Day: December 26, 2022

Sermons

Sermon for the Feast of St. Stephen

“Lord, lay not this sin to their charge”

The readings for the Feast of Stephen are in stark contrast, it might seem, to the feelings of good will and good cheer associated with Christmas. How strange that the wonder of Christmas night and Christmas morn should be followed by the stoning of Stephen as recorded in Acts and by the dire words of Jesus about “kill[ing] the prophets, and ston[ing] them which are sent unto you”? Images of stark and disturbing violence. How is this good news, we might ask? How to reconcile this with the Christmas messages of peace on earth and good will toward men? And yet, the Gospel insists that these things are really all a blessing.

“Blessed is he that cometh in the Name of the Lord”. The three holy days of Christmas illuminate the radical meaning of Christ’s birth. It is not about ignoring and denying the realities of sin and evil, the realities of the cruel suffering inflicted by humans upon humans. Rather what we see is what is proclaimed in carol and song: “Christ was born for this!” Born for what? Born to bring redemption and healing to a broken world, born to suffer and die that we might have life in him.

In a profound sense, St. Stephen’s Day illustrates the meaning of the Christmas anthem from 1st John. “In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent his only-begotten Son into the world that we might live through him”. The love of God means loving your enemies and blessing those that persecute you. Such is the radical nature of divine love which alone transcends the divisions and animosities of our hearts and world in disarray.

Stephen is the proto-martyr, the archetype of Christian witness, not simply by being killed, but by the spirit in him by which he faces death. Another lives in him, we might say, and that other is Christ. Christmas is really about our lives as lived in the love of God; God with us and we with God, we in him and he in us. That sense of co-inherence and mutual indwelling establishes an entirely different perspective on how we think about the darkness and evil of our souls and our world. Stephen’s words deliberately echo Christ’s words on the Cross, the words of forgiveness. Those are the words of love conveyed towards us as sinners which in turn shape our words towards those who seek our harm.

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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

Domenico Gargiulo, The 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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