The Church is Not the Powers
Acts 7
If you follow along with our services, you’ll see we’ve hit a couple of tough stories, ones that we might want to skip or pass over, or ones that pastors might go their whole ministries without preaching on. This week, I understood that desire even more. The killing of Stephen is not a great story, not an easy story, not one we really want to spend time on. Because if we spend a lot of time thinking about the story of Stephen we’ll find a man who was called to be a deacon, to serve the community and still found himself before the religious and political powerful of his time, proclaiming and preaching and teaching and losing. And then thinking, feeling what it must be like to have each stone land on his skin. It’s a slow and painful way to die. So… why have we stopped here? Fair question. But I also think this story gets to one of the truths of who we are as church--we are not the powerful in the world.
Stephen was preaching, he told the story, he upset folks. So they brought Stephen to the High Council. The Pharisees, the Scribes, the elders. And they listened, until they didn’t. And it boiled down to 2 things:
1: You, the council, the representatives of powerful, throughout the history of their people, have built this structure for God. Believing you could contain God, keep God close. But was on the road with Abraham and on the mountain with Moses and in the fields with David, God will always live where God pleases.
2: God sent you prophets to tell you of what is happening in the world, in your communities, to your people, and you killed them. Prophets were not fortune tellers, creating some future from nothing. Nor was God planning some ultimate destruction. No… the prophets were revealing what was, and what the natural consequences were. The prophets would say: you have not cared for the widow and the orphan, you have not lived into your calling as God’s people. By keeping the poor underfoot and the weak separated, they made themselves vulnerable, the empire would take advantage of that. A
AND Stephen said, they killed the prophet Jesus--which was just too far. It was too much and too far to call Jesus a prophet, to claim he came from God, and to accuse them of destroying God’s messengers. The story says they covered their ears which sounds really childish, like a “La La La, we can’t hear you!” but I’m sure it was more about how much they couldn’t abide what they were hearing. But it was also the privilege of the powerful, to silence the words they don’t like to hear.
The church is not the powerful.
Stephen stood up to the powerful and told them the truth. Held up a mirror up to them of reality of the world that they were living in and it was too honest, it was too much. It had a cost but it was to the powers, to the political and the religious powers of day when Stephen said that how they were lviign was not who God had called them to be, Because the council believed with certainty that they were fulfilling for everyone what God was and wanted of them. Maybe it was at the cost of their position, their status, their power, their authority as one who speaks for God, their wealth.
We have a choice in this moment of the story… who is the hero? Who is our example?
And Stephen is held up in our story as being the example for the church and how the church is to live in the world. While the powerful of the time weighed the costs of what Stephen was saying, there was clearly a cost to Stephen as well.
The example we have for what it is to be Church, for how it is to live in the world. Stephen reminds us of what the prophets had been telling the people for centuries::: We are not the powerful.
So let me take a moment to do a bit of what Stephen did.
Long before we meet Stephen, and Jesus for that matter, we find the story of the Hebrew people. They started as a landless nomadic people. And the stories we have included Moses--advocating freedom of slaves before the most powerful empire of his time--Egypt. And when they found the land they would make home, the prophets reminded the leaders of the call of God to care for the widow, and the orphan, and the sojourner in their midsts, the poor and the maraginalized because the Leaders of the Nation stopped seeking Jusitice. And the story continues of an exiled people learning to leave and worship their God under the more powerful Empire of the time--Babylon.
We meet jesus in the midst of the Hebrew people being oppressed by, you guessed it, the most powerful Empire of the time--Rome, and Jesus’ work and ministry was to rise up the poor, to declare that the time had come to set free the captive, to heal the afflicted, that the last will be first and the first will be brought low, that the meak and the peacemakers will inherit the earth. These things are problems for the powerful, and like Stephen said to the religious authorities, and like many a prophet before, Jesus’ message couldn’t continue and Jesus had to be killed.
The story doesn’t stop there.
Some of the earliest days in the earliest days of the church, it was a subset of the Jewish tradition and so the powerful of the time were the Roman occupation and the Jewish religious leadership. Not unlike some people today there was an expectation of purity of the religion. they wanted it to look a particular way. they wanted people to respond in a particular way. they wanted people to believe in a particular way and that is how we've ended up with the Samaritans as outsiders. they had been Jewish believers who no longer worshipped at the same Temple as those in Jerusalem, so they were considered outsiders.
