Our Hero

Sermon Acts 6:8-8:1
St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church, Jan. 1, 2012

Each year our patron saint gets short shrift because his feast day falls on Dec. 26 and who is going to come to church the day after Christmas? It’s like having your birthday on Dec. 25. It gets lost in the bigger celebration. This year the Worship Committee decided to celebrate St. Stephen’s Day on Jan. 1, since today is a Sunday.

Stephen is our hero and a great one he is. We know a lot about him, since the Acts of the Apostles features him in its early chapters. He was one of the original seven chosen to be the first deacons. Their role was to relieve the apostles of the work of serving tables and caring for the widows. Stephen had abilities far beyond those tasks, for he was a preacher and a miracle worker so outstanding that he, like Jesus, threatened the power structure in Jerusalem, and, like Jesus, he was called before the Sanhedrin. There he preached the good news and confronted the Sanhedrin with the fact that they had manipulated Romans into killing the Son of God. This confrontation so inflamed the Sanhedrin that they took him outside and stoned him to death without a trial.

Stephen became the first martyr following in the steps of his Master. Then we saw something that was to be repeated many times in the early history of the Christian Community and memorialized with this saying. “The blood of martyrs is the seed of Christianity.” Following Stephen’s profession of faith and his lynching, a persecution against Christians broke out in Judaea, the first of many to come throughout the Roman Empire. As a result, many Christians left the Holy Land and scattered around the Mediterranean. They took their faith with them and began to convert both the Jews in those cities and most especially the Gentiles. When the persecutions came to those areas and other Christians were martyred the faith spread all the more, fed by the example of great faith shown in the martyrs.

A side story often hardly noticed in the account from Acts is the fact that a young Pharisee by the name of Saul stood by as Stephen was stoned. He did not actually participate but it says he approved.
This reminds us of another wise saying: “All that is required for evil to prevail is for good men and women to say and do nothing.”

Of course, following upon Stephen’s death young Saul became Paul, arguably the Apostle most responsible for the spread of Christianity throughout the empire. It took the appearance to him of Jesus on the road to Damascus and his being blinded before he got the message, however.

So what’s the message for us on this New Year’s Day, 2012? If you are in to New Year’s resolutions, even if you are not, let me suggest a resolution to witness your faith this year and every year. It’s harder to know how to do that, compared with Stephen’s time and the price you pay will likely not be a dear as his. I think we witness by doing the right thing, the honest thing, even when we get ridiculed for it. We witness by doing the loving thing, the caring thing, especially when we don’t get on TV for it. We witness by forgiving those who have offended us, as did Stephen, following the example of his Master, just before he was put to death.

It is one thing for people to remain quiet and not protest against evil. It is quite another thing for people to use the guise of Christianity to teach hatred against those with whom they disagree. It’s amazing to see people say I am a Christian or even naming their denomination and with that dubious justification, lashing out at others, advocating death, supporting war and the denial of basic rights guaranteed under our constitution.

We witness for Christ when we teach His message as found in the New Testament, whenever and wherever we can. It is really up to each one of us to decide what we believe his message is and not to let someone else, even one’s priest, determine what that is. So how about this for an expanded Every Year resolution: “To witness for Christ wherever and whenever I can and to listen to the New Testament in order to know what His message really is?