Easter 5, Year A

A Sermon Preached at the Cathedral Church of St. Mark

Easter 5, Year A

The Very Reverend Tyler B. Doherty, Dean & Rector

Our passage from the Book of Acts for today centers on the martyrdom of Stephen, hailed by the tradition as the first Christian martyr. The parallels to Jesus’ own death on the cross are, of course, unmistakable. In Luke, Jesus on the way to cross meets violence not with violence but with forgiveness—“Forgive them Lord for they know not what they do.” Mocked on the cross by one of the thieves, he ministers to the other even in the midst of incredible torment—“Truly I tell you today you will be with me in paradise.” And when the moment of his death comes, Jesus cries out with a loud voice and says, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.”

Stephen’s death at the hands of the angry mob displays many of the same leitmotifs. The angry crowd licking its chops and rolling up their sleeves eager to lay into their scapegoated victim. The prayer of surrender and release “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.” And as the stones are coming thick and fast, the final act of forgiveness, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.”

What is Luke up to here? What do these parallels tell us?  Did Luke just run out of good material? I don’t think so. Remember, the purpose of the Christian life is to follow in the footsteps of Jesus down the way of love that we might become a little more like the one we call Lord. The purpose of the Christian life is to put on the mind of Christ—to see with eyes opened by his love, to touch with his hands, to hear with ears unstopped to the cries of poor and needy. If you want a clear picture of what a truly human human life looks like, we need look no further than Jesus. He is the full and final manifestation of what love looks like when it comes into the world and takes on human flesh. 

Like Philip, sometimes we want to “see the Father,” while the whole time Jesus has been revealing the Father’s love in his humble servanthood to others. The Father is shown and known in healing with the woman with the issue of blood. The Father is shown and known in feeding the hungry. The Father is shown and known in the washing of the feet and the breaking of bread. The Father is shown and known in breaking the chains of demoniac and returning him to relationship in and with the community. The Father is shown and known in radical welcome and indiscriminate hospitality. Philip thinks there is “something else” lurking behind the curtain, but Jesus says no, this is what love looks like—follow me, imitate me, become me and stop muddying the waters with your abstract metaphysical speculations. 

That’s why it’s so important to spend time daily with scripture—to get to know this person of Jesus particularly as revealed in the Gospels. His life is the shape our lives are to take. And the more we acquaint ourselves with the shape of that life, the more we are able to embody and enact it in and through the lineaments of our fragile, unrepeatable, and precious life. That’s why it’s so important not to neglect our times of daily prayer, for going apart, for resting in God beyond thoughts, words, and images. This, in the words of 1 Peter, is the “spiritual milk” for which our souls hunger and cry out.

So the parallels between Stephen’s death and Jesus crucifixion are really about the transformation that takes place in the lives of each one of us as we journey into love, as we practice the non-practice of opening, allowing and receiving, of making a little space for God to get at us and do God’s work in us. Stephen spent regular time taking refuge in the Lord, making contact with the strong rock, acquainting himself so thoroughly with the castle that keeps us safe no matter the swift and varied changes of the world, that he actually came to a certain likeness with Christ.

We’ve all heard that we are created in the image and likeness of God, but what does that actually mean, practically speaking? The Greek Fathers have a lovely way of talking about the difference between image and likeness. Image exists as potential—in everyone without exception. That’s the core of our Baptismal Covenant. Likeness, however, is the name for journey from mere potential to manifestation, or realization. I had a soccer coach when I was growing up who at the start of every season would say, “You got a lot of potential, but that just means you haven’t done anything yet!” That’s what Stephen did. He made the journey from image as potential to likeness as manifestation and realization to such a profound degree that even in death we can’t help but see Christ. And the astounding fact of the Christian vision of what it means to be human is that that’s what each of us is called to as well.

So how does that transformation take place? Again, it’s through contact with the “living stone,” encounter with the Risen Christ. In that beautiful language of 1 Peter, we are called to, “let ourselves be built into a spiritual house.” Notice that it is not we ourselves, under our own steam and relying on our own efforts who do the building. We let ourselves be built. God’s presence and action does the heavy lifting. God’s the master builder and it is our job to allow ourselves to be built into a spiritual house, a house with Jesus Christ as the chief cornerstone. And the hint as to what this letting ourselves be built looks like can be summed in the words of our psalm—“Into your hands I commend my spirit.” If I had to pick a single phrase that captures the fundamental disposition of life of prayer in the most succinct way, that might just be it. Commending ourselves to the Lord, trusting that our times in God’s hand and that God’s face shines upon us in good times and in bad is the antidote to thinking we have to do everything ourselves, the endless, exhausting wheel of self-effort and self-improvement projects that always come from the place of “not enough.”

I think that’s one way we can understand what it means to “be taken out of the net that they have secretly set for me.” We often think of the references to enemies in the Psalms as references to other people, which sets up a kind of dualistic, us and them mindset. But isn’t it the case that we often set the net ourselves? Aren’t we sometimes our own worst enemy? Might not the net to which the psalmist refers be the net of thinking that we’re going to take heaven by storm by our efforts? Might not that net be the mistaken belief that God’s love for us is somehow dependent on what we do? United Methodist Bishop Jeremiah Park was fond of saying, “God loves you, and there is nothing you can do about it!” That’s the rock. That’s the castle. That unconditional belovedness that only wants to love us into loving is the chief cornerstone upon which we let ourselves to be built. Grace comes first and is non-negotiable, but our journey into likeness with Christ begins with our co-operation with that grace, our consent to God’s presence and action in our lives, with that simple movement of the will—“Into your hands I commend my spirit.”

1 Peter ends with that powerful declaration, “Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.” When we forget our story, the story of God’s wild, uncontainable love for us, we cease to be a people. We become isolated, alone, split off from ourselves and each other. In that place, we’re not being built up in love, but living from fear, scarcity, and lack. When we forget who and whose we are, we get cut off from the source of Beauty, Goodness, and Truth and we’re more likely to pick up a stone to throw at some imagined enemy than to let ourselves be fashioned by love, in love, and for love. 

            That’s really the choice that lies at the heart of each moment of lives—to unite ourselves in fear of a common enemy we can rush against with stones clenched in our fists, or to open our hands, to drop the rock, to commend our spirit, and let ourselves be built into that spiritual house without walls, or windows, or doors where there are no insiders and outsiders, those on top and those on the bottom, haves and have nots. That’s what it means for us, all of us, to be royal priesthood and a holy nation, God’s own people. That’s what it means for us to drink deeply of the spiritual milk of God’s love so that we can be that milk for others. Drop the stone. Commend your spirit. Let yourself be built. Then welcome the stranger into that house where God’s face shines on everyone.