Seventh Sunday of Easter, May 16, 2021 – Acts 1:15-17, 20A, 20C-26; 1 John 4:11-16; John 17:11B-19

Those of you who like to go to a casino now and then, know that most of the time you don’t win. Every now and then, if you’re lucky, you come home with a couple of bucks more than you left with, but most of the time you made a huge donation to New York State. But most of you would never dream, as you drive or ride to the casino, of praying to God that you have a good day. And yet, here we have, in our first scripture reading, praying to God, and then using the most common form of gambling in the first century, to choose a replacement for Judas. How come?

I told you to listen carefully to the numbers that are placed into the first reading. The first number comes up so quickly that you were probably still getting settled into your seat, when it passed you by. There are a hundred and twenty people gathered. Where were they gathered? They couldn’t possibly all be in the upper room, where the Pentecost event is going to take place; they wouldn’t have fit. These hundred and twenty people are probably the disciples mentioned so often in the gospels. Saint Luke puts a number on the disciples - seventy or seventy-two - depending on which manuscript you go by. So, when you count disciples in the first century, you only count men, because only men can be witnesses. But most of them were married, so part of the hundred and twenty were their wives. It certainly included the women who watched the crucifixion from a distance. And the women, some of them the same, some different, who, according to different gospel stories, went to the tomb. So why Matthias and Justus? Strange thing about Matthias and Justus. One of them gets chosen by lot, and the other one not, but this is the last time that either name appears in the church’s story. Matthias gets chosen, and disappears from scripture. It almost didn’t matter which one was chosen. The criteria, though, is what matters. This is what St. Peter said was the criterion, “Those who accompanied us the whole time that the Lord Jesus came and went among us, beginning from the baptism of John, until the day on which Jesus was taken up from us.” The reason why, is because they must become witnesses. Witnesses. Not apostles, witnesses. We tend to put the same category being a missionary, and being a witness. The twelve apostles were not viewed, in the early church, primarily as missionaries. They were viewed primarily as witnesses.

Why is that so very important? Because our faith is based on historical fact in the broadest sense. St. Paul says, more than once in his letters, that we must have reasons for our faith. Faith is a mystery of grace, but it is not removed from reality. The entire Christian edifice is like a house of cards. But it’s an upside down house of cards. There’s only one stack at the bottom, and that is Jesus. On top of that stack is built all of the New Testament testimony about Jesus. And on top of that, all the Old Testament story of the Hebrew people, the covenanted people. If you can knock out the bottom card, the whole edifice collapses.

What we know about Jesus, we know from the written record. But the apostles were witnesses who only spoke; they did not write. It was their followers, the second generation of people following Jesus, who wrote most of what we call the New Testament. How do we know that both the witnesses, and those who wrote down the witness, were reliable? We could say that there are probably three things that would make them unreliable. The first is if they were liars. Liars in the broadest sense, not deceivers, but people telling a story.

The first century before Christ, and the century in which Christ came, were a time of the great blossoming of fictional literature in the Greek and Roman empires. A tremendous time of creativity. How do we know that what the four evangelists each wrote were not like the epics written by Homer? Well, here’s how we know. We know, some from scripture, and some from the earliest traditions of the church, that all of the witnesses - all the apostles - with the exception of John, died for what they wrote. The ordinary process of execution was to give the condemned a chance to deny their teaching about Christ. They all chose death - some of them horrible deaths - rather than go back on the word that they had written. So at least we know they were convinced that it was true.

But how do we know they weren’t deranged? How do we know they weren’t hallucinating? Victims of a mass hallucination, maybe? Because everything else they wrote, in the telling of the Jesus story, they constantly make allusion to their professions, to their customs and culture of their times, to geographical places they had been and what they looked like. And so in every other area, except their witness to Christ, it is clear that they are in touch with reality. Although that’s not a definitive proof that there was not emotional disturbance in them, it argues for the fact that they were emotionally sound people.

Ah but, maybe they were deceived by Jesus. How do we know? I mean, after all, the twentieth century saw one of the most notorious and nefarious mass deceptions in human history. How did Hitler, this little insignificant man, get a whole country so absorbed in what he was saying that they did heinous things under his influence? Well, in each of the gospel stories, when Jesus appears for the first time after his resurrection, lots of people immediately rejoice. But, the people who were the witnesses tell the embarrassing story on themselves. That they refused to believe until they asked Jesus to do awkward things. To let them touch his wounds. To insist that he eat something in front of them. Only after their senses convinced them, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that this was true, did they finally cave in and accept the experience of their senses.

So what do we have now? We have witnesses, whom we can trust, who have written down what they believed to be true. But what about the person in whom they believed? Was Jesus self-deceived? Was He doing what He was doing, and saying what He was saying, for a nefarious purpose, or was He delusional and deranged? Well, we can say the same thing about Jesus as we said about the writers of the scriptures. That, in every other way, He seems completely connected with reality. If you look at Jesus’ parables, He’s constantly talking, with at least a layman’s knowledge, about all the major professions of His time and place. He talks about farming, and shepherding, and building, and making war, and making money. He talks about all those things all the time, so he seems to be completely aware of the world around him and completely in tune with it.

But does he have an ulterior motive? The most common ulterior motive for Hebrew people, in his lifetime, would have been an attempt to overthrow the Roman government. It was constantly what they call “Messiah Fever” going on in that area. People who gathered a crew around them, and whipped them up into a frenzy, to overthrow Roman overlord. Any attempt like that would be doomed to failure. They might have a couple of little skirmishes, but the whole might of the Roman Empire would be borne down upon them in nothing flat. But every time that Jesus was asked whether He was, or invited to be, a political messiah, He refused absolutely. In John’s gospel, after the multiplication of the loaves and fishes, John says they wanted to carry Him off and proclaim Him king. And He ran away, and went and hid in the mountains. When they asked Him whether or not they should pay the Roman coin. He said, “Show me. Show me whose inscription, and whose image is on this coin. Well then, if that belongs to the emperor, then give it to the emperor.“ And, when confronted by Pilate in John’s gospel, and asked, “Are you a king?” He said, “My kingdom is not of this world.”

So now we have a written testament, written by people who seem to be in control of themselves, about a person, who seems to be, in his own way, in control of himself, and not deceiving. That’s as far as reason can take us. The next step, always, is the leap from reason to acceptance of mystery. We’re all gathered here this morning because we all do that, or did that, or had it done for us when we were baptized. But it’s always good, now and then, to sort of take our spiritual pulse, and ask ourselves if we believe what we believe.