“Participant Observation”

A sermon from Acts 7:55-60

During the season of Easter, the lectionary gives us readings that call us to reflect on the impact of Christ’s resurrection on the earliest Christians. Usually that’s pretty upbeat reading, but this Sunday, we’re shown the last recorded scene in the life of Stephen, an early Hellenistic Jewish Christian, one of the first deacons of the church, and also the first recorded martyr for the Christian cause.

To set the context for this scene: Stephen has been serving as a deacon, “doing many wonders and signs among the people,” and also participating in religious debates, in the course of which he’s made some enemies. Those enemies have riled up a crowd that drags Stephen before “the council,” the religious judicial body, charging blasphemy. The proceedings have been what we could call inflammatory. And then this happens …

We’d no doubt agree that this is a tale of “judicial process” gone completely out of control, in which the passions of a worked-up mob of people overwhelm whatever clearer thinking and norms of civility and institutional restraints were in place, allowing violence and its dreadful dynamics free rein.

We can leave it to the scholars to sort out, if that’s even possible, how much of the story reflects the historical details of First Century institutions, Roman administrative effectiveness – or lack thereof, the influence of Luke’s literary genius, shaping his account of Stephen’s death to mirror Jesus’, etc., etc., etc. As readers of sacred text, we’re clearly meant to see that there is something wrong with what happens to Stephen.

And one of the things that’s really wrong with it, by the way, is the glaring violation of the holiness code laid out in Leviticus. Because according to Leviticus 19:16 “You shall not go around as a slanderer among your people, and you shall not stand idly by when the blood of your neighbor is at stake: I am the HOLY ONE.” So those “false witnesses” who start all this, and that “young man Saul” who just stands there guarding the coats while blood is being shed, are actively betraying their consciences here.

And yet, we’re also meant to see something right in all this, to join the Christians down through the ages who have seen Stephen’s story as, genuinely, a story of victory.

Reminding us that what Christians mean by “victory” can strike outside observers as peculiar. Observers who would argue that a pretty basic requirement for a “victory” story is that the main character be alive at the end of it, and who wouldn’t recognize, or appreciate, the heroic and victorious elements that are there in this story.

Like, for instance, that dramatic vision Stephen shares, of seeing the heavens opened and the Son of Man – Jesus himself – standing at the right hand of God. That had to have been exhilarating! What follower of Jesus Christ wouldn’t want to share that vision? On top of which, if we know our Old Testament prophets, we’ll recognize that Stephen here is sharing a visionary experience with the prophet Daniel (see Daniel 7:9-14), meaning Stephen has now been made part of an elite group of individuals who’ve enjoyed the heights of spiritual experience. Once we put it that way, we can recognize that as a victory.

And like the way Stephen has fully succeeded in following Jesus’ instruction to “deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow me,” to its ultimate conclusion. He’s fully accepted Jesus’ admonition that “those who lose their life for my sake will save it,” and has not backed away from that. (Luke 9:23-24) He has completely risen above whatever resentment we might have expected him to have, at the injustice of this situation, and instead has managed to fulfill Jesus’ command to love his enemies, and to pray for those who persecute him. (Matthew 5:44-45) So that Stephen gets the highest possible grade for being a disciple, a student, of Christ’s, and for practicing Jesus’ teaching and example, even when put to the test in this most extreme way.

That makes the victory in the story the fact that Stephen stays true, faithful, to his commitment, as a man of God and a worshiper of the God of Israel no less, to Jesus, as the Christ, the Risen One, the one to follow into new and eternal life, even to and through death, to this world.

It’s that very steadfastness – that insistence on sticking with his story as a follower of Christ – that makes Stephen a martyr. That is, literally, in Greek, a “witness.” That Greek word martyr would be used for someone who testifies in a court of law, for instance, or who tells a friend about something they’ve seen or heard.

This witness aspect of Stephen’s story seems to be vital, because Luke, the narrator of the story, has pointedly contrasted Stephen’s kind of witness with the other, different, witnesses in this story.

Those “false witnesses,” who’ve been recruited and egged on by Stephen’s riled-up opponents, who are high on outrage, but who are at best misinterpreting what they’ve heard, and at worst purposely twisting and sensationalizing it.

