For all of you who waited patiently for the third installment of The Lord of the Rings, I cannot recommend too highly the three books on which the films were based. In contrast to the graphic fireworks of the films the books offer a watery witchery of words. They also offer Tolkien's poetry, which is largely absent from the movies, and they offer indices at the end of the books.

In one such index you will find a scene between King Aragorn on his deathbed and Arwen, "who has given up her elvish immortality to be the mortal Aragorn's queen" (Anna Mathie, First Things, Nov. 2003, 10). Arwen pleads with him not to die, to which Aragorn answers, "I speak no comfort to you, for there is no comfort for such pain within the circles of the world" (quoted in ibid).

Then Arwen says these memorable words about death. "If this indeed, as the Elves say, the gift of the One to Men, it is bitter to receive" (ibid).

Our culture of youth, beauty and stength can identify readily with the bitterness. We are only beginning to come to grips with the notion that death is a gift, especially the untimely death of the young, beautiful and strong. Faced with that unwelcome intruder, we cry, "Foul." We question the integrity of God or the universe or whomever else we see about injusitice.

Sooner or later, most of us entertain that question and wonder where we can find any suitable answers. In my reading I recently came across a Christian proposal for our wondering minds. It goes like this: "The Christian vision of things affirms the ultimate coherence of reality, so that the opaqueneess of existence reflects a mystery, not an incoherence" (Alister McGrath, Theory, 98).

Untimely death makes life feel mysterious and incoherent. Can we be persuaded that life is mysterious and coherent? I doubt that many of us can be argued into being persuaded. We need to see intimations of coherence within circumstances that seem to be nothing but mystery and incoherence. Luke offers us such intimations in a story from the early Church that I find somewhat promising. Please join me in Acts 12.

The Untimely Passing of an Apostle
Throughout the first seven chapters we watched the gathering tension between the Jewish Church and the Jewish Sanhedrin. Interrogation, imprisonment, flogging, direct orders not to speak in the name of Jesus, and flagrant disobedience of those directo orders led finally to violence. Saul of Tarsus, acting on authority from the Sanhedrin, supervised the stoning of Stephen to death, and opened an all-out effort to destry the Church that took him beyond the borders of Israel.

Chapters 8-11 report the unintended consequences of that effort. Saul's effort to destroy succeeded only in dispersing the Church throughout Judea, which easily absorbed the fleeing Christians. Other Jewish Christians dispersed into Samaria, a place where historically Jews did not care to go. They went and to everyone's amazement, Samaritans, who otherwise had nothing to do with Jewish religious events, believed the story of Jesus and became His followers. Philip baptized them into the Church, thus putting Samaritans on an equal footing with Jews.

Then came a bombshell. Saul, the architect of Church destruction, became a follower of Jesus and a public advocate for Jesus and the Church he once tried to destroy. Luke the master of understatement, says nothing about the consternation this caused in the Sanhedrin. It must have been considerable.

And the other shoe dropped. Christians fleeing from Saul's persecution left Israel altogether. Some found a place to hide in the large, Gentile city of Antioch. People wanted to know why they were there, and those Jewish Christians told them. To their amazement Gentiles believed the story of Jesus and became His followers.

They did so in increasing numbers. A new church sprang up. The Jerusalem apostles dispatched Barnabas to manage the situation as well as he could, and it was Barnabas who found Saul in Tarsus and brought him to Antioch to teach the church

In Acts 12 Luke takes us back to the turbulent relationship between the Jerusalem apostles and the Sanhedrin. It becomes obvious from verse one that they had secured the help of the secular authorities in taming, if not destroying, the young Church's apostolic leadership. It was about this time that King Herod arrested some who belonged to the church, intending to persecute them. Verse two makes it clear how serious his intentions were. He had James, the brother of John, put to death with the sword.

Not James! Not the son of Zebedee, who left his father in their boat with the hired servants to follow Jesus! This is the ambitious James, who asked Jesus to let him and his brother, John, have positions of power in Jesus' coming government. This is the James to whom Jesus said, "The cup that I drink you will drink, and with the baptism with which I am baptized you will be baptized."

James drank that cup at the hand of Herod, but he was so young. He might even have been in his 20s. His career lay before him. He was clearly a leader in the company of the apostles. He can't be gone. But he was gone, taken from them senselessly, violently. Life must have felt very mysterious and incoherent to the Church. It promised to become even more mysterious and incoherent.

Peter's Miraculous Deliverance
Verses 3-5: When he (Herod) saw that this pleased the Jews, he proceeded to seize Peter also. This happened during the Feast of Unleavened Bread. After arresting him, he put him in prison, handing him over to be guarded by four squads of four soldiers each. Herod intended to bring him out for public trial after the Passover. So Peter was kept in prison, but the church was earnestly praying to God for him. You never know when God will hear your prayers.

Verses 6-10 tell a remarkable stort. The night before Herod was to bring him to trial, Peter was sleeping between two soldiers, bound with two chains, and sentries stood guard at the entrance. Suddenly an angel of the Lord appeared and a light shone in the cell. He struck Peter on the side and woke him up. Physical sort of angel, don't you think? "Quick, get up!" he said, and the chains fell of Peter's wrists.

Then the angel said to him, "Put on your clothes and sandals." And Peter did so. "Wrap your cloak around you and follow me," the angel told him. Peter followed him out of the prison, but he had no idea that what the angel was doing was really happening; he thought he was seeing a vision. Apparently, seeing is not always believing. They passed the first and second guards and came to the iron gate leading to the city. It opened for them by itself, and they went through it. When they had walked the length of one street, suddenly the angel left him.

