Sermon for the Seventh Sunday of Easter
Today I want to talk about grace in-between the lines. I’m sure we could all come up with stories about how grace – a full-out, unwarranted, undeserved, wonderful thing – happened in your life. The birth of a child, falling in love, being forgiven by a friend, getting an unexpected windfall at just the right time, feeling completely in tune with life and with God –are examples of the kind of grace we could name and celebrate. I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about the grace that’s there even when we don’t know it’s there, that is in-between the lines of the stories of our lives and we could easily miss it – or just as easily believe it isn’t even there at all.
Martin Luther wrote this in his commentary on the Book of Romans: “Faith is a living, daring confidence in God’s grace, so sure and certain that one could stake one’s life on it a thousand times.” Let that sink in for a moment.
“Faith is a living, daring confidence in God’s grace, so sure and certain that one could stake one’s life on it a thousand times.”
When I read that, I couldn’t help thinking about a man who got up and spoke at a seminar that was supposed to help religious leaders learn how to minister to returning veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan. Speakers had addressed the spiritual and moral wounds of war and the fact that most veterans were unlikely to enter our churches. There is a variety of reasons for that, but what this man had to say was the most heart-breaking. He was a therapist who counsels vets, and he described the inability of many veterans, in light of things they had seen and things they had done, to get back into ‘a state of grace.’ Imagine being in that dark and lonely place and hearing Luther’s words. Faith as “a living, daring confidence in God’s grace, so sure and certain that one could stake one’s life on it a thousand times” might seem like an impossible dream.
Another example is the man I used to visit in a skilled nursing facility. He would often reminisce in great detail things he had said in anger or mistakes he had made – over 50 years ago. He ruminated about these things all the time, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t let go and enjoy the living, daring confidence in God’s grace available to him.
And that brings me to Judas. Now- don’t get me wrong. I’m not going to compare veterans – or anyone else – to Judas as a betrayer. I know that as soon as we hear the name, we think of words like villainy and treachery. But that’s not where I’m going. So stay with me for a bit.
Let’s go back to today’s reading from Acts where the early Christian church was having its first organizational crisis. The disciples had to call a congregational meeting so they could hold an election to fill the vacancy left by Judas – because somewhere, somebody had decided there had to be twelve apostles to symbolize the twelve tribes of Israel. And now they were down one apostle. Verses 15-17 give the explanation for the vacancy; 21-26 explain the nomination and election process.
But notice that there are some verses missing in the passage from the lectionary. Where are verses 18-21? What happened in between verses 18-21? Well, what happened was the death of Judas, the gorier of the two accounts of his death. In between the lines of the story is a desperate act of disbelief in God’s grace.
But wait a minute. Why should we care? Don’t we believe in the wickedness of Judas, his utter unredeemability? How could we think there could have been any grace available to him in between these lines? Aren’t we supposed to accept some version of the horrific picture painted by Dante of the ninth circle of Hell, where Satan gnaws on Judas for all eternity?
Maybe not. There are some other possibilities for thinking about Judas that not only see the historic Judas as redeemable, but also his name which for so long has been synonymous with traitor.
One of the most convincing arguments is that in the earliest writings of the church Judas is not a treacherous character at all. In the letters of Paul, the first one written around twenty years before the first gospel, there is nothing hostile about Judas, at least by name. Paul does write about “the night in which Jesus was betrayed,” but says nothing about it being by one of ‘the twelve.’ Also, when Paul described the experience of resurrection, he said that Jesus was seen by ‘the twelve’ – not the remaining eleven. So Judas is still among them, according to Paul.
Where Judas begins to take a hit is in the gospels. Starting with Mark, the first gospel written, you can see the image of Judas becoming increasingly negative. By the time John wrote, Christianity was breaking away from being a sect within Judaism, and we can read the hostility in John’s references to ‘the Jews’ – of whom he was one, but of a different church body (and we know how nasty church fights can be).
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