On the Feast of Stephen

Sermon by Jamie Howison on Acts 6.8–7.2, 51–60

Merry Christmas everyone! And Happy St. Stephen’s Day! Now in all fairness, you may not be at all accustomed to thinking of the 26th of December as being anything other than Boxing Day, but in the traditional church calendar the 26th is also marked as St. Stephen’s Day. In the mid-80s in the Anglican Church of Canada there was a move to shift it to August 3rd, and maybe if you were a member of a St. Stephen’s parish you might think that a pretty decent idea. After all, if you wanted to celebrate your patronal festival, having this feast day fall on the second day of the Twelve Days of Christmas might be somewhat less than ideal.

But you know, I’m not convinced that the feast day should be moved, and when it falls on a Sunday like it does this year, it makes good sense to observe it.

Yet it might seem a bit odd to read the story of the stoning of Stephen during a season that we assume might be a bit more… well, a bit more Christmassy. But the decision to mark the second day of this season by telling the story of the first Christian martyr is no accident.

If you took part in our liturgy on Christmas Eve, you’ll know that I spoke of how the story of Mary and Joseph in Bethlehem was set against the background of the Pax Romana, or the kind of peace that the Roman Empire was enforcing. Sure, the Romans built great roads, assembled rather extraordinary cities, and kept all of the peoples under their rule firmly in line, but it wasn’t a particularly safe or happy time for most of the average people of Judea and Galilee. Not only that, but by the time of St Stephen, the established Jewish temple religion and its authorities found the whole Christian movement to be an appalling aberration of the religious faith to which they were desperately holding. To place St Stephen’s Day here on the 26th says that once you’ve told the admittedly pretty story of Bethlehem you need to look at what it might cost to follow that babe once he’s grown up.

In the case of Stephen, the cost was high. Confident in his faith that through the life, death and resurrection of Jesus God had acted to bring in a whole new covenant with humanity, he can’t not proclaim the good news. As in the case of Paul and of Peter and a host of others who would follow, this is met with deep opposition, and so Stephen is accused of blasphemy and hauled before the council. Undaunted, Stephen preaches—his speech fills the better part of the seventh chapter of Acts—which fuels the fires of those who would condemn him. He’s then dragged into the public square, where he is killed by a violent mob. As he dies his words echo those spoken by Jesus from the cross: “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit,” and “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.”

Listen to what William Willimon has to say about the way that Luke understands the figure of Stephen:

Luke sees Stephen as a hero of the faith, a quite rational person who died for the same faith by which he lived. Indeed not to die for what you hold most dear would seem, to the church of Acts, to be the essence of irrationality, even insanity. So many Christians (and Jesus) died at the hands of the Empire because it was impossible to reconcile the Christian claim—that is, that God, not nations, rules the world—with those of a progressive world empire.

To follow the one born in the stable in Bethlehem might just mean being placed in a position of conflict with the way the world works. For all of the loveliness of the nativity story, our telling of it cannot stop short of the telling of the bigger and deeper story. It just can’t.

Now popularly we do hold a little reminder of St Stephen’s Day, in the 19th Century carol written by John Mason Neale, called “Good King Wenceslas”. You know how it begins, I’m sure:

Good King Wenceslas looked out

On the feast of Stephen

When the snow lay round about

Deep and crisp and even

It goes on to tell the story of a good king who, upon seeing a poor man off in the distance gathering sticks to keep his fire burning, is moved to help. The good king sets out with his page to take the man food and drink and wood for his fire, but on the way home the two are caught in a snowstorm. The king trudges on, cutting a path that allows his page to keep walking. As the carol presents it, so passionate is the king’s faith that his feet melt the snow and open the path for the page to walk through:

In his master's steps he trod

Where the snow lay dinted

Heat was in the very sod

Which the Saint had printed.

And then the closing lines, which offer something of a moral lesson to all who would sing these words:

Therefore, Christian men, be sure

Wealth or rank possessing

Ye who now will bless the poor

Shall yourselves find blessing

There was in fact a Wenceslas, and by most accounts he was relatively good news as a ruler. He reigned as king of Bohemia in the 900s and had some reputation for fairness and compassion; for actually translating his newly found Christian faith into practice. The story in the carol is a complete fiction, but the historical record suggests that reaching out to a poor man on St Stephen’s Day would not have been out of character for Wenceslas, whether or not, “heat was in the very sod, which the Saint had printed.” What John Mason Neale wanted to celebrate was the possibility of a good and decent ruler, and one whose imagination had been shaped by a deep Christian faith.

There is, though, another connection to St Stephen. Wenceslas was also murdered, in a plot orchestrated by his brother—who did most definitely did not share his faith nor his character—in a bid to take over his throne and return the land to more “sensible” pagan terms. What his brother did not anticipate what that Wenceslas was almost immediately heralded as a saint and a martyr; someone to be remembered, and whose story should be retold.

So is it a bit paradoxical to mark the death of a martyr with a feast, particularly in this festal season of Christmas? No. To mark a feast is not just about being grateful for good things; it is also to resiliently say something about how things should be and shall be. And maybe that’s most important in a year like this one, in which we again face the prospect of increasing limits due to the pandemic, and the challenge of hunkering down for the sake of the health care system, nurses and doctors, and our neighbours across the way. We tell a hard story, remember a costly discipleship, and then sing our alleluias, reminded that like both Stephen and Wenceslas before us, our lives and our deaths are held in the hands of God.

May these 12 days bring you both a deep peace and new insight into what it is that is worth living for.