Stephen

Stephen

Acts 7:54-60

Last week, we checked in on the earliest Christians in their earliest days.  After the extraordinary moment of Pentecost, when everyone was filled with God’s spirit and everyone understood one another, there were some good days.  We were told about how everyone shared everything.  We were told that people worshiped together, not out of shame or guilt for fear, but simply because they were grateful.  Here’s the question that you should ask yourself:  “How long could that last? Seriously, how long?”

The answer to that question is, “Not long…” Peter…you remember him…the guy who denied ever having known Jesus at all, who was later forgiven repeatedly by Jesus?  Well, there was an elderly couple who sold their stuff just like everyone else but held some back.  Peter confronts them and shames them and displays no signs of forgiveness for either of them.  (This is my emphasis, not the text’s.  The text seems perfectly matter of fact about this.) Then, the man dies.  A day or two later, the woman dies, too.  So much for that whole forgiveness and redemption thing…

About that same time, it became obvious that when you bring everyone together, some people just have a lot less than others to share.  Some people are just plain poor.  Some of the poorest people are widows.  This was a problem that Jesus addressed over and over again in his ministry.  It shouldn’t have been a surprise that this challenge would continue in the new church.  What did the church do?  The apostles, who had assumed leadership by virtue of their proximity to Jesus during his life, appointed a council to deal with this issue.  They created a committee…and we’ve pretty much been creating committees non-stop, ever since.

One of the members of that council was a young man named Stephen.  Stephen was full of promise, a good looking, articulate, faithful man whose whole life was ahead of him…until the day it wasn’t any more.  Frederick Buechner, one of my favorite writers and preachers, summed this moment up pretty well:  "His career was a short one. In addition to doing what he could for the poor, he also did what he could to spread the word about Jesus, the one who'd gotten him interested in the poor in the first place. He healed, and he preached, and he talked about how his own life had been changed, and it wasn't long before the Jewish authorities called him on the mat to defend his far-out views as best he could. As far as they were concerned, he was a bad apple.”

Now, let me pause and emphatically make a point here.  I am profoundly supportive of the separation of church and state, the wisdom that is embedded in our constitution that has been challenged ever since.  Those who feel like they have a majority of citizens in their faith always feel like we should just agree to be their “flavor” of a “faithful nation.”  At the same time, those who have power and want to hold onto that power can be found checking who that majority of “faithful” citizens might be.  Then, they try to do their best to sound like just like them, simply to hold onto power.  A lot of German citizens thought they were doing God’s will in arresting Jews.  Find me a religion that has become a “national faith” and I will show you a faith that has been used and abused and diminished.  Show me a nation that believes that God is on their side and we'll watch together as they do terrible things in God’s name.

So, almost nothing in Jesus’ story or the story of the early church or the story of Stephen has that much to do with Judaism, per se.  Instead, it is all a giant caveat about mixing religion and politics and power.  Religion and politics, when mixed, become partners in supporting the status quo, in keeping the winners winning and in keeping those who are oppressed in their place.  This is how politicians and pastors keep their jobs.  It’s also how they altogether forget the core values and callings which brought them to that work in the first place:  to build a better society; to help the overlooked and the ignored.  Bottom line:  when religion and politics are in bed with one another, change is not welcome here.

That was the problem with Stephen.  He not only cared about the poor.  He wanted to share his faith, the upstart, crazy faith of those people who were following the Nazarene, the guy who was crucified.  So, the authorities, who happened to be Jewish and in cahoots with the Roman political powers, arrested Stephen.  He was given a chance to defend himself and, boy, did that turn out to be a mistake.  Stephen delivers quite a speech about what a total piece of work that the Jewish people have been, again, in Buchner’s words:  “Circumcised as all get-out in one department, but as cussed and mean as everybody else in all the others.”  Moses brought them out of slavery and they gave him the run around.  They treated pretty much every prophet and priest who crossed the status quo the same way, ever since.  Stephen drives the point home when he points out that they had pretty much treated Jesus exactly the same way.  If someone dares to tell you the truth that you don’t want to hear, you turn away.  If you have power and someone dares to tell you what you don’t want to hear, you arrest them or you crucify them or, in Stephen’s case, you stone them to death.

