After Jesus ascended, it took a while for his followers to
settle down and get organized. One problem that quickly arose was the care for
the poor, specifically the widow and orphans. They were being overlooked by the
disciples because they were busy preaching the gospel and getting arrested. The
complaint was brought up by the pastoral relations team and the disciples said
to another, “It’s not right for us to forsake the word to wait on tables.” So
they told the group to choose seven men who would oversee the care of the poor
within their community. They would be responsible for making sure the widows
were looked after, and any other need that arose within the community.
The community agreed, thinking this was an excellent idea
and they chose seven men. One of these men in particular was a man full of
faith and the Holy Spirit, named Stephen. We are not told a lot about Stephen
except that he was full of grace and power, and did great wonders and signs
among the people.
He argued with those who belonged to the synagogue of the
Freedman. They could not match Stephen’s moxie and wisdom. They were angry with
him and began to organize a coup to get rid of him. Eventually they convinced
enough people that he was a heretic and the Jewish authorities called him to
court to defend himself.
Stephen made them a long speech, the gist of which was that
from year one the Jews had always been an ornery lot, stiff necked and
circumcised as all get-out in department, but as cussed and mean as everybody
else in the others. They’d given Moses are hard time in the wilderness, he
said, and there hadn’t been a saint or prophet they hadn’t had it in for. The
way they treated Jesus was the last and worst example of how they were just
missing the boat, but doing their darnedest to sink it (Fredrick Buechner).
The authorities become incensed and filled with rage. For
some strange reason, Stephen doesn’t come to invitation time after his sermon,
instead reveals a vision he is having. He looks up and sees the heavens open up
and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God. Well this angered the
court even more. They covered their ears and rushed him with a loud shouts.
They dragged him out of the city and began to stone him.
I am not sure if you have ever stoned someone to death. I
doubt you have. It’s hard work, beating a person to death, especially a young
person. You can’t just use pebbles and bottles. You have to get your hands
dirty. You need the big rocks and you need to work up quite a sweat to finish
the job. So they took off their coats, laid them at the feet of a young man
named Saul, rolled up their sleeves and got to work.
The murder of Stephen ends a series of unfortunate events
for the apostles. Things started off well. Hundreds upon thousands were joining
the God Movement after Jesus ascended and the Holy Spirit descended on them.
They were out doing amazing works until they hit a few bumps in the road. They
encountered a pair selfish members who lied about their finances. Several of
the apostles were beaten by the council after healing others. And then the
disciples are tasked with solving a serious issue within the Movement, the care
for the poor among them, specifically the widows. After Stephen’s murder, Saul
begins to put the heat on the Movement, and many of them were scattered.
The murder of Stephen provides an honest tale of speaking
something new into something old. If we were to place it in today’s context,
you could see Stephen stepping into one of those mega-churches, standing in
front of the preacher, and before the thousands seated there, “The Almighty
does not live in man-made buildings. The prophet bears this our when he says,
“The sky is my office, the earth is my den,” says the Lord. “What kind of house
could you build me, or what kind of a resting place, seeing as how I’ve made
everything already? (Isaiah 66:1, Cotton
Patch Gospel).
You could see the preachers hearing this and stirring up one
another. You could see them arguing with but unable to hold a candle to his
wise and inspired answers. You could see those preachers calling up their
friends and cohorts saying, “You won’t believe what we heard Stephen saying. We
heard him saying some awful things about God and the Bible.” You could see them
trying to get him arrested, claiming he is a communist, and how he’s against
the American way of life.
We need to acknowledge, just like Jesus, it’s not atheists
who murder Stephen. Stephen is murdered by the high priests and followers of
God. Stephen is murdered by the Church. If I may, I would like to make a bold
statement. Observing what informs our interpretations of scripture, our
theology and image of God, I have come to the conclusion we no longer look
through the lens of Jesus, but through the lens of twenty-four hour news
stations, Christian network news, and other Christian celebrity personalities.
In doing so, we have come to believe we are a persecuted group.
I would agree that we are persecuted group. We’re not
persecuted by an anti-Christian government or lawmakers. The majority of the
members of our three branches of government claim to believe in Jesus. In fact,
the Supreme Court recently upheld prayer at the beginning of Government
meetings. You may recall the Congressional chaplain taking congress to task in
prayer to God for the government shutdown last year. A prayer in which several praised him for. He
did not end up like Stephen.
We’re not persecuted by antireligious groups. In fact, I
wrote this sermon at a public restaurant in which I displayed my bible on the
table, and prayed before eating. I wasn’t asked to leave. I wasn’t told to put
my stuff away. I wasn’t taken out and beaten. We are gathered here this morning
without the fear that someone will set our church on fire. The only fear I have
this morning is being understood and making someone upset.
We’re not persecuted by the people we are lead to believe.
No, we’re being persecuted by those within the Church. We
are persecuted by those who seek to maintain their worldly power masked as
Christian propaganda. We are persecuted and divided by preachers and
televangelists who build their flashy mansions on the sands of the dollar. We
are being divided by those their own televised hour of commentary. We are
persecuted by those who our brothers and sisters in Christ. The Church is
persecuting the Church. The Church is persecuting anyone who dares to challenge
the power structures of wealth found in the sermons of some of our prominent
preachers.
I want to share with you my own experience of persecution.
You may or may not be aware of this but I have experienced the pain of being
fired from a church. I didn’t receive a letter from the President or Governor
ordering my dismissal. I was fired because a deacon wanted my job, parents were
upset about the type of kids showing up to the church. I was fired because I
supported women in ministry. I was fired because I spoke out against the
injustice of small town politics and silence regarding the abuse of many of the
students. I was fired and we were literally given two weeks to get out of town
by god-fearing Christians.
