Service on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/seeyouonsunday/videos/1237393891062170 and YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWIveKW80S4
There’s a segment of the Rose family that moved to Oklahoma to work for an organization called Voice of the Martyrs. It was founded by a pastor who had been put in prison in Communist Romania, for as he said, preaching the gospel. And I have no reason to question his story. The Voice of the Martyrs is a non-profit whose mission is to serve the modern persecuted church around the world.
They published a book that came out in 1995 with popular contemporary Christian band. DC talk called Jesus freaks to tell stories of Martyrs from the first century to through the 21st. I thought I was much older when this book came out. It fit in perfectly with a growing Evangelical understanding imposed upon the millennial young people to assume that you will be persecuted. You will be bullied or judged or hurt because of your faith. Now growing up in a mainline Protestant church, I was still Evangelical adjacent and some of the things that I did and communities I traveled in and they wanted you to have a defense that we were fighting a battle.
Of course, it all reached a head in 1999 with the shooting of Columbine, and the story of one of the young victims being asked if she believed in God and saying yes before she was shocked and that story spread like wildfire and wasn’t true at all.
Didn’t matter. Of course. I feel the fire that you should be prepared to die for your faith and then it turned a whole lot of young people into obnoxious, aggressive Christians kind of with the goal of being persecuted, when most of the world just didn’t care.
Stephen was a Greek-speaking follower of Jesus. Steven is a Greek name. Who was respected in his community and filled with the spirit, and called to participate in the caring of the community.
He was probably a latecomer to being a follower of Jesus, having joined when the crowds were gathering as Jesus rode humbly into the City on a donkey or maybe he heard Jesus teaching in the temple with kindness and courage. Calling out the powerful offering. Blessings to the poor.
If that’s Steven’s story, he was probably at the cross when Jesus died. Maybe he had built a connection and was in the upper room when the women returned on the third day, when Christ appeared in their midst, their 50 days later, when the spirit came upon the community, empowering them to speak of the good news of the resurrected Christ who brings life. That was the resurrection ethic that had the community assuring the care of all of the widows. Even the Greeks became ones who may be the disciples who spoke Aramaic just didn’t notice or we’re on the edges.
And I wonder if Stephen saw these widows being on the edges of a community of Jewish Jesus followers, the only distinction being their language, I wonder if he started to notice all of the people who are living on the edges of their community who are being neglected. Not for any reason but that they stood just a little different than the norm. I wonder if he brought that back to his community. I wonder if he spoke for Justice and care for the widow, the orphan, the immigrant, the poor.
The second half of our story Steven, a Greek-speaking Jew, was in a synagogue in Jerusalem of Greek-speaking Jews. And that already sets them apart from the norm of the community, which were Aramaic-speaking Jews. I imagine Greek-speaking Jews were outsiders in the Jerusalem Jewish communities–technically part of them, but always on the edge. But Steven is not just a Greek-speaking Jew and an Aramaic-speaking city, he was a Jesus follower in the community. That made him a minority, of a minority, of an occupied people. The follower of a man who had been recently executed by the state, a state that could and would do it again without hesitation.
We don’t have a choice but to trust the author, who in this case is the same as the author of The Gospel of Luke we just finished.
We don’t have a choice but to trust our author who says that Stephen proclaimed the good news of Resurrection Life to the community, that he called them out like the prophets of old for trying to contain their God, for not making space for a god incarnate, and for not caring for the poor in their midst. For some reason, they found this very upsetting
It could be that he was just causing a ruckus and the Greek-speaking Jews did not need that kind of attention–as a minority of an oppressed people. It could be that they were afraid that Stephen would start causing the kind of chaos Jesus had.
The one-to-one of Jesus’s execution by the state to Steven’s lynching are pretty close, all the way to him asking forgiveness for those who have killed him.
It’s like Luke is telling us that this is what happened to Jesus and how he handled it, and this is what happened to Stephen and how he handled it, and you, dear reader, dear follower of Jesus, dear Christian, this might will happen to you and this is how you should handle it.
And youth group kids from the 1990s all over this country were here for it, because blessed are the persecuted.
And I am a Christian, so I will be blessed. And I must be persecuted here in America. More ridiculously, in Menomonee Falls.
Unlike the Greek-speaking Jewish community and Jerusalem, the United States Christians, particularly if you include the Protestant and Catholic Christians, remain the largest single religious group in the country, it is unusal to have a non-Christian touting politictian (faithfulness to the calling asside), it is the Christian God implied on our money and in whom our money trusts, and there is a church on every corner.
Of course, the times are changing, and some of those churches are closed. And fewer people are showing up and there are fewer kids. Even the big church down the street is not seeing the numbers they would expect. The statistics for the future of Christendom don’t look great.
