When the Difficult and the Ugly Lead to the Revelation of God’s Grace

By the Reverend Shirley Smith Graham

St. Martin’s Episcopal Church, Williamsburg, VA, April 20, 2008

 

            Do you remember how confused we all were when some of the Food Lion grocery stores became “Bloom” instead?  “Bloom.”  We wondered whether a mega-mart florist was moving into town.  Or perhaps so many of us had become vegetarian that we needed a market that predominantly sold things that “bloomed” instead of things that were sent for food processing?

            Well, once we figured out that the “Bloom” market was still going to offer food, we began to feel a bit better.  But then confusion set in, as we realized some Food Lions were becoming “Bloom” while others were remaining “Food Lion.”

            We’ve all adapted pretty well to this change in grocery stores, especially since we have the Ukrops and Farm Fresh folks to rely on.  So this example is a rather comic one.  And in the comedy of this example from ordinary life we can look at an example of when disorientation and confusion feels less safe.

            I’m turning for the sermon this morning to the text from the Book of Acts, and our lesson from chapter seven, verses 55-60.  And it is here, if we are paying attention that we may have exactly that discomforting feeling of something known and familiar suddenly slipping into a disorienting and confusing event.  We have become used to hearing from the Book of Acts as it is traditionally read during the Easter season in place of the Old Testament reading.  The reason is because the Book of Acts is the only book of the Bible that explains itself as a record of the first months and years of the Church.  What happened after the resurrection of Jesus Christ?  Why didn’t the disciples all just scatter?  How did the Church get started?  How did the Church survive?  If we want to know these things from the Biblical witness, we turn to the Book of Acts.  In many ways, this book is like the family Bible, if your family is fortunate enough to have one.  Whereas your family Bible might note the names of your ancestors, the dates of their births and death and their major life events – their baptisms, confirmation, marriages, and sometimes their wanderings – so the Book of Acts records the names of the ancestors of our Christian faith and gives us a link to our progenitors.

            So, in this sense of being like our family Bible, the Book of Acts may seem familiar, tame, sedate, even respectable.  But if we read this book carefully, this comfortable image quickly slips into something disorienting, wild, controversial and disreputable.  And we see that, like a lot of families, our family faith story is more complicated and conflicted than the neat writing on the fly-leaf of the family Bible might convey.

            Listen again to the excerpt from today’s lesson in chapter seven.  The set-up for this moment is that Stephen is one of the followers of Jesus who is in the larger group outside of the original number of disciples.  It is even possible that he has been brought to the faith after the death and resurrection of Jesus and through the preaching of the disciples, preaching such as Peter did when 3,000 people joined the Way in one day.  In this first year of the faith many Christians were also Jews, since they, like Jesus, had grown up under the first Covenant and saw Jesus as a fulfillment of the prophets in a way that would not be discontinuous from Judaism.  Let us remember that, before the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 A.D. by the Romans, the social pressures did not exist to create enmity between Jews who did follow Jesus and Jews who did not. 

So here we are in Acts in this time when many Christians are yet Jews and many others are gentile Greeks who had not access to God before Jesus opened the Way to them.  Because God sent the Holy Spirit upon the disciples after Christ’s resurrection, the numbers of believers multiplied among Jews and Greeks.  So huge were the numbers of people who came to the house churches for worship, to share the meal of Holy Communion and to hear the gospel and scriptures, that the disciples had too much to do.  So, we see in chapter six that “the twelve disciples called together the whole community of the disciples” to develop a system for doing ministry for more people, with more people.  Thus, “seven men of good standing” were selected to do particular acts of ministry, acts we now associate with the ministry of deacons.  Stephen was one of the seven selected for this diaconal ministry.

And, like many deacons, he was a great preacher – a little longwinded, perhaps, but great nonetheless.  You can see his sermon, which takes up the whole of chapter seven.  Stephen preaches this sermon in circumstances I’d hope never to see.  You see his ministry has had such powerful affect that he has become known for being “full of grace and power” and doing “great wonders and signs among the people.”  Now remember that Stephen is doing these works likely as a Jew, among fellow Jews as well as gentiles, but that his message would have been terribly threatening to some because he was saying, as Jesus did, that the Jerusalem Temple was not necessary to salvation, that one could have relationship with God through the person of Jesus Christ and did not need the rituals of the Temple.

As a result of this threatening message, two separate group within Stephen’s own Jewish identity group accuse him: the first group is from North Africa, the ones referred to in our text as “Cyrenians and Alexandrians”; the second group is from Asia Minor, referred to as those from “Cilicia and Asia.”  So these two group make a coalition to oppose Stephen and his “great wonders and signs.”  They seize him and bring him before the religious authorities and make persuasive arguments such that folks get stirred up against Stephen, and these folks include the people in the streets as well as the elders and scribes of the Temple.  Think about the outbreaks of protest in our day and the effect they have: the protests against China in the running of the Olympic torch, the demonstrations for Tibet, the rioting over food prices in the Southern Hemisphere that are prohibiting children from eating.  This kind of uproar always feels destabilizing.

