Stones

Acts 7:55-60

Easter 5A

May 14, 2017

Fondren Presbyterian Church

The Rev. Dr. Robert Wm Lowry

Donald McLeod, longtime professor at Princeton Seminary, enjoyed telling the story of a prayer offered in one of his classes.  Each class gathering he would ask a student to offer an opening prayer and one day he invited a prayer from a young Chinese seminarian who came to Princeton after fleeing his family and nation under threat of persecution.
The seminarian shocked his classmates when he prayed, “O God, give us something to die for, for if we have nothing to die for, we have nothing to live for.”
I heard that story in a sermon during a conference at Princeton a few years ago.  After that chapel service we went to lunch and were confronted with witnesses to three lives that lived up to that prayer.
Outside the dining room of the McKay student center there is a plaque inscribed with the names of three Princeton graduates who died for what they lived for.  It reads:
Walter Macon Lawrie – Thrown overboard by pirates in the China Sea, 1847.
John Rogers Peal – Killed with his wife by a mob at Lien Chou, China, 1905.
James Joseph Reid – Fatally beaten at Selma, Alabama, March 11, 1965.
They lived for the gospel and by all accounts died for and because of their allegiance to the gospel.
The story of Stephen in Acts 7, commonly referred to as the “Stoning of Stephen” or the “Martyrdom of Stephen,” tells the story of another of Jesus followers who was willing to put his life on the line for the gospel.  
The book of Acts tells us precious little about Stephen.  From his name we can infer that he was likely from the Greek speaking part of the community.
He was a deacon.  The church realized early on that they were becoming neglectful in caring for the widows in their midst and appointed Stephen and six others to ensure that the widows and orphans were cared for.
Though it does not give many specifics, the text goes on to tell us that Stephen was, “full of faith and the Holy Spirit (6:5),” and “full of God’s grace and power (7:8),” and that he did “great wonders and miraculous signs among the people. (7:8)”
That Stephen’s story made the cut to be included in the Book of Acts suggests that when it came to his great wonders and miraculous signs, he was probably doing more than making the Sunday fellowship meal stretch to fit the crowd or making the benevolence budget last until the end of December.
It was more likely that Stephen was healing people physically and spiritually.  He was reaching into people’s lives and, the text tells us, with the power of the Holy Spirit making people whole again.
It was that ministry of passion and compassion that aroused fierce opposition among the religious elites.
Stephen was upsetting the settled way of things.  He was disrupting the order of religious life and with it the power of the priesthood.  He was disrupting the settled way things were and were assumed to supposed to be.
In the end, it cost him his life at the hands of a mob that, the text tells us, stoned him to death.
Stoning is not something we hear about in daily life.  A quick Google search reveals one verified case in recent memory.
And martyrs?  We can all likely name some, but they seem fixed in the past fixed and memorialized like the adornment over the Great West Door of Westminster Abbey where statues of Martin Luther King Jr., Maximiliian Kolb, Oscar Romero, and Deitrich Bonhoeffer join other 20th century martyrs to the faith.
As is often the case with biblical stories remote in history and context, the story of Stephen is frequently romanticized in art and narrative.  Stephen becomes a character of the faith whose death is no more real than a movie; remote and almost too much to be believed.
But Stephen’s story is true. It is real.  And it is ours to wrestle with.
And if we are to really encounter this story we have to wipe away the Hollywood veneer, unmoor it from the past, and see it for what it is; a witness to the power and danger of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
A careful reading of this text not merely in its own context but in ours as well reveals a dimension that frighteningly recasts this ancient tale into our own world reality.
Stephen did not just die for his faith.
He was lynched for it.
This was a lynching.
My guess is that word brings some very specific images to mind.  It was images like those that prompted some very well meaning colleagues to warn me against using that term this morning.
Too loaded.
Too charged.
Too harsh.
Better to leave this one in the storybooks; remote, distant, easily put away until it rolls around three years from now on the fifth Sunday of Easter.
That may all be true, but it does not change the fact that Stephen was the victim of an extrajudicial killing carried out under the watch and with the tacit permission of the powers of the community.
Paula Fredrickson, Boston University Professor Emerita of the Appreciation of Scripture (isn’t that the greatest job title ever!) wrote,
“[C]rucifixion was a Roman form of a public service announcement: ‘Do not engage in sedition as this person has, or your fate will be similar.’  The point of the exercise was not the death of the offender as such, but getting the attention of those watching.  Crucifixion first and foremost is addressed to an audience.”
The means of Stephen’s death may have been different, but the message was the same; keep your mouth shut and keep your head down.