Following Buechner a step further, he writes:  “Stoning somebody to death, especially somebody as young and healthy as Stephen, isn't easy. You don't get the job done with the first few rocks and broken bottles, and even after you've got the person down, it's a long, hot business. To prepare themselves for the workout, they stripped to the waist and got somebody to keep an eye on their things till they were through. The one they got was a young fire-breathing arch-conservative Jew named Saul, who was there because he thoroughly approved of what they were doing.”

I want us to see a couple of things here.  Stephen was the first Christian to die for what he believed.  Remember, everyone else up to this point had run and hidden, in the case of the disciples, or had simply not mattered enough to be noticed, in the case of the women.  Stephen stands up to those in power and takes a stand for his faith.  God is there to meet him in that death but God does not keep him from dying.  That loss had to reverberate through every believer.  If Stephen can be killed like that, then any of us could be next.  The truth was that many were, not because of a problem with Judaism, but because of what people will do to hold onto power.  (There’s probably not another faith in the world that has suffered this truth more than Judaism, itself, which is so often a “minority” faith and, as a result, is so often a scapegoat.) Stephen, a follower of the man who taught that, “There is no greater love than to lay down one’s life for another” laid down his life.

The person who the Book of Acts goes out of its way to tell us about on that day was Saul.  Saul was a member of the Sanhedrin, a lawyer, a guy who was steeped in the rules. What made him doubly dangerous, though, was that he was still so young that he had no problem believing that he was absolutely, one hundred percent right in his beliefs.  Saul listened to Stephen’s speech, took in the scene, heard the verdict and nodded in agreement.  This was the law, rightly applied. 

Here’s the thing, though.  Saul never picked up a rock that day.  No…that was left to others.  Were they just physically stronger and more able to get the job done?  Were they more experienced in such matters?  Were they perhaps less educated and more common folks, the kind of folks who are often relied on to do the “dirty work?”  We don’t know.  What we know is that Saul stood there as everyone took off their cloaks and prepared to get down to business, and essentially functioned as their valet.  “Can I hold your coat for you? How about I take care of that hat?”  The whole time he just stood there and smiled and nodded.

All sorts of people had to be haunted by what happened that day.  Stephen’s killers had to notice the absence of hate that Stephen returned their way.  The harder they threw those stones, the harder Stephen prayed for God to forgive them.  Some of those people would have been too caught up in the frenzy to be moved by that but I wonder, was there someone…anyone…who saw what was happening and questioned themselves?  As we mentioned before, the early Christians certainly would have been haunted, too.  This whole faith thing was clearly “for keeps.”  Could they ever hope to live up to Stephen’s example when their “time of trial” arose?  The person who had to be the most haunted though had to be Saul. 

Saul thought he knew what life held for him.  He had a future as a lawyer, as a man of power and prestige, as a keeper of the faith.  His mind was sharp and his tongue was even sharper.  It was all laid out, just as bright as the future that had been laid out for Stephen.  And yet, God had other plans.  (Isn’t that the sentence that applies to all of our lives?) Saul had no idea that his own connection to God was about to take a real turn, that the mind and the tongue that he treasured were going to be turned toward an entirely new focus.  He had no idea that one day, he, just like, Stephen, would be put on trial and defend his faith and that he, too would die for what he believed.  What he really had no idea of on that day, though, was just how much remorse he would feel about  that one day long ago when he stood back and watched as Stephen died.

Peter and Saul, who would come to be known as “Paul,” would be the two most pivotal leaders in the early church.  Both of them were incredibly gifted and entirely broken human beings.  None of us do any better than that.  Those who have desperately needed to be forgiven would later refuse to forgive others.  Those who self-righteously condemned someone else, would one day become the condemned.  The lesson of Scripture is not that there are occasionally saints in a sea of sinners.  Rather, the lesson is that, with God’s help, sometimes we can rise to the occasion and be a bit more forgiving than we otherwise would be.  Sometimes we can take the mind and the tongue that we’ve been given and humbly ask God to put it to God’s use rather than use it for our own ends

So, from the earliest days of our faith, God was present and amazing things happened:  people understood each other; people shared things; people looked out for those in need.  At the very same time, people kept being people and even the best of us did some terrible things.  The struggle was on:  to be better, rather than worse, to be more faithful and forgiving and less self-righteous and self-serving. 

We’ve all been Peter and self-righteously teed up our neighbor.  We’ve all been Saul and stood by while something terrible happened and felt good about ourselves the whole time until we realized we were terribly wrong.  The question is whether we can be a little bit more like Stephen, ready to account for the neediest among us and ready to speak the truth and stand for what we believe.