And the darkness breaks
The Feast of Stephen | Matthew 23:34-39
Merry second day of Christmas!
There are two downsides to being a part of a church whose patron is St. Stephen. The first is that our patronal feast day is the day after Christmas Day. And most people are ready to be done with Christmas. But here we are! We’re like “Church three days in a row? Why not?”
This is a pretty obvious downside because the church doesn’t even let us move our feast to the closest Sunday. Most other patrons can be celebrated on a different day. Not ours. Stephen is to be celebrated on the day after Christmas. And likewise John, then Holy Innocents. I don’t make the rules; I’m just reporting them.
Other churches, like St. Paul’s or St. Andrew’s, they can celebrate their feast day on a Sunday and the whole church will come out. Even better if you tie it to the annual meeting or a church picnic! The possibilities are endless. For them.
December 26th is just a hard time to celebrate our patron. But that isn’t even the worst part.
The second downside?
Stephen was martyred.
And I don’t mean that like its a unique thing. Many of the saints of the church were martyrs. But Stephen — that is half of his deal. He was the first of the seven deacons and the first martyr.
And did you catch those readings? Nothing says Merry Christmas like being stoned to death.
So all of this makes for a really unpopular celebration for the church.
But…
From the earliest days, the church has offered this feast along with John on the 27th and Holy Innocents on the 28th as the rest of the story of Christmas.
The story we know
The story we know is about a baby being born, angels coming to shepherds, and the celebration of the Messiah coming into the world.
We think of joy, happiness, generosity, hope, and even courage as the message of Christmas.
But we do this with a kind of shaving off of the rough bits of the story.
Like what happens after the birth. And what world this child was born into.
And its not like we ourselves are unfamiliar with darkness. In Jesus’s story or our own. And we know that the light shining in the darkness isn’t the only part of the story.
But we often focus on the light to the exclusion of the dark in the story. And then, in our world, we focus on all of the dark and just, gosh darn it, wish some light would show up to help us out.
As if these two things were unrelated.
Jesus came into a dark world.
He and his family were hunted and fled to Egypt. Tyrannical kings, zealous revolutionaries, and a brutal Roman empire controlled the region. After Jesus’s death and resurrection, the disciples, too, were hunted at different times.
The truth of what Jesus was offering the world is useless to us without the reality of the time and the rest of the story. And without recognizing the depth and effect of that story in our world.
Recognizing this doesn’t dampen our Christmas spirit, either. It is far more likely to enhance it. Because we recognize what the need looks like. And what saving us looks like, too.
So then, why Stephen?
It starts with his place. After the apostles had begun establishing community, they found themselves stretched too thin. They couldn’t do everything themselves. They had to find the first leaders not called directly by Jesus.
These first leaders are seen by tradition as the first deacons, for their role was to serve the community. But no sooner had Stephen been tabbed to take on that role than he was out proclaiming the Good News to others. And it is this work that gets him stoned to death.
Tradition marks this day for that sacrifice and service, connecting the supposed youth of Stephen to the challenging journey of following Jesus.
But I find the fact that Stephen was picked to serve tables, only to find him publicly proclaiming the Good News a few verses later as the most telling of moments. That the apostles wanted someone to proclaim the Good News without using words and Stephen was like “sorry, not gonna happen!”
English tradition has, for centuries, marked the Feast of St. Stephen as Boxing Day, for it was the day royal families boxed up the food from their Christmas feast to give to servants and those who would come to the palace to receive. It became part of the practice of feasting and sharing.
Feasting and Sharing
This, of course, becomes an all too clever rabbit hole for good people to run down. Trying to nail down the “right” approach. Why send leftovers and not invite the huddled masses in? Such attempts to qualify different types of good is no better than numbering angels on pinheads. I imagine Jesus offering us that meme “Why not both?”
I suspect there is plenty we can offer to honor our patron and his own commitment to following Jesus. And we are really good at trying to figure out what the right thing to do is.
But let us not avoid the hard parts of the story. Let us not forget the courage of proclaiming the Good News when it is dangerous to do so. To speak to love when we’d rather not; to joy when we’d rather fuss; hope when we’d rather deny.
Because our words are so important.
Yes, words of support. And yes, words of comfort. Also words which encourage joy. Words of hope and faith, trust and commitment. We need to hear about the way God is moving in your life. And we need to hear about the way God is challenging us to do new things.
The darkest days of the twentieth century came, not when good people stopped doing good things. And not because bad people ever had a majority. They came when evil went unchecked and good people fell silent. Or worse, argued among themselves about the right of evil people to speak.
It would be easy to do that now. To avoid the challenge of the dark by speaking only about the light. Or really, to speak of nothing at all. Just doing good things for people.
But we need your voice, too. A voice tied to a faith whose values are love, hope, joy, trust. Who frees prisoners and proclaims freedom to and for prisoners. Who welcomes the immigrant and proclaims welcome to and for the immigrant.
Let me leave us with a personal anecdote.
My sponsoring diocese had a long history with political divides. People would come to convention with something conentous. And we’d have these big arguments which sometimes kept going into the next day.
It wasn’t always fun, but it always felt important.
And I had a leader tell me that they were thankful that we didn’t do this anymore. That we didn’t bring contentious things to deal with because they believed it made people mad and prevented us from doing (more) important things.
A year or so later, the same leader said that they didn’t know what people were thinking anymore.
They didn’t make the connection. That we do have to talk about important stuff. And we also have to work together.
The people silencing Stephen killed him. But if he silenced himself, he isn’t proclaiming the Good News.
This is part of the role of deacons.
To remind us of where the need is. Where Christ’s love ought to go. To say unpopular things about our attachment to violence and war, and willingness to starve and persecute.
There is a whole side to the Good News that scares us. Because it means naming the evil in our world. And while some Christians are obsessed with sex and abortion there are people dying in the cold. Because we refuse to shelter them. Not just in our homes, but in our public policy.
We let our politicians determine what counts as poverty and who deserves the dignity of eating food.
This is also the Christmas story.
And when Scrooge or the Grinch are forced to see what they’ve done, not just to one other person, but the whole community, they are transformed. By grace.
I think Stephen was the original Cindy-Lou Who. And we are those whos down in Whoville celebrating anyway.
And filled with his grace, we now proclaim: It is dark, but Light came just the same.