Fear v. Love
Acts 7:55-60
But filled with the Holy Spirit, he gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God and Jesus standing at the right hand of God. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God!’ But they covered their ears, and with a loud shout all rushed together against him. Then they dragged him out of the city and began to stone him; and the witnesses laid their coats at the feet of a young man named Saul. While they were stoning Stephen, he prayed, ‘Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.’ Then he knelt down and cried out in a loud voice, ‘Lord, do not hold this sin against them.’ When he had said this, he died.
Our last sermon was a full two weeks ago, so you might not immediately recognize the stark difference between this week’s passage and our last one. Two weeks ago, the disciples were In the honeymoon phase of the early Christian movement. What they were describing was almost utopian, this amazing time when they weren’t getting quite enough recognition to be actively sought and persecuted by the Romans, but enough that, thanks to their good works and welcoming and inclusive meals, they were gaining hundreds of followers. Well, that was in chapter two. Now we’re in chapter seven, and things have… escalated.
We’ve come to the time in which this early Christian community isn’t getting the type of recognition or attention is necessarily wants—I mean, Glenda just read for us the story of a mob murder of Stephen, now considered a saint, and believed to be the first person martyred in the name of Christianity. But this is a really short passage for today. One might find themselves wondering, okay, what really led to such a violent act of a mob coming together and stoning this young man in the streets, while meanwhile Stephen is here, taking after Jesus, pleading to God and Jesus to forgive these murderous people. I know I was wondering what led to all this.
Well, what comes before this violent act, was actually a pretty fire-and-and-brimstone, and very insulting, shame-filled sermon from Stephen. It is… not a fun read. He spends several paragraphs reminding the people he’s preaching to how much they messed up out in the wilderness, he’s yelling at them that Jesus is greater than Moses, he calls the stiff-necked, he calls them betrayers, it’s a far cry from the saintly prayers he pleads as he’s dying. Now, keep in mind, Stephen isn’t one of the original disciples, he’s a newer follower, and the passion and vitriol he preaches with could maybe be chalked up to being young and new to all this, because insulting a bunch of people who aren’t quite ready to change their whole lives to follow Jesus yet doesn’t seem like the best way to evangelize? Especially when we think of two weeks ago, when the apostles were gaining hundreds of followers by inviting them to dinner, giving them their resources, and even miraculously healing people. Stephen seems a little… misguided… a little unhinged, even. When powerful people are already suspicious of a new movement that’s been slowly but surely changing the way people think, and changing the world, Stephen’s strategy seems very ill-informed and ill-thought out to me.
But that being said—did this young, passionate, if misguided young man, deserve to die? Much less deserve to die in such a horrendous and public way? Now, stoning to death was indeed a legal form of capital punishment in these days, but this was not a lawful killing. This was a lynching. This was a group of angry people livid and scared of Stephen’s words, getting riled up and riling each other up to the point of taking someone’s life.
I’ve opined this so many times before, but my God, I wish these most troubling parts of the Bible weren’t so relevant to today’s world. While I was working on this sermon this week, news started coming out about a 30-year-old homeless man, Jordan Neely, in the midst of a mental health crisis on the New York City subway who was place in a chokehold by a 24-year-old young man and civilian for fifteen minutes—and he died. Neely was yelling out for food, crying that he was hungry and thirsty, crying that he didn’t care if he died. Now, as someone who’s lived in cities with subway systems before moving up here to Vermont, I can tell you, that this is sadly typical, frantic men and woman having crises on public transportation, sometimes the only place they can get out of the rain or the cold when shelters are full, or when they won’t be admitted while in the midst of some kind of episode. And this could lead into a whole other sermon about the abysmal state of mental healthcare and the lack of mental health resources in this country, but that’s not for today. I can tell you from experience, I have never seen the need for anyone to by dealt with physically, much less something as violent and dehumanizing as a fifteen-minute chokehold. If I was ever feeling uncomfortable on the subway, I’d simply move cars, or in more extreme cases, you can speak to the conductor.
Now, even if Neely was behaving erratically, even if he was making some people on the train uncomfortable, did he deserve to die? Did he deserve to have a man, someone with military experience come up from behind him and subdue him so violently? Did Stephen, this young man, maybe a little too passionate about this new faith community he was a part of, maybe a little misguided, did he deserve to be stoned to death in the streets? Both these men were victims, not necessarily of hate, but of a violent and dangerous fear. Both these men were victims of both a fear of the unknown, of something new, something others didn’t understand; and they were also victims of irrational fear of our own neighbors.
