24th May - Acts 1 :15-17. 21-26, Psalm 1, John 17:6-19
I can’t remember when it happened, but sometime between my childhood and when I first started catering for cub parties a shift in British cooking and eating tradition occurred.
When I was a child sausage rolls were a real, treat, home made with much fuss from shortcrust pastry and sausage meat, the sausage meat may possibly have been purchased from that great 1970s institution of Bejam.
These treats would then arrive at a particular party or event, without much thought for refrigeration on the way.
However the shift has occurred and now it is easy to buy, perfectly acceptable sausage rolls which are pre-cooked. In fact they are ready to serve, all that is required is opening the packet placing the sausage rolls on the plate and putting out on the table.
The connoisseur may complain but I tell in the past ten years not one cub or brownie has noticed the difference between these offerings and home-made.
A line does have to be drawn somewhere, but where? Personally I have always baulked at ready to serve custard (although careful examination of my cupboards may find instant custard?) and ready to serve porridge (again how is that necessary when ready brek exists). In our instant world the whole concept of ready to serve has come a long way since my childhood of carefully rubbed in lard and margarine to make the pastry for the sausage rolls.
The gospel passage find’s Jesus praying for his disciples? It’s quite a long and complicated prayer, worthy of a sermon per sentence, but towards the end of the reading today Jesus asks ‘ Make them ready for your service.’ In other words, make them ready to serve.
Jesus says ‘For their sake, I am making myself ready to serve so that they can be ready for their service of the truth.’
Jesus knows that the disciples have been serving, but they need to be ready to do a whole lot more serving before their time is done here on earth. So what is it that makes the disciples ready to serve?
Today we listened to the NIV version, the Revised standard version translate these verses differently. It uses one word, Sanctify, instead of the ready to serve phrase so instead of
17.Make them ready for your service through your truth; your teaching is truth.
We have
17 Sanctify them in the truth ; your word is truth.
So Sanctify and being made ready for service appear to be the same thing. If I asked you to define sanctify as a word, thing s like, being made holy, might come up in the explanations. And so it seems there is something inextricably linked between the being made holy and being made ready to serve. If being holy is to do with being like God and being like Jesus, the great servant King, then yes of course Sanctify means being made ready to serve.
In the Acts passage we are looking for someone to replace Judas in the twelve. Why do they need to replace Judas, why not run with eleven? Well partly to do with the idea that they are to be witnessing to the twelve tribes of Israel, and partly to do with their innate Jewish sense of twelve being complete and eleven being incomplete.
So they look for someone to be one of the twelve, one of the apostles, they realise that some things are necessary in the person whom they are choosing after all they really do need someone who is ready to serve.
So what is it that makes the shortlisted candidates Matthias and Barsabbas ready to serve?
They realise they need people who have seen everything.
21 Therefore it is necessary to choose one of the men who have been with us the whole time the Lord Jesus went in and out among us,
22.beginning from John’s baptism to the time when Jesus was taken up from us. For one of these must become a witness with us of his resurrection.”
They need to be eyewitnesses, the disciples realise the continuity of eyewitness testimony will be the church’s foundation.
Then after they look for the qualifications they let God choose by lot the person it should be.
God is in one way not about to send the disciples on a leadership course, but in another real way he already has and he is about to take them on a huge learning journey.
The disciples realise the importance of having been a witness to Jesus’ time on earth, their training has been their experience of living in a relationship with Jesus, this has sanctified the, this has made them ready to serve.
So what makes us ‘ready to serve’? Is it to have lived in relationship with Jesus –Yes.
Is it to have been witness to God’s amazing acts? – Yes
Is it to have been sanctified and set apart holy by God, - Yes.
Maybe it’s easier to think about sanctification as something into which one grows, we are sometimes zapped, we are sometimes immediately changed with one thing or another in our lives. But often the process of sanctification is one which is characterised by slow growth.
The disciples had been being trained by their experience, and part of that experience was through serving.
The become more ready to serve by their experience of having already been serving. This is in one way a circle, or spiral, every time we do anything we are changed,. We serve God in one way, the service, the experience the reliance of God we see in that service, sanctifies us, changes us and makes us even more ready to serve.
So I guess the question for today is are we ready to serve?
Maybe we feel the answer is no, then we should do what it is we feel necessary to makes us ready to serve, because to be a disciple of Christ is to be ready to serve. If we feel we need more experience, then let’s get it. If we feel we need to spend more time with Jesus, then do it. But the disciples knew that serving led to sanctification which led to more serving, which led to more sanctification.
So today’s big question is, are we prepared to be ready to serve.?