Fifth Sunday of Easter: To Suffer like Stephen

Passages: Acts 7:55-60, Psalm 31:1-5, 15-16, 1 Peter 2:2-10, John 14:1-14

In you, O LORD, I have taken refuge;
let me never be put to shame;
deliver me in your righteousness.

Turn your ear to me,
come quickly to my rescue;
be my rock of refuge,
a strong fortress to save me. –Psalm 31.1-2

"While they were stoning him, Stephen prayed, "Lord Jesus, receive my spirit." Then he fell on his knees and cried out, "Lord, do not hold this sin against them." When he had said this, he fell asleep. –Acts 7.59

The past two entries in this blog focused on Christian counter culture and the call to carry the cross. During the season of Easter, the lectionary reminds us that the Christian life is one at opposition with the world; a life full of trials and persecution. The promise of Easter is not a promise of an easy life – Christ did not suffer so that we would not. The promise of Easter is that God will be present in your suffering, and there will be a transcendent victory. In our Acts lection, Stephen is stoned to death before Saul for publicly testifying his faith. Like Jesus, Stephen was not delivered from his execution nor did he plead with God to alter his fate – he forgave his persecutors and committed his spirit unto Jesus (echoing Luke 23.46, where Jesus calls out on the cross, “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit”, which echoes today’s Psalm 31).

Today’s Psalm lection, Psalm 31 prays to the Lord “to come quickly to my rescue; be my rock of refuge.” This provides an interesting contrast to the acts. Clearly, God did not come to the physical rescue of Stephen. If the Lord was Stephen’s rock of refuge, that refuge did not provide sanctuary from the rocks hurled at his body. The Psalm also asks the Lord to “let me never be put to shame.” Yet Stephen suffers the shame of being publicly executed for heresy.

Yet Stephen and other Early Christian leaders had a radical understanding of righteousness and God’s presence in their life. The Holy Spirit gave them the strength and virtue necessary to accomplish their mission in the world; but it did not keep them safe. Stephen’s death, like Jesus’, was admired as the most fitting end for a holy man (or woman). He faced his death as Jesus did, and Christians did not see death in martyrdom, but everlasting life. Last week I spoke of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s nonviolent resistance that is based on a similar understanding of Christ’s example. King understood suffering’s role in the coming of the Kingdom of God, and recognized the transforming power of living Christ’s example of love in the face persecution. Stephen’s death also demonstrates the transformational power of braving persecution with love – it is in this passage that we are introduced to Saul – who “was there, giving approval to [Stephen’s] death” (Acts 8.1). Saul, of course, is the Apostle Paul and the most dramatic conversion story in the New Testament. Although Saul is not blinded on the road to Damascus until later, it is clear that Stephen, and other Christians Saul encountered in his persecution, were planting the seeds of righteousness in the perhaps the second most influential figure of the New Testament (after Jesus). If Jesus had come to Saul in a vision without the preceding example of Stephen, perhaps Saul never would have been transformed into Paul. The death of Stephen was something Paul surely carried with him throughout the entirety of his mission as Apostle to the Gentiles, and must have been an inspiration in his own beatings and imprisonments.

The message of inevitable suffering that will befall Christians and the power of facing that suffering with love and compassion for your tormentors is a prominent message of the Easter lectionary, but often missing from modern pulpits during the season. This Sunday I heard a great sermon from Rev. Molly Baskette on violence. It challenged the disconnect between condemning violence in the world, which is often muffled by distance from our comfortable lives in Massachusetts and our consumption of violence as entertainment. A thoughtful and intelligent preacher, Rev. Baskette, dealt with the theme in a nuanced and thorough way. However, having been reading Acts, I was waiting for her to connect the theme of violence in her sermon with the violence and brutality experienced by the first generation of our church. She spoke of how our rejection of violence as Christians – if we thoroughly answer that call in refusing to participate in the fantasy of violence everywhere in society – will alienate us from the world. But there was nothing about how it would provoke the violence of the world. The idea that many of would experience violence or brutality because of our commitment to Christ’s message of peace and justice seemed like a foreign possibility. Truthfully, times have changed so that, at least for American Christians, it is indeed a remote possibility that we will experience anything close to Stephen’s or Paul’s trials.

But all people face hard times, and times when their convictions are truly tested. And almost all people will be touched by violence at some point in their lives, and it’s important to have a solid conception of how that violence is to be met and understood. Like in the 31^st Psalm, I pray that the Lord be “a strong fortress to save me” but know that it is not necessarily physical salvation; so I commit into his hands my spirit, and hopefully I will have the strength to suffer like Stephen.