Acts 7:55-60

They'll stone you when you're trying to be so good

They'll stone you just like they said they would

They'll stone you when you're trying to go home

They'll stone you when you're there all alone

They'll stone you when you're walking on the street

They'll stone you when you're trying to keep your seat

They'll stone you when you’re walking on the floor

They'll stone you when you’re walking to the door

They'll stone you when you're at the breakfast table

They'll stone you when you are young and you’re able

They'll stone you when you're trying to make a buck

They'll stone you and then they'll say good luck

They'll stone you and say that it's the end

They'll stone you and then they'll say come back again

They'll stone you and then say they're all brave

They'll stone you when you're sent down in your grave

These words taken, taken from the lyrics of a Bob Dylan’s song offers a disheartening observation of the human condition. 

Beyond the slang term, which is to denote some form of intoxication; I’ll leave that to your imagination, these words suggest that all of us will face public execution, we will be flogged, we will be beaten, we will be battered, we will be bruised, and as in the case of Stephen in this morning’s text, we will be stoned, even before we meet what Martin Luther King referred as life’s final common denominator—physical death.

Everybody must get stoned. Everybody must endure a public execution. Everybody must go through some hurt.  Everybody must go through some pain.  Everybody must go through some let down.  Everybody must go through some setback. Everybody must get stoned.

It is messages like these that make prosperity theology much more appealing the to ear, and temporarily more palatable to the spirit—at least until something happens. 

For prosperity theology is based on the erroneous premise that if you are stoned, it is due to your having fallen out of favor with God.  Therefore, anyone who has God’s favor will not be stoned.

But those of you within the sound of my voice know that is not true.  Some of you know from firsthand experience that it is quite possible to be stoned while guilty of no infraction whatsoever.

Some of you know it because Paul told you and your life confirmed it, that when you try to do right evil is always present.  Some of you know it because Job said it and your isolation affirmed it that if I knew where I could find him, I would go into his dwelling and I would plead my case.

Some of you know it because Jesus shouted it as did your heart feel it, and the suffocating conditions of your crucifixion demanded it, that you cry out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

The point being that you already know it, better than I could possibly tell you that everybody must get stoned.

In the season of Easter we celebrate not only God's raising Jesus from death we also celebrate God’s ability to resurrect us from the spiritual death of despair.

It is a tragic deception when those of us in the pulpit mislead our congregations that we are somehow beyond the century’s long reach of suffering’s chain.  From the youngest to the oldest no one is immune to the bitter taste of suffering.

For those who persist in following God's path, suffering awaits—the only mystery is when and how long. We need only consult Paul, Job, Peter, Martin, Jesus, and Stephen for an affirmation.

This story comes at a pivotal point in the Book of Acts—it is the story of the church in its infancy shortly after the resurrection of Jesus, guiding us to the end of Paul’s ministry. But this episode marks one of the turning points in the life of the young church.

The early chapters of Acts reveal to us the growth of the community of believers, the ecclesia, the church. Soon, we will mark the great events of Pentecost in Acts, chapter 2. The story in these early chapters is of growth and it is also one of conflict with the Jewish authorities in Jerusalem.

Through their preaching, the apostles win converts by the thousands, which manages to draw the anger of Jewish authorities, who first warn the apostles to stop teaching, then arrest them, then - finally - stone Stephen to death.

After Stephen’s death, we read of a great persecution that runs these early believers out of Jerusalem. After Stephen’s death, the story of the early church takes place almost entirely outside of the holy city where Jesus died and rose again.  After Stephen’s death, followers of Jesus would be relegated to a permanent, underground, subversive, fringe sect for several centuries.

To further understand why this particular story matters, we must also familiarize ourselves with Act 7:2-50.  This is a rather long-winded sermon by Stephen that is less than complementary of the Temple elders.  It is this sermon that seals his fate in verses 55-60 of our text.

Furthermore, I must again remind you of several things about Jewish law. In the first five books of the Old Testament, God’s commandments to God’s people are recorded—totaling 613.

We may be familiar with the Ten Commandments—unless of course, I offered a pop quiz to see how many of you could name all ten—but we are likely not to be so familiar with the others. Some, based on the benefits of our contemporary sociological understanding, would undoubtedly seem antiquated, bizarre, and useless, void of any real benefit or purpose.

For my own demented theology, I like to conduct from time-to-time take a random survey as to how many of you good bible reading saved folk are actually adhering to God’s word.

Let me see a show of hands. How many of you follow God’s command to not wear garments made of two different fabrics?  How many of you follow God’s command not to eat lobster (this one excludes those of you who are allergic to seafood)?

How many of you follow God’s command that every 50 years to forgive the debts of anyone who owes you money? That might be one you want to think about.

A fundamentalist reading of these 613 commandments, we also find that God advocates capital punishment by way of stoning if certain commandments have been violated.

Disobedient children should be taken to the city gate and stoned to death. Men and women caught in adultery should be stoned. People who blaspheme - who say false and bad things about God - should be stoned to death.

These subjective violations that call for stoning by the dominant culture, do not suggest the people of Israel willfully engage in such acts, but rather it is done so because God requires it.

This is why Stephen is being stoned.

Now before we judge the Temple elders too harshly, we must ask: has the Christian church fared any better than its Jewish counterparts when it comes to hiding behind God in order to release its manmade truculence onto its brothers and sisters?

What am I getting at?  Well if nothing else, this morning’s text is one that indicates the tragic residue of the mob mentality that is as old as recorded human history.

This is the moral dualism constructed by Reinhold Niebuhr in Moral Man and Immoral Society between individuals and groups. For Niebuhr, individuals are morally capable of considering the interests of others and acting prudently when they sense conflicts of interest between themselves and others. That is to say, as individuals we can demonstrate at times a Christ-like unselfishness.

