The Saint we have Chosen to Haunt Us [St. Stephen's Day (Observed) - Acts 6:8-7:2a, 51c-60]

 The Rev. Jeremiah Williamson

Acts 6:8-7:2a, 51c-60

 

The saint we have chosen to haunt us

 

Today is a martyr feast, our martyr feast – a perpetual day of mourning.  As red as the blood that stained that ancient stone and dust.  As red as the blood that stains our history.  We are called Grace and St. Stephen’s: we have adopted this feast, the one we celebrate today.  We have adopted this martyr.  We are the ones who keep his death alive.

 

Stephen is our ghost.  He is the saint we have chosen to haunt us.  His story is our story; his life our possession.  It is 2000 years later and we are sitting in the shadow of his shrine, listening to the shadow of his story – or at least what is left of his story.  Time is polishing him down so that he fits nicely into a couple of chapters – chapters still too long to read in one church service.  Even his truncation has been truncated. 

 

At this point, St. Stephen is more afterlife than life.  His statues live longer than he did.  He is icon.  He is inspiration.  He is a sketch who gives life to great works.  His faithful death has preserved him, carried him safely across the dangerous waters of time and space.  So that, in death, he can live with us.

 

But why death?  Why was his blood spilled by the stones?  Why was his body placed in the mass grave of the prophets?  Why did he become a martyr, now our martyr?  What did he do to deserve such violent treatment?

 

Stephen told stories.  That is why; that is what he did.  Don’t be surprised.  Stephen told the family stories – the honest kind, the dangerous kind.  The kind of stories that powerful privileged people always try to silence.  Stories that are mostly missing from today’s Acts passage: the stories that live in those blank spaces, in the omitted verses.  In those missing verses, Stephen pulled the bones out of the closet.  He rattled them in the faces of the elders. 

 

Stephen is remembered mostly as a deacon but also he is prophet – one of those prophets who make people uncomfortable, that make folks squirm.  And prophets, you see, are never outsiders, not really; they might live in the margins; they might be locked in the attic.  But they are never outsiders.  They are family.  They are the members of the family who know too much and say too much.

 

Stephen said too much.  He spoke too much truth.  And that truth felt, to those on the bench, unpatriotic, like it was stepping on a sense of national pride, like it was smudging the pages of a beautiful mythology.  That truth felt to them like it was hatred when really it was a deeper form of love, love that was reaching for, longing for, salvation. 

 

Stephen’s speech before his brothers and fathers was too honest about the pride and rebellion and violence that possessed their history; he was too honest about those things that needed to be exorcised.  Stephen knew the elders could hear the persistent jangle of the chains, the haunted moans of the ghosts.  They could hear them but they had learned to ignore the sounds the leaked forth from the shadows.  The stones were meant to silence the ghost stories.  The stones were thrown by haunted hands, bloody hands.

 

Stephen understood something about ghosts.  He knew what William Faulkner knew: that “The past is never dead.  It’s not even past.”  The old untold stories are just rewritten to make them more palatable; they become the haunted secrets of the future.  Old sins do not just go away; they take new forms.  The iniquity of the parents is visited upon the children and the children’s children – bad blood flowing through our ancient veins.  The ghosts are passed down the generations like precious heirlooms.  The slave ship eventually becomes the lynching tree.  And so it goes. 

 

Nothing that St. Stephen said to his people was new; it wasn’t even unknown.  But typically when we tell our family stories, our intentions become heroic, our deeds noble, our darkness light, our enemies inhuman.  The truth is distorted until the past becomes what we wish it had been, what we want our children to believe about us.  Stephen should have known better; he spoke the unspeakable; he told the story wrong.  And so he was silenced.

 

Today a little child comes to be born again in sacred water.  Today he is a miracle in our midst; he is a sign of hope for our future; he is the dream of saints and martyrs past.  We walk him to the font so that today we can witness as he sheds the old ghosts of his human inheritance to make space for a new possession: the Holy Ghost, the Spirit of Truth.

 

As we do every time we approach this holy sacrament, we long to transformed in the transformation, to again find our salvation in this salvific act.  We hold this child, and his parents, in our prayers because we know that the baptized life to which we are called often feels like a life spent kicking against the goads, praying for the kingdom come while the world burns.  But also we know that the dream of God breaks into our reality through those who are possessed by the Holy Spirit.

 

Today we will pray that the Holy Spirit will open Asher’s heart to grace and truth.  So that he, like his brother, our patron, blessed Stephen, will have the courage to tell stories that might plant the seeds of a better world. 

 

Blessed Stephen is the saint we have chosen to haunt us.  To open our eyes and uncover our ears.  To haunt us with truth, the truth that leads us to repentance, a repentance that frees us from the ghosts of our violent human past.  We tell his story so that we have the courage to face our own story.  To wash the blood from our hands in the water of the font.

 

Today is a martyr feast, our martyr feast.  But it is not about death.  It is about what happens after death loses its power.  Today is about the new life that springs forth from dusty ground.  It is about the hope that is found in the cleansing waters.  It is about the Holy Ghost, in us and around us, that blows us, pulls us, dreams us into our better future.