Casting Lots, Making Decisions

"Casting Lots, Making Decisions"

Acts 1:15-17, 21-26
May 17, 2009

In those days Peter stood up among the believers (together the crowd numbered about
one hundred and twenty people) and said, ‘Friends, the scripture had to be fulfilled,
which the Holy Spirit through David foretold concerning Judas, who became a guide for
those who arrested Jesus— for he was numbered among us and was allotted his share
in this ministry.’ So one of the men who have accompanied us throughout 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 must become a witness with us to his
resurrection.’ So they proposed two, Joseph called Barsabbas, who was also known as
Justus, and Matthias. Then they prayed and said, ‘Lord, you know everyone’s heart.
Show us 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 added to the eleven apostles.

This morning I’m going to invite us to do a bit of imagining, some fancying of a possible
other scenario that might have happen, say, some three years ago, when the Search
Committee of our church was winding down its quest for a new minister. Let’s just
imagine that perhaps they hadn’t settled on clear cut choice—maybe they had lucked
into having two great candidates. Of course, there was me, and I know there are so
many of you who can’t a better minister than me—that’s a joke, a really bad joke—but
let’s imagine that the committee stumbled onto an equally gifted minister—I know, I
know, but that’s why they call it imagination—named Susan, and after having
interviewed us both extensively, it was really clear that they couldn’t come up with a
decision. So, after prayer and maybe some fasting, it was decided that the committee
would flip a coin to decide who to actually present to the congregation as the choice of
the committee.

Now, I assume that most of us, at the very least, would raise an eyebrow if we had
heard that after a couple of years of searching the committee had resorted to a coin
toss to decide who would lead us into the future. But that is essentially what happened
here in our text from Acts today—you have moment where there is a vacancy on the
board, so to speak—the disciples are down to 11 because of Judas’ betrayal. Jesus
has spent some forty days, teaching them, nurturing them, before he rises to the
heavens, an event that we celebrate on this day, Ascension Sunday. What the
disciples are left with is a decision—a decision about who to chose to join that elite club
so that the number will be back up to 12. Now, to be honest, I would have thought they
would have bothered to ask Jesus about who to pick while they had them him in the
room, but, hey, I’ve been known to forget things while being a state of amazement and
excitement. Nonetheless, they have to make a decision about adding that twelfth and
final member, and I suppose it’s for symbolic reasons that they wanted to fill out their
ranks—12 tribes of Israel, 12 disciples, etc, but the interesting thing is that this group of
disciples will never be reconstituted like this after this moment—there is no succession
plan beyond these earliest disciples, so the symbolism that is meant here is only for the
earliest church.

The other interesting thing going on here is that two men are mentioned—you have the
one who wins the coin toss, or what is essentially a coin toss, Matthias, and the other
guy who is forever known as the guy who didn’t make the cut, didn’t make it into that
club of twelve—his name is Joseph, also known as Justus. Thing about that: forever
etched in history as the guy who didn’t become one of the elite disciples, the one God
chose against, at least if you believe that God spoke through this casting of lots. And
to be frank, we don’t really know what the method was being used here when the
Scriptures mention that the decision was reached by casting lots. Still, there is a long
history of Israel seeking out the will of God by using this method: sometimes they were
used to determine guilt, to apportion land, or to select which animals were to be used
for sacrifice. In 1 Samuel 10, we find out that casting lots was used as a way of
choosing Israel’s first king and lots get cast for Jesus’ clothing as he is dying up on the
cross. The interesting thing here is that Israel’s laws forbid any kind of divination, but
for some reason this was seen as something different, something less sinister than
consulting the spirits for an answer. “Some have suggested that perhaps two lots were
used, and they were perhaps pieces of wood, bone or stone, that were shaped alike,
but with different markings or color.” (NIB Dictionary, “Lots”) We don’t really know how
the Israelis cast those lots, not for sure anyway, but it’s clear that the practice was still
alive when the remaining 11 disciples found themselves with the dilemma of how to
round out their depleted ranks.

