L. R. Tarsitano—Saint Andrew’s Church, Savannah

Saint Stephen’s Day—December 26, 2004

Witness

“But [Stephen], being full of the Holy Ghost, looked up stedfastly into heaven, and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing on the right hand of God, And said, Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son of man standing on the right hand of God. Then they cried out with a loud voice, and stopped their ears, and ran upon him with one accord, And cast him out of the city, and stoned him...” (Acts 7:55-58).

The first Christian feast day after Christmas Day is the celebration of the death of the first martyr for Christ: St. Stephen, one of the seven deacons of the original Jerusalem Church. In many countries, St. Stephen’s Day (or the Second Day of Christmas) is also called “Boxing Day,” from the custom of giving Christmas packages to people other than the members of one’s immediate family, and from the delivery of boxes of food to the poor and indigent.

This relief of the poor is an especially fitting remembrance of a deacon, since the very office was begun to make certain that the poor and shut-in were cared for, while freeing the Apostles and Elders to concentrate on their own proper ministry of the Word of God, the sacraments, and prayer, which they were expected to extend to the rich and to the poor, to the sick and to the well alike. This division of labor was very productive, and today’s Church would benefit immensely by the restoration of a strong, active diaconate at work in our various parishes.

But we would be remiss is we didn’t stop to consider St. Stephen’s final acts of ministry: his fearless witness to Jesus Christ and his martyrdom. As a matter of fact, in the Greek of the New Testament, “witness” and “martyrdom” are the very same word: maturia. Thus, the witness and martyrdom of St. Stephen are a reminder to us that whatever office we hold in the Church, whether we serve Jesus Christ in the lay order or in one of the orders of clergy, we are all obligated to witness to the truth that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and the Savior of the world.

And what did St. Stephen witness to, in particular, that so enraged the Jerusalem mob and moved them to such great violence? These were Jews, after all, and not barbarians. If someone had asked them, “Do you believe in God; do you believe in the Scriptures; do you believe that God has promised a Messiah?” the vast majority of them, perhaps all of them, would have instantly answered “Yes.” And yet, they stopped their ears against St. Stephen’s witness and killed him with stones. Why should this have been?

Part of the answer can be found in the first words of today’s Lesson from the Acts: “But [Stephen], being full of the Holy Ghost, looked up stedfastly into heaven.” St. Stephen was “full of the Holy Ghost,” who had descended upon the Church, through the Apostles, to enliven and strengthen all believers. Stephen, therefore, was alive before God in a way that the members of the mob simply were not. Stephen, alive in Jesus Christ and indwelt by the Holy Ghost, had a redemptive, saving relation to God in Christ that his enemies lacked, and so they resented his confidence in the God of his salvation.

Look more carefully, too, at the second part of this statement, which tells us that St. Stephen “looked steadfastly into heaven.” The original could be translated even more literally to say that Stephen had given his full and undivided attention to heaven, so that he really wasn’t paying attention to the crowd or to their discontents. He was certainly speaking to them, but his purpose wasn’t to please them or, as we hear too often today, “to meet their perceived needs.” St. Stephen’s purpose was simply the truth: the truth about God; the truth about God’s Son Jesus Christ; and the truth about the simple way that anybody who will submit his life to God in Jesus Christ can be saved from his sins and live forever.

The mob, on the other hand, as is true of all mobs, had given its full attention to itself. The mob was unhappy, so someone had to die, and not very long before, this same mob had joined in crucifying Jesus Christ, and for essentially the same offense. Jesus, and now his disciple Stephen, had refused to pay any attention to the popular and deadly notion that God belonged to Israel, rather than the other way around.

This sense of “owning God” was, of course, a travesty and a reversal of all that the Old Testament had taught. It was a denial of everything that the Patriarchs and Prophets of Israel had believed. Nevertheless, for the members of the mob at least, this terrible error had its attractions. It sounded religious, and it allowed a profession of faith and supporting quotations from the Bible. It provided social respectability, even as each man went his own way according to his own lights. It allowed them to disobey any commandment of God that they felt like disobeying, as long they said that the Bible was “hard to understand.” And it kept God in a box, lest he become so powerful in their lives that he might actually take control of their lives away from them.

But there stood Stephen, the prisoner of God’s love and grace, paying attention only to heaven and to heaven’s God. And he dared to tell them, to their faces, that God didn’t care at all about their domesticated, human religion. God only cared about his own true religion, established in the blood of his Son and by the power of the Holy Ghost. And God didn’t need their permission to send a Messiah, to give the Gospel, or to set up his New Testament Church. So they stopped their ears for fear of being converted, and they killed God’s messenger of grace.

It is easy, at a distance, to condemn that mob, but before we do, we ought to listen to the accumulated wisdom of Christ’s Church. Why does the Church insist that we celebrate St. Stephen’s martyrdom on the day after Christmas? The answer is that every human being is vulnerable to the temptation of idolatry and in danger of substituting the false worship of ourselves and of our own ideas about religion for the true religion and worship of God. After all, how many people calling themselves “Christians” today bend the Scriptures or completely ignore them, even as they profess their loyalty to Christianity?

How many Christians are more concerned about social respectability than they are about paying all of their attention to heaven and to God’s demands? For that matter, how many Christians who twenty-four hours ago celebrated the birth of Jesus Christ have refused to obey him this morning, staying in bed on the Lord’s Day, when the Fourth Commandment tells them clearly that it is a sin to do so and that such disobedience dishonors God?

Human nature is fallen, and so we all need a Savior. In his mercy, God has been kind enough to give us one. But we should return God’s loving kindness with our own loving kindness, as St. Stephen did, paying all of our attention to heaven. More even than this, we ought to recognize the fact that the sinful weakness that cripples today’s Church is the same sin that moved that mob to murder Stephen: a hard-hearted resistance to any authority but our own. Too many of us submit to nothing—not to God, not to his Word, not to his Church, not to those that Christ sends to teach us, and not to the grace of God speaking out in every faithful Christian witness.

As our Lord Jesus Christ warns us in today’s Gospel, “Ye shall not see me henceforth, till ye shall say, Blessed is he that cometh in the Name of the Lord” (Matt. 23:39). The mob in Jerusalem neither knew nor saw Christ for who he is because they did not bless St. Stephen, who came to them in the Name of the Lord. But Stephen did witness in the Name of the Lord, as he was sent to do by the Apostles, who were sent themselves by Christ, who was sent by his Father in heaven. God still sends us today, but if we want to see Christ and to live with him, first we must listen to the witness of God and not stop our ears against the words of his commandments and Gospel. And that is our witness and martyrdom, in the Name of Jesus Christ.