Stoning Prophets
A sermon about the stoning of Stephen (Acts 6:1–7:2a, 44–60), white Christians, and “A Prayer of a Weary Black Woman”
This is the Easter season, a time when we reflect upon resurrection and possibilities for new life. In the two Sundays since Easter, the Narrative Lectionary has taken us from Jesus revealing himself to two grieving followers he met on the road to Emmaus to one of the leaders in the early church getting stoned. And we’re not talking ‘peace and love’ stoned here. We’re talking the ‘bashing his skull with rocks’ kind of stoned. Why in the world would this gruesome story be read during the joyful Easter season?
To help us get there, let’s think of Acts as Luke 2.0. Acts is Luke continuing the story after Jesus returns to God. At this point in the story, most of Jesus followers are still in Jerusalem. They are becoming less and less a sect of Judaism and are more of their own community forming their own traditions, rituals, and beliefs. We see in Acts 6 that the early church is also doing the work of becoming multi-ethnic, as Jewish Jesus followers and Greek Jesus followers are forming church and community together. As we know, this is hard work.
It also seems that the twelve disciples (Matthias has replaced Judas) are trying to do all of the work of the church themselves. In addition to preaching and teaching, they’re also doing the ministry of distributing the community’s shared resources to those who need them. They can’t do it all. And it seems that either they are discriminating against the Greek church members or their unconscious bias is getting the better of them. You see, the Greek speaking church members complain that the disciples, who are all Hebrew speaking, are neglecting their widows when they distribute food.
The disciples decide that they should focus on preaching and teaching, and the church should select seven additional leaders to carry out the service ministries, the first deacons. All seven, whom the church chooses, have Greek names, so it seems that the early church takes steps to repair injustices in their community. The early church models that inviting those who have been pushed to margins into leadership is a path to making communities more equitable, just, and inclusive. Representation matters.
One of the seven deacons is Stephen. Luke tells us that Stephen is full of faith and the Holy Spirit. He overflows with grace and can perform miraculous signs and wonders.
One day Stephen encounters a group of Greeks at their Hellenist synagogue. They try to argue with him, but apparently Stephen’s gifts for debate and rhetoric are as strong as his gifts for service. Much like the religious leaders who could never outsmart Jesus, this group of religious folks can’t get the best of Stephen either. They get angry and retaliate against him. They start rumors that Stephen blasphemed God, and they get the community so stirred up that it starts an uprising.
The religious folks seize Stephen and take him to the High Council with trumped up charges. All of this resembles Jesus being taken to the Council before the crucifixion, doesn’t it? Even though Stephen finds himself in an extremely dangerous and scary situation, his face glows like an angel. While they angry crowd may not recognize it, readers know that this connects Stephen with Moses, as well as with Jesus.
Standing before his accusers, the High Council, and an angry mob, Stephen, who has been ordained to the ministry of service, not preaching, preaches the longest sermon in Acts. Stephen describes how the faithful rejected Moses’ leadership over and over again. He continues to preach about the Jewish patriarchs. When he gets to Solomon, Stephen rebukes the king for building the temple. God doesn’t actually dwell in any kind of structure that humans can build. How can beings created by God build anything that could contain God?
Stephen’s audience knows that idolatry is sin. They can see examples of idolatry in the past, like the golden calf, but Stephen accuses them of making the temple an idol. Then he says that they may call themselves faithful, but they are no different from the anyone else in their hearts. They’re no different than the people who murdered the prophets, including Jesus, because they fight against the Holy Spirit time and time again.
You can imagine how the already angry audience responds to this. They work themselves into a frenzy. When Stephen proclaims that the Son of Man is at God’s right hand, they completely lose it. The crowd of faithful folks ambush Stephen. They drag him outside of the city. They toss their cloaks to some guy named Saul (who will later become the Apostle Paul) to hold for them while they bludgeon Stephen to death with stones.
In the midst of this, Stephen takes a knee. This image highlights the difference in power dynamics and the violence that’s happening to him. As Stephen breaths his last breath, he cries out, “Lord, do not hold this evil against them.”
We’re still stoning prophets, aren’t we? Religious folks are still prone to lashing out against those who challenge tradition or deeply held beliefs. I guess we all are.
