What do you have to say for yourself?
If you get a chance this week, read Acts 6-7.
It’s the story of Stephen which I’ll sum up here.
It took a bit after Jesus died for his followers to settle in and get organized. It seems with almost any group their is a schism, and this group was no different. In this case the problem was between the Hebrew speaking believers and the Greek speaking believers. It seems the Greeks thought that their widows weren’t being treated very fairly in the distribution of the groups resources.
How would they take care of the poor? The disciples established a study group to study the problem of dishing up the meals while the rest of the group dished up the message. Funny thing is, the meals often are the message.
One of the fellows they appointed was a man named Stephen. He did what he could for the poor, but he also continued to tell people about Jesus… the one who’d gotten him interested in the poor to start with. He talked enough that he started to get attention, but then that attention turned from good to bad.
Not unlike the Jesus Stephen was obsessed with, the authorities called him to the carpet to defend his craziness. They picked up some witnesses to lie about how he had said he would destroy the temple and disregard the teachings of Moses.
“What do you have to say for yourself?”
In Acts 7:2-53 he gives them the long answer:
You missed the boat people! You messed up when you sold Joseph into slavery and managed to get yourselves enslaved in Egypt. You messed up when you gave Moses a hard time in the wilderness and haven’t listened to a prophet, priest, or king since. Not only did they miss the boat when they fixed it so that Jesus was crucified, they were doing their damndest to sink it.
Needless to say they didn’t like that answer. So they took him out back and stoned him.
And Stephen kept preachin’.
Of course there’s more to the story.
It takes awhile to stone someone to death, particularly someone as buff and filled with the Spirit as Stephen. So the men that were throwing rocks took off their clothes, set down their stuff and got a guy named Saul to watch their stuff. Saul wasn’t throwing rocks himself, but he hardly did anything to stop it. The same Saul-who-became-Paul never fathomed that his time under watch was not too far off either.
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