Stephen, by giving his allegiance to the Gospel and rooting his compassion in the work of the Spirit threatened the structures of the world and for that he paid a price.
When we keep stories like Stephen’s safely tucked away in distant memory, it becomes tragically easy to forget that we serve a Lord who encounters us and the world at a cross-current and whose message of how things may be is all to often anathema to the way things are.
That is why Stephen met his end at the hands of the same baying crowd as Christ.  Both were killed not primarily to punish them for crimes committed but as examples to the audience of both their lives and their deaths.
The cross of Christ stands at the center of our theology precisely because of and in active opposition to this reality.
James Cone, Emeritus professor of theology at Union Seminary and widely regarded as the first great African-American liberation theologians wrote about the fundamental relationship between the cross and the lynching tree in his book of the same name.  Cone argues that there is merely a division in time between the terror of the crucifixion and the terror of lynching.  Christ, Cone argues, was lynched for the same fundamental reason as John Heath, George Meadows, and scores of others whose deaths served the purpose of terrorizing the audience into obeisance to the way things are and silence about how things ought to be.
The lynching of Emmett Till and the subsequent publicity surrounding his death shook the consciousness of the nation and had the opposite effect his murderers had hoped.  Refusing to bow to the hate that took her son’s life, Till’s mother insisted that his casket be left open for the entire world to see what had been done to her son.  She pulled back the curtain and revealed that the rhetoric of the order of the world was nothing more than a veneer of fear and hate.  Rather than paralyze the black community in fear, Till’s death came to galvanize action and passion and a sense that the fight for equality was a fight worth dying for.
The death of Stephen had a similar effect on the early church.  If the hope of the authorities was that with the stones heaped on Stephen would serve as a warning to the fledgling Jesus movement, they were in for a surprise.  As our text from today in chapter 7 closes with Stephen’s death, chapter 8 begins with acknowledgement of the harassment of the Jerusalem church and the defiant preaching of the gospel in the city and beyond.  Even in the face of Saul’s persecution, the early church would not be deterred from their mission and ministry.
They had found something to die for and because they had something to die for, they had something to live for.
So they preached and they taught and they served the poor and they built community and they shared the meal and they celebrated the resurrection and they bore witness to the kingdom of God and the power of the Holy Spirit in the world and 2000 years later…
… the cross of Christ and the stones of Stephen have been replaced by the lynching tree and nothing seems to have changed.
For 2000 years the church has preached, however imperfectly, the perfect justice of Christ, yet injustice continues to infect and inflict us;
For 2000 years the church has preached, however imperfectly, the perfect love of God, yet hate and intolerance continue to divide us one from the other;
For 2000 years the church has preached, however imperfectly, the perfect truth of the Spirit, yet the false narratives of violence and might continue to be the refuge of the powers and principalities of the world.
It is 2000 years later and it is as if the stones are still striking Stephen.
I spent a few hours in Thursday down at Stewpot. We are fortunate to have in Jackson such an impactful and important ministry as Stewpot. From the St. Dominic clinic in the basement, to the art program, to the daily meals, Stewpot’s ministries seek to reach into our community’s troubles and touch God’s children by transforming lives and bearing witness to hope.
Stewpot and ministries like it are not single handedly changing the world, but tangibly and faithfully refusing to surrender the promise of a better tomorrow to the troubles of today.
That is the work of Jesus Christ in the world.
It is the work of hope entrusted to the people of God.
It is the work begun 2000 years ago in Jerusalem and continuing today in Jackson.  The same Lord who called Stephen and the earliest disciples calls us today.
And so, we preach.
We teach.
We serve the poor, build community, share the meal, and do all the things we have done as the body of Christ because we trust in the one who calls us to our work and we have faith in the promises of God.
We have faith that though, as Reinhold Niebuhr famously wrote, “Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime,” we are nonetheless saved by hope.
We are saved by hope in a Lord who, though he was buried, rolled away the stone and declared that death has lost its sting.
We are saved by hope in a Lord who, though he died, lives.
We are saved by hope in a Lord who, though he came into the world in the innocence of a child, lived with the humility of a servant.
We are saved by hope in a Lord who is the true rock of our redemption.
We are saved by a hope that is worth dying for precisely because it gives us life.
Let us pray.
God of all courage and hope, you have given us something worth dying for; the promise of your kingdom and the hope of Jesus Christ.  Move us toward a more perfect faith in which we do not count the cost but instead live out our salvation with courage and love.  Amen.