Fame and Truth: Sermon Preached on 12th May 2024 (The Sunday After Ascension)

Preached at St Peter’s, Poulshot and St Mary’s, Potterne

Readings – Acts 1. 15-17, 21-26 ; John 17. 6-19

“…and the lot fell on Matthias.”

On the morning after the Eurovision Song Contest, it seems appropriate to reflect that fame and celebrity seems to be the El Dorado of the present age. It isn’t new, of course – even in the 19^th Century, artists with a worldwide reputation like the singer Nellie Melba or the pianist-conductor Franz Liszt could often arrive in a new city to crowds of screaming fans, much as the Beatles and the Stones would a century later. The ancient Romans and Persians also had their celebrities. But this ancient human trait seems to have intensified since the turn of this century. Reality TV and talent shows began to crowd out more interesting forms of programme-making, while the Internet facilitated new forms of celebrity entrepreneur, willing to say, do, or sell anything to harvest attention from their own little world of fans.

People can make a good living from this. You’ve probably never heard of Charli d’Amelio. Charli is a social media influencer, someone who’s famous on social media because she’s famous on social media, and therefore attractive to people wanting to advertise and promote brands. Charli has 44 million followers on Instagram and a whopping 154 million followers on TikTok. Her most recent TikTok video, posted on Wednesday, shows Charli and a friend dancing to music while washing their hair with Garnier shampoo.

Compare this with the situation in our epistle reading. The 120 people Peter speaks to seem to comprise all the remaining Christians in the entire world. Even I have more social media followers than this. About twice that number came to church on Easter morning in our little country benefice.

These people have recently returned to Jerusalem from seeing Jesus ascend into heaven. It feels like they have retreated from the world. They are not, however, inactive: instead they are doing the most important thing they could do, praying constantly, along with Mary and some other women.

Then Peter stands among the believers and asks them to deal with an important administrative matter—they need to decide who replaces Judas as one of the twelve apostles. There are two seemingly well-qualified possibilities from their chosen pool of candidates: men who followed Jesus right from His baptism by John through to His Ascension. They are content to choose between these two by lot. I would love to tell you more about them, but about the unchosen Joseph Barsabbas we know nothing, and about St Matthias, whom the lot fell on, we know little more. This is so even though he was with Jesus from the start to the very end of His public ministry, even though he became one of the apostles, and even though he still to this day has his own feast day, celebrated by the Church of England this coming Tuesday, 14 May. So these people who lived extraordinary lives and who were clearly held in the highest regard by their colleagues have left almost no trace in the historical record.

Does this matter? God knows why they were held in such regard and how and why they helped His Kingdom to come on Earth; they are now in His nearer presence forever.

This is a vision entirely opposite to that of celebrity culture, and it’s easy for us to sit in Church and stand in judgement on celebrity culture. But it’s much healthier spiritually to explore our own attitudes, and fortunately we also have a challenge to how the Church sees itself here.

To explore that, we need to remember what happens in Acts immediately after the lot falls on Matthias? Pentecost! We all love the idea of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit everywhere, actual miracles like people speaking languages they don’t even know, and thousands of people becoming Christians as a result. This is all wonderful, but we need to remember that neither the Church nor the world all just lived happily ever after that first Pentecost. From that tiny nucleus of a hundred and twenty people, the Church grew into a body of billions. Yet it still struggled with theological divisions and personality disputes, and even Christians found it hard to forgive each other; some Christians had their fingers in the till, like poor old Ananias and Sapphira, who dropped dead at history’s first PCC meeting. Like the great display of the Northern Lights on Friday, spectacular events illuminate our lives, perhaps change them permanently in some important respects, but some sort of normality always returns afterwards.

Of course, I’d love us to have an actual Pentecost here next Sunday, in our villages, where we all went out into the streets making converts, suddenly able to speak Polish or Urdu whenever we needed it. But the next day we’d have an awful lot of admin to do – processing all those forms for new members of the Electoral Roll, and standing orders for regular giving, and hopefully even a few co-options to the PCC. We’d also need to do plenty of praying, because the temptation to let all that success go to our heads would be enormous—especially in our celebrity-obsessed culture. Also, we’d need to pray that all this earthly success didn’t distract us from heaven, God, and the eternal things.

So, a lot of our Christian life has to be like that of the apostles in today’s reading from Acts—dealing with our needs as a community, dealing with admin, and praying. Today, the Sunday After Ascension, is one of the odd little by-ways of the Church’s year, a brief moment of ordinariness between the two great feasts of Ascension and Pentecost. It points us towards the long run of Ordinary Time in the Church’s calendar that will start in a few weeks’ time and run all the way to Advent Sunday. It is a celebration of the ordinariness that must make up most of our lives.

In contrast, our Gospel reading is set at a most extraordinary moment—almost the last words that St John records Jesus saying to His closest followers before His arrest. This passage is full of the sense of conflict between good and evil that is not just located in one city in one particular week, but something of eternal and cosmic significance. Jesus asks for His followers to be protected from “the evil [one]” – in other words the Devil, the Father of Lies. Then Jesus asks His father to sanctify them, to make them holy, through the truth. At a fundamental level, this great cosmic conflict seems to be one between truth and lies.

This conflict is, for most of us, lived out in the humdrum of our daily lives, for the Devil also seeks to tempt us in the ordinary. The damaging lie we pretend is just a harmless little fib is one of the Devil’s most powerful weapons, along with the wilfully denied act of spite and the carefully nursed grudge. He uses them among families, friends, workmates, lovers – oh, indeed! – and certainly among people who worship together. It is from these that we need to pray to God for protection.

On the other hand, should God use us to do great things—for example, if he grows an enormous forest of faith from our little village churches in some latter day Pentecost—that is wonderful. Remember, though, that we know almost nothing about Matthias and Joseph Barsabbas, even though God seems to have used them for great things in the presence of Christ on earth. We should reject the central premise of celebrity culture, that the more people who see our image, the more we are of value. Instead, rest confident that God knows the good you do in the everyday, and that this is good enough for Him.

Now thanks be to God the Father, who has given us the victory through Our Lord Jesus Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit. Amen.