Acts 7 Sermon

I played my first real game of golf a few weeks ago with some guys from Redeemer, and it was a truly eye-opening experience. Never in my life would I have thought that hitting a stationary ball with a stick would be that difficult. At one point, I baffled the two guys I was with, because I somehow managed to swipe the tee out from under the ball, sending it several yards in front of me, while the ball casually dropped straight down from where it was resting on the tee. It was like that magic trick where you yank the tablecloth off the table without moving anything on it. Everyone was impressed, but not the good way. I never thought it would be that difficult to merely hit the ball, I wasn’t even worrying about where it went after hitting it.

Now, I love learning new things, so I’m asking all kinds of questions about stance and swing and positioning, and what I come to find is that correct golfing posture and form is unnatural and uncomfortable. My body is accustomed to certain movements and positions that I have learned over the 30 years of my life, that I had learned from playing baseball and playing tennis, and these guys kept telling me I had to change those customs, I had to rethink them. Chuck said it best about halfway through the course, he said, “If it feels wrong, in golf, it’s probably right.” So all game long, I was fighting against what I was accustomed to.

This struggle is not unlike the struggle to follow Jesus in our context. You and I, we’ve grown accustomed to all kinds of things that make following Jesus difficult. We do not live in a vacuum. We have cultural customs as Americans, as Southerners, and as suburbanites that make it challenging to build our lives around the teachings and practices of Jesus. And just like how my friends’ instructions caused me to doubt my customs in golf, so too when the church proclaims Christ, the customs of our culture are questioned. This is what we see in the story of Stephen.

Stephen was one of those men filled with the Spirit and full of wisdom who was put in charge of ensuring that all of the widows in the church were having their needs met. Now, we learn that he was teaching people about Jesus, and there was this group of religious leaders who tried to counter what Stephen was saying. They aim to debate what he’s teaching. But, they couldn’t argue with the guy. Peter’s filled with the Spirit and they are not, so they lose the debate. So, as is often the case when people know they’ve lose the debate of ideas, these leaders attacked the person. We never see that in our world, do we? So they start accusing him of stuff. What was the charge? Verse 13:

13 and they set up false witnesses who said, “This man never ceases to speak words against this holy place and the law, 14 for we have heard him say that this Jesus of Nazareth will destroy this place and will change the customs that Moses delivered to us.”

The religious leaders saw Stephen and the Christian message as dangerous, and what was the danger? Stephen wanted to change their customs.

Now, when we think about customs, we rarely do them justice. We are constantly underestimating the power of customs. Our customs shape us into the people we are. The practices and habits that we repeat again and again have a lasting and formative effect on who we are as people. Parents understand the power of customs better than anybody. This is why we set limits on how much TV or internet our children have access to, because we know that those habits or customs have the power to shape our children. Melanie and I were just talking this week about our desire to eat healthy foods as a family so that our children grow up with that custom in their lives and grow to be people who love vegetables and fruits and not just chicken nuggets or pizza. Our customs shape us into the people we are.

This is one reason so many of us have fallen in love with the Anglican church, because of our liturgies that we say over and over again. We believe that these habits of prayers and patterns of confession have an effect on us. They shape our faith and our identity. Well, customs are just cultural liturgies. They are the practices we do again and again, sometimes consciously and sometimes in ways that we aren’t even aware of, but they shape us into who we are.

The Christian faith has always called into question the customs of the culture around it, because the customs shape the people. This is what the religious leaders were accusing Stephen of doing, “He’s causing people to question the customs that Moses delivered to us.” The customs of Moses, or the Torah, was the narrative of the Jewish people. Their whole lives were centered in these customs. It was the way they lived their lives, the things that formed them and shaped them as God’s people. What it meant to be a Jew was to participate in these customs. And they are saying that Stephen is calling into question who they are as Jews, their identity, because he’s calling into question their customs.

Becoming a Christian is not a slight course correction. The switch from customs that make us a Jew or a Roman or an American or a Southerner or a suburbanite, the switch of customs from those identities to being a Christian is not a slight change. It’s a complete and total shift of our way of life, of the narratives and customs that shape us. And what Stephen goes on to say in Acts chapter 7, when he gives this long and important sermon, he goes on to say to these Jewish leaders, “you think that your custom is obedience to God, but your actual custom, your actual habit, your actual pattern that you repeat again and again is rebellion against God and a rejection of his love and grace.”