But let’s face it: this is an odd way of doing something, even if it is drenched in prayer. I
heard (though not verified, to be honest) that among the Mennonites of earlier
generations, men in a congregation would draw lots in order to determine who God was
calling to be the new preacher of a congregation. Can you imagine going to church as
a plumber, let’s say, and having to go home and tell your wife that you had suddenly
become the pastor of a congregation? And can you imagine flipping a coin in order to
determine between “Susan” and me about who God was calling to lead this church?
Who in the modern would really tolerate such a practice? And as much as the
Scriptures seem to indicate that this was a God drenched process, one that was
wrapped in prayer, the choice seems to land with quite a thud, at least in the long term.
I’ve mentioned that losing out on the chance to be one of the 12 didn’t give you much
press—we don’t hear much from Joseph after this moment—but it’s not much better for
the winner here—we really don’t hear from Matthias afterwards either! He’s never
mentioned in the New Testament again, a seeming non-entity in the early church. Of
course, he did have to replace the most notorious disciple of all time, which means the
expectations for you aren’t great—just don’t screw up like the one you’re replacing!

Now, we have to ask ourselves, did something go wrong with the pick? Sure, not ever
being mentioned again in the New Testament is not that big of a deal, but it does bring
up some interesting questions.   I mean, were the disciples more concerned with filling
the opening than they should have been? Did they rush to a decision, rather than
taking their time and waiting for the Spirit to speak more clearly, rather than basically
playing a game of chance in order to determine who was going to get the lucky call to
fill the opening—or unlucky, if you look at it another way, because, of course, tradition
say that all disciples died a martyrs death. Justo Gonzalez has suggested that what
went wrong was that the remaining eleven placed issues of organizational structure
before that of the mission of the church (Feasting, as quoted by Erskine, 530)—they
wanted to fill the position quickly rather than focusing on their purpose as disciples, and
thus allowing the Spirit to speak to them a possible new word. I wonder, I wonder if they
had waited and really discerned the will of the Spirit whether or not a woman would
have been chosen to join the ranks of the eleven male disciples? Certainly having a
woman would have increased the Gospel’s popularity amongst women—and yet,
ironically enough, in the later decades, Christianity would be laughed at by some
because it was considered by many to be a woman’s religion, since it seemed to attract
many more women than men. Instead, the disciples looked for someone like
themselves, someone with the same background, same religion, same gender, and yet,
that is not often how the Spirit works, not in the real world. We listen most often to
those that look like us, believe like us, love like us, sound like us, but the disciples, right
at the moment they were about to go tell the good news to all the Gentiles out there,
the non-Jews, they added Matthias to their ranks, a fellow Jew who looked and thought
just like them. Maybe that is why Paul becomes so important latter on—he was a Jew,
but he had been so Hellenized, so immersed in Greek and Roman culture, that he
thought like the very people he was trying to convince to embrace this Gospel and thus
becoming the most effective apostle.

But we mustn’t be too critical of the disciples, or even be too sure that they got their
pick wrong—but the silence from the rest of history, well, It does seem to hint at
something gone awry with the pick of poor Matthias, a good man, no doubt, a faithful
man, and certainly a better man than the one he replaced. More than anything, it just
goes to show us how hard it really is to discern the will of God, to know what God wants
out of us in a particular moment. Years ago, when I was choosing between two calls,
two churches who were offering me essentially the same part-time position, though in
different states, I had to try to discern what God wanted me to do, and in that
discernment process, I found that the call was, surprisingly, to the church that I hadn’t
expected to be called to, the one that was the biggest mess, really. To do this day, I
think I chose the one place God wanted me to choose, but the years have sobered up
that truth a bit, because I’m less certain about that—no, I don’t think I should have gone
to Fort Collins rather than Spokane, Washington, but the line between what I want and
what God wants is always a blurry thing, and time and some maturity often blurs it even
more. The good news is that God seems to find a way to use our choices for good, if
we do what the disciples did in that moment of decision when it came to replacing
Judas—if we immerse something in prayer, if we drench something in prayer, if we
baptize our choices in prayer, then I can’t imagine that there’s a whole hill of beans of
difference between our decision for us and God’s decision for us.

