Sarah’s table, the risen Jesus hides reliably in loaf and cup. He is present to us here no less than he was present to the capital A Apostles.
Just so, come to the table.
But be warned:
Because the bread and the wine are him, the loaf and the cup: they make you no different than Matthias. But, as it turns out, this is no great burden at all.
