Can I Get a Witness?
Acts 7:55-60
May 22, 2011
“Can I get a witness?” seems like a simple request, but it seldom is simple. Mostly we have reduced this request to a matter for a court of law: have you witnessed, actually seen a particular crime and are you willing to say what you have seen? Some of you have been legal witnesses, willing or not, and we know that with many crimes many see but are not willing to say anything.
I once was a witness to an automobile accident, the result of very reckless driving by a teenager early one weekday morning while I was out walking near the town reservoir. Fortunately, the passenger in the car hit and flipped over was not seriously hurt. I stayed around until the police showed up since I knew I had uniquely witnessed the whole scenario unfolding. The policeman who showed up was someone I knew from a neighbouring United Church, so he knew where to find me when the hearing came up. I was called in and repeated what I had witnessed. The teenager challenged what I said, but the court official had an obvious agenda and by the end of her rant against this young man I was actually sympathetic to him. People often accuse ministers of being judgmental, but I have never heard any minister act as judgmentally as that court clerk did. I wondered whether my witness was turned from truth into vengeance. I never heard what the final outcome was.
Witness became a popular word in the New Testament and in the early church and is still widely used today. In the original Greek of the New Testament the verb “to witness” is martureo, or as it wandered in the language, to be a martyr. A funny or awful thing happened along the way – we forgot about what a witness saw and focused instead on how he died. “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church” wrote the second century writer Tertullian, and until Christianity was declared the legal religion of the Roman Empire it seemed to be more important to die for the faith than to testify to what it consisted of.
We know well today the danger of suppressing even the most absurd of religious fanatics is to create a martyr and thereby increase the fanaticism. By their fruits they shall be known, so we just let people like Harold Camping reveal the inauthenticity of his witness simply by worshiping here today.
Ask any veteran of Sunday School who the first Christian martyr was and she will say Stephen. Luke, the author of Acts, relates Stephen’s ministry at length, so what we have heard read today is only the conclusion. Nevertheless, there are references to nameless victims of Saul’s purging of the Christian community before he walked the Damascus Road. When Saul stood off to the side of Stephen’s martyrdom, he had been there before. What’s really good sometimes comes out of what’s really bad.
Stephen was an ordinary follower of Christ until there was one of the first real church fights. There were Hellenists and Hebrews, sort of like Methodists and Presbyterians, a merger they didn’t exactly want but had to accept. The Hellenists complained that their widows were being shortchanged in the daily distribution of food and resources. Can you imagine those holy people, the models of how one should be a Christian, discriminating on the sly against the Presbyterians, cutting defenseless widows out of bread?
The Twelve knew this was too much work for them, that if they attended carefully to such matters they would have little time to teach and preach. So they asked the membership to select seven men to devote themselves to this business. The church membership was enthusiastic and seven were chosen, set aside and ordained. Stephen was named and quickly the story focuses on him.
Stephen seems to have done more than hand out food – “full of grace and power, he did great wonders and signs among the people.” He was really good at explaining and proclaiming the distinctiveness of the Gospel from the Torah. Most of chapter 7 is his recounting and interpreting Biblical history and when he arrived at the present, he called them a stiff-necked people, always resisting the Spirit of God and persecuting and murdering the prophets who proclaim God’s true way. Some people loved it, those who were leaders hated it and hated him. At the end of this damning sermon Stephen went ecstatically into a visionary experience, “Behold, I see the heavens opened and the son of Man standing at the right hand of God.” A fancy way of saying that he, a human being, was looking right up into heaven at Christ and God. That was an impossible thing to say in Judaism, for no one could see God. Utter blasphemy, which we no longer bother with, but it enraged his listeners in the way those Danish cartoons of Mohammed infuriated Muslims a few years back.
They grabbed and took him outside the city walls and starting stoning him – who knows who threw the first stone? – and so that they could throw better, they took off their coats and placed them with a young man named Saul. These stone-throwers were intriguingly called “witnesses.” Were they witnesses of the truth or of condemnation of the guilty? Stephen followed Jesus’ pattern and asked God not to hold his death against his attackers, and he fell asleep. Back to Saul, he was consenting to Stephen’s death. Something’s happening here and for a while still it won’t be exactly clear.
Was this the event that caused Saul to change, to become Paul who shaped the Gospel into Christianity? Paul talks about “the thorn in his flesh” assailing him for decades and there have been a lot of theories, none of which can be proven. But I like Scott Hozee’s conjecture that his memory of that day with the cloaks piling up around his feet never left him, impaling his heart and conscience with his witness to a pain too deep for human words.
We are not intended to be martyrs, to sacrifice our life as our way of living out our faith. It’s not our choice whether that happens. We are called to bear witness to what we have seen, to describe how we have been changed from what we once were. Does that sound prosaic and too ordinary? I witness the people of this church acting in ways that are not done elsewhere, that are remarkable, unusual, non-conformist, courageous and selfless, and when you come to think of it, when you make it your spiritual profession to witness to what God is doing in this place, you see it everywhere.
The first year I went to England after living in the middle part of the continent where the sun seemed to shine more in the winter than even in the summer, all I saw were the clouds and gloom and rain and not much sun. The second year I started off looking for the sun and believe me there was a lot more of it than I had imagined. When you see the sun, when you see the Gospel in your neighbour in the pew, you can’t keep it quiet, it’s got to come out, you have to give witness and testimony regarding how you see people giving away their lives to others. I guess that makes them martyrs too. Can I get a witness?
Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan