Reassure

2024-33
sermon preached at Church of the Good Shepherd, Federal Way, WA
www.goodshepherdfw.org
by the Rev. Josh Hosler, Rector
The Seventh Sunday of Easter (Year B), May 12, 2024
Acts 1:15-17, 21-26 ; Psalm 1 ; 1 John 5:9-13 ; John 17:6-19

I remember sitting in church as a kid and listening to the readings. Sometimes they held my attention—sometimes not so much. Now, here I am, a grown man with a child in college, and a priest no less, but I have to confess something to you: today’s readings don’t really hold my attention. I find them obscure and hard to grasp.

Not everything in the Bible is equally compelling, of course, but this set of readings … well, what can I say? We have the eleven remaining apostles, trying to figure out after Judas’s death who will take his place, because obviously there have to be twelve of them, right? The verses that have been omitted from our selection today describe the gruesome death of Judas; at least that would have been more interesting than what seems to amount to the minutes of a committee meeting.

On the other hand, maybe even meeting minutes could be more exciting:

John nominated Justus. Andrew seconded. Bartholomew nominated Matthias. James seconded. Discussion followed. Mary Magdalene called the question. Thomas informed Mary that she couldn’t call the question because she had voice, but not vote. Heated discussion followed about Robert’s Rules of Order; the consensus of the group was that Thomas was correct, but that Mary should be allowed to second the calling of the question because she was, after all, the Apostle to the Apostles. Joanna asked why, then, Mary didn’t have a vote. Peter wrestled back control as the chair of the meeting and brought out the official flipping coin. Peter flipped, Matthias called it in the air. Matthias won the flip.

See? The early apostles were already holding vestry meetings!

Then there’s Psalm 1, which I’ve long felt is the most naïve of the psalms. It seems to suggest that good people always prosper and bad people always fail. If only that were true! Indeed, if you read on to Psalm 2, you can see that it immediately debunks the whole premise of Psalm 1.

The author of the first letter of John appears to be tying himself in knots. How many times can he use the word “testimony” in one short paragraph? And the dualism! He seems to be saying, “Either you’re with Jesus—and, by extension, with our little group—or you’re dead,” and that strikes me as a little extreme. I also think this passage smacks of circular logic, though I can’t follow it well enough to tell you how.

Finally, there’s our reading from John’s gospel, a snippet of Jesus’ farewell discourse at the Last Supper. That speech takes up nearly a third of the book. Those who’ve compared and contrasted the gospels can easily observe that Mark’s Jesus says relatively little, while John’s Jesus can’t seem to shut up. What is all this? “They were yours, and you gave them to me, and I gave them your words, and they received my words, and now they have my words. All mine are yours, and yours are mine, and they’re in the world, but I’m not in the world, but don’t take them out of the world! Sanctify them in the truth, which you are, since you sent me into the world that I am not part of, but they are, but they’re really not, so we’re all sanctified in truth and it’s all good!”

Come again?

All this is to say that if you’ve ever tried to read the Bible and found it just plain boring, I want to reassure you: there’s nothing wrong with you. No, the Bible isn’t objectively boring—that’s not really a thing. It’s just that the Bible is highly varied and contextual: it’s a sprawling library of texts of all different kinds that don’t speak with the same voice. So the more you know about it, the easier it is to understand—and, honestly, the more fascinating it becomes. We get bored by things that don’t interest us. But by definition, the minute the Bible piques our interest, it becomes significantly less boring.

When we’re trying to read the Bible, we can so easily be held back by our assumptions about what the Bible even is … and what we can expect it to do. So in the past week, after going over these readings a few times and rolling my eyes a little bit, I had a realization. Maybe it was fitting that that I, on this particular Sunday of the year, was struggling with my sermon preparation. Maybe I wasn’t any worse off than the apostles were at that time.

On Wednesday night, we celebrated the Eve of the Ascension. We told the story of Jesus blessing his apostles and then disappearing from their sight. We noted his instruction to them to go back to Jerusalem and wait—wait—wait for the Holy Spirit. More than any other Sunday in the year, this Sunday is about waiting. And anytime we’re stuck waiting, it’s possible to get bored!

Maybe during those ten days of waiting, the apostles sat and read their Bibles. I know, they didn’t actually have printed Bibles and most of them were probably illiterate. But maybe they compared their understandings of the ancient stories of Israel, reviewing what the risen Christ had taught them about how he could be found even in the centuries-old stories of Moses. Maybe they went back over their knowledge of Isaiah’s writings and rediscovered ways that he might have been inadvertently talking about Christ all along.

After forty days back with them, I hope the risen Christ had left the apostles with some tools for prayer and theological reflection. But maybe it was enough that they just needed to wait. Maybe in these ten days between the Ascension and Pentecost—sitting there in a room together without their teacher—they finally came to understand that they couldn’t force the creator of the universe to change the script. Everything seemed obscure and hard to follow, so they were just going to have to wait and see what happened next. The most they could do was pick somebody to take Judas’s place—so they did that, and then they kept waiting.

I can totally relate. Sometimes our lives seem stuck in the middle. Sometimes our world seems stuck in the middle. In our own time, change has happened so quickly that it’s sent us spinning into fear and mistrust of one another. We look around at a badly broken world, and we might even get so exhausted that we stop praying entirely—for Gaza, for Sudan, for Congo, for Ukraine, for Hong Kong, for the United States of America. We feel helpless to change the scene ourselves, and maybe that’s true. No matter how much we recycle and compost, we can’t singlehandedly stop climate change. No matter how much we donate to the Episcopal Diocese of Jerusalem, we can’t prevent famine in Rafah. We can’t stop Vladimir Putin or other dictators from carrying out their programs. We can’t assure a presidential election unmarred by violence. We can’t even provide housing for the people living in our woods, because the rent is too high!

Yet there are two kinds of waiting: active waiting and passive waiting. Passive waiting might look like filling all our time with mindless entertainment—not bothering to have any positive effect even on the situations where we do hold some power! Do you know the term “doomscrolling”? That means becoming addicted to all the atrocities our mobile devices can show us, and feeling worse and worse but somehow never looking away. Scroll, scroll, scroll.

Active waiting is different. It means working intentionally to change what we can, and then turning the rest over to God. You know you’re involved in active waiting when you get up in the morning and decide what you will do. It also means engaging in spiritual practices that can prepare us to meet the critical moment with energetic decisiveness, so that others will benefit from the gifts we offer.

What if we stopped trying to save the world? What if we just looked at our own little sphere of influence and decided not to be paralyzed by fear? What we if did one little thing every day or every week, such that we could come back to Good Shepherd the next Sunday and tell each other what one faithful action we took for the good of the world? That would be worthy conversation for coffee hour, wouldn’t it? “Hey, everyone—this is the one thing I did to walk the way of Jesus this week!”

Friends, the world is indeed badly broken. It has always been such—that’s why we have the weird, complicated Bible we have! Even the ancients knew what we know now about human sin and the fear that drives it. It’s in every one of us. Today I just want to reassure you: you’re doing OK.

Today is Mother’s Day. Mothers, you’re doing fine. Don’t be so hard on yourself. Parenthood is all about the long haul, and God is mother to all of us. Hang in there—we see you, we love you, we appreciate you. Hopefully, with prayer and friendship and insight, this can be a community where you feel supported as mothers and can share your anxieties and joys with us.

Today we’re preparing for a bishop election—this coming Saturday, in fact! Be not afraid. All the candidates look like different kinds of wonderful to me. I know whom I plan to vote for, but I think we’ll be fine whichever way this goes.

Today the world is in a very bad way. I can’t do much about that—but I can do my little part. I can commit to be here for all of you, as your priest, your spiritual life coach, your cheerleader—even when the assigned Bible readings for the week don’t exactly inspire me.



What commitment can you make today—to those you love, and to those you don’t know well? To those at Good Shepherd, and those beyond our walls? What reassurance can you offer while you wait for the Holy Spirit to sweep us up into something new?