The Consequences of Love--May 9, 2023

The Consequences of Love--May 9, 2023

"But they covered their ears, and with a loud should all rushed together against [Stephen]. Then they dragged him out of the city and began to stone him; and the witnesses laid their coats at the feet of a young man named Saul." [Acts 7:57-58]

We can't often predict what events will unfold in the course of a day; but we can make the choice in advance to commit to responding with love, come what may.  And while we never know what will come of that choice in any given situation, there is reason to believe that God can use such decisions in ways beyond our expectations.

I want to take a step back for a moment and re-enter the story of Stephen that we explored yesterday, and that many of us heard this past Sunday as well as our first reading from the Scriptures in worship.  This is the story of Stephen, a Greek-speaking servant-leader in the early church when the Jesus-movement was still basically contained within the city of Jerusalem.  Stephen had been one of the first leaders of a food distribution program in the early church that made sure there was food provided to the widows who had no means of providing for themselves, in particular to make sure that those who were ethnically different because they spoke Greek rather than Hebrew or Aramaic were still included.  [It is worth noting that from the very beginning, the church had to wrestle with including people who were deemed "other" and had to make the choice not to discriminate against "those people" who spoke a different language and came from a different culture.]  Anyway, Stephen helped to lead that community food distribution program, and then he found himself in trouble with some of the Respectable Religious People, who had him arrested.  When he told them, not just about Jesus, but about how their people had consistently missed God's action and silenced or killed the prophets God had sent, well, that angered the Respectable Religious People even more. [Telling history truthfully, in ways that don't cover over our missteps and wrongdoing, has a way of doing that.]  In fact, they became a lynch mob.

Now, as Luke the narrator tells the story, it would be easy to picture this all happening in a blur of frantic chaos, and to assume that Stephen doesn't have a chance to think clearly.  Surely, if he had his wits about him, Stephen would have fought back, right? Surely he would have picked up some rocks of his own to lob back at the angry crowd?  Maybe he didn't carry a sword and a shield around with him, but at least he could have returned fire with the same stones the crowd was aiming at him?  Maybe he could have taken some of them down--after all, the council was surely made up of older, respected men, and Stephen was likely a younger man. Maybe if he would have gotten a few good shots in and hit a couple of his attackers in the head, it would have frightened the rest into backing off.  Maybe Stephen didn't need to kill ALL of his attackers, but if he would have at least left a couple of them on the ground, he could have walked away the winner, right?  Sometimes we read a story like this and think, "Too bad Stephen didn't think things out ahead like we do and have a plan to fight back at a moment's notice."

Except... I don't think Stephen is a helpless victim or naive do-gooder who hasn't thought things through.  I think we have every reason to believe that Stephen made the choice before he even opened his mouth to address the council that if they got upset or violent, he wouldn't let himself be provoked into throwing rocks back at his persecutors.  That much is clear from what he says as he is dying [as we noted yesterday, Stephen echoes Jesus' own words from the cross as he says, "Lord, do not hold this sin against them," in his final breath. In other words, this wasn't a situation where Stephen didn't have time to attack the mob back, or where he just didn't have the foresight to carry a sword at all times.  This was Stephen's conscious choice to be vulnerable in the world as a presence of truth-telling and love, but not to answer violence with more violence or mob-justice with his own vigilante justice.  

Stephen made the choice, before the situation boiled over, to walk the way of Jesus, even if that meant laying down his life, rather than killing or wounding someone else. He didn't have a death-wish, but he did know how to commit to responding with love to whatever situation he found himself in. He embodied what the late theologian Walter Wink said:  "To have to suffer is different from choosing to suffer.... Martyrs are not victims, overtaken by evil, but hunters who stalk evil into the open by offering as bait their own bodies."  Stephen wasn't interested in looking like a hero, but rather in loving like Jesus. So he stalked evil out into the open like a hunter, offering his own life to expose the hatred of the mob, and to offer an alternative. Because he had chosen to walk the way of Jesus' love, he knew whatever situation he found himself in, some options were off the table. 

Now, that by itself is a powerful witness to Jesus' way of love that doesn't keep score or hold grudges.  But something amazing happened as a consequence of Stephen's choice not to retaliate.  In fact, it is still reverberating through Christian history even two millennia later.  As Luke notes, when the council decides to start stoning Stephen to death, they leave their coats with a member of their group named Saul, who is nodding along approvingly while they murder Stephen.  At first, you might think this is just a random detail [sometimes the biblical writers do that, after all].  But you might recognize that name, too, becuase this same Saul is the one who becomes both early Christianity's greatest persecutor and then its greatest ambassador. This is the same Saul of Tarsus who will shortly begin a reign of terror against Christians, rounding them up and putting them in jail [or worse], and then the same Saul who will meet the risen Jesus on the road to Damascus, and find himself transformed by that encounter to becoming a Christian himself.  And pretty soon after that, people start calling him by his Greco-Roman name, Paul, and we come to know him as the Apostle whose name is attached to half of the New Testament, the same man who spread the Gospel to reach Gentiles, and who brought the news of Jesus first to the shores of what we now call Europe [from which I'm pretty sure all of my ancestors traced their lineage, and a goodly number of yours, too, I'll wager].  

In other words, Stephen's choice not to answer violence with more violence meant that Saul the Coat-Holding Easy Target [I mean, his hands would have been full, right?] wasn't killed, just as the rest of the council was spared, too.  And even though that meant further hardship for the church for a while, it also meant that Saul could be claimed by Christ's enemy-embracing love, too, and become a follower of Jesus himself.  Stephen couldn't possibly have foreseen all that, but he did know that the way of Jesus' love has transformative power, and it was enough to be faithful to that love and let God do the rest.

I seriously hope the stakes of your day today are not nearly so tense or traumatic as what happens in this story.  But I do hope that each of us dares to face whatever comes in this day as people who embody the way of Jesus.  That means making the choice, before our feet hit the floor in the morning, to answer hatred with love, deceit with truth-telling, and evil with good.  From there, we can only guess how God will use such disarming, transformative love in world full of violence and vengeance.  We can, however, trust that God will.

Lord Jesus, give us the courage to love vulnerably, and to make the choice ahead of time today to follow your way wherever it leads us.