Day: December 26, 2015

Sermons

Sermon for the Feast of St. Stephen

“Lord, lay not this sin to their charge”

The Feast of Stephen comes right after the great festival of Christ’s holy birth. It illustrates something of the deeper meaning of the mystery of Christmas.

St. Stephen is the proto-martyr, the first Christian martyr, to be sure, but the word ‘proto’ here signifies something more. He is not only the first but also the prototype of all martyrdom. Martyrdom is about witness. Stephen shows us what Christian witness really means. And I don’t simply mean by being stoned to death, either literally or metaphorically! What, then, is the witness of St. Stephen which serves as the prototype of all Christian witness? Simply what is captured in the medieval carol of this season and, more specifically, of this day, “Good King Wenceslas look’d out/ On the Feast of Stephen”.

And what did he see? “A poor man…gath’ring winter fuel”. And what did the king do but set out with his page, his servant, with food and wine to attend to the poor man? The story of the carol tells us of the fears and uncertainty of the page-boy about the journey and of the answer of the kingly saint to “mark my footsteps, my good page, / Tread thou in them boldly” and so “in his master’s steps he trod”. The carol concludes by pointing out the moral that “Ye who now will bless the poor, / Shall yourselves find blessing”. True but only if we follow in the master’s steps. In a way, the carol is a parable of Christmas itself. Christ has come to our poor and impoverished humanity in the early winter of our discontent. He has come with food and wine and those who would be his followers must mark his footsteps and follow in them bearing the gifts of Christ to others as well.

Something of what that means is signaled in the Feast of St. Stephen as a parable of the Christmas message. “Christ”, as another carol, puts it, “was born for this”, meaning death and rejection, sacrifice and crucifixion. And by extension, it means that Christ’s holy birth embraces all the miseries and sorrows of our lives as well as the forms of persecution and evil that are either visited upon ourselves by others or that we visit upon ourselves and others in our rejection of God.

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Prayers and liturgy

Saint Stephen the Martyr

The collect for today, the Feast of St. Stephen, Deacon and Martyr, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

GRANT, O Lord, that in all our sufferings here upon earth, for the testimony of thy truth, we may stedfastly look up to heaven, and by faith behold the glory that shall be revealed; and, being filled with the Holy Spirit, may learn to love and bless our persecutors, by the example of thy first Martyr Saint Stephen, who prayed for his murderers to thee, O blessed Jesus, who standest at the right hand of God to succour all those that suffer for thee, our only Mediator and Advocate. Amen.

The Lesson: Acts 7:55-60
The Gospel: St. Matthew 23:34-39

Lorenzo Lotto, Martyrdom of St. StephenAll that is known of St. Stephen’s life is found in the Acts of the Apostles, chapters 6 and 7. He is reckoned as the first Christian martyr–the proto-martyr. Although his name is Greek for “crown”, he was a Jew by birth; he would have been born outside Palestine and raised as a Greek-speaking Jew. The New Testament does not record the circumstances of his conversion to Christianity.

Stephen first appears as one of the seven deacons chosen in response to protests by Hellenist (Greek-speaking) Christians that their widows were being neglected in the distribution of alms. The apostles were too busy preaching the word of God to deal with this problem, so they commissioned seven men from among the Hellenists “of good repute, full of the Spirit and of wisdom”, then prayed and laid hands on them. Stephen, the first among the seven, is described as “full of faith and of the Holy Spirit”. A few verses later, Stephen is said to be “full of grace and power [and] doing great wonders and signs among the people”.

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