Societies, however, tap in primarily to individuals’ selfish impulses and not their capacities for unselfishness; it feeds on our fear rather than what is possible, it encourages our hate when it should be more reliant on our capacity to love.

This leads Niebuhr to conclude that the group is more arrogant, more hypocritical, more self-centered and more ruthless in the pursuit of its ends than the individual.  And we would be remiss to conclude that this dualism is immune from infiltrating the church. Religious folk stoned Stephen; it was not a band of hooligans. 

Religious folk took out the full-page ad calling Martin King an extremist for marching nonviolently in Birmingham, prompting King to write his famous Letter from Birmingham Jail, it was religious folk within the Catholic Church that violated the trust of its youngest parishioners.

I would like to believe that someone that picked up a stone, hurling it at Stephens’s defenseless body, knew it was wrong before that rock left their hand.  I would like to believe as Stephen winced from the pain of the stone there was a wincing of the heart.

But the mob mentality grants us permission to unleash our dark-side unfiltered and unbridled.

One of the stark differences between the two wars that we are currently engaged and the Vietnam conflict is more care has been given to ensure that we have limited access to the catastrophe caused by our mob mentality. 

We don’t see the dead bodies that come home, we don’t see those who have been permanently injured, we don’t see the orphaned Iraqi children, or their dead parents, we don’t see the soldiers in dire need of mental health services, we don’t see the divorce, we don’t seen the abuse, and we don’t see the addiction—created in large measure by the 70 percent approval rating before the conflict began.

The text also reveals to us that the natural inclination to participate in the mob mentality requires an unnatural behavior on our part.

Beginning with verse 56 it reads,  “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.

By covering their ears they covered their hearts.  For those who have stoned and those who have been stoned there is a tendency to cover our ears, our eyes, and our spiritual senses in order cover our heart.  For in one’s heart we find the highway to Zion—the gateway to God’s grace and the avenue to Jesus’ love.

And by covering our heart we have stunted the potential of our spiritual growth.  In Stephen we have an example of one opening his heart at a time, by societal standards, it would have been permissible to shut it down.

When we cover our ears we can’t hear forgiveness, we can’t hear grace, we can’t hear redemption, we can’t do justice, love mercy, or walk humbly with God.

Here we witness one of the tragic illustrations of the human condition and simultaneously what is required to be a follower of the teachings Jesus. Stephen the individual opens his heart, allows the Holy Spirit to enter, he sees Jesus standing at the right hand of God only to have his accusers cover their ears so that they can carry out the immoral impulses of the group.

Part of the tension within the text, for our purposes, lies in the fact that the group is only wrong because we have the advantage of hindsight.  Were they not adhering to scripture?

And subsequently has not a portion of the church, founded by the blood of Jesus at Calvary, sought the refuge of biblical justification as it willfully aligned itself with some of the dark chapters in human history.

We are therefore challenged going forward, not to simply identify with Stephen who is unjustly stoned, but to also recognize we bear a responsibility as children of God not to cover our hearts when consumed by the immoral temptations of the group.

It so easy to throw stones; and most of us are good at it.  Some of us have developed a seductive way of throwing stones so that we only appear publicly as the recipient of an unmerited stoning.

We can be stoned at work, come home and throw stones at our family.  We can throw stones at the very one’s we need to reach out to, but are confined by our fears rendering us unable to open our hearts.

When we succumb to the mob mentality it becomes easier to throw stones at anyone who may differ from ourselves because we unjustly view them as the reason society is throwing stones of frustration and stagnation at us.

Those of us that make up the church will throw stones of superiority at other denominations, let alone, other religious traditions.

So we ought not to simply seek to identify exclusively with the martyred Stephen in the text.  If you have covered your ears, closed down your heart, disconnected your soul from Jesus’ grace, mercy and love you may have prepared yourself to be part of the stoning—because you will be unable to conceive, embrace or adhere when Jesus said, “Let anyone among you who is without sin cast the first stone.”

Fortunately for us there is a God of resurrection that understands those of us who throw stones and those of us who are being stoned are interchangeable roles, each requiring Jesus’ love.

The post Easter theme this week is one of courage, courage to follow Jesus’ path, which could lead to a public stoning, and the courage to follow Jesus’ path in resisting the mob mentality that wants to lead by way of arrogance, hypocrisy, and fear.

But the amazing grace of God literally shows us in the text just how interchangeable these roles really are.

Notice if you will verse 58, “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.”

Saul who would soon have his own Damascus road experience and become Paul of Tarsus would accept his commission to spread the gospel to places such as Corinth, Rome, Philippi, and Ephesus—inspiring them in their moments of doubt, comforting them in their moment of uncertainty, appealing to them in the moments of confusion just as he does with us today.

Paul tells us like he told the Colossians, “So if you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God.”

He tells us like he told the church at Rome, “We also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given unto us.”

He tells us like he told the church at Philippi, “Finally, my brothers and sisters, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever are honest, whatsoever are just, whatsoever are pure, whatever are lovely, whatsoever are of good report, if there be any virtue and if there be any praise, think on these things.”

And ultimately, Paul too would receive a fate similar to Stephen, but our introduction to him is one who held the coats.  The duality in Paul that we are privy to get a glimpse in verse 58 is also our duality.

Whenever I read this passage with an honest lens I must come to the conclusion that I see myself in Stephen unjustly stoned, but I too have participated in my share of stonings, I’ve hurled a few rocks in my day.  But I’ve also held a few coats.

I’ve also orchestrated, as some of you have, a few stonings as well. I’ve covered my ears as to not hear Jesus remind me that there was another way.  But through the redemptive love of Jesus I’ve come to realize that God has mercy for those who are stoned, those who do the stoning, and even those who hold the coats.