Vulnerable to death; vulnerable to life
Wonderings:
I wonder if you’ve ever shared something important to you, and somebody shut you down?
I wonder if there’s a habit or strategy that you formed in another time of life—that isn’t working for you any more?
Reflection based on these wonderings + the readings assigned for the Fifth Sunday of Easter in Year A of our Lectionary.
Acts 7:55-60; Psalm 31:1-5, 15-16; John 14:1-14
Let us speak, and listen, held in the presence of our loving, liberating, and life-giving God. Amen.
These are difficult readings today. They may call up grief in us: this passage from the Gospel of John is often read at funerals: we hear how Jesus says farewell to his disciples, anticipating his own imminent betrayal. We recoil from the stoning of Stephen in our first reading from Acts. These are readings that speak to us of death.
But these are especially difficult readings because they do not speak only of our vulnerability to death, but also of our vulnerability to life.
So much of our time and energy is spent just surviving. Just hobbling on with our old, familiar hurts, just trying to make it through another day. But we were made for so much more—for awe, for creativity, for relationships of mutuality, authenticity, and trust. And that calling will assert itself, in one way or another. That abundant life breaks through the humdrum and the grind, it disrupts our carefully controlled calendars, and it catches us off guard with its beauty and power.
We are vulnerable to life—where we know joy that breaks our hearts open. The Risen life that includes death, and is greater than death.
I want to talk about Stephen this morning. Because Stephen allowed himself to be vulnerable to that kind of life. Stephen was one of the 7 people called to be deacons—to serve the most vulnerable in the growing community of Jesus-followers. (And let us remember that these are days of miracle and wonder. We will tell the whole story in a few weeks, but the Holy Spirit has descended upon this community on the day of Pentecost. And we see again and again throughout the book of Acts that the Holy Spirit empowers the followers of Jesus to do the works that Jesus did…and pushes them into places they’d rather not be, among people they would prefer not to associate with. Throughout Acts, the Holy Spirit keeps on doing a new thing, keeps on acting in surprising and even shocking ways—and the Jesus movement tries to keep up.)
Even within that dynamic movement, Stephen stands out. The text tells us that Stephen “did great wonders and signs among the people,” that he spoke “with wisdom and the Spirit,” and his face shone like an angel’s. The joy and authenticity of his calling were undeniable—it was written all over his face. And all that he said and did proclaimed that the Holy Spirit was doing a new and life-giving thing.
So, who would meet such a man, and want to stone him to death? What did he do to incite a mob against him?
We have to back up a few chapters before our short passage today, which only gives us the tragic end of our story. Back in Acts chapter 6, verse 9, right after Stephen is introduced in the story, we hear that he inspires opposition: “some of those who belonged to the synagogue of the Freedmen (as it was called)...stood up and argued with him”—Cyrenians, Alexandrians, and others of those from Cilicia and Asia.” And when they could not beat him in an argument, they plotted secretly against him.
Does that sound familiar? It sounds a lot like what happened to Jesus in his ministry. Jesus ate with sinners and tax collectors, and his solidarity with the marginalized was such a threat to the political and economic hierarchy that the powerful smeared him, falsely accused him, and executed him as a criminal. It sounds like the same thing is happening to Stephen.
But there is a crucial difference here. The people who opposed Jesus were mostly powerful elites. They were in league with the Roman occupiers. But the people opposing Stephen come from the “synagogue of the Freedmen.” The synagogue of the freed men. These are people who gather to worship the God of Israel with others who know what it is like to have been enslaved. To have struggled to live according to the Jewish Law in the house of someone who thinks they own you. Furthermore, the text specifies that they come from Cyrene, Alexandria, Cilicia and Asia. So these are people who have struggled to maintain their ritual fidelity to the God of Israel while enslaved AND in the farthest corners of the Roman empire. On top of the indignity of being reduced to someone else’s property, some of them likely endured religious persecution.
These are people who love the Law of Moses, who have clung to that Law as their stable and abiding connection to God, while they were dehumanized in strange lands. And now the Holy Spirit, through Stephen, seems to be doing a new thing. And a new thing means change…and a new thing might well mean loss. It might mean that obedience to the Law might not be the central, defining form of faithfulness to God. The thing that kept them grounded, assured of God’s presence in the midst of their dehumanizing enslavement—they might need to loosen their grip on it.
So perhaps we can view these freedmen with compassion when the new thing the Holy Spirit is doing is more than they can bear. But they haul Stephen before the same council of priests that tried Jesus for blasphemy—the Sanhedrin.
Called to defend himself against the charge of blasphemy, Stephen makes a powerful speech. He says that the God of Israel has always been doing a new thing—doing the loving, liberating, life-giving thing. God called Abraham and asked him to leave the place he’d always lived and journey to a new land, where his descendents would be more numerous than the stars. God filled Joseph with dreams and brought him to power in the Egyptian court, where he could rescue the brothers that betrayed him. God appeared to Moses in the burning bush, and empowered him—a misfit with a stutter—to stand up to Pharaoh, and part the Red Sea, and receive the Law on Mt. Sinai, and eventually lead God’s people to the Promised Land. God anointed Jesus to reveal God’s heart to God’s people, and to call them into a reign of justice and peace.
And, Stephen says, there have always been people who set themselves against those liberating and life-giving works of God. Who wanted to go back to Egypt. Who built idols and worshiped them, rather than trusting in an invisible God. Who persecuted the prophets that God raised up. Who didn’t want to hear from this “Jesus.” Who wanted things to be the way they had been before.
Stephen fearlessly asks the crowd gathered—would you prefer to stay in your familiar misery, to keep your world small and controlled and unhappy—rather than risk real life, the real healing and liberation that God desires for you, and for everyone?
And the crowd does not like that. Perhaps because it rings true; perhaps because it cuts too close to the bone. So they rush in and grab Stephen; and lynch him as a mob.
In our Gospel reading today, Jesus said, “The one who trusts in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these.” Stephen, full of the Spirit’s grace and power, does what Jesus does: he proclaims good news to the poor, and release the captives—and he is so faithful to that call, that with his last breath he forgives those who can’t stand that good news: “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.”
Let us just sit a moment with Stephen’s question—and let that question come to us. Maybe we can let it link up with that wondering about the habit or strategy that isn’t working for us anymore. What would it feel like to allow the healing and liberation that God desires for us? What would it look like to trust the new thing that the Holy Spirit is doing in your life, and in our times? Are we willing to be vulnerable to life?
Amen.