At last, Peter gets a grip on reality. Then Peter came to himself and said, "Now I know without a doubt that the Lord sent his angel and rescued me from Herod's clutches and from everything the Jewish people were anticipating." When this had dawned on him, he went to the house of Mary the mother of John, also called Mark, where many people had gathered and were praying.

Peter knocked on the outer entrance, and a servant girl named Rhoda came to answer the door. When she recognized Peter's voice, she was so overjoyed she ran back without opening it and exclaimed, "Peter is at the door!" That's really funny, but not nearly as funny as what the prayer meeting crowd said to her.

"You're out of your mind," they told her. When she kept insisting that it was so, they said, "It must be his angel." Why did they find it easier to believe it was an angel than to believe it was Peter? And in the meantime, do angels knock on doors?

Verses 16-17: But Peter kept on knocking, and when they opened the door and saw him, they were astonished. Peter motioned with his hand for them to be quiet and described how the Lord had brought him out of prison. "Tell James and the brothers about this," he said, and then left for another place. Peter, for the time being, had gone into hiding, lest another leading apostle be taken from the Church in an untimely manner.

Coherent Mystery
Once again, the proposal for our wondering minds says, "The Christian vision of things affirms the ultimate coherence of reality, so that the opaqueness of existence reflects a mystery, not an incoherence" (Alister McGrath, Theory, 98). So, why was Peter spared but not James? Where is the coherence in that? Where is the justice in that?

Of course, we ask those questions, but are there in this story intimations of of an asyet invisible coherence? Let's go back to our accusatory question. Why was Peter spared but not James? Let's ask a different question. What do Peter's rescue and our question about it tell us about the nature of reality?

First, Peter's rescue tells us that God has the power and will to intervene in human affairs to prevent unjust violence against an innocent person. His selective use of that power fuels our question.

Second, our question assumes that God operates by the same rules and will understand our question about sapring Peter but not James. Because God created us in His image, we also believe we learned our sense of justice and fair play from Him.

Third, God doesn't give direct answers to questions like ours, or at least not for a long time. So, we are faced with a choice. We can believe that God is capricious and spares Peter but not James on a whim or worse out of pleasure at seeing James killed. In that case reality will always be mysterious and incoherent.

On the other hand, we acknowledge that our experience is opaque. We can't see its coherence. We see a mystery. But we can believe that God has coherent reasons for sparing Peter and not Jamees, but we do not have acceess to those reasons. We have reason to believe reality is coherent, and we can look for intimations of its coherence.

Interestingly enough, chapter 12 closes with two such intimations. The first takes us back to Herod, who executed James. Verse 20 describes the resolution of a political dilemma that Herod had. He had been quarreling with the people of Tyre and Sidon; they now joined together and sought an audience with him. Having secured the support of Blastus, a trusted personal servant of the king, they asked for peace, because they depened on the king's country for their food supply. He had the Church on the run, and now he had secured peace with his neighbors to the north.

Verses 21-23 report an unexpected turn of events. On the appointed day Herod, wearing his royal robes, sat on his throne and delivered a public address to the people. They shouted, "This is the voice of a god, not of a man." Immediately, because Herod did not give praise to God, an angel of the Lord (another pesky angel) struck him down, and he was eaten by worms and died.

Well, he deserved it, the stinker. Oh, you think so, do you? Is that because this time heaven acted the way you thought heaven should act? Well, of course! It doesn't bring James back, but it evens things up. But if we agree in this case that God has acted justly, shouldn't it dispose us to believe that He acts justly in cases, where His reasons are not plain to see? It doesn't prove that. It intimates that.

And so does verse 24. But the word of God cotinued to increase and spread. In spite of what happened to James many people, much closer to those events than we are, embraced the very faith for which james died. They must have known that embracing that faith put them at some risk. Whatever questions they had about James' death and Peter's rescue, it did not deter them from entrusting themselves to the God of Jesus Christ, who sent His angel to rescue Peter and appeared to remain silent while James died.

The Pastoral Center of Gravity
None of this proves the ultimate coherence of reality, but, altogether these two events do intimate that beneath the surface incoherence of life that can be bitter to receive there is a deeper coherence that we can trust, even when we can't see it. We can dare to embrace the mystery of life.

Sometimes, the only way we can bear the mystery and trust the coherence is in silence. When you are swallowed up by the darkness, a lot of well-meaning chatter about the meaning of life is not particularly welcome. But in that darkness you may find yourself able to utter the immortal words of Job 13:15 as your very own. Though he slay me, yet will I hope in him; I will surely defend my ways to his face.

The rest of us can speak when spoken to, and while we wait permission to speak, we can pray and watch and be amazed at the trembling dignity and courage with which people bear the inscrutable sufferings of this mortal life.

There is a second pastor reflection on this remarkable chapter. Judging by verse 24, the death of James did not slow down the growth of the Church. To put it another way, the growth of the Church did not depend on James. It never depends on any one person.

I remember thinking at one time in my life, "What will happen to Christianity, when Billy Graham can no longer preach?" Now that Dr. Graham has been slowed by age and infirmity, we already know the answer to that question. Christianity will do quite well, thank you, because it doesn't depend on Billy Graham.

God has brought together a good staff for BVBC. The day will come when all of us will be gone. The impact of that inevitability will depend far more on where your confidence as a congregation lies than on the staff that is to come. If your confidence for a stable and effective ministry rests with the present staff, then you are sowing the seeds of a future crisis. If your confidence rests in the God of James and Peter and Herod and angels, the God who sustains coherence beneath all the mysteries of life, then you bequeath to the future of this church hope and the possibility of unfettered blessing.