Since 2016, Colin Kaepernick, someone else who took a knee, has been reviled by many for kneeling during the national anthem in effort to protest injustice and police brutality against Black people and people of color. Despite the facts that Kaepernick both is a professed Christian and a huge philanthropist, many Christians have led that attacks against him.
Efforts to support conversion therapy, to protect panic defense laws, and to ban trans athletes from participating in sports are often led by conservative people of faith. Their arguments often include harmful language. At their worst, they condone physical violence.
Seminary professor and psychologist Dr. Chanequa Walker-Barnes wrote a prayer that is included in Rhythm of Prayer, a recently published book edited by Sarah Bessey. Dr. Walker-Barnes’ “Prayer of a Weary Black Woman” follows the format of the psalms found in scripture. It begins with her bringing raw, honest feelings to God. Throughout the prayer, she is in dialogue with God about her feelings and struggles. Through her conversation with God, the prayer is able to conclude in a way that acknowledges the validity of her pain but allows her to approach the source of her pain in a way that is healthy and can renew her.
As you may guess from the title of the prayer, the very real struggle about which Dr. Walker-Barnes prays is racism. She brings the rawness of her pain to God by beginning her prayer with the sentence, “Dear God, please help me to hate White people.”
You can imagine how many white people have reacted to this. A couple of weeks ago, a pastor, who happens to be from Alexandria, came across her prayer. Despite being theologically trained, he apparently didn’t recognize that this prayer is a psalm. I don’t know if he’s never read psalms like Psalm 137, where the psalmist begs God to bash the the heads of all of the Babylonians’ babies against rocks. This pastor, it seems, couldn’t get past the first sentence of Dr. Walker-Barnes’ “Prayer of a Weary Black Woman”, and he took to Twitter to proclaim how dangerous he thinks the prayer is.
Well, his reaction is what proved to be dangerous because it unleashed an angry Christian mob against Dr. Walker-Barnes, Sarah Bessey, and to a much lesser extent, everyone who has supported them. Frenzied tweets accuse them of being sinners, false witnesses, even demons. Dr. Walker-Barnes and Sarah Bessey have had to shut down all of their social media, and Dr. Walker-Barnes is receiving death threats.
Imagine how terrifying this is. If strangers go to the trouble of finding your phone number, what else might they do? Most of this is happening by professed Christians and in the name of faith. Their real motive, white supremacy, is being disguised as pious faith. It’s gross. But it’s also nothing new.
Now, it’s easy for us to separate ourselves from these fanatical folks, but do our words or actions ever rob people of their humanity? It’s one thing to say, “You’re wrong” (yes, we should call out injustice). It’s something entirely different to treat someone as though they are not human.
Cheri Spiegel, a deacon at CBC, is taking a class on non-violent language. When we chatted about this, she said, “I think our words become violent when they become a strategy to meet a need that does not recognize the needs of another.” When our culture is so quick to forget about the needs or even the humanity of another, we would be wise to do some soul searching before assuming that we never participate in this.
Here’s where I think this heavy story actually does connect with Easter: Religious folks who felt their way of life was being threatened, lashed out in violence against both Jesus and Stephen. I wonder if how we Christians process the violence of the cross impacts our likelihood to engage in violent actions or words when we feel like our way of life is threatened? Do we believe that God demanded the violence of the cross (so many of our songs refer to our debt to pay), or do we believe that the human propensity to become violent is what killed Jesus? Do we believe that it was the violence of the cross that became redemptive or that Jesus died in order to show us that there is another way and that’s what’s redemptive?
Right now many Christians in America justify violence as being righteous. Many Christians are advocating for violence to be written into our laws. What could happen if even a small number of Christians vowed to live a radically different way? What could happen if we committed to truly following in the ways of Jesus? It would be completely counter-cultural, which means it would get attention, just like Christians in the early church did. It would be risky. It might even be dangerous. But it just might bring new life to us and to our churches and to those who are most likely to receive the brunt of Christian violence and to those who don’t yet know there’s another way but who are paying attention.
You see, after Stephen’s stoning, the counter-cultural Jesus followers got scared. They left Jerusalem and scattered about. Their way of being in the world did get people’s attention, and little house churches sprang up all over the place. Their way of living caught on, and Christianity spread throughout the world.
That kind of Christianity is worth reclaiming. It can resurrect us all.
