Why do they kill Stephen?

Our lectionary jumps in at the very end of a two chapter story. A story about Stephen, our patron saint. After all the explanation of who he is, what he says, and why it makes the people angry enough to kill him, then they jump in. So let’s back up a little bit.

Easter 5A  |  Acts 7:55-60

In chapter 6, it says that

Stephen, full of grace and power, did great wonders and signs among the people.

And, much like Jesus himself, Stephen was confronted by some in authority who took issue with his theology. Or, closer, the political implications of his theology. They didn’t like what he was saying about them, perhaps, or what becomes of God in Stephen’s telling. They couldn’t handle it:

“But they could not withstand the wisdom and the Spirit with which he spoke. Then they secretly instigated some men to say, ‘We have heard him speak blasphemous words against Moses and God.’”

So not only could the people not handle it, they rejected it and made junk up to prove him guilty of a false charge.

In other words, Stephen was harassed without probable cause and arrested on trumped up charges. He was convicted on incredible eyewitness testimony, and murdered by the state for a crime he didn’t commit.

Tell me this doesn’t sound like Freddie Gray. Or Michael Brown. Or Emmett Till.

Tell me there isn’t a spirit of injustice storming through our culture, whispered as fear and thundering as anger! A rage breathed into life by conviction and power.

Tell me these young men didn’t die in vain. The vain glory of having every opportunity to do things right, but choosing instead the loose power of uncompromised authority.

Dare tell me the world isn’t worse for their deaths. That the blood of martyrs isn’t on our hands. Dare tell me we don’t condone these deaths and justify the fear that leads to hate and do so against what Stephen actually said to them, what Stephen actually did, what Stephen actually represented to them:

The Spirit awake and revealed in their midst.

And the only one with any faith in God at all, is the one lying dead, struck with so many stones.

A faith Stephen reveals by preaching. He pulls them through their shared history, starting with Abraham and how God calls him to journey with God by faith. From Abraham to the patriarchs and to Moses and to Jesus. A story which bears constant witness to their movement and journey for God from one place to another, as immigrants and refugees, as aliens and strangers in a land that is God’s for them, saying:

Yet the Most High does not dwell in houses made by human hands; as the prophet says,
“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?”

Stephen tells the story of the faith, of their shared faith and how all of this builds to the revelation of Jesus.

And like any good preacher, like the gospel itself, Stephen gets pretty spicy.

Here’s what the lectionary compilers chose not to include: verses 51-54, which deal with that question I started with: Why do they kill Stephen?

‘You stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears, you are for ever opposing the Holy Spirit, just as your ancestors used to do. Which of the prophets did your ancestors not persecute? They killed those who foretold the coming of the Righteous One, and now you have become his betrayers and murderers. You are the ones that received the law as ordained by angels, and yet you have not kept it.’

When they heard these things, they became enraged and ground their teeth at Stephen.

Notice that the charge Stephen levels at them is that they kill prophets. And that moments later they kill a prophet. They embody the charge against them.

These leaders had to make up a charge against Stephen, but they are guilty.

Guilty of hate and murder. Guilty of fear and distrust of God and the Spirit. They couldn’t prove Stephen guilty of blasphemy, but Stephen proves that they are guilty of that very charge. That they have no faith. That God is not “on their side.” That they may be followers of the law, circumcised in the flesh, but their hearts and ears break the covenant.

The power of Stephen’s example doesn’t come in his prayerful death or even in his standing up to the authorities, but to the fact that his very life was a revelation of the Holy Spirit’s presence within humanity. That Stephen was chosen, as it says in 6:5, as “a man full of faith and the Holy Spirit” and three verses later:

Stephen, full of grace and power, did great wonders and signs among the people.

That he was arrested after these signs, that even his arrest, conviction, and murder could be a sign of grace and power is the gospel incarnate.

It is Jesus in the flesh and the Spirit in our midst.

That we can receive his testimony, like the testimonies of countless saints in the centuries since, like the testimonies of fellow seekers and refugees, reveal as signs the grace and power of the gospel. Of God’s great dream for humanity. What Jesus calls the kingdom of God and what we might call the Welcome Table with its flipped, upside down economics and its devotion to mercy and love.

What could be seen in the life and ministry of Julia Ward Howe, who nearly a century and a half ago called for the first Mother’s Day, not as a holiday with brunch and flowers, which is beautiful and graceful and love, but for a summit of mothers to gather so that none of them would again lose their sons to war. That the greatest service of motherhood is not to raise mighty warriors, but raise brokers of peace. And the only way to do that is to be brokers of peace for other mothers.

For these are the bearers of loss and love.

Like the ones who witnessed human disgrace and Godly grace upon the cross, brokenhearted and broken open to be filled with faith.

The very vehicle to bring mercy and real justice to the world.

As we remember our patron, honor our mothers, praise God in faith, let us do so by the grace of the Holy Spirit. Following her lead, loving her mercies and challenges to our sense of justice. Let us be filled with her love and devotion to truth and the hope she reveals in our world.

May we also repent of the way we’ve been obstacles to her great revealing, preferring our security and certainty to her candor and unsettling truth.

And may we love her leading us into the deserts and wilderness of our lives and faith, into foreign lands as immigrants, a people following God out of our homes of origin and into new homes, as a new people, faithful, merciful, loving, and “full of the Spirit and of wisdom.” That she might break our hearts open, fill them with love, and send us forth to bear the light of Christ to the world.