In 12 years of ministry and 33 years of life I have never
been persecuted by an atheist or agnostic or a person of another faith. I have
been questioned by them and engaged is some of the best conversations. However
I have been called a liar, a heretic, and accused of apostasy. I have been
accused of intellectualism because of my education and my critical interpretation
of the scriptures. I have been told the devil has a grip on my life because of
my struggles with depression. I have been called to council, cussed at and
emotionally abused, all at the hands those who call me a brother in Christ.
It wasn’t the President who tried to get me expelled from
seminary because of my understanding of Jesus. It wasn’t congress or the senate
or the Supreme Court who fired my pastors and friends. It wasn’t atheists who
organized secret meetings and secret emails, accusing the pastor of abandoning
the biblical principles of the bible because he urged them to care for the poor
and needy. It wasn’t an atheist who told the preacher she was sinning since she
wasn’t preaching on hell, the inerrancy of the bible, the Holy Spirit, and the
evils of abortion every Sunday. It was a deacon and when asked where he got
that information, he said it was the 2 am telepreacher who told him so.
It wasn’t the atheist groups or Islamic groups that ran a
young preacher out of a North Carolina town because of her gender. It was the
local Baptist who did so with their pitchforks and threats of disassociation.
It wasn’t the atheist who held the lives of starving children hostage until
World Vision recanted their nondiscriminatory hiring policy. It was the evangelicals.
In my experience, my conversations with those who do not
believe or do believe but no longer attend church, their reasons have nothing
to do with our three branches of government or nonreligious groups. Their
reasons are filled with stories of emotional abuse by their pastors, or other
church members. Their reasons are filled with tormenting stories of alienation
by other members because their skin color, gender, sexuality, their clothes,
their hair, their tattoos, and their wealth were not up to the standards of the
church. In my experience the enemies of the Church are the Christians who
attend church.
It is safe to say that if Stephen were here before us. If he
was preaching about how we were constantly missing the boat, all the while
trying our darnedest to sink it, and how we’ve become not a people of God but a
people of nationalism and power, I think we’d take him out back, and get to
work on him.
There is good news though. You may recall a certain
archconservative Jew named Saul stood by and watched the coats of the men who
stoned Stephen. He never forgot that experience. He began chasing after them,
seeking to end this God Movement before it could get going. He was the vilest
of them all, as he often said of himself, until one day when he was on the road
to Damascus and there he was blinded by the light of the Lord, and became a new
creation. I wonder, as he stood there beside the coats, watching as a man is
beaten to death, if he ever thought by the grace of God he would one day be on
the other end?
I want to close with a true story: How many of you know who
Robert Carter III is?
Carter was the richest of all the members of the
Revolutionary-elite and one of our founding fathers. He raised his children in
a pristine mansion, owned a textile mill, over twenty plantations that produced
cash crop, a bakery that could produce one hundred pounds of bread at once, a
one-fifth share of Baltimore Iron Works, and nearly five hundred slaves. That’s
more slaves than Jefferson and Washington combined.
Carter was a deist like Jefferson and Washington until the
summer of 1777 when came down with fever heat from smallpox. He experienced
what he called a grand illumination of the spirit. He began to explore religiosity,
reading every book he could find, talking with ministers of every denomination,
eventually confessing to the Church, “I doubted, till very lately, of the
Divinity of Jesus Christ—I thank almighty God, that, that doubt, is removed.” He
wrote to Thomas Jefferson a year later, “I do now disclaim it and do testify
that Jesus Christ is the Son of God; that through him mankind can be saved
only.”
Carter’s conversion went beyond pious posturing and words.
The slaveholder who never intervened in overseers’ disciplining of his slaves
now began to defend them openly. He scandalously he worshiped with not only
Baptists, who at the time were thought to be ignorant and illiterate and were
subject to summary arrest, he also worshiped with integrated congregations. On
September 5, 1791, Carter put into action what the signers of the Declaration
of Independence only wrote about, and freed every slave he owned. Not only did
he free all five hundred (the largest number of enslaved human beings ever
freed in America until the Emancipation Proclamation), he made provision for
them during their transition to freedom, including housing that had been built
for whites and arranging for them to farm their own shares on his plantations.
He even refused to rent one of his plantations to a well to do Episcopalian
minister because, Carter explained, his “present wish was to accommodate the
poor.”
His actions caused a great deal of anxiety among the other
revolutionary elite that some of his peers, including Thomas Jefferson,
objected and claimed Carter’s actions were subversive to the colonies’ social
balance and racial relations. They feared the potential of a backlash by white
workers against their new competitors for wage labor. In other words, they feared
his actions of freeing the enslaved would doom their revolt from a government
that taxed without representation. They were afraid he was setting a dangerous
precedent. He ostracized and his dangerous liberationist intentions were
opposed at every turn.
Carter’s emancipation of his slaves cost him financially
since slaves represented wealth in America’s economy and it cost him socially.
To escape the controversy and the scorn of his peers, Carter moved to Baltimore,
where he died in 1804, virtually alone. Yet his courage and willingness to put
into deed the egalitarian, liberationist ethics of the faith that this nations’
Founding Fathers only put into words, and “laid the primitive groundwork for an
interracial republic, challenging in numerous small instances the notion that
young America would fall apart if blacks and whites were free at the same time”
(Hendricks, Obery M. The Politics of
Jesus: Rediscovering the True Revolutionary Nature of Jesus’ Teachings and How
They Have Been Corrupted. p.185-87).
In the words of Paul for us today: For all of you are, children
of God by the virtue of the Christian faith. You who were initiated in the
Christian fellowship are Christian allies. No more is one white and another
black; no more is one American and another foreigner; no longer is one a male
and the other a female. For you are as one in Christ Jesus.
No comments:
Post a Comment