Now maybe you’re sitting in the pews thinking, “why is she talking about this crime on public transportation that happened in the biggest city in the country? This has nothing to do with us.” But this growing fear of our neighbor, this is widespread, this is happening across the country, in urban and rural areas alike. A couple weeks ago, I’m sure you remember that rash of gun violence beginning in Kansas City, when 16-year-old Ralph Yarl was shot and thank God, survived, after he did nothing but knock on the door of the wrong address looking to pick up his siblings. And the 16-year-old cheerleaders in Texas who mistakenly tried to get into the wrong car and were shot, and again, thank God, survived, by the car’s owner. And there was also the killing of Kaylin Gillis who was murdered for the crime of getting lost on a dirt road in rural upstate New York and turning around in the wrong driveway. That happened in Washington County, New York, right on the border of Vermont—a town full of confusing and dark dirt roads. Sounds like Hartland, doesn’t it? Or really, any small town in Vermont. And I remember not too long ago, on our own infamous Hartland listerv, someone posted about a car seemingly mistakenly ending up in their driveway, and the person brazenly posted about how he went out to meet the car, proudly showing a gun in his waistband, letting these likely lost tourist know that he could be killed.
Just like this could be a sermon on the lack of mental health resources in this country, this could also be a sermon on the epidemic of gun violence, but it’s not. This is a sermon about fearing our neighbors. This a sermon about fear of the unknown, fear of what we don’t understand.
The people who stoned Stephen to death were angry and scared—they were made angry by in insults sure, and that’s valid enough, but they were also scared of this new and growing community. They were scared at the traction it was getting, scared of things Stephen was yelling about—because while they were insults, he wasn’t threatening anyone. He wasn’t insinuating that any kind of violence would happen.
In the late James Cone’s revelatory book The Cross and the Lynching Tree in which is accurately and powerfully compares Christian cross (which is, indeed, referred to as a tree several times in the Bible), to that of the lynching trees that saw the unlawful and violent deaths of thousands of innocent Black people in this country, he writes,
If white Americans could look at the terror they inflicted on their own black population—slavery, segregation, and lynching—then they might be able to understand what is coming at them from others. Black people know something about terror because we have been dealing with legal and extralegal white terror for several centuries. Nothing was more terrifying than the lynching tree.
That legal and extralegal terror continues today. People are so irrationally scared of what and who they’ve been told to fear, and what and who they don’t understand or know. They haven’t been taught the facts about the unjust and violent beginnings of this country, and so they fear; they haven’t ventured out of their own bubbles or echo chambers, and so they fear. And instead of working to understand their neighbors, they respond with fear, which leads to violence.
In an interview with a 28-year-old New Yorker, Wallace Mazon, after seeing the video of Jordan Neely dying on the subway, he cried, saying it brought back traumatic memories of watching the videos of the murder of George Floyd. Mazon is quoted as saying, “I kind of felt hopeless. I just want to be in community with other people and not feel so helpless.”[i] Now even though Mazon uses these words, “hopeless” and “helpless” in this heartbreaking quote, there’s a lot of promise and hope here. He wants to remedy these feelings by being in community with others— the type of community that will prevent this kind of fear-based violence from happening again and again.
Because we have to depend on one another, we have to help one another, we have to trust one another. We have can’t mindlessly fear our neighbors. When we truly live in community with one another, work to know and understand one another, that is how we stop this kind of unfounded, ugly, and ultimately violent fear. And as I’ve talked about so much before, the increased comfortability with isolation has pushed us so far from the vibrant communities full of people who once looked out for one another, who once greeted a lost stranger with offers to help instead of greeting them with a gun.
Now, it’s said that one of the reasons Stephen became such a passionate Jesus-follower is because he witnessed the inequality that was rampant in his community—he noticed those in power, the Romans and the high priests picking and choosing which widows (and remember, widows were some of the most vulnerable and destitute people in the population at this time)—they were picking some widows to receive help and benefits, and leaving others to the streets. So it was these inequalities and this lack of community that drove Stephen to his tirade of a sermon before he was stoned to death.
And for Jordan Neely, he was lamenting his hunger and thirst, his desperation, living in a society that vilifies and demonizes the mentally ill and homeless, rather than give them the help and assistance they need and deserve. And he was killed for that by a civilian. He was lynched.
This is why we have to do the difficult work of building and rebuilding community, of replacing fear with Love, or inviting the stranger in instead of being ever suspicious and fearful of what we do not know. We, as a society, have strayed so far from those utopian and communal ideals of those early Christian days in which community and companionship were emphasized—in which breaking bread together, sharing meals together and truly connecting with one another was a given, not an anomaly.
We have to learn from our history why so many fear those who are differently abled than us, those who are not as well-off as us, those who are look and act and believe differently than us—and then, rather than giving into any kind of fear or despair, we have to meet those strangers and our neighbors with compassion and Love. That’s the only way we’ll bring about an earth as it is in heaven. Amen.
[i] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/05/nyregion/jordan-neely-chokehold-death-subway.html