Or that silently approving witness of “the young man Saul,” who by not speaking up for what he must know to be the right ends up supporting the forces that aim to silence Stephen and his disruptive testimony.

Stephen is an importantly different kind of witness: a faithfully fearless witness to a truth he’s encountered himself, as a participant observer, from within the body of Christ.

That “participant observation” language will sound familiar to the anthropologists, or anthropology majors, in the congregation. It’s a method for learning about people, their ways of life, and the meaning of those ways of life, that was pioneered by the likes of Bronislaw Malinowski, who lived among the Trobriand Islanders, and E.E. Evans-Pritchard, who lived among the Nuer people of E. Africa. The method calls for immersion in the life of the people one wants to come to know, learning their language, listening deeply to their descriptions and explanations of themselves and their lives, experiencing their reality from the inside.

The participant observer becomes an insider witness … someone who can even bridge two different worlds, because they have deep personal experience of both.

Which is, for that matter, very much the way Christians come to know the truth that God loves us: because God shows us that, in the person of Jesus Christ, by coming into our human world and its way of life, and immersing that divine life in this human one, becoming a fully participant observer of our humanity [apart from the sin, of course] – for the purpose of making redeemed and renewed life possible, and to invite us into participation in the abundant eternal life of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.

And that participation is, most profoundly, how Stephen can say, as a witness, “Christ is alive. I know it.” Not as a witness to the kind of “faith” that – as the outside observers like to have it – “believes something without proof.” But rather to the tenacious kind of “faith” that is “conviction, based on warrant or compelling evidence” – warrant gained by what people have seen, heard, trusted, lived, for themselves.

Because Stephen would have, we trust, heard the apostles themselves bear witness, to what they’d experienced, firsthand, of Jesus Christ, of his life, ministry, death, risen life. And been moved by that witness.

He’s been baptized. We must know that. So, he’s been personally inducted into the life of dying and rising with Christ that is represented by and enacted in baptism. He has already died to a past life, and risen to a new one, personally, in that way.

He has experienced the enlivening impact of the power and the communion of the Holy Spirit in his own life.

And, he has been participating fully and enthusiastically in the new life of the early Christian church. He’s been worshipping with this growing body of believers, he’s been sharing the Lord’s supper, recognizing the risen Christ in that communion – which, by the way, we understand was more substantial in those early days, something more like a good southern Indiana pitch-in lunch, so he would have experienced very concretely the way the spiritual presence of the risen Christ concretely feeds the hungry and breaks down what were no-longer-insurmountable social barriers …

In other words, Stephen himself would have experienced firsthand the transformative impact of this way of life of following Christ. Would have known it to make a difference in his life, would have seen it make a difference in the lives of others. Would have known that difference and that transformation as the work of the Holy Spirit, communicating the living presence of the risen Christ in the church.

Plus, he’s been actively serving others in the name of Jesus Christ, experiencing “wonders and signs” in the conduct of that ministry. We don’t have to imagine those as “miracles” that defy the laws of physics [not to rule that out]. They could have been the more ordinary miracles of seeing hungry people become full, and people who were full share what they had and grow even fuller in the process. Maybe something like what happens when people fill up sacks of weekend food for kids in their community every week.

Stephen is a “hero of the faith,” but not because he “believed without proof” the grace of Jesus Christ and the steadfast love of God and the power and communion of the Holy Spirit. He was a hero of the kind of faith that bears witness: to the kind of personal knowledge that made him unable – certainly, unwilling – to do anything other than insist on the truth of the resurrection life of Jesus Christ, at work in the world, and available in the present to anyone who will accept it.

Which, to be honest – is the kind of witnesses we ourselves will, ideally, be … be able to be … as disciples and students of Jesus Christ. The kind of witnesses who can, and will, be able to say, with complete integrity: this is what we’ve learned, and known, about the grace of Jesus Christ; here is where we’ve heard and read, what we’ve trusted, and why; this is the experience we’ve gained … of speaking the truth in love, of forgiveness, of kindness, of welcome and welcoming … and on and on … as participant observers … in the body of Christ.

Image: “Open book 1,” by Alina Daniker alinadaniker, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

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