The below is adapted from the sermon I preached on Acts 7:54-60 today. You can read that text here.

The Stoning of Stephen

As the mob closes in, Stephen is distracted, beautifully distracted, by a vision of Jesus. “Look,” he says, “I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God!” Usually when we hear about Jesus at the right hand of God, he’s seated, as on a throne. But it’s as if Jesus stands up to receive his servant Stephen, to welcome him into an unmediated experience of God’s love and presence, for all eternity.

His angry listeners thought they were hearing blasphemy, and so covered their ears. This Jesus who died was to them a heretic, rightly crucified under God’s curse for claiming to be something he was not. And Stephen says he sees this Jesus standing next to the one God! So bad was this blasphemy that they had to rush him out of the city of Jerusalem. The holy city should not be subject to such absurdities.

Verse 59 says that as he was being stoned, “Stephen prayed, ‘Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.’”

This should sound familiar to us. Luke, who wrote the book of Acts, also records Jesus saying on the cross, “Lord, into your hands I commit my spirit.”

“Then [Stephen] knelt down,” Luke writes, “and cried out in a loud voice, ‘Lord, do not hold this sin against them.’”

More familiar words. Luke also records Jesus saying, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”

Stephen is remarkably like Jesus in his death. He is able to ask for forgiveness for those who are unjustly killing him.

Stephen makes death by stoning look easy. Luke says in the NIV that he “fell asleep”…. It was actual death, obviously. But so smooth, so easy, so forgiving and loving, so peaceful was the way in which Stephen faced his execution, that he simply “fell asleep.” And he entered into God’s presence.

“The Blood of the Martyrs…”

An early church theologian named Tertullian famously said, “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.”

Even on that day of Stephen’s death, there might have been a small seed planted in Paul’s heart, as he collected coats from the crowd.

Stephen was the first Christian martyr after Jesus’ death and resurrection. Before Stephen there was John the Baptist. After Stephen there were James, Peter, and a host of other apostles and church leaders. A number of means were used for martyring someone. Some of them quick and sudden, others slow and painful.

“The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church,” because we marvel at the courage of our sisters and brothers in Christ who stand for Jesus, come what may. Books of the lives of martyrs have long been popular among Christians, for use in private devotion and in public worship, to inspire, encourage, and exhort the body of believers to persevere in their faith.

I’ve been reading about one such martyr lately.

Catholic Archbishop Óscar Romero made it a hallmark of his ministry to stand with the poor, the marginalized, those who were on the other side of power. Romero, in what would be his final recorded sermon, gave a litany of the recent deaths of peasants and students in his El Salvador, even naming some by name, so that unjust violence and oppression would not go unnoticed. These victims have names, he insisted. Amazingly, his sermon concluded with an appeal to “the National Guard, the police, and the military” who were responsible for the killing. He said,

I implore you, I beg you, I order you in the name of God: stop the repression.

As he was preparing the Mass in a service of worship the next day, he lifted the chalice high, and was shot in the chest, falling at the feet of the crucifix.

“May God have mercy on the assassins,” he said, echoing Jesus and Stephen. Like Stephen, he committed himself into the hands of his Lord Jesus.

Martyrs Today

Most of us will never stare a martyr’s death in the face, but today, throughout the world, Christians do. Some of their stories are known, many others are unknown.

Sadly, we don’t have to look very hard for martyrs in 2014. Just this last week in Sudan, a 27-year-old woman, Meriam Yahia Ibrahim, received a death sentence for not recanting her Christian faith in favor of Islam. She has a 20-month-old son and is 8 months pregnant.

But the Islamist courts and government that have handed down her sentence cannot destroy her faith in Jesus, or even the Church of Jesus, to which she belongs, with us.

Like Stephen, she has committed himself into the hands of her Lord Jesus.

A Christian’s death because of his or her following Jesus continues to inspire the Church to grow.

A hip-hop artist in El Salvador, 30 years after Romero’s death, reflected on the former Archbishop’s ubiquitous cultural presence in that country. “What [Romero’s] killer did,” he said, “was to keep three generations thinking about him.”

