First Sunday After Christmas
Acts 6:8 - 7:2, 51-60
The Two Powers
Yesterday we celebrated the birth of our Savior. The angels were singing a heavenly chorus; Mary and Joseph were beaming with pride; the shepherds had come to kneel at his manger - it was all so warm and wonderful; so glorious and filled with hope. There were smiles on our faces, and happy greetings of "Merry Christmas" filled the air.
And today, well today is another thing altogether. Today we read of Stephen being stoned to death and are reminded by Matthew that the Jerusalem of his day had the reputation of treating God's prophets with contempt and violence.
Do you feel the tension here this morning? Something seems out of balance! On the one had we are still singing the beautiful Christmas carols that speak of his tender birth; yet the scriptures for today sing not the sweet song of light, love and angel wings, but the shrieking cries of madness, fear, violence, and death! It doesn't take very long and the world is back to its dirty tricks!
These two realities to which yesterday and today point represent, to me, the greatest POWER STRUGGLE in all of history! Every other power struggle, even the great ones of our century: East against West and the centuries great wars are dwarfed by this power struggle. The power struggle of the ages is Human power against God's power! Humanity against God; and God against humanity! It's the struggle of the millenniums.
Yesterday we celebrated the tender birth of our Lord. It's the story of an astounding miracle. It's A LOVE STORY! It's the story of God taking off His kingly robes, shedding His Godly status, discarding His royal power, and channeling, and expressing all of who he is into the very fragile and vulnerable life of this little baby, and the man he grew to be. And that is the beginning of the story about the Power of God. The apostle Paul spoke eloquently of this miracle when he says in Philippians,
"Who though he was in the form
of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but
emptied himself taking the form of a slave."
The story in our lesson for today is about the power
of humanity. It can be summed very easily. In Acts it says,
"When they heard (Stephen),
they became enraged and ground their teeth at him. . . and with a loud shout
they rushed together against him. . . and they stoned him. . . to death."
That's a story about the power of
humanity. The coercive power of humanity as it's sometimes
expressed in ignorance, violence and hatred.
God's power! Human power! Place them side by side! Put them as close together as possible until, similar to like poles of magnets, when placed together, they begin to repel one another, and one of them has to go, something has to give.
In a mere few moments of madness Stephen was as dead as anybody has ever been dead - his body battered and mutilated at the hands of mob gone berserk!
Apply it to Jesus: In a few hours or so the Son of God was just as dead as anyone else's son. Those beautiful tiny infant hands that grew into the hands of the man who healed the sick, touched the lepers, and who raised the dead were as mutilated as any hands have ever been!
You see, the power of God is vulnerable to the person who choose to oppose it. The power of God is defenseless against anyone who wishes to crush it!
And I think a good question to ask this day after Christmas is, does God really have any power? And if God does, then what God's power like? What's it all about, and how does it work? And by power I mean something a lot more than to merely make us feel cozy and inspired for a little while on Christmas Day, and then the next day the whole business evaporates like the morning fog, and it's forgotten! I mean power that lasts and stays and makes difference!
You see, this is a huge dilemma for a lot of people in this world! There are a lot of practicing agnostics who have pretty much given up on the idea of God because they don't perceive that God has any real power, or if God does, God doesn't use it! For it is said, if God has real power then why is there so much suffering, why doesn't God use his power? It's a good question!
Let's talk about human power for a moment. This doesn't take long, not because humanity has so little power it's hardly worth mentioning, but because humanity has so much power it doesn't need mentioning. Human power is expressed in primarily two ways: the power to create and the power to destroy. Everyday, you and I have opportunities to create or tear down.
In most situations that make up the mundane moments of our days, we have the power:
- to affirm or to condescend.
- to give love or withhold love.
- to listen or close our ears.
- to seek truth or blind our eyes.
- to be magnanimous or to be petty.
- to be kind or to be callous.
- to be objective, and see the bigger picture; or to be subjective, and only see the smaller, more self-serving picture.
Ever day and every hour we make choices and we exert the power we have over the people around us: our families, our co-workers, our neighbors, our friends, our community, our situations.
The fundamental characteristic of human power is that it is primarily external and coercive, for better or worse. It's fundamentally the power to move things and people around from the outside in. We have the power to push, to pull, to prod, to force, to manipulate, to shape people and situations to our liking, according to our values, our desires, and our wills - mainly from the outside. And when people come together with different ideas/values/wills who live in the same arena, and they start pushing, and pulling and prodding on each other, there is a conflict and a power struggle ensues.
