Sermons
May 17, 2026 (7th Sunday of Easter)
Fixing a Hole[1]
Acts 1:12-26
Do you know how Portland, Oregon, was named?
Seems that the founders of the city, Asa Lovejoy of Boston and Francis Pettygrove of Portland, Maine, could not agree on which of their hometowns to name the new city after. Eventually they decided to decide the issue by a best-two-of-three coin toss. Pettygrove won, and the city became Portland, Oregon Territory.[2]
It seems like that might not be the ideal way to make a big decision, although to be fair I don’t know that Mr. Lovejoy and Mr. Pettygrove[3] had any idea the little frontier town they founded would become a major city in the western United States.
We sure wouldn’t use a method like that to hire a new employee, would we? Put the names of the top candidates in a bowl and draw one out, and offer the position to that person? I think any executive who proposed such a method would be laughed right out of the HR director’s office.
Yet that’s what the disciples did when they set out to replace Judas, isn’t it? They took the two finalists, Matthias and Joseph Justus, and cast lots to determine which would be chosen. Cast lots—that means they threw dice, or flipped a coin, or drew the name out of a hat!
To our modern minds that seems like an awfully unserious way to choose someone for an important position.[4] But we have to remember that every word of the Bible came from cultures very different from our own.
We tend to see casting lots, drawing straws, whatever, as sort of superstitious. But in the ancient world it was a fairly common way to make decisions or divide property (remember that the soldiers cast lots for Jesus’ clothing at the crucifixion).[5] The land of Canaan was to be divided by casting lots.[6] The sailors who were with Jonah as he sailed to Tarshish cast lots to figure out whose fault it was that God (or the gods) had sent a deadly storm.[7] The story of Esther revolves around a ceremonial lot called Pur, which was cast to determine the day on which Esther’s people, the Jews, would be exterminated by the Persian official Haman—giving rise to the Jewish holiday called Purim.[8] And the high priest’s ceremonial vestments contained a pocket in which the Urim and Thummim, which were used to cast lots for a variety of ritual purposes, were placed.[9]
It wasn’t really thought of as superstitious; instead, by taking any human biases out of the equation, casting lots was considered a way to determine God’s will (although I doubt that’s why the soldiers at the crucifixion did it).
The Enlightenment way of thinking was that humans could be completely objective and could therefore make such decisions without silly superstition like casting lots. Nowadays we know that no human being can ever be totally objective; we carry our biases and experiences with us everywhere we go, and everything we do and every decision we make is inevitably colored by those biases and experiences. That’s not right or wrong; it just is.
Yet we still look sort of suspiciously on folks who try to make big decisions with a coin toss (or, humorously, by playing rock-paper-scissors—although that game goes back to an old, old Chinese game that functioned like casting lots did in the Bible).[10]
I don’t know that I would advocate going back to making decisions in this way, even if it is common in the worlds of the Bible. But there is one aspect of this story from Acts that we do well to make our own.
If you’ve ever been part of a church nominating committee, you know that the proceedings are often marked by anxiety and sometimes even despair. The truth is, nominating committees are given a near-impossible task: to fill the slots in a church structure that might have been effective sixty years ago, but isn’t really working anymore. It’s actually reflective of a breakdown in the generational change that is supposed to be part of church life.[11]
Up until the middle of the 20th century, each generation has stepped up and re-made churches and other institutions, like service clubs, according to their own preferences. But that came to a screeching halt when the generation that won World War II stepped up to take its place as leaders of churches and other organizations.
Granted this is a bit oversimplified, but the modern church structure with a large board and numerous functional committees was the outgrowth of how that generation worked together to win the war. Everybody did their part. Everybody had a role to play. We pulled together, worked together, and won together.
After the war was over, that generation decided that was the best way to do business in churches and other organizations. There’s a place for everyone, and everyone does their part. And so churches and Lions Clubs and other organizations all over the United States organized themselves such that there was a place for everyone, and everyone did their part.