These new followers of the way they didn't fit into the world that they had created, that was safe for them. they were pulling people away from the temple worship and their funds into another group of believers supporting these radical nomadic preachers.
Eventually, they were no longer considered Jewish. Much of that because there are so many gentiles people who were never Jewish as part of their community.
After Stevens murder there would be fear and there were others who were killed for fear that they would be killed so they traveled they went far and wide the expansion of the church is in part from this moment. And persecutions would happen, some small in towns and few from the Emperor himself.
For almost 400 years this was the early church.
Then everything changes. The mother of the emperor converts. Wealthy women had been joining the Way for years, but none quite so powerful. And like many of you may know that even when what you thought was unacceptable is suddenly someone you love things change.
Constantine saw this as a means to unify the empire that was starting to fall apart. And suddenly this obscure band of misfits and outsiders and rebels who would stand up before the powerful and demand and honest reckoning had a chair at the table. And Christianity would be forever changed in the lights of the empire.
And every five hundred years or so the church has a reckoning. 1000 it was the schism between Eastern church in Constantinople, now Istanbul. In the 1500 it was the Reformation it was Martin Luther demanding a change the Catholic church it was John Calvin it was John Wesley it was a movement of offering the scripture to the masses in a language they could understand, something they could learn, at it was salvation by faith--not something you had to earn, or pay for.
And since it’s been about another 500 years--starting in the 1950’s it's been the movement of liberation theology a groundswell from Latin America to say that and to remind the church that God has a disposition toward the poor. it is the black theologians saying that there is a connection between the God who was crucified and the lynched bodies a black men.
It is those who reflect today of the ongoing connection between the Christian church and the empire as it grew and spread across the world and as it remains a colonized Force. It stands up to the powerful and says the God we believe spoke through the prophet Isaiah: learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.
God will always always always be present wherever God pleases and God has already been there already been in the life those have been left behind by the powerful
In the life of Stephen, we see the prophetic truth of the church. We see who we are called to be. We see that we are to be a voice not for the powerful but I'll be half of those whom God has always been in relationship
That is why the history of the United Church of Christ has been filled with abolitionists and women's women's rights. it has been on the side of the immigrants and opposing child labor. The history of the United Church of Christ is ordaining the first openly LGBT clergy and standing up for the full inclusion of lgbtqia people into the life of the church and into society and politics. The history of the United Church of Christ is participating in civil rights movements and lifting up the voices of our black siblings. It is why the United Church of Christ has a long history of standing up to the powerful and declaring that the way things are today are not as they are called by God to be.
That is why your United Church of Christ family and your clergy stand up and March and say that black lives matter not because we don't believe everybody matters but because we have a God who called the prophets and came to earth to live among us, we have the example of Steven and the prophets and Jesus who stood up and said that the lives of widows matter when the powerful didn't care. and we have the prophets who said the lives of the orphans matter when the powerful care and we have an example that says that the lives of children matter when the disciples tried to send them away and we have an example who said that the lives of women matter when the powerful didn’t count them.
We have in Steven an example of one who said that God is present everywhere when the powerful didn't agree and we have in Steven an example of one who said that the prophets words matter when the powerful didn't agree.
We have the opportunity to stand up to be the prophets in the world not because God doesn't care and love everyone equally but because we have a God who has a predisposition for the poor, for the orphan, the widow, for the dispossessed, for the oppressed, for the lost, for the lonely, for the least
And so this is me holding myself to account reminding myself to live into the calling of a prophetic voice and this is me calling all of us we don't get to choose the calling. we don't get to choose who God loves. We choose to follow what God is already doing in the world as God is already Our lives choose to live into the calling we choose to speak truth
And I need you to know that I have been trying to hedge the middle ground because we don't know each other and we haven't really gotten the chance to know each other. And I am here is your interim, as one who holds the space between. And I could spend the time maintaining making sure that everything is just level and everything just stays the same, that we just coast through. But are we willing to pay the costs of losing our voice and ignoring the call of God in our lives? This is a different kind of power to follow the call of God, to follow the leading of the Spirit, to live into the example of Jesus.
Listen to the call of God to the church--Raise your voice. Hold a mirror. --following the God of love--speaking truth--Learn to do good; Seek Justice.