How did they do it?

How did these men and women face death so calmly? So peacefully? How did Stephen and Romero both ask, with their last breaths, for God to forgive the ones who turned them into innocent victims?

I’m convinced that by the time a Christian martyr is confronted with death, she has already died a thousand deaths, by living for God.

In the moment that a disciple of Jesus looks the end of life in the face, he has already died to himself, many times over, by accepting Scripture’s call to follow Jesus.

When Jesus says, “take up your cross and follow me,” he says, do it daily. Take up your cross in life, in your everyday life. Not just in death, but in life.

Which is a funny thing to say, if you think about it. We’ve got a rather sanitized view of the cross. It’s a thing we might wear around our necks, or a centerpiece in some church sanctuaries. But it’s a symbol of death. For Jesus, it was a means of martyrdom.

A Call to Be Living Martyrs

The call to “take up our cross daily,” then, is a call to martyrdom, maybe in death, for some… but for sure it’s a call to be living martyrs. We who follow Jesus have a call to die to ourselves, each day.

Two years before his death, Archbishop Romero paraphrased Jesus a bit, though I think he captures his meaning well. He said,

“Let those who would follow me deny themselves”…repress in themselves the outbursts of pride, kill in their hearts the outbursts of greed, of avarice, of conceit, of arrogance. Let them kill it in their hearts. This is what must be killed, this is the violence that must be done, so that out of it a new person may arise, the only one who can build a new civilization: a civilization of love.

Stephen, when he came to the day of his stoning, was already dead to himself. He was already fully alive in Christ, living for God alone. His whole being was consumed with imitating Jesus.

At his dying he said the same things Jesus said in his death, “Father forgive them.” “Into your hands I commit my spirit.” And so, mind-boggling as his final prayers are, they are not anything you wouldn’t have already expected, if you knew him.

Those kinds of prayers were already part of his daily life. Prayers like,

Father, forgive those who do wrong to me. Jesus, have mercy on those who mistreat me, who misunderstand me, who fail to give me the benefit of the doubt, who take advantage of me. Please forgive them.

And, prayers like,

Jesus, into your hands I commit this day; I give you my work. I devote my time to you. I lift up my children and my family to you—they are truly yours and not mine, so I commit all of us into your care.

Stephen fixed his eyes on Jesus as the crowd started to pick up heavy stones. But this sort of “looking up,” this sort of steady gaze on the person of Jesus, was already an ongoing posture in Stephen’s life.

We must die to our carnal desires that make an empty yet compelling promise of life. We must live instead to the will of Jesus.

We must die to the values of this world, a society that tells us that newer is better, that less is worse, that power over others is something to be procured and preserved. We must live instead to the values of the kingdom of God, where the pure in heart see God, where we are satisfied not with buying or getting more stuff, but where we are satisfied in God when we hunger and thirst for righteousness.

We must die to arrogance and greed, and live instead to humility and generosity.

We must die—as we are able—to our impatience with others who insist on taking our time and attention, when we’d rather keep to ourselves.

We must die to our desire for revenge, and live instead to show mercy to even the merciless who don’t deserve it.

We must die to any impulse we may have toward violence, and live instead to make peace.

We must die to ourselves, and live to Jesus, losing our lives for his sake.

Like Stephen, we must commit ourselves every day into the hands of our Lord Jesus.

“Beautiful is the moment,” Romero said, “Beautiful is the moment in which we understand that we are no more than an instrument of God; we live only as long as God wants us to live; we can only do as much as God makes us able to do….”

Into your hands, Lord Jesus, do we commit our spirits.

Into your hands, Lord Jesus, do we commit our lives.

Into your hands, Lord Jesus, do we commit our desires and dreams.

Into your hands, Lord Jesus, do we commit our whole selves.

As my wife and I continue to raise our three young children, we try to think about the values we want to instill in them. It’s not just about how we want them to behave, although we let them know that, too, but we have a certain ethos we are trying to cultivate in the family. We find ourselves saying things like, “That’s how we act in this family,” or, “This is not how we talk to each other in this family.”

