Monday of the Third Week of Easter

Lectionary: 273

Stephen, filled with grace and power, was working great wonders and signs among the people. Certain members of the so-called Synagogue of Freedmen, Cyreneans, and Alexandrians, and people from Cilicia and Asia, came forward and debated with Stephen, but they could not withstand the wisdom and the Spirit with which he spoke. 


During this Easter season our first readings of the weekdays are taken from the Acts of the Apostles. I have no standing among the those who chose these readings but I wish they had done better by Saint Stephen. His final sermon of eleven hundred and fifty-six words has been cropped of a thousand and ninety-two words, leaving only a suggestion of why the mob stoned him to death. It's worth a read if you have the time! (And what better use of your time do you have than to read God's word?) 
Before an angry, suspicious mob Saint Stephen retold the history of Israel, beginning with Abraham and the promise, through Moses and the Exodus, and Solomon and the temple. He spoke of God's fidelity to his promises with special emphasis upon the people's habitual rebellion against God. He recognized in the city's rejection of Jesus the latest chapter in a very old story. 
So when he concludes, as we hear in tomorrow's first reading, 

You stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears, you always oppose the Holy Spirit; you are just like your ancestors! 

he is simply recognizing the current manifestation of an ancient, inconvenient truth. 

As I read the sermon I was struck by one phrase I'd never noticed before: "This Moses, whom they had rejected with the words, ‘Who appointed you ruler and judge?'" 
He refers to an incident, when the young Moses broke up a fight between two Hebrews. One of them threatened to expose him for killing an Egyptian slave driver the day before. But Steven saw this one man's betrayal as the sin of the whole nation: "This Moses, whom they had rejected with the words...." 

Our law courts might recognize one man's crime but they never suppose his misdeed is typical of the whole nation. Or that the nation is guilty of his crime. We like to isolate our convicted criminals, removing them from society as if we could purge our guilt with incarceration. Or, in some cases, our guilt might be removed if we execute the guilty, a form of human sacrifice for the greater good. 
A drug dealer is just a drug dealer, not symptomatic of a nation that habitually misuses drugs. A boy who invades a school and kills a dozen children "acted alone," as if he didn't have the support of gun owners who support the NRA. 
This custom of blaming only the individual -- the scapegoat -- and denying our collective responsibility for misdeeds prevails, but consistently fails to relieve our distress. Murders, rapes, domestic violence, and other crimes continue unabated. By punishing the criminal we have only preserved the illusion of innocence, of ourselves as a good people, a holy nation, blessed, preferred and commissioned by God. 
Like the thugs in Jerusalem's street, we would not take well Saint Stephen's broad accusation, 

...Which of the prophets did your ancestors not persecute? They put to death those who foretold the coming of the righteous one, whose betrayers and murderers you have now become.You received the law as transmitted by angels, but you did not observe it.”

But, if we learned anything during Lent, we should have learned that our willingness to own our guilt and confess our sins is the only clear sign of God's favor. The claim of innocence not only flies in the face of the Truth, it practically cancels the covenant God offers. It might even be that "sin against the Holy Spirit," unforgivable because it neither asks forgiveness nor expects any. (Despite its cocksure sense of entitlement.)
How difficult is it to admit we are a nation like any other nation? A church? A family? A corporation? A neighborhood? A caste like all others? 
Within the "lion's den" of disintegrating family life, drug abuse and suicide, we recall the prayer of Daniel:

By a proper judgment you have done all this because of our sins; For we have sinned and transgressed by departing from you, and we have done every kind of evil. Your commandments we have not heeded or observed, nor have we done as you ordered us for our good. Therefore all you have brought upon us, all you have done to us, you have done by a proper judgment. You have handed us over to our enemies, lawless and hateful rebels; to an unjust king, the worst in all the world. Now we cannot open our mouths; shame and reproach have come upon us, your servants, who revere you. For your name’s sake, do not deliver us up forever, or make void your covenant. Do not take away your mercy from us, for the sake of Abraham, your beloved, Isaac your servant, and Israel your holy one, To whom you promised to multiply their offspring like the stars of heaven,or the sand on the shore of the sea. For we are reduced, O Lord, beyond any other nation, brought low everywhere in the world this day because of our sins.