Simon and Jude
Dean Gay Hall
Seabury-Western
October 30, 2007
Yesterday morning’s Chicago Tribune greeted me with a story about the Chicago episcopal election which really made me angry. The story was on the first page of the Metro section, and it was entitled “Episcopalians grill bishop candidates.” What annoyed me so much about the story was the way its writer generalized out of a limited interview pool confidently to speculate that two “front-runners” had emerged. Worse than that, the story then went on to detail at least one uncomfortable moment faced by a nominee during the walkabout, and then it singled out other nominees for more favorable coverage. I felt like I was reading a story about American Idol. I fired off what AKMA would call a “sternly-worded missive” to the paper, but then as my anger cooled I began to reflect about what this coverage says about us. We live in an age of celebrity. I guess it’s hard, sometimes, to think about even a bishop election without comparing it to the race for the Oscars. Are we electing a celebrity or a bishop? And if our bishop is a celebrity, then are the rest of us merely that person’s fans?
All of us struggle with this sense that we are both central actors and bit players in the drama of life. Part of what gave Tom Stoppard’s 1960s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead both its humor and its poignancy was the way in which we as the audience connected with two characters who understood themselves, for once, merely to be bit players in someone else’s drama. If you’re familiar with Hamlet, you’ll remember that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern exist not so much as characters in their own right but as conveniences to help forward a very convoluted plot. At one point in Stoppard’s play, Rosencrantz shouts, “Incidents! All we get is incidents! Dear God, is it too much to expect a little sustained action?!”
Now when St. Simon and St. Jude’s day rolls around, I cannot help but think of them as the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of the Christian calendar. Most of the other apostles have for us some kind of concrete reality; but Simon and Jude are pretty much apostolic ciphers. We know they were called and chosen by Jesus, and there are some legends about them and their exploits, but essentially they are like minor, faceless characters in a drama starring someone else. We know that Simon was zealous and that Jude favors hopeless causes, but beyond that they don’t really seem to exist. What’s a Christian preacher to say, then, about them?
I think what one might say about Simon and Jude takes its bearing from a line in the letter to the Ephesians which we heard read earlier this morning:
He has abolished the law with its commandments and ordinances, that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace, and might reconcile both groups to God in one body through the cross, thus putting to death that hostility through it. [Ephesians 2]
What the author of Ephesians is getting at is this: the church itself is a sign of the Gospel that it proclaims. By that he means that we are, as a community made up of Jews and Gentiles, the new humanity that God has made in the life and death and resurrection of Jesus. By bringing together groups thought irreconcilable into one body, God has done what was thought to be impossible. The church’s very existence as a community which transcends human boundaries and identities is a sign in and of itself of who God is and what we, as creatures made in God’s image, can become.
Now that’s a very big thing which this writer sees going on in the universe. Christianity is not only a movement living out the teachings of Jesus; it is, in itself, the living body of Christ in the world. And it enacts its life as Christ’s body in the way in which God calls women and men and Jews and gentiles and slaves and free people into a body where their old identity counts for nothing at all. In the church it doesn’t matter if you were Roman nobility or a Palestinian peasant. Your identity is no longer your ethnic or racial or gender label given you by the world; your identity is the one you have taken on as part of the ekklesia, the community of the called, and it is conferred on you in Baptism. Who you were no longer matters in precisely the way you thought it did. Who you are is now inextricably bound with who we are. Your name is a symbol of who you are becoming in relation to where we are going as the body of Christ.
Now if that’s the central affirmation of a sacramental understanding of the church, which I believe it is, then it helps us understand the extraordinaryanonymity of Saints Simon and Jude. Because one way to understand Simon and Jude is to see them as Christians who have emptied themselves of the last vestiges of ego. It’s not that they have no identity. It’s rather that they allow their own identity to be caught up into the larger identity of the apostolic community. Simon and Jude are not merely ciphers. They are a kind of willed emptiness through which you and I can enter more deeply into the fellowship of the apostolic community gathered around Jesus.
Last week, eight Christian people endured our diocesan walkabout as part of the process by which we will select a new bishop. Now three of those eight are friends of mine, so I need to be careful in what I say here. But as I sat on those cold, hard pews for what seemed like four interminable hours in Glen Ellyn last Tuesday night, I was dismayed by what I experienced as my own internal prurience for celebrity. We live in a church culture which exalts celebrity, and I’m not speaking mega-church Evangelicals here, I’m talking basic Episcopal parish stuff. Think of the way parishes and dioceses define themselves around their leaders. Think of those gloomy portraits of all Seabury’s deans in the refectory. Something in us wants our leaders to be at least minor celebrities, and as I sat through the walkabout speeches and answer sessions I felt my internal processes reaching for a bishop who would be a tangible personal presence in my own emotional life. In the terms of this homily, I was a Rosencrantz looking for Hamlet.
But if Ephesians is right, then God is doing something which calls our yearnings for celebrity into question. I think this is one of the reasons I find myself continually questioning the Friedman version of leadership. When we think about the apostolic ministry in our midst, what is it that we want: a well-differentiated leader who will persevere through resistance to realize his or her own vision for the Diocese of Chicago? Or do we want something else that we cannot even name: a Christian person who understands that the church is itself a sign of God’s own gracious and redeeming activity, one who lives out the Baptized life by a kind of self-emptying transparency which points not to themselves nor even to us but to Jesus? I’m not sure we would recognize that person if we saw them.
And that brings me back to Saints Simon and Jude. We don’t know very much about them, and that invisibility might just be their greatest gift as we contemplate apostolic ministry in our own time and place. We want our bishops and our clergy to be politicians, executives, and television stars. Perhaps those are realities of the fallen world we live in. But as we gather at God’s table, let us remember that the true identity we want from our leaders in the one that Jesus gives them in Baptism. And let’s also remember that even some apostles have worn their identity so transparently that they seemed to disappear in the process, showing us not themselves but the One in whose name we gather and give thanks. Amen.