Sunday Musings

TRINITY, FROM THE GROUND UP

5/31/2026

Trinity Sunday, May 31, 2026
First Congregational Church of Cheshire
© the Rev. Dr. James Campbell

Genesis 1:1-2:3
When God began to create the heavens and the earth, the earth was complete chaos, and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. And God saw that the light was good, and God separated the light from the darkness. God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.

And God said, “Let there be a dome in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.” So God made the dome and separated the waters that were under the dome from the waters that were above the dome. And it was so. God called the dome Sky. And there was evening and there was morning, the second day.

And God said, “Let the waters under the sky be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear.” And it was so. God called the dry land Earth, and the waters that were gathered together he called Seas. And God saw that it was good. Then God said, “Let the earth put forth vegetation: plants yielding seed and fruit trees of every kind on earth that bear fruit with the seed in it.” And it was so. The earth brought forth vegetation: plants yielding seed of every kind and trees of every kind bearing fruit with the seed in it. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, the third day.

And God said, “Let there be lights in the dome of the sky to separate the day from the night, and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years, and let them be lights in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth.” And it was so. God made the two great lights—the greater light to rule the day and the lesser light to rule the night—and the stars. God set them in the dome of the sky to give light upon the earth, to rule over the day and over the night, and to separate the light from the darkness. And God saw that it was good. And there was evening and there was morning, the fourth day.

And God said, “Let the waters bring forth swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the dome of the sky.” So God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that moves, of every kind, with which the waters swarm and every winged bird of every kind. And God saw that it was good. God blessed them, saying, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.” And there was evening and there was morning, the fifth day.

And God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures of every kind: cattle and creeping things and wild animals of the earth of every kind.” And it was so. God made the wild animals of the earth of every kind and the cattle of every kind and everything that creeps upon the ground of every kind. And God saw that it was good.

Then God said, “Let us make humans in our image, according to our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over the cattle and over all the wild animals of the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.”
So God created humans in his image,
    in the image of God he created them;
    male and female he created them.

God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” God said, “See, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is upon the face of all the earth and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food. And to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the air and to everything that creeps on the earth, everything that has the breath of life, I have given every green plant for food.” And it was so. God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.

Thus the heavens and the earth were finished and all their multitude. On the sixth day God finished the work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all the work that he had done in creation.

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Did I ever tell you about the time that a Unitarian youth group came to worship at my church in Manhattan?  And did I mention that it was on Trinity Sunday – a concept that the Unitarians rejected a long time ago?  Well, as you can imagine, their visit made me nervous.  And so did the multiple expressions those teenagers wore as I preached that day: bewilderment, boredom, amusement, maybe even a little disdain.  (I’ve never seen any of those things from you!)

The Unitarians are also Congregationalists.  But once upon a time, we had a big family argument over, you guessed it, the Trinity.  And in the early 1800s, the Congregational churches of New England began to choose one side over the other.  The Unitarians eventually became the Unitarian Universalist Association.  And the Trinitarians mostly became the United Church of Christ.

During that big family fight, both sides appealed to the Bible to make their arguments.  But frankly, we Trinitarians were on the weaker footing there.  Because at best, the idea of the Trinity is only implied in the pages of Scripture.  It took a series of early church councils to finally button it all up, make it the official dogma, and then demand that everyone sign on the dotted line.

Except that all these years later, it’s still not buttoned up.  The Trinity continues to perplex most people.  And because it does, we mostly just ignore it or we stick to Sunday School notions about what it means to say that God is Triune – One in Three, Three in One.

I remember that my own Sunday School teachers had some very nifty analogies that were supposed to clear up any confusion about the blessed Trinity.   One of them said: “The Trinity is like an egg.  There is the yoke and the egg white and the shell, but they are all still one egg.”  Well, that one was never very convincing to me as a kid, because I knew that none of those things, on their own, was an egg.  Each was just part of the egg.  And besides all that, it made me imagine that God looked like Humpty Dumpty.

Another Sunday School teacher said that the Trinity is like water: it can display itself as liquid, solid, or gas but all of those things are still H20.  Well, that one came a little closer to answering my existential theological questions.  But I remained generally unsatisfied.   And I suppose I still am

And so, every year, I come to this Sunday and think “Can’t we just sing “Holy, Holy, Holy” and be done with it?