Grace and peace to you from our risen Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.
Does it feel shocking to you? A little jarring, perhaps? That, on this Mother’s Day, this day we hold up mothers and women and, particularly, we lift up the qualities of mothers, those maternal qualities that both women and men possess. Qualities such as caring for others, for nurturing and loving. Qualities that give life, instead of those that take away life.
So, does it feel shocking to you that, on this day when we celebrate those life-giving qualities, our reading from Acts should be that of the stoning and martyr’s death of Stephen?
I can’t speak for you. But, I know that when I opened the text to prepare this week’s sermon, this Mother’s Day sermon, all I could think was, “Oh, wow! How can I find care and nurture, love and life in this passage today? How can I preach a sermon of life in the midst of the violence and death of Stephen?”
Was it only last week that we read the description of the early church--how the disciples held all things in common, how no one was in need, how they spent time daily in the temple, praying, and praising God, and how, daily, God added to their number? How did we move from such a place of wholeness and life, a place of salvation, to this place of violence and death?
Well, for me, the way in which to figure this out, to make sense of this is to move backwards from today’s text, into previous chapters. To go back and to see how it is we got here.
It didn’t take long that things began to fall apart for the early church. Even though many signs and wonders continued to happen, the disciples certainly weren’t making many friends among the Jewish leadership. We read in Chapter 4 that, as Peter and John were performing miracles and speaking to the people, proclaiming the Good News of Jesus’ resurrection, the religious leaders came to them, very annoyed at what they were saying to the people.
They had Peter and John arrested and brought in front of the leadership to question them, they were amazed at their boldness and even more amazed at their message, given the nature of Peter and John as "uneducated and ordinary men." The leadership could find nothing to hold them on. So, they were forced to let them go, but not before they ordered Peter and John not to teach or speak in the name of Jesus.
It wasn’t only with the Jewish leadership that trouble began to happen. Within their own ranks, selfishness and greed began to appear, challenging the disciples’ tradition of holding everything in common.
Some of the Greek disciples began to complain against the Judean disciples, claiming that their widows were being neglected in the daily distribution of good. In response, the twelve disciples decided to appoint seven elders to take charge of distributing food. In this way, the twelve would then be able to more fully devote themselves to prayer and to preaching the Word. One of those seven appointed was Stephen.
The sixth chapter of Acts describes Stephen in this way: “Stephen, full of grace and power, did great wonders and signs among the people.” Even when some of the Jews attempted to argue with him in the synagogue, we read that, “...they could not withstand the wisdom and the Spirit with which he spoke.”
It was this group of Jews, these religious people, these people of faith, who then began to stir others up against Stephen. As the momentum built against him, he was confronted by them, arrested and brought before the Jewish leadership council.
But, even then, Stephen, would not be stilled. Even in the midst of a parade of false witnesses lined up against him, our text reads that “all who sat in the council looked intently at him, and they saw that his face was like the face of an angel.”
And, then, he began to speak. Full of the Holy Spirit, Stephen began to challenge these religious leaders. To challenge their perception of God--that God’s dwelling place was not only the temple, as they believed. That God dwells not in houses made with human hands, but, as the prophet says, quoted in Acts 7, “Heaven is my throne, and the earth is my footstool. What kind of house will you build for me,” says the Lord, or what is the place of my rest? Did not my hand make all these things?”
After the people heard this, they were enraged. And they dragged him outside the city. And it was there that they began to stone him. To kill Stephen with stones of death.
It is easy for us to sit back and to condemn these people, isn’t it? Who, of us sitting here, would ever do such a thing?
But, the people who kill Stephen, who stone him, are not local thugs. They are upstanding religious folks. Regular members of synagogues. Committed leaders, religious professionals, Priests. They are guardians of valued traditions. Their own traditions of faith. They are the faithful who have invested much of themselves into the religious ideas and systems that they believe are necessary, that are crucial, for making God known in the world.
They simply wanted to protect their understanding of God, an understanding that had become so important to them that it closed off their ability to be curious about that understanding.
They presume to know exactly how God works. They refuse to make room for anything that a visionary, like Stephen, might say. And then, they lash out in violence because they are victims of the oldest sin in the Bible, the sin of idolatry.
I wonder how much we are like them. How much we, too, like to contain God in our own little “God box.” Thinking that God can only be found within these walls, only within the church. That we are so focused on what is happening here, within the church, that we fail to see the other places where and the ways in which God is present. Or that we are so filled with our own arrogance that we fail to humbly gather with fellow seekers and to be open to both new and old ways of finding God.
You see, Stephen’s story isn’t about identifying and vilifying the bad guys. It’s about recognizing the reality that all of us are too prone to reject God’s messengers and to hold on tightly to what feels safe and secure, to what we already know, or think we know. To worship creation instead of the Creator. To imagine that God can be contained and, therefore, controlled and owned.
When we do this, when we seek to control God and to own God, we are no different than those who hung Jesus on the cross. Or those who cast stones of death upon Stephen.
The antidote for this, though, is not to avoid being religious. The antidote is to be open to encountering God. To be open to a God who breaks into our midst, who disrupts the status quo that we want to protect so dearly. It is to determine whether we hold onto our convictions so hard that we leave broken bodies in our wake. Or that snuff out life and vitality in other ways.
The story of Stephen challenges us. It challenges us as the body of Christ, as it did Stephen, to take on Christ’s ministry, to take on his crucifixion and ministry of servanthood as our own. To be filled, like Stephen, with the Holy Spirit so that we might be the presence of Christ in our world.
To be--as we read in 1st Peter--living stones. Followers that are being made into the image of the Creator, that are living stones being built around Christ, that chief cornerstone, and into God’s spiritual temple. To be a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people who are God’s own possession and who are called to speak of the wonderful acts of the one who called us from darkness to light, from death to salvation, to be stones of life and not stones of death.
This is the story of Stephen. It is the story of a visionary, who saw the depth and breadth of God and of the life that God offers. Life offered not just to him or to us. But to all people. And, on this day that we celebrate and hold up those who give life, what else is there that could be more affirming?
Thanks be to God!
Amen.
Preached May 14, 2017 at Grace & Glory Lutheran Church, Goshen, KY
Fifth Sunday of Easter
Readings: Acts 7:55-60, Psalm 31:1-5, 15-16, 1 Peter 2:2-10, John 14:1-14.
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