Seeing the Beautiful [Acts 6 & 7 - St. Stephen's Day]

The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson

Acts 6-7

Seeing the Beautiful

I must admit: sometimes I forget to see beautiful in this world, this same world that God created and calls good.  I forget that every thing, every single thing, that surrounds me is amazing, impossibly intricate, carefully crafted, a product of impossible divine love.  This entire world, our island home, is just covered in the stardust-y fingerprints of our ancient Creator.  And so in that sense: is saturated through and through with the beauty of holiness. 

And somehow, most of the time, I miss it; I fail to see it.  I forget to see beautiful in this world.  Maybe it’s because I’m too focused on my calendar, too worried about my task list, too concerned with my routine.  Maybe it’s because the headlines are so packed with atrocities that it seems impossible for there to be enough room in this world for goodness.  Maybe because the history of our species is written in the blood of war and plague and conquest.  Maybe because I drive home on streets bathed in rage – I’m seeing a middle finger pass me on the right and I’m not even sure why.

Or maybe I just focus on the wrong things.  Like I curse those weeds, the ones that keep popping back up in my yard like whack-a-moles.  And I’m walking with my younger son, Isaiah, and he is picking the flowers off of those same weeds.  And he is making them into a bouquet.  Because he loves his mommy and he wants to give her something beautiful.  And he is so little that he still sees the beautiful everywhere he goes.  Schedules and headlines and just life have not yet calloused his eyes. 

And I think about St. Stephen, our patron.  And certainly no one would blame him if he were a bit calloused.  He is remembered, after all, for being pummeled with stones.  His history written in the blood of martyrdom.  Enshrined in the Hall of Saints because of a violent death. 

We generally give martyrs a pass on the life they lived because of the death they died.  Because dying is a big deal; and martyrdom the grandest of grand gestures.  St. Stephen faced the rocks like a champ.  He didn’t back down, didn’t even dodge.  We put a rock in St. Stephen’s icons to remind ourselves why we remember.  We wear red for him on his day.

But what amazes me about St. Stephen is not martyrdom; a lot of people die – almost always for something, or because of something, they loved a lot.  Death is not why I want to be like St. Stephen.  To me St. Stephen is special because he could see the beautiful in impossible places, in those moments when beauty was most veiled. 

Like when Stephen was surrounded by killers, all gritted teeth and white knuckles.  And the angry shouts, like a perverse Pentecost.  And the jagged violence of stones large enough and manifold enough to do more than harm.  And there he stood, surrounded by the ugliness of a frenzied mob, a living manifestation of destruction inciting destruction, rage feeding rage. 

And all the ugliness, it didn’t even make sense.  It should have been an agree to disagree situation.  There should have never been stones.  But something about Stephen and the way his words struck a nerve and the way that humans allow things to escalate and go too far…  Stephen was different from them – a heretic who refused to recant.  And on this day, in this crowd, that was a crime worthy of death.

It was an ugly scene, just terribly ugly.  But somehow Stephen didn’t get caught up in the ugliness.  He stayed with the beautiful.  He caught a glimpse of heaven while living through hell.  He found beauty beyond the senseless violence.  That violence took his body but it never touched his soul.  And that’s why I want to be like Stephen. 

And it wasn’t just on that day, on his last day.  He always had that in him.  He always possessed the capacity to see beauty where others could not.  He is remembered mostly because of his death, but the story of his life is that he could see the beauty in people; he could see the image of God in those whom others passed by without a thought.  He was called, by God and the Church, to serve the poor and marginalized, to touch the sick, to see the invisible and forgotten ones.  And he did.  He looked into the eyes of the sick and the suffering, of the ill and the ignored and he glimpsed heaven.  He saw Jesus in their eyes.  That’s why I want to be like Stephen.

The ability to see beauty in those disregarded by society is enough to make one a saint.  But life has this way of pushing the boundaries of our love, of forcing us to strain our eyes for the beautiful.  On the verge of death, after the stones had completed their terrible work, Stephen looked into the faces of his own murderers.  And in their piercing eyes and gritted teeth, he could still see something beautiful.  It is beyond me how he still could find the image of God buried under so many layers of hatred and violence.  But he did.  And while it is a worthy thing to be able to see beauty in a flower or a bird or a baby, and while it is a virtue to see beauty in the face of the outcast or the stranger, it is a devastating thing to see beauty, to see Jesus, in the face of the perpetrator.  Saints have that kind of devastating vision.  Stephen’s last words on this earth were: “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.”  That is why I want to be like Stephen.        

There is more to our saint than death.  Everybody dies.  Death does not make one a saint.  Death is not why we commemorate St. Stephen.  Death is not why his name graces our church.  Death is not why we need our patron still today; death is not why he matters. 

There is a lot of ugliness in this world – pain and evil, hatred and tragedy.  We are reminded of that daily.  And it can feel like the blight of despair is so encompassing as to block out the very possibility of beauty.  But God is not daunted; God has filled this world with beauty.  We are surrounded, every day, by glimpses of heaven.  We just have to remember to see them.  And that is why St. Stephen still matters, that is why I want to be like St. Stephen: he never stopped seeing the beautiful.