So it is in this conflicted environment with many distinct parties of people with differing opinions and causes that Stephen delivers his sermon, which is clear but not particularly diplomatic.  And, after the sermon, Stephen receives a vision.  “Filled with the Holy Spirit,” Stephen gazes into heaven and sees “the glory of God and Jesus standing at the right hand of God. ‘Look,’ he said, “I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God!’” If you don’t remember the context that I’ve spent the last few minutes describing, this vision sounds like only good news.  But understanding the context we see that the good news comes into a conflicted social situation and causes disruption.  The good news always has consequences that seem less than good.  Sometimes the dominoes that get tipped over when the gospel is preached are consequences that are neither morally good nor pleasing.  Yet the response, even when it is violent, is part of our faith story.

The response to Stephen’s sermon is immediate and brutal.  The crowd cores their ears so that they will not hear anything more than he has to say nor anything that someone defending him might say.  They cover their ears because they wish to hear no more.  They are done with him, and they do not wish to be constrained.  They do not wish to be dissuaded from what they are about to do, even if someone in authority were to order them to stop.  So they cover their ears, “and with a loud shout all rushed together against him.  Then they dragged him out of the city and began to stone him.”

This story is not a tame and respectable story.  It’s hardly a pleasant even that fits with this pleasantness of a Sunday morning.  Yet it is our story, and that is one of the fierce beautiful aspects of our faith to which I am passionately dedicated.  The life of God that Jesus brings us is not one that takes us out of the world, but rather it is a faith that causes us to reckon with the world, struggle in the world, be in the world but not of it.   It is popular in modern Christianity to sanitize the struggle out of our faith, to simplify the daily life of faith until it sounds pure and easy; but if we do that – if we sanitize and simplify our faith – what do we do with an event like the stoning of Stephen?  What do we do with an event like the shooting and suicide of the Virginia Tech students?  If we do not in the life of faith talk about the difficult things – violence, murder, disabling mental illness, to name a few – we are denying the power of God’s witness to us – that even in these things, even through these things, even despite these things, God makes himself known to us through Jesus the Christ and brings us into his heart-home.

If we do not ask courageous and embarrassing questions, we miss the power of God’s revelation.  After all, how much more embarrassing could a question be than one of Jesus’ own disciples saying to the resurrected Christ, “Lord, we do not know where you are going.  How can we know the way?”  For heaven’s sake, here the disciples looking at someone who should not be able to be seen because He is dead, yet He, this Jesus, is alive in front of their very eyes.  After such a witness of power, don’t you think anything would seem possible?  But no, so acutely do the disciples feel their distance from God, so limited to they feel in their humanness to feel united with God, that even seeing God before their eyes they say, “How can we know the way?”

But, you see, if they hadn’t asked the ugly, difficult question, they would have missed the revelation.  For it is in Jesus’ response to that embarrassing question that Jesus reveals the touchstone that poetically rings in our ears: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.”

You may have realized that this sermon is really about encouraging us all to be brave: to look at the ugly things in our world; to recognize the violence; to recognize the dehumanizing acts; to acknowledge our own embarrassing questions and to let God respond to them with His revelation of grace.  Look at God’s grace-filled response to the murder of Stephen: as he was dying forgiveness was on his lips, as he cried out, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.”  Look again at God’s grace-filled response to the disciples own sense of alienation from God: well, come closer, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.”  It’s all going to be o.k.  But it’s only going to be o.k. because you’re not afraid of the difficult things.

I think it is this penchant for seeking God in the difficult things that makes me passionate about youth in the church.  When teenagers come to church with their questions and their questing, we know we’re making progress.  Insights from psychology and human development tell us that faith is developing when teens look at a belief they’ve inherited from their parents and say, “But is that true for me?”  When teens don’t do that, when they accept unquestioningly their parents’ faith, they often do not have the “muscles” to integrate what happens later in their adult lives with what they believe.  As a result, many leave the church, finding their faith inadequate for the complexities of life.  So now you can see why I love it when teens bring their questions to church: it means that faith is developing.

            Faith is developing when they bring their “struggle with the world” into the Church.   In the words of commentator Kathy Dobie, is there an end to their loneliness? … “They want something bigger than themselves to live for, something steadier and stronger than one-on-one love … ‘ ‘we’ in their lives, family feast that never ends, a tribe of friends, God’s will.”

And the teens’ questing and questioning is good for the rest of us too.  The teenager’s “job description” of hopeful skeptic, and they live out that hopeful skepticism by passionately seeking the cause for hope, the cause that will bring meaning into their lives, the cause whose Genesis is God.  Their passion is good for us.

Their questions, their yearning, their desire to find God is yeast for us all, such that youth are not just the future of the Church but they are our present; teens are our now; the youth are the yeast that makes bread happen in our own lives with Jesus.  One of the benefits the new Assistant Rector will bring us is the time for me to spend do more with our youth and to integrate their spiritual growth with the growth of the congregation as a whole.  For aren’t we all better off for doing that first century Book of Acts things, of engaging with the world, as ugly, as confusing, as disorienting, as heart-breaking as it is at time, and letting God respond with that grace-filled revelation that in ever new ways says, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.”

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