A Lectionary Reflection for the people of Thankful Memorial Episcopal Church for worship from home, May 16, 2021 Year B, 7 Easter

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

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

At first glance, the readings for this seventh Sunday of Easter seem out of place with one another. 

On the one hand, there is a portion of Acts that is almost plodding in its practicality.  In the first days of the Church, the now-eleven apostles want to bring their number back up to twelve and they choose between two candidates by luck of the draw.  They pray for God to reveal whether Matthias or Joseph should join them and then simply “cast lots for them” and assume that random chance is answer to prayer. 

Twinned with this description of the very sensible early apostles are two passages from the first letter of John and the Gospel of John that are so esoteric that it’s hard to make much sense of either of them. 

In the gospel, Jesus prays to God for his disciples on the eve of his crucifixion.  It is known as Jesus’ “high priestly prayer.”  And while it is clear from the tone and tenor of Jesus’ words that he is finding it hard to say goodbye to these beloved friends, what’s less clear is what exactly he is “asking [for] on their behalf.”  He wants his Father to “protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.”  But we don’t know what they ought to be protected from, or what threatens their unity.  And beyond that, Jesus seems to be talking in circles about belonging and sanctification.  What, in heaven’s name, does it all mean?

To be honest, I don’t really know.  The language of Jesus in John’s gospel is so mysterious that it seems sacrilegious to try to parse it all out like some dry exercise in grammar.  But there do seem to be some themes that recur consistently through Jesus’ prayer.  “And now I am no longer in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you,” he says.  And then a few lines later the same language comes back: “I have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world.”

So, whatever else is going on in Jesus’ prayer, one certain theme is that we, Jesus’ disciples, do not belong to the world.  Our belonging lies elsewhere, with and in God.

In the first novel of C.S. Lewis’ Narnia series, The Magician’s Nephew, the magician, an old coward of a man named Uncle Andrew, inherits from his godmother some material – like dust – that he discerns came from another world altogether.  Over time, he fashions the dust into a set of yellow rings and uses one of them in an “experiment” to send his neighbor’s child Polly into that other world, a beautiful and calm forest that Polly names “The Wood between the Worlds.”  Uncle Andrew’s nephew, Digory, is tasked with following Polly into that wood and helping her come back.  Andrew explains to Digory how he thinks the rings work: “I knew […] that if only you could get it into the right form, that dust would draw you back to the place it had come from.”  And, though he misunderstands the details, Uncle Andrew is right.  As the children soon discover, “the stuff of which [the rings] were made had all come from the [other worldly] wood.  The stuff in the yellow rings had the power of drawing you into the wood; it was stuff that wanted to get back to its own place.”

And as I hear again Jesus’ words in the high priestly prayer in John’s gospel, I am reminded of Uncle Andrew’s rings – or if you know the story of Narnia, it would perhaps be better to say Aslan’s rings.  Jesus asks his Father to ensure that the disciples hang on to the “stuff” that makes up Jesus’ own self, the divine material that marks us as belonging to the “place” of God.  It’s as though Jesus has implanted into his disciples a kind of spiritual “dust” that comes straight from God.  And now that we have it, now that this divine material is part of us, like those yellow rings, it is always trying to get us back to the place from which it came; it pulls us ever back to God.  Thus, even though we live in this world, we can never “belong” to it for the word of God that has been given to us through Christ Jesus draws the core of who we are into God’s eternal world.  Long before C.S. Lewis, St. Augustine put it this way in his own prayer to God: “You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless, until they can find rest in you.”

And so Jesus’ disciples – then and now, you and me – we are all held in the tension of living in this world even as we are always drawn into our true belonging in God.  Through our participation in Christ’s death and resurrection, in our baptism as members of Christ’s body and in the Eucharist – which we look forward to celebrating together again very soon – as Christ’s little brothers and sisters who share in some portion of his divine material, we are caught up in his life that is lived already outside of our world and with God.  Or, as the also-obscure language of the first letter of John puts it: “God gave us eternal life, and this life is in his Son.  Whoever has the Son has life.”

Thus, though our bit of divine material might leave us feeling “restless” until we rest in God, it is nonetheless good that our ultimate belonging is not of this world but in the world of God’s love.  Yet we do have to live in this reality in the meantime.  We may not be of this world but we are still in it.  So we may feel like we still don’t know what it all means.  What effect does all this talk about eternal life and ultimate belonging have on our daily lived experience as followers of Jesus right here and now?

Well, funnily enough, I think to answer that question, we must turn back to the simplicity of that story in the Acts of the Apostles.  Our rational minds might read that description of the choosing of Matthias as the twelfth and scoff at such simple faith that sees the hand of God in the roll of dice or the picking of straws.  In our scientific age, it is ok to take a different view of these things than the disciples did. 

But, at the same time, maybe those early apostles got it right. Maybe the effect of being caught up in the eternal life of Christ on our present lives is that we can afford to have a little bit more faith, a little bit more trust that God’s Spirit moves among and within us, even now.  Maybe all we have to do is step out in that faith, in simple ways, trusting that the divine material that is within us will guide us forward into the realm of God’s love.  Maybe all we have to do is live this life, restless though we may often be, believing that God will “not leave us comfortless,” but has already sent us that “Holy Spirit to strengthen us, and exalt us to that place where our Savior has gone before,” to that world of God where we all truly belong.  Amen.