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.