What about our other family—our church family? How do we act? How do we treat each other? What sorts of things should we do? What are the values of this family?

The lectionary reading (Acts 2:42-47) provides some serious inspiration, some robust answers to that question. It gives a portrait of a thriving community of Christians.

The Four Things They Did

Acts 2:42    They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer.  43 Everyone was filled with awe, and many wonders and miraculous signs were done by the apostles.

There are four repeated activities listed in verse 42, that the earliest church was practicing together regularly. These are all things that they devoted themselves to… they gave themselves wholly to these things.

1. The Apostles’ Teaching

The first thing to which the early church devoted themselves was the apostles’ teaching.

Earlier in this same chapter, Acts 2, Peter, one of the apostles, addresses a crowd who is amazed at the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on this early community of believers.

He speaks of the life of Jesus, his death, and his resurrection. As one summary formulation of the Christian faith says, “Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.” The apostles did us the great favor of writing down their teachings and the teachings of our Lord… so that we, too, can devote ourselves to the apostles’ teaching, just as the early church did.

At our own church we “devote [ourselves] to the apostles’ teaching” any time we gather to hear God’s Word read and proclaimed, when we study our way together through a book, or in a small group setting. We do that when we remind ourselves of the truths contained in Scripture, how the teachings of the Bible make available to us a fuller life than we could have ever dreamed of.

A thriving church devotes itself to the apostles’ teaching, to their words preserved for us now through the Scriptures.

2. The Fellowship

Second, they devoted themselves to “the fellowship.”

This term “fellowship,” that the author Luke uses, was also used in his day to describe the sort of close relationship that exists in a healthy and intimate marriage.

We can think about some of the marks of a good marriage: spending unhurried time together, taking a slow walk to just talk, sitting down for a meal and conversation, learning what makes the other person tick, trying to understand how to speak their love language. Happy marriages are not devoid of conflict, but have at least some established patterns for dealing with conflict when it inevitably arises. They’ll stop and carve out the time to work together on building the relationship.

My college roommate and I had so many post-conflict, relationship-clarifying talks our first year living together, that we often talked about how ready we were both going to be for marriage… how lucky two women were going to be to find such well-formed, emotionally mature men such as ourselves, who knew how to work through disagreements and differing life perspectives.

The analogy breaks down, obviously, and I’m not suggesting we think of ourselves as married to this church, per se. But there is something to be said for a repeatedly investing yourself in a close fellowship with others. It takes effort. And, you may have heard it said, sometimes to have a friend, you need to be a friend. Fellowship doesn’t just happen by all showing up in the same place together each week.

One writer puts it this way:

There are churches that view themselves as friendly and welcoming, but within which a visitor will not be drawn into conversation—where even members can suffer silently, unknown and unloved. Devotion to fellowship means nurturing the habits of hospitality—and it takes work: It takes courage to notice a newcomer, helping him or her find the coatrack or a classroom. It takes initiative to invite someone to lunch or a cup of coffee after worship…. It takes creativity to start a regular gathering where a small group can begin to know and care for each other.

A thriving church devotes itself to the creative, proactive work of building fellowship. Members of such a church make efforts to intentionally cultivate relationships.

3. The Breaking of Bread

Third, this early, thriving church devoted themselves to “the breaking of the bread.”

Alister McGrath writes about the passing of his aunt, barely 80 years old when she died. As he and some others were cleaning out her house, they found an old photograph of a young-looking man, someone his aunt had been in love with, but the relationship had come to an unexpected and premature end. His aunt was never married—this young man she had loved, and him alone.

Why did she keep the photograph, so many years after the relationship ended?

McGrath writes,

As she aged, she knew that she would have difficulty believing that, at one point in her life, someone had once cared for her and regarded her as his everything. It could all have seemed a dream, an illusion, something she had invented in her old age to console her in her declining years — except for the photo. The photo reminded her that she really had loved someone once and was loved in return. It was her sole link to a world in which she had been valued.

