LUTHER SEMINARY CHAPEL
24 APRIL 2008 (PREVIEWS DAY
FOR HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS)
TEXT: ACTS 7:54-60 (FIFTH
SUNDAY OF EASTER)
PREACHER: FREDERICK J. GAISER
On Dying (and Living) like Jesus
Nothing like
a good, bloody execution story to welcome young people to Luther Seminary! But
the text turns up in our churches this week, and, even if not so uplifting, it
does at least allow for truth in advertising, because if some of you young
folks are being encouraged to think about seminary, you should know that this
is a place where we talk about matters of death and life pretty much everyday.
How weird is that? Or, maybe, how cool is that! Fact is, if you read the Bible,
you might not need Prom Night for gruesome adventure.
My guess is
that questions about death are not foreign to you. Yes, we are told that
teenagers all consider themselves immortal, and we remember that feeling about ourselves—though
now, of course, as parents and teachers, it scares the crap out of us when kids
we love act as though it were true. But it’s also the case, if I can remember
back that far, that teenagers think about death, sometimes fearfully, sometimes
romantically, sometimes tragically. You think about death, of course, when a
grandmother dies or, more shockingly, a classmate—an all too frequent event in
the news these days. But sometimes, if you are like I was at your age, you
think about your own death—perhaps seeing yourselves dying heroically to save
the world or at least someone you love. Or dramatically, in a way that makes
everyone take notice—What if one day I just exploded right in the middle of
English class? Perhaps, on bad days, you find yourself wishing to die to escape
the calculus test tomorrow or, worse, much worse, to escape a life that has
become more than you can bear.
Death stalks
us all in one way or another. And, because the Bible is honest, death stalks
the biblical characters, too.
Do some of
you remember praying this bedtime prayer as a child?
Now
I lay me down to sleep,
I
pray the Lord my soul to keep;
If
I should die before I wake,
I
pray the Lord my soul to take.
Maybe some
of you still do. The prayer’s connection between sleep and death touches
something deep in human psychology and becomes a frequent theme of human
mythology and literature. Stephen fell asleep, it says in our text. But he didn’t
wake up in the morning. Sleep and death, so closely related that we all need
ways to deal with our nighttime fears. Opus, in the comics, didn’t invent the
childhood anxiety closet or the monsters under the bed. But they’re real enough
that parents and children have always had to invent ways to keep them in check.
Set all the Teddy bears in the right order. Read Dr. Seuss again. Make sure the
night light is on. Say, “Now I lay me....” Make it okay to fall asleep.
People in
the Bible prayed a similar prayer, and we prayed it ourselves just a few
minutes ago: Into your hands I commit my spirit. In the Bible, it’s a line from
Ps 31, but in the life of pious Jews it was the bedtime prayer: Into your hands
I commit my spirit. Or, in simple English: God, as I go to sleep, I lay my life
in your hands.
That
would make it okay, wouldn’t it? God, I lay my life in your hands. I give my
life to you. You gave it to me, so surely you can take care of it for just a
few hours while I sleep. Into your hands I commit my spirit.
That’s the
background of the first prayer we hear in the mouth of Stephen in our text. His
problem is not just monsters under the bed. His monsters are quite real, and
they are about to kill him. So, he prays his own version of “Into your hands I
commit my spirit.”
Generations
of Jewish believers had prayed this prayer before him. Perhaps the young mother
ravaged by tuberculosis, no longer able to breathe, no longer able to care for
her family or her self. No longer in control. “Lord, into your hands I commit
my spirit.”
Perhaps the
aged grandfather for whom nothing works any more. Not the legs, not the eyes,
not the mind, not the bladder. “Lord, into your hands I commit my spirit.”
Perhaps the
young person mortally wounded in one of those all too frequent biblical wars.
He won’t be going home. He won’t be getting married. He won’t be having
children. He won’t be growing old. “Lord, into your hands I commit my spirit.”
And then,
one more character, this time no “perhaps”; this one we know: a young carpenter
from Nazareth, a wandering preacher and healer, falsely accused of treason,
denounced for blasphemy (for defaming God), despised for hanging out with the
wrong kind, deserted by friends, and now given over to the cruelist of deaths.
From him, too: “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.”
Stephen learned
to die from his fellow believers and from his Lord Jesus. Here he is, a young
disciple, just called to be a deacon in the new Christian community—to
distribute food to the needy—taking the opportunity to tell everyone he meets
that Jesus had been raised from the dead, that Jesus was the Son of God, that
Jesus was the savior of the world. So now, he, too, is denounced and despised
and handed over to the executioners, the rock throwers, who would break his
body but not his spirit. Because, like the Jewish believers before him, like
Jesus, he could give that spirit to another for safe keeping. Throughout the
ages, Jews had handed their spirits (their lives) to God; a few weeks before,
Jesus had handed his spirit to his Father; now, Stephen hands his spirit to
Jesus: “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit”—confessing, even as he dies, that Jesus
has gone to the Father, that Jesus, like God, hears prayer.
Then,
perhaps more surprising, Stephen raises another prayer—this one, too, learned
from Jesus—pleading for the forgiveness of his killers: “Lord, do not hold this
sin against them.” Just as Jesus had done from the cross: “Father, forgive
them; for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34).
With this,
Stephen’s death does move toward becoming heroic. The American writer Ernest
Hemingway would have liked it. Hemingway liked heroes, especially tragic heroes
like The Old Man and the Sea, and he sees Jesus in that role in his
short play, “Today Is Friday.” Three Roman soldiers who had been on Jesus’
crucifixion detail are sitting in a bar that Friday night, getting drunk to
forget the horror of having been made to nail a human body to a hunk of wood,
and one of them keeps coming back with the refrain, “He was pretty good in
there today.” Ironically, they’re drinking the same kind of cheap wine that had
been given Jesus earlier in the afternoon, but it won’t work for them either: “I
can’t drink the damn stuff,” says one, “It makes my gut sour.”1
And so it does. For us, too. Torture is not pretty, not for Jesus, not for
Stephen. But the Acts text describing Stephen seems to agree with Hemingway
about Jesus. “He was pretty good in there today.” Dying like Jesus, faithful to
the end, amazingly forgiving his killers. Pretty good.
And there’s
the fascination again. Could we die like that? Should we? God help me, I don’t
know how I would respond if called to give my life for my faith. Could I
forgive my own murderers? Would God give us the hope and strength of Stephen?
We pray never to have to find out.
But there’s
another part of Stephen’s story: his call to be a deacon, a servant, a waiter,
to bring food to those in need. As the new Christian community grew, including
many who could not care for themselves, the apostles saw the need for some kind
of “Meals on Wheels” program (or perhaps, in that culture, “Suppers on Sandals”).
So they chose seven trusted men for that job, and Stephen was one of them.
Interestingly, we never actually see Stephen delivering food and waiting
tables. We only see him preaching and healing to spread the gospel; but, no
doubt, his day job remained the distribution of food: not so sexy, hardly
heroic, so never mentioned again in the text, and Hemingway would never have
written a story about it—but in that work, too, Stephen was following Jesus
just as fully as on the day of his death.
Because
serving people is what Jesus came for. True, Jesus came to die on the cross and
save the world, but that was just the last and largest act in a life that was
characterized every day by service of others: “For the Son of Man came,” he
said, “not to be served but to serve” (Mark 10:45). To serve, to wait tables,
to wash feet, to speak well of others, to give rather than to take, to forgive,
every day to show the world in his own life that God is a giver and a helper
and a lover and a friend. And, surprisingly, we might be able to do that,
whether or not we get the call to be a heroic martyr: we can love one another,
serve one another, care for one another, forgive one another. It’s what the
kingdom of God looks like. It’s what Jesus looks like, and Stephen, too. Pretty
good.
In his life
Stephen shows us how to live and die like Jesus. In his preaching, though, he
would have stressed something else—not how to live and die like Jesus, as
important as that might be, but rather the surprising news that Jesus came to
live and die like us. Jesus, God’s only Son, came to serve, to wait tables, to
care for the needy, to hang out with the unlovely. Jesus came to deal with his
own anxiety closet and ours, the monsters under his own bed and ours, to share
the death of the terrified, and to say with them and for them: “Father, into
your hands I commit my spirit.”
Finally, it’s
not our own romantic or heroic deaths that matter, so we don’t have to find
ourselves in fantasy. Finally, even the pain and suffering of death cannot
separate us from God, so we don’t have to lose ourselves in fear. Like Jesus,
we can put our lives in God’s hands; like Stephen, we can put our lives in
Jesus’ hands—not only for the day of our death, but for today and tomorrow as
well. Now I lay me down to sleep. My bed is safe. Into your hands I commit my
spirit. My life is safe. So, I am free—and at home, next door, at school, all
around the world, there are tables waiting to be served and people waiting to
be fed. AMEN
1Ernest Hemingway, “Today Is Friday,” in The Short
Stories of Ernest Hemingway (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953)
356-359.