Seventh Sunday after Easter, Year B, May 13, 2018; The Rev. Pamela L. Werntz

O God of love, grant us the strength, the wisdom and the courage to seek always and everywhere after truth, come when it may and cost what it will.

Today is a threshold Sunday, and I don’t just mean between the Sanctuary and the Chapel. Today is a threshold Sunday between the Feast of the Ascension and the Feast of Pentecost. Our readings this morning have something to say about standing on the cusp, standing in between the feelings of abandonment and feelings of inspiration. The curious story of the selection of a replacement apostle for Judas Iscariot comes right after the list of the eleven remaining, praying and waiting in Jerusalem along with “certain women,” including the mother of Jesus. Peter addresses an assembly of 120 and explains that the way he understood scripture, Judas’ betrayal and what happened afterwards was just like Psalms 69 and 109. (Incidentally, he doesn’t mention his own three denials of Jesus, or his remorse.)

Our lectionary calls for verses to be left out of the Acts reading, but I re-inserted them because they tell a very different story of what happened to Judas Iscariot after he led the police to Jesus. The Gospel of Matthew’s version is what most people learn – that after the betrayal, Judas returned to the chief priests and returned the money he’d been given, admitting that he had “sinned in betraying innocent blood,” and then hung himself. Luke (the author of Acts) has a very different account. According to Luke, Judas took the money he’d been given in exchange for identifying Jesus, and bought a small farm, but due to a bad fall in the field, he bled to death. It seems to me that leaving these verses out is the lectionary’s way of tidying up, but that creates such a straight and narrow reading of scripture, and I prefer elbow room that differences offer.

Whatever happened to the one who betrayed Jesus, Peter and the other ten felt the need to find a replacement. Probably because twelve represents the longed for restoration of the twelve tribes of Israel; twelve is a number that represents cosmic totality. The assembly nominated two who had been with Jesus since the days of John’s baptizing until Jesus was taken from them. Then they prayed for God to make the final selection and they cast lots – like tossing dice. There’s no distinction between chance and divine choice here. Divine intention was revealed by a gamble. Incidentally, the Greek word for “lot,” is kleros which has the same root as for the word clergy. (humbling) Matthias was selected to witness to the resurrection and he was never heard from again in the New Testament. Later writers can’t even agree on the name of the replacement apostle. Nevertheless, Matthias is the patron saint of alcoholics, carpenters, tailors, perseverance, hope, and Gary, Indiana.

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago: 1 John was written to remind the community of Jesus followers, probably in Ephesus, that Jesus was really human, really suffered and really died; and that the community’s actions needed be more consistent with right-relationship and peace. The ending, which we heard this morning, is focused on those who are being tempted to worship idols, rather than paying homage to God, Who is Love.

For several Sundays now, we’ve heard passages of the Gospel of John from what is called Jesus’ farewell discourse. This farewell discourse is part speech, part prayer. It takes place before Jesus is arrested. It’s an extremely long goodbye. It reminds me of something Kurt Vonnegut said, “”People don’t come to church for preachments, of course, but to daydream about God.” I don’t know the context in which Kurt Vonnegut said it. I really don’t even know what he meant – whether it was a positive or negative critique. The word ‘preachments’ doesn’t sound so positive – but neither does ‘daydreaming’ – not if you spent your elementary school years being scolded by teachers for staring into space!

But today, with all those teachers behind me, I want to suggest that there is inherent value in daydreaming (as long as you are not operating heavy equipment or a vehicle). There is inherent value in daydreaming especially if you are sitting in a pew in this sanctuary. Daydreaming offers opportunities for fun, adventure, creativity, deep insight and healing. It improves efficiency in decision-making, strategizing, and emotional regulation according to computer analysts who have developed artificial intelligence routines that are programming computers to daydream! According to the website “WebMD,” daydreaming can help you relax, manage conflict, maintain relationships, boost productivity, clarify values, and relieve boredom! The author of the WebMD entry concludes that, “we should nix the negative stereotypes and become, in the words of The Monkees, ‘daydream believers.’” (That was a 1960’s band for those of you under the age of 55).

Maybe the author of the Gospel of John somehow knew that there is inherent value in daydreaming about God. The long long passages from the farewell discourse certainly seem to promote it! In my daydream believing, this long farewell reminds me of the love poem by e e cummings, called, “i carry your heart.” In my daydream believing I imagine that Jesus knew that God says it to each one of us and longs to hear it back from us, and longs for us to say it to one another – friend and stranger. In my daydream believing, I imagine that this is what Jesus meant in the prayer of his farewell discourse. The poem goes like this:

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

In this lengthy farewell discourse Jesus is praying something like this. Jesus is praying to God to protect those he loves. In the narrative, his words anticipate his departure. Of course, when the words were written in the Gospel of John, Jesus had already been gone for two or three generations. These are the words written in the voice of Jesus to an early church feeling very threatened – very unprotected – very vulnerable. “Sanctify them in your truth,” Jesus prays – in other words, “set them apart in your sincerity, in your frankness, in your candor, O God.” Sanctify — set them apart from what is untrue, what is insincere, what is evasive and deceptive and unjust. And I wonder, how is this prayer of Jesus’ a prayer for us? What I mean is, could we imagine in our daydream believing Jesus praying this prayer for Emmanuel? “Set them apart in your sincerity, in your frankness, in your candor, O God.”

Jesus says, “I speak these things so that they may have my joy made complete in themselves.” My hunch is that this prayer is addressing a community that is not feeling Jesus’ joy made complete in themselves. If they were already feeling his joy made complete in themselves, Jesus would have been praying another prayer – perhaps thanksgiving for complete joy or perhaps asking for something else altogether. But here he’s asking for something that the community does not have. And there’s a way to think about complete – perfect – full – in a moment, even while holding in tension the recognition that all is not reconciled, that we carry grief and pain of loss in our hearts, that we often feel vulnerable and unprotected, and our truth is often all mixed in with untruth, sincerity mixed with insincerity, frankness and candor mixed with evasion and deception. Even with all of that, Jesus’ prayer for his friends, and for us, is “…That they may have my joy made complete in themselves.”

In his collection of essays about faith and fiction, Ron Hansen writes: “We have a tendency to separate heaven and earth, soul and body, mind and matter, the unseen and the seen. Myth unites them. Myth honors our intuitions, frees our imaginations, mediates between those things we can explain and those things we cannot explain but in our heart of hearts know…our lives are filled with mysterious and miracles, coincidence, hunches, and revelations, feelings that have no basis in anything we can put a finger on. Myth pays homage to those intangibles, acknowledging that they are…fully a part of our experiences…” [1]
Perhaps when we are standing in the threshold between Ascension and Pentecost, between a sense of abandonment and a sense of inspiration, we might ask, what joy is started here that Jesus longs to complete, to make perfect and full in us? What joy is started in this parish, perhaps abandoned, that longs to be complete, to be made perfect and full (not in here, but out there in our Monday through Saturday lives)? What might be different if we renew our commitment to the dream of God for joy made complete in us and all around us? What might be different if we daydreamed about what the world could be like if we lived as if the life and teachings of Jesus are so true that the resurrection must also be true? Let’s daydream of offering renewed witness to the resurrection with our whole lives. Let’s employ Myth as our connective tissue to rejoin “heaven and earth, soul and body, mind and matter, the seen and unseen” for the people of God, for the Love of God.

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