SERMON                                Full of Faith                             Acts Chapters 6:5-8 and 7:54-8:1

 Robyn Hogue                                         June 28, 2015                           Skyline Presbyterian Church

 

Perhaps at some point in your life you have considered writing your autobiography. You may not produce a best-seller, but nevertheless, you could come up with an important history to pass onto your family. One way to outline such a biography would be to devote a chapter each to all the times in your life when you were chosen. The idea of being chosen is central to the biblical message. God chose us. Before we love God, God first loved us. After creating all the galaxies, God chose to live among us on an insignificant planet in a tiny solar system called earth. God chose to enter into human life in the person of Jesus. Before that incarnational visit God chose a people through whom to reveal God’s divine nature to the rest of the world, the Hebrew tribes of Israel. God chose Mary through whom the Messiah came. In time God chose you and me to be God’s instruments of revelation and reconciliation.

Being chosen is something all of us desire. It is one of life’s greatest experiences. We dream that the right person will choose us as a marriage partner. We hope to be chosen for a particular job or for some specific group or assignment. Many of life’s dreams are tied up with being chosen, and that means we have to deal with the pain and disappointment when we are not chosen, or when being chosen results in suffering or disillusionment.

My first memory of being chosen was in first grade when the teacher moved my desk next to a new girl and asked me to be a friend to her. The little girl spoke only French and her daddy had moved to our mountain town to be a ski instructor. It was fun to learn French words from her and teach her English words…until some of the kids in class starting calling me “teacher’s pet.”  My new status was a mixed blessing. My next triumph came in sixth grade when I was chosen to be a member of the safety patrol. I could wear the white belt and badge, carry the traffic flag and stop traffic for kids to safely cross the street to and from our elementary school. However, I also bore, with the other patrol members, the stigma of the establishment. We were sometimes avoided at recess and teased. Being chosen, again, had its bitter side.

The biblical record indicates that the price of being chosen is often responsibility and…suffering. The Jews are chosen people who have suffered across the millennium. There’s a wonderful scene in the musical Fiddler on the Roof, in which, the hero, Tevye, says at one point, “O Lord, couldn’t You choose somebody else for a while. I’m tired of being Your chosen person.” Mary is chosen and pays a great price. When she brings her baby to the temple for the rite of purification she meets the old prophet, Simeon. Holding the baby, he tells her that he has now seen the salvation of Israel, but he also says that a sword will pierce her heart. Both were accurate prophecies.

At the end of the sixth chapter of Acts, we find Stephen being chosen as the first deacon. He was chosen to correct problems in the young church. Food and benefits were not being distributed equitably, and discord and jealousy had resulted. Stephen had excellent credentials, being full of wisdom, the Holy Spirit and of good reputation. He was so good and so powerful that he was an offense, and before long he was brought to trial and martyred. He suffered a premature death by stoning. (There is no guarantee we’ll live a long life if we’re chosen.) In death, Stephen saw the glory of God. We read that Saint Paul was there watching and consenting to the persecution of the church and this unjust execution.

Being chosen means both glory and suffering. Scott Peck, the psychiatrist who has written the book titled, The Road Less Traveled, opens the book with the sentence “Life is difficult. Once you accept that fact, then it is no longer difficult.” We tend to think that being chosen by God means we’ll be spared any suffering. John quotes Jesus in John 8:36 “If the Son makes you free, you will be free indeed.” Free from suffering? Not at all.

Nor are we to seek suffering any more than we are to label all suffering character producing”. For hundreds of years there has been a strange heresy in the Christian church which implies that suffering is noble, and that the more you suffer, the more you are like Jesus. To glorify suffering is heresy. To spiritualize abuse or injustice is sin. Nevertheless, suffering may come, often undeservedly as it did for Stephen.

In the middle of his persecution, Stephen, “full of the Holy Spirit, gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at the right hand of God.” (Acts 7:55)

There are Stephens in the church in every century. During my first year in seminary the Roman Catholic Church canonized a new saint. He was born Raymund Kolbe in 1894 in the then Kingdom of Poland. He was from ordinary background…the second oldest of five brothers born to a father who was a weaver and a mother who was a midwife. 

He was strongly influenced by a vision of the Virgin Mary which he experienced at the age of twelve. He later described this incident: “That night I asked the Mother of God what was to become of me. Then she came to me holding two crowns, one white and the other red. She asked me if I was willing to accept either of these crowns. The white one meant that I should persevere in purity, and the red that I should become a martyr. I said that I would accept them both.”

At thirteen, Kolbe and his elder brother enrolled in a Franciscan seminary. The next year Kolbe was allowed to enter the novitiate, where he was given the religious name Maximilian. By the time he was twenty-one he had earned a doctorate in philosophy followed by an additional doctorate in theology at the age of twenty-five.

From the ages of nineteen to twenty-two he taught at the Krakow seminary. At thirty-one he founded a new Franciscan monastery near Warsaw which became a major religious publishing center.

Between the ages of thirty-four and forty-two he undertook a series of missions to East Asia. At first, he arrived in Shanghai, China, but failed to gather a following there. Next, he moved to Japan, where by the age of thirty-five he founded a monastery at the outskirts of Nagasaki. (The monastery he founded remains prominent in the Roman Catholic Church in Japan. Kolbe built the monastery on a mountainside that, according to Shinto beliefs, was not the side best suited to be in harmony with nature. When the atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, Kolbe's monastery was saved because the other side of the mountain took the main force of the blast.)

At the age of thirty-eight he left Japan for Malabar, India, where he founded another monastery; this one however closed after a while. Meanwhile, the monastery near Warsaw began in his absence to publish the daily newspaper. This publication reached a circulation of 137,000, and nearly double that, 225,000, on weekends.

Poor health forced Kolbe to return to Poland at the age of forty-two. Two years later, in 1938, he started a radio station.

After the outbreak of World War II, which started with the invasion of Poland by Germany, Kolbe was one of the few brothers who remained in the monastery, where he organized a temporary hospital where he and other monks provided shelter to refugees from Greater Poland, including 1,000–2,000 Jews whom he hid from German persecution in their friary.

Kolbe also received permission from Rome to continue publishing religious works, though significantly reduced in scope. The monastery thus continued to act as a publishing house, issuing a number of anti-Nazi German publications. In 1941, the monastery was shut down by the German authorities. That day Kolbe and four others were arrested by the German Gestapo and imprisoned in the Pawiak prison. Three months later, he was transferred to Auschwitz.

Continuing to act as a priest, Kolbe was subjected to violent harassment, including beatings and lashings, and once had to be smuggled to a prison hospital by friendly inmates. Four months after his arrival, three prisoners disappeared from the camp, prompting SS-deputy camp commander, to pick 10 men to be starved to death in an underground bunker to deter further escape attempts. When one of the selected men cried “My wife! My children!” Kolbe volunteered to take his place.

According to the eye witness account of an assistant janitor at that time, Kolbe continued to lead the prisoners in prayer. The records of their last days indicate that there was no complaining. There was joy! They sang hymns of praise to God. One by one they succumbed to starvation until only four were left. There was such a mysterious, powerful aura around that dungeon that the guards refused even to go near it. Father Kolbe was the last to die, almost as though he had been commissioned to help the other nine die with grace. When, after three weeks, he still lived, he was killed with a lethal injection. Father Kolbe found the same glory in suffering as Stephen, the first martyr.

Each of us has the opportunity to say, “Lord, let me use this circumstance.” We can become wounded healers, to use Henri Nouwen’s phrase—those who have borne great sorrow with such faith and grace that we are God’s resource for others.