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.
Comments
Post a Comment