Which, of course, is absolutely the point. Christianity has been so wrapped up in the kingdoms of this world, of the powers, of the political might, of the privileged, of the majority, that as its place of privilege has started to look like it might slip, anything that speaks of that is persecution–when your voice, opinions, beliefs, understanding of the world are disagreed with; when you’re “just speaking truth” or “just telling you what the Bible clearly says” and people find it mean, and there are consequences, it can be called persecution
Consequences for your actions are not persecution. Ask most parents.
But there is a section of Christianity that is always on the lookout for persecution, for where they have been wronged, and how it relates to their faith–whether or not we or anyone else, would see it that way. From integrating lunch, counters, and schools to interracial dating on Christian campuses and cake baking for same-gendered marriages, from no institutional-led prayer in school because you can pray in school on your own to disagreeing with medical procedures someone else and their doctor decide, there are endless reasons someone will find a reason to claim they’re being persecuted.
The problem seems to be, we (the US Christian church) don’t know how to live in the world where we are not the most powerful, the biggest, the most influential, and the most privileged. And Christianity will come to understand that because, for a multitude of reasons we don’t have time to get into in this sermon, we are heading into a secular age. And we, The UCC, are a subset of mainline Protestantism, a subset of Christianity, are often dismissed, ignored, rejected, even on the edge of the Christian communities as being too progressive, too liberal, too of the world.
But it is us, and worshiping and Jesus following communities like ours, who are going to have to stand up, to be a voice to the powers–political, Christian, other.
We need an ethic of Resurrection, to stand in the face of the powerful and proclaim the gospel of life. That is what we have in the resurrection–it’s not about some heaven light years away, but about life here, for the poor, the vulnerable, the sick, the widow, the orphan.
This week, many people discovered Rev. William Barber II for the first time. But he’s not new.
In 2013, in response to North Carolina’s bills and budget that would disproportionally hurt the already most vulnerable, wrote: “(W)e have no other choice but to assemble in the people’s house where these bills are being presented, argued, and voted upon, in hopes that God will move in the hearts of our legislators, as he moved in the heart of Pharaoh to let His people go. Some ask the question, why don’t they be quiet? Well, I must remind you, that it has been our collective silence that has quietly opened the city gates to these undemocratic violators of our rights.”
During that first protest on April 29, 2013, 17 were arrested.
The protests in North Carolina launched a grassroots social justice movement that, in 2014, spread to Georgia and South Carolina, and then to other U.S. states such as Illinois and New Mexico–even Wisconsin.
12 years to the day of that first March, 12 years of showing up at the capital of North Carolina or DC, and also two days after the first meeting of the anti-Christian bias task force, newly formed Reverend Barber was arrested at the Capitol rotunda in Washington, DC
Despite the intensity of the response, Barber said he is unmoved and plans to continue demonstrating — and praying — in the weeks to come.
He said, “Just as Jesus turned over the tables of the money changers, so we have to be willing to put our bodies on the line. I pray that impacted people will (come) — again, not to go to get arrested, but to arrest the attention of the nation.”
His speech on the steps of the capital is worth finding, can give you a fuller understanding of the work they have been doing and the call he has been giving to the faithful. Even to us.
I’m not saying like Luke was that we are going to be killed like Jesus. It seems unlikely. I am saying, it’s not going to get easier to be a follower of Jesus, particularly ones who are committed to the humility, kindness, and courage that Jesus and Stephen displayed.
The humility to be right-sized–to not come in with an ego but also to not make ourselves small in the face of the power, injustice, discussion.
The kindness to be moved with compassion, to have empathy, to be those who care the body of before us, and to be good neighbors to all in need.
The courage to stand for justice, to know it is not enough to feed the hungry, to care for the poor, to make sure the widow–literal or metaphorical–has enough, but to fight the systems that are leading to the suffering, keeping them poor, unhealthy, with less.
We get caught up in the understanding that martyr means who is killed for their beliefs, but its straightforward definition is witness, one who bears witness to their beliefs, unapologetically. That is our call.
And yes, maybe we’ll take some blows–metaphorical, maybe literally. Maybe we’ll need to make a bail fund for when there are consequences for standing on the front lines. Maybe the powers will decide we’re the “wrong” kinds of Christ followers, and there will be some kind of consequences. Maybe we’re just concerned about things that will never happen.
But this is what the early church was preparing us for–for our lives to be a commitment to the way of Christ. To care for those who are in need, to love those who are alone, liberation for the oppressed, justice for those suffering, compassion for all.
That is who we are. That is who we are called to be. Always but especially in these moments. This is resurrection living–it’s not so much what are you willing to die for, even though it is–it’s about what are you going to live for, and how are you going to bring resurrection life to all.
May we today, this season, always, be people of the good news of resurrection, of life, of abundance for all.