For about 5 years, I worked as a high school teacher in a great books style, classical education program. This sounds a little hoity-toity, but primarily it means that instead of focusing the classroom around lectures and textbooks, we focused our classes around great books and discussions. Instead of reading textbooks about American History, they would read Frederick Douglass & Abraham Lincoln; instead of reading a textbook or anthology with snippets of English Literature, they would read G.K. Chesterton & T.S. Eliot — straight to the source. Likewise, instead of coming to class to hear me lecture about one of these topics, I would give them an opening question on the book they were supposed to have read that week, and we would spend the whole class discussing the text at hand. My job was to facilitate, to act as a guide and to help the students plumb the depths of whatever book we were discussing — to help them discover that they were able to understand and grapple with the powerful, often di cult ideas and questions o ered in these books. And the wonderful thing is that they were able; I consistently had better discussions about philosophy and theology with my 14 year old students than with my fellow seminary students in PhD seminars.
The trickiest bit about my job was to help the students themselves discover that they really were able to understand and grapple with this stu if they did the work, trusted one another, and didn’t give up. And this makes sense, right? I’m sure you can tell that many of the books we would read together are the kind of thing that most of us write o as being out of reach or irrelevant for the average person — stu for ‘those smart people.’ Most of my students didn’t think of themselves as being capable of understanding this stu when they started our classes. We would get into our rst discussions and they would freeze up after I asked a question, not because they couldn’t do it, but because they had been trained to believe that the teacher was ‘the smart one’ who had all the answers, that their job was just to follow along and receive the special knowledge that I possessed. Especially with rst year students, it would take almost the whole year for the group to really break out of this; as the tutor, I would have to try all sorts of strategies to try to get them to realize that they were capable of doing this work together. One of my favorite strategies was to just go silent and dramatically turn my chair around and put myself in the corner for part of a discussion. The goal here is simple: if the students are unhelpfully relying upon you, looking to the teacher to answer the question instead of using the text, their own minds, and one another, then you remove yourself. You refuse to cooperate, and you stay out until they eventually give up waiting for you to answer the question for them and start to answer it themselves (because it’s either that or they sit in awkward silence for an hour and half) — and (if it works) something magical happens.
They try it. They start to say ‘yes’ to my invitation and begin to do the work together. They vulnerably throw out an idea, they try to puzzle through a confusing passage together, they stumble upon a key idea and start to make sense of it, and they realize that they can do this work, that their minds are made of the same stu as mine, and that they are just as capable and worthy as I am to discover the goodness, truth, and beauty hidden in those weird old books we would read together.
Now, why did I spend so long talking about this? I’m tempted to just go sit in the corner and make you guys preach the rest of the sermon for me, but that’s not why I bring it up. In the Old Testament reading, we nd Moses feeling overwhelmed and angry, feeling as though God has saddled him alone with the impossible responsibility of taking care of the whole people of Israel. He complains to God about this, and God says, ‘Sure, no problem’ — and ordains 70 ‘elders’ to help Moses lead the people. Two of those ‘elders’ don’t come to the meeting when they are supposed to, and so the spirit of God comes upon wherever they happen to be. Suddenly they are overcome and God’s spirit begins to speak through them out in the middle of the Israelite camp. When Moses’s right-hand man, Joshua, hears about this, he is ‘jealous’ for Moses, he wants to protect Moses’s reputation as ‘The One’ who holds God’s authority, and tells Moses to shut them up. But Moses doesn’t want to, because he is overcome with relief and gratitude because he has remembered that God is the one who leads and provides for his people, and God has given him a whole lot of help when he nally asked for it. Joshua misses the point — Moses doesn’t care about protecting his status and authority, he cares about the presence and power of God being present among his people, and he even looks forward to a day when God would ‘put his spirit on all of God’s people.’
Similarly, when we get to the Gospel, we see the disciples up in arms about the fact that some rogue exorcist is out doing miracles in the name of Jesus, when this person doesn’t follow them. The disciples, like Joshua, are missing the point: they are more concerned with controlling who counts as a ‘legitimate’ disciple of Jesus, with protecting their status and worthiness, than with the fact that the healing work of God is being carried out through this stranger. Remember how Jesus caught them ghting over which one of them was ‘the greatest’ in last week’s gospel? So Jesus reminds them of what he said in last week’s gospel, that the way they are treating this stranger or that little child is the way that they are treating Jesus.
There is a ip side to our Gospel reading this morning. Jesus rebukes the disciples harshly, telling them that it would be better to be drowned or to cut o a limb than to let their pride and desire for status and ‘greatness’ cause them to mistreat or ‘become a stumbling block’ to another person in whom Christ is present, because to do so is to reject Christ himself — because in some mysterious way, Christ is present in each of them.
In other words, the hope of Moses has come true in Christ. God has put his Spirit upon all of his people. And so when we get to our reading from the epistle of James, we are given a picture of a spirit- lled community. A place where all members participate in the life of Christ. Notice that there is no Moses- gure, no special teacher or priest in James’s passage. James assumes that the Spirit lives in every member of the Church community, so he exhorts all of them to praise and pray with one another, to confess to each other, to receive healing through one another’s prayers. He believes that any one of the people he writes to could pray with as much power as Elijah, whose prayers stopped the rains in Israel for 3.5 years! He believes this, because he knows that God has placed his Spirit within each of us and so the whole life of Christ himself is on o er to us — if we can receive it.
The gospel this morning is not just a word to the disciples, it is a word to the ‘little ones’ — to all of us. It reminds us that the life of faith, prayerful connection with God, and the joy and fullness of Christ’s own life are not just for the special, ‘holy people’ over there — for the Moses, the ‘disciples,’ the priests up at the altar, the special saints who are ‘quali ed’ to experience God. We each have di erent gifts and di erent roles to play, sure, but we all are one of those little ones whom Christ stands with. We are all capable of extending Christ’s love and power and healing to each other — just like in the reading from James. And this is good news, especially for St. Matthias, because we don’t have a Moses right now, we don’t have a priest. All we have is one another and the Spirit of God here with us — and that is a gift, because it gives us an opportunity to discover that this is enough. St. Matthias can’t wait around for Church to happen until we nd a priest. We don’t know how long this search process will take, and we don’t need to wait. God has placed his Spirit within you. You are invited to step further into the life and love of Christ here and now, and invited into sharing that life with one another — whether or not there is a priest up there to help you do it. This is what we mean by the ‘priesthood of all believers.’
Each day, Christ holds out his hand to each and every one of us in ways great and small and invites us deeper into his abundant life. But each day, there are things that stand between us and accepting that invitation. Our fears, our shame and feelings of unworthiness, complacency and comfort, the wealth of distractions we are ooded with, even just the layout of our liturgy can mislead us into thinking that the real ‘Christian stu ’ happens up there, with the special ‘holy people’ in special robes rather than down here in each of us. In the somewhat grisly language of today’s gospel, there are parts of our story or our life that might need to be ‘cut o ’ or ‘plucked out’ to allow us to see and grasp the love of God. Just like my old students, we sometimes have a hard time believing that God wants to bring us into the story, that we are capable or worthy of being an instrument of God’s love or a bearer of his peace — and just like my old students, I believe that we have been made capable and worthy and there is much to discover together if we show up and trust. I believe that if we trust James and Jesus today, if we trust that Christ has put his Spirit in us and we do the faithful work of asking for God’s help and listening for his answers, of learning from one another and the Scriptures, of loving those around us and trying to say yes to all the little invitations God sends our way — if we say ‘yes’ then we will discover that we are capable of receiving joy and life that we could not have imagined.
May St. Matthias become a place where we begin to discover this together. Amen.