But, of course, every decision is a gamble, isn’t it? Even something so simple as
getting into our car to go get milk at the store—who knows if we will get back home safe
and sound—I’m gambling on the fates to bring me back home safe and sound again.
Maybe we shouldn’t be too surprised at the tactics the disciples took to find out God’s
will—they felt forced to find some way of making a decision between two equally good
choices, and since Christ hadn’t given them the answer while he was there amongst
them, they resorted to what we resort to—a roll of the dice, a decision to go one way
rather than the other way. What we usually don’t do is to immerse our lives in prayer
when it comes to living our lives, we don’t speak our wants to God, our wants for clarity,
our wants for goodness to come out of whatever we choose. Don’t get me wrong: it
doesn’t have to be three hours of prayer on whether to pick up the wheat or white
bread, and it doesn’t even have to be three hours for a much more important decision—
I think the key thing here is the intention involved, the placing before God the ordinary
and extraordinary decisions we all must make in this life, that God is part of the
equation as much as anything else.

Earlier, I mused a bit about whether or not the disciples had chosen the right guy,
maybe Joseph would have been a better choice than Matthias, or maybe even a
woman, or even better, a Gentile woman. Of course, in the disciple’s minds, they hadn’
t done the choosing—God had chosen Matthias. But most of us know of moments in
our lives when we were pretty sure we knew what God wanted us to do, we had clarity,
more clarity than even something like casting lots might have given us—we knew what
to do and where to go—and then we quickly realized that the decision we had made, or
we believed God had made for us, was not quite what we were expecting. Maybe it
imploded or exploded on us, maybe we found a much different outcome than what we
had expected, maybe we now felt we had made the wrong decision. There have been
moments I knew I was right about something, that I was sure I was fully in the will of
God, and then found out very quickly that wasn’t quite the case, or, more usually, I
found that the will of God was a lot more complicated, and more murky than I had
expected. Most of us have probably had that kind of experience, and what I think the
great lesson in those moments is this: no matter how we immerse ourselves in prayer,
and we immerse our question in prayer, there will always be a lot of “us” in that
discernment process, and separating our will from God’s will is really probably
impossible. That doesn’t mean there isn’t something God wants us to do, that there isn’
t something that God desires of us, even sometimes pretty specifically, but what this
murky discernment process should do is humble us, and make us aware that we simply
don’t quite know the mind of God, not perfectly and never completely.

You know, the problem that religion has suffered across all belief systems is that each
particular group thinks it gets to speak for God, that it knows what the actual will of God
is—we certainly have the religious right in this country saying that to us, telling us who
God loves, and who God isn’t fond of, who should and shouldn’t get married, who
should and shouldn’t be able to make decisions concerning their body—and the rest of
us just cringe, because people look at that kind of behavior, that kind of blind certainty,
and instinctively know that they are being fed bad food. That is why the youth in this
country stay away from churches, on both ends of theological spectrum, because we
people of faith cannot seem to distinguish our voices from the voice of God, the latter
being a bit hard to interpret, hard to hear amidst the din of all of our talking and
screaming at each other. What I think we need—and I speak for me—is a bit more
humility about what we are doing when we think God might be saying something
through us, when we cast our own lots, toss our own coins, and arrive at what we think
God is saying to us and to world in any given moment. Blind faith is not faith—it’s just
being blind, friends, and what’s worse is that it’s our own choice to be blind. I think God
wants us to be smart, and faithful and humble, with each other, and when we speak in
God’s name. That doesn’t mean we don’t speak out for justice, for inclusion, for the
good news of the Gospel, but what it does mean is that we take what we learned in our
personal lives when it comes to knowing God’s will—how ambiguous and difficult it can
be to ferret that out—and then apply to the greater world, and to our public witness as
people of faith. That’s the hard part—taking what we know personally and actually
having the courage to live it out publicly, in the ways we speak and act on our faith in
this world. Poor Matthias had been anointed as the chosen one because the chips fell
where they did—and maybe he was God’s chosen, but for those of us who are not
quite comfortable with gambling in order to find God’s will, what we are left with is some
wisdom, and a challenge to be humble when we speak of what God wants in our lives
and in the lives of others.   Amen.