The lot fell on Matthias, and he was added to the eleven, and he was never heard from again.
With the high stakes of filling the void that Judas left, the careful qualifications described, the prayerful atmosphere, and the leaving of the final decision up to God, you might think that the apostle selected this way would be a major player in the ongoing story of the Christian community, in those first days and years in Jerusalem after the resurrection and ascension of Jesus.
But no.
Matthias – this carefully selected apostle – completely disappears from the story after this one big important moment.
It’s as if it isn’t really about Matthias at all.
And that is exactly true.
This story about the selection of Matthias is not about him, really.
It’s a story about the community.
About what it takes to make the community ready for God to act. Ready for God to transform and empower them.
After forty days of making resurrection real for the disciples with teaching and prophecy, Jesus has just ascended into heaven, leaving behind a promise of immersion in God’s Spirit, of power to share the experience of resurrection with the whole earth, and the hope of the renewal and restoration of the kingdom of Israel.
And it’s that hope that makes “the eleven” – the disciples first selected by Jesus to go out and proclaim his message during his own life and ministry – really feel their incompleteness, the void left by Judas Iscariot when he left their circle by betraying Jesus to the Temple authorities.
They were twelve when they were first selected; they were twelve during Jesus’ ministry and their own in support of him. Twelve is the number of completeness, representative of the twelve tribes of Israel, the fullness of God’s people.
But now they are eleven.
And if Jesus is really gone, this time, and the whole responsibility of sharing resurrection and good news with the world is going to be on his followers, and the renewal of the kingdom might be at hand…. well, it’s just not going to work without the community being whole: complete and ready, with a circle of twelve on hand to anchor the mission.
So they look for someone to take that place – someone who has been with the community, with Jesus, from the beginning, and knows how we got here.
One scholar comments that this episode reveals a chronic problem with church leadership – that existing leadership tries to replicate itself, to maintain the way it’s been done before, while the Holy Spirit has a track record – in those first years in Jerusalem right through to here and now – of picking out those most unlike us to share the Spirit’s power, to challenge and change our assumptions, to lead God’s people and spread God’s salvation and story wider than we can yet imagine.
That commentator is absolutely right about our need to challenge ourselves to look for the unexpected leaders the Spirit is choosing when we consider church leadership today – and I’ve had conversations with a few of you recently about how that plays out in our life at Trinity!
But I think there’s a different challenge the Holy Spirit is offering us – in this story about Matthias. (Or, really, not about Matthias at all.) A challenge that my help us with welcoming the new.
You see, the Holy Spirit actually affirms the selection of Matthias. God chooses him – that’s what it means when they pray and “cast lots” – and the Holy Spirit descends on Matthias right along with all the others, newcomers and established insiders alike, a few days later.
In this case, God and the gathered community choose someone who isn’t new, who won’t make headlines, who will not himself transform the church or challenge the way it’s been. God and the community choose a person to provide assurance of shared history and the anchor of completeness that prepares the community for all the unexpected gifts and challenges the Holy Spirit may bring.
When the lot falls on Matthias, the role for which he is chosen by God and his community is to make his community complete, ready for the work and the power that God will give them, power for transformation of the world.
He is never again named in the story, so we don’t know anything about what he actually did as a member of “the Twelve”. But I suspect his role of completeness is probably an active one.
Matthias is undoubtedly showing up for gatherings and tasks and the things that make the community work. He’s has to be actively present and committed if he’s going to represent the direct experience of Jesus for a community that grows and grows and continues to include more people who don’t have that experience.
His job – the job of any of us who have been here for a while, who have quietly followed Jesus and lived the story without making headlines – our job is to create the conditions that make the community ready for the Holy Spirit to arrive, to transform everything, to fill newcomers and long-timers alike with the power of God. And holding a community ready for transformation, keeping us prepared for the incredible things God is doing next is the work of a whole life.
We are – many of us – like Matthias: called to actively enable the future by bearing witness to the transformation of the past.
To tell over again the stories of how we have seen Jesus himself break barriers, seek out the least likely people for God’s blessing, or go against the way it’s always been, in order to help our community find new and fuller life in embracing a new challenge or leader or change.
To testify that the innovations the Holy Spirit is bringing us today are consistent with God’s previous innovations for the salvation of our community and world.
To tell a story, for example, about how the current wild and uncertain territory of digital church – now taking us out of our comfort zones, and demanding that we reconsider a lot of our expectations about community and who’s in charge and when and where the holy happens – is like the wild and uncertain territory of the Protestant Reformation five centuries ago.
Or like the uncertain territory of the early disciples figuring out how to be a whole new kind of believer in resurrection in the middle of Jerusalem twenty centuries ago.
When change and transformation come our way, we need to remind ourselves and others that God’s done this before, and it has given strange and unexpected gifts of life.
God chooses Matthias – and many of us – to quietly, unremarkably, create a foundation of trust in the reality of God’s presence and action that prepare us for the innovations the Holy Spirit will inspire, for the unexpected and unusual people that Jesus will bring into our lives to expand God’s love and power and presence, for the next miracle God will do.
Some of us do that now by teaching Sunday School, or managing the logistics of the annual stewardship drive, or showing up reliably when there’s work to be done, or joys to celebrate, or tears to shed, or worship to be offered so that the community is present and we don’t meet change alone.
So if you are not a headliner, but you’ve been here for a while and know the story – ask yourself today, this week, how you might be Matthias.
What transformation are you – we – actively helping God make possible?
What new life are we helping into being, by being ourselves in this community?
What more can we do to help God prepare our community, our world, for miracles of love and power and transformation?
Or if you’re feeling like an odd fit in the church; if you’re new to the story of Jesus; if you might just be chosen by the Spirit as unexpected and new – well then, look for Matthias here and now.
God has chosen someone here to make us ready for you, to anchor that deep experience of Christ that prepares us to recognize God at work in you – and in what God will call us to do next, together.
The lot fell on Matthias, and he was added to the eleven.
And he never made a headline again.
But when the whole world changed – when we changed – we were ready.
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