Here’s where we ran into trouble: The next generation, the Baby Boomers, were very different from their predecessors. Instead of taking their places in leadership of churches and organizations and re-making them to fit their preferred way of doing things, many of the Baby Boomers rejected those institutions altogether. (Now many Boomers are back in churches today, but to get there a lot of them actually created their own churches rather than simply going back to the mainline churches their parents had led.) And since they weren’t interested, they didn’t see any need to convey the importance of those institutions to their children, and so on until now we’re four generations out from the people who shaped the church structure we now hang onto for dear life even though it’s not really working anymore in a lot of places.
So when a nominating committee sits down with the massive list of slots that need to be filled each year, the first reaction is anxiety—where are we going to find the people to fill them, given that our churches are getting older and smaller and the people who were able to do the work in the past might not be able to do it now? And the second reaction is a despair-filled look in the rear-view mirror: Well, we used to have full pews, full Sunday schools, full committees, full men’s and women’s groups, and we used to not have these problems.
We also don’t often imagine there could be a different way of organizing a church—it’s a bit like asking a fish to describe the water it’s swimming in; it doesn’t know anything else. So we sit with that list and the church directory, and we twist arms and fill slots and worry, and eventually we come up with a slate of nominees, but every year we fear that next time might be when it all falls apart.
And so a lot of times sitting on the nominating committee is really one of the least desired tasks in a congregation.
In Sac City we had a church secretary named Sherrill for quite a few years. Sherrill and I did a lot of talking and thinking (and arguing) about all kinds of things, including Biblical interpretation and church life.
One year she got chosen to lead the nominating committee. That year’s nomination process was absolutely the easiest and smoothest one I’ve ever experienced.
We chose and ordained some new elders—in one case someone who had never thought of herself as qualified to be an elder but who proved to be an excellent one. We picked committee chairs who were truly called to the ministry those committees were meant to carry out. We selected deacons not in the hope that making them deacons might cause them to actually attend church, as had been done in the past, but from the ranks of folks already active to at least some extent and ready to take the next step toward leadership.
What made the difference? Well, that’s what we see in today’s reading.
No, we didn’t cast lots. That’s something that may have been common in Biblical times, but I wouldn’t advocate it today.
What we did was what the disciples did before they cast lots—where they understood the casting of lots to be the way God’s will was made known.
Sherrill and I led the nominating committee to bathe every decision we had to make, every ministry we needed people to carry out, in prayer. Instead of going through the directory and putting people into the slots almost randomly, we prayerfully considered each person’s personality and God-given abilities, and asked people to serve where we believed God would have them serve.
It wasn’t Sherrill’s or my personality or spectacular leadership skills that made the difference that year. It was our commitment, not just the two of us but the whole nominating committee, to pray before every conversation, every phone call, every decision.
What if we made the same commitment here and now—not just when we’re in the nomination process, but with every conversation, every decision, every action we carry out as Jesus’ body here in Butler, Missouri?
[1] Hat tip to Lennon/McCartney, of course.
[2] This coin toss took place in 1845; Oregon joined the union as the 33rd state in 1859. Apropos of nothing, Mike lived in Oregon for three decades and somehow didn’t know this story until last week.
[3] Both these men have streets named after them in Portland; and did you know that the characters in The Simpsons are named after Portland streets, since creator Matt Groening is from Portland? The pastor at the Simpson family’s church is named Lovejoy.
[4] An important decision, perhaps; but once he has been chosen to take Judas’ place, Matthias is never seen again in Acts or anywhere else in the Bible.
[5] Matthew 27:35; Mark 15:24; Luke 23:34; John 19:23-24. Only John spells out that this refers to Psalm 22:18.
[6] Numbers 26:55-56
[7] Jonah 1:7
[8] Esther 3:7; 9:24
[9] Exodus 28:30; Leviticus 8:8; Deuteronomy 33:8; 1 Samuel 14:41; Ezra 2:63; Nehemiah 7:65
[10] There actually is an official website for rock-paper-scissors, where the history of the game is explained: https://wrpsa.com/the-official-history-of-rock-paper-scissors/.
[11] Our former Regional Minister Dick Hamm has written and spoken extensively about this.