In the same way, McGrath goes on,

Communion bread and wine, like that photograph, reassure us that something that seems too good to be true—something that we might even be suspected of having invented—really did happen.

Jesus, you will remember from last week’s reading, was made known to two disciples on the Road to Emmaus, in the breaking of the bread.

Breaking bread together is a way we remember and reinforce the content of the apostles’ teaching: “Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.” When we break bread and drink from the cup together, we remind ourselves that something “really did happen.”

4. Prayer

Fourth, this early, thriving church devoted themselves to “prayer.”

Here, too, devotion and initiative are needed. It takes dedication to remember to pray not just here, not just today, but throughout the week for each other. And it also takes devotion to have the guts to share something vulnerable, to ask others for prayer for specific things we are in the middle of. But as we do, we find ourselves growing together into a closer fellowship of Christians.

A thriving church devotes itself to prayer.

One More Thing They Did

And there’s at least one more thing this early church did, that still stands out as an example to us. That is in verses 44 and 45.

44 All the believers were together and had everything in common.  45 Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need.

This passage and these verses in particular have inspired many an intentional community to actually move in and live together as disciples. Churches are a little bit different, in our context, but part of a deliberate devotion to fellowship is making sure we care for our own, especially when they are in need.

One other translation says that “they sold from time to time,” implying that this was not just a one-time event, but an ongoing solution that the church offered to the financial challenges its members faced.

With Determination, With Glad and Sincere Hearts

Luke twice mentions the devotion that the church had in working together to build a healthy and faithful community. In verse 42, “they devoted themselves….” In verse 46, “Every day they continued to meet together.”

It was continually, with perseverance, over and over, time and time again, that the church persisted in coming together. They worked at it, and they didn’t stop working at it.

But lest we think it was all work and no fun, Luke also says, “They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts.” They were truly happy to be together. They thoroughly enjoyed each other’s company.

Come, Devote Yourself to the Church….

“It is not good to be alone,” we hear, very early in the Bible.

Loneliness is a sort of pre-existing human condition, and the church is its best antidote.

Do you feel flat, dull, or stale in your walk with God? Come, devote yourself to church, and have your faith renewed by worshiping with others who want to love and know the same God you do.

Are you listless, directionless, or looking for wise counsel as to how to live? Come, devote yourself to the teaching of the apostles, and we as a church will dwell on God’s Word together.

Do you feel despondent as you eat another quiet meal alone? Come, devote yourself to the fellowship of the church, where we spend time in meaningful conversation with each other, often with food and drink in hand.

Have you forgotten who you are, and who Christ is? Do you need to remember again just how much Jesus loves you, precious child that you are? Come, devote yourself to the breaking of the bread, and know Jesus—and taste his love—in the physical reminders of his body and blood, given for us.

Are you facing a scenario that is far beyond your capability, that has you throwing up your hands in surrender? Or have you experienced a recent joy, the excitement of which is so great you have to tell somebody else? Lean on others who will mourn with you, who will rejoice with you, and who will pray with you and on your behalf. Come, devote yourself to prayer, and find renewal and strengthening from the prayers of others.

God, Who Makes it Grow

The last verse in our passage says, “And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.” Ultimately it was God who grew that young church.

Whether it’s numerically or in other ways—spiritual depth, strength of fellowship, vulnerability of relationships—it is God who adds to the health and vitality of a fellowship of believers. We are planters, though, and we can dig out a small hole in the dirt and drop in a few seeds. We can cultivate what we’ve planted by watering it and protecting it from pesky garden predators—those forces that would prohibit growth together. We can nurture this organic, living body we call our church through our perseverance, our continual commitment to be together, and with glad and sincere hearts.

Come, let us devote ourselves to the work of nurturing this church: through learning the Scriptures, through fellowship, through the breaking of the bread, through prayer, and through sharing with each other when we are in need…. And as we work, let’s watch God move among us and make us grow.

The above is adapted from the sermon I preached on Acts 2:42-47 today. All Scripture quotations come from the NIV (1984) or TNIV. See my other sermons, if you desire, here.