But you see, God's power is so much different that ours. It's an altogether different thing! And this is where we get tripped up. For when we think of power, we primarily think of force and coercion/ exertion of the will! And when God doesn't live up to our expectation of power, when God doesn't force God's will, it seems to us that God has no power! When evil wins the day; when the one we pray for dies, when bad things happen to good people, we say where is God, God has no power! God didn't force God's will! But we're looking in the wrong place!
I stand before you today and I say, God has power, or I wouldn't be standing here! God has power, but it's altogether different than your power and mine! It's a totally different thing and it works in a different way!
God's power is right before our eyes in this story about the martyrdom of Stephen. It's right in front of us, but because our way of thinking about and using power is so different, we don't see it, and we have a hard time accepting it - but it's right there! Do you see it?
Let me read it,
"While they were stoning
Stephen. . . he knelt down, and cried out in a loud voice, "Lord do not
hold this sin against them!"
That's it! That's the power of God! As frenzied hatred was crushing the life out of Stephen, the power of God flowed out of him in his appeal to God for the forgiveness of his executioners! Now I wonder where he got an idea that? Or rather, I wonder where he got the power to love like that!
I have to ask, is this the way it works with you and me most of the time? Heck no! All it takes for us is for someone to cut us off in traffic or give us a dirty look, let alone throw rocks, and we feel the impulse to lash back with some external expression of power: perhaps a contemptuous gesture; or another dirty look, or a harsh word; or a cold shoulder, or maybe gossip behind their back; or perhaps far worse - whatever!
What we see in the life of Stephen, and most certainly what we know to be true about our Lord Jesus Christ is that God's power is expressed, not through coercion, or force, or pressure, or duress, or intimidation, not through forcing and imposing His will, but through suffering love! That's the place to see God's power at work - suffering love! God's give us the freedom to tear him down, to beat him up, to throw stones, and nail him to a cross. But the one thing all the human power in history combined cannot do, is destroy God's love for you, for me, for the whole human family! "God so loved the world..."
We get a glimpse of God's power in the last words out of Stephen's mouth; and the last words out of the mouth of our Lord Jesus Christ - it's right before us, but it's so different than what we know or what we expect - so we don't see it!
Imagine a person invested with every form of human power you can think of: the destructive of a Hitler; the analytic power of an Einstein; the creative power a Shakespear; the economic power of a Bill Gates; the moral power of a Schweitzer, and so on! Then try to imagine what that person could or could not do. That person could very likely conquer the world - but could that person satisfy the deepest longing of his own soul, or the deepest longing of your soul. Could that person satisfy the deepest longings of just one single human being of the millions we can imagine his having conquered. And by deepest longing I mean, the longing for unconditional love; the longing for a sense of peace deep in one's soul; the longing for an eternal hope and purpose that transcends time and experience; the longing for joy, that assurance that comes even when facing life's worst nightmares. I believe this is something that no person has the power to do for themselves or for anyone else. In terms of what every person needs the most, all human power is powerless because the deepest longings of our souls are a longing for God, and for this all human power is powerless to satisfy. This is the place where the power of humanity becomes impotent, and the power of God becomes operative.
In the last moments of Stephen's life God's power is clearly expressed - we see a man so totally at peace with self and God; so filled with joy, hope and purpose, so connected to God's love that not even the ugliest hatred could stop God's love from flowing out of his life.
God's power is not external and coercive like human power - and God never forces his will - and of course, this is what we often fail to understand. Rather, God's power is internal. God's power transforms us into who God wants us to be, not with coercion, not with force, not with manipulation, but with suffering love - a love willing to die for us! It's the only way God can transform you and me (and the world) without destroying our freedom! For we must have the FREEDOM to love God back, for that's when we truly become new people - and that's when the world will become a better place. If God would force His will, and force us to love, we'd lose our freedom, and we wouldn't stand for it, and it wouldn't really be love. But with the freedom to love Him back, also comes the freedom to destroy Him and to destroy one another. That's the risky and terrible thing about our freedom!
The power of God, the power of Humanity forever in conflict, I suppose. We see the two coming to clash between Stephen and his executioners; we see the two coming to an incredible crescendo in the life and death of our Lord Jesus Christ; and we see these two kinds of power at work in the everyday mundane moments of your life and mine!
I pray that as you and I face the minutes and moments of our days, we will live with a consciousness of God's kind of power, a love willing to give all for the other, and I pray we will ask for the courage to let God's power flow through us. Oh, we may never be faced with a crises like Stephen's, but we will have our million little crises, when the two powers will provide two very different ways to travel. Let God's love and power, the power of suffering love, the power of this little child born to peasants in a Bethlehem stable come to clarity and expression in your life and flow through you! Amen!
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