Stephen summarizes the story of the Old Testament, hitting on the great standard-bearers of the Hebrew narrative: men like Abraham, Moses, David, and Joshua, and in each of these stories, Stephen highlights how God, in his mercy, sent help, and specifically, he sent a helper, his personal representative, but the people rejected that help and his helper. Again and again the pattern is repeated: God sent a Redeemer, and the people refused it. And how does Stephen end his sermon? Verse 51:

“You stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears, you always resist the Holy Spirit. As your fathers did, so do you. Which of the prophets did your fathers not persecute? And they killed those who announced beforehand the coming of the Righteous One, whom you have now betrayed and murdered, you who received the law as delivered by angels and did not keep it.”

What was Israel’s real custom that they were living by and that had shaped them? That they had rejected God’s helper. Stephen tells them that just like their forefathers, they had missed the Messiah. And are we any different? Our real custom that shape us into who we are is this custom of rejecting God’s kingship. We’d much rather be king. We’d much rather have the power to choose what is good. What Stephen is revealing is that the customs that they are living into is not leading them closer to God, but it is leading them further away. We need to listen to that, church. Are the customs that you’re living into, the habits, the practices, the cultural liturgies that form you, are they leading you towards God, or further away? Just this past week I had to intentionally give up news articles and social media, because I recognized that the practice or staying up-to-date with everyone’s opinions was not making me a better follower of Jesus but was making it even harder. Are the customs that you’re living into, the cultural liturgies that form you, are they leading you towards God or further away? This is a very important question for the church.

So Stephen proclaims Christ and in doing so, calls into question their customs, the practices that constituted their cultural identity, and they are enraged. A few months ago I would have said, “How could these people be filled with so much rage and animosity simply because Stephen is calling into question these things,” but I get it now. Have you noticed how angry everyone is? The world is so angry right now. There is so much rage in our hearts that we can’t even broach certain topics with people because we’re afraid of how they will respond to us for simply bringing it up. Well, Stephen is living in a similar climate, and he’s not shying away, he’s not preaching a seeker-sensitive sermon here, and the people are enraged and they kill him.

But Stephen’s heart is not full of anger, even as they beat him to death. With his final words, he follows in the footsteps of his King Jesus and he calls for their forgiveness. He speaks the words of Christ. What we see is that Stephen has been brought into a new custom, a new practice that has formed him into the kind of person who responds to hate with love, just as Jesus did. How does Stephen die?

But he, full of the Holy Spirit, gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God.

The custom that Stephen has been brought into, the custom that now shapes and forms him, is the custom of gazing at Jesus. The Greek word there is stronger than our translation can do it justice - it means to fix your eyes on something continually and intensely. It’s like when you’re driving home from work and the evening sky is filled with a spectacular array of pinks and oranges and you can’t help but fixate your eyes on it. That’s how Stephen dies, with his eyes fixed on Jesus, gazing at the glory of the King. That’s the custom and the practice that shapes and forms him, and that is the custom of the church.

Our custom is to gaze at Jesus, to fix our eyes on him continually and intensely. We as the church are called to say unpopular things, because we proclaim Jesus, and when Jesus is proclaimed, cultural customs are questioned. We will say unpopular things, but not because we’re looking down on others, not because we’re angry, but it will simply happen because we’re calling the world to look up beyond themselves and to gaze at King Jesus. That is our custom. And this morning we have to ask ourselves, what custom is louder in our life? The customs of America, of suburban life, Democrat, Republican? Or the custom of the church, to gaze at Jesus.

Many of us are looking for hope right now. Well, Luke gives us the hope of Saul. Everything has gone wrong in this story, hasn’t it? Stephen proclaimed Christ and the people didn’t listen and they killed him. But Luke tells us that a man was present when Stephen died, and man who didn’t lift a stone himself, but watched everyone’s stuff during the murder, a man who would never forget what this moment, a man who would become the greatest missionary in the history of the church.

There is a theme in history that it often looks like the church is losing. It often looks like the church is losing. Stephen, this incredible leader in the church, a charismatic teacher! He’s gone! And yet, by the blood of Stephen, the heart of Saul is beginning to soften. Jesus, even in this dark moment, is raising up an even greater leader to continue the mission of his church. It may feel like the church is losing. We look at the world and culture around us and we ask, where is there hope? Well the hope is that Christ is governing all things. He is standing at the right hand of God, and even as Stephen is falling, the King is calling Saul to become Paul. Where is the hope? The church will not be overcome by violence, by hate, by division, by plague, by politics, by changing cultural values. The King is standing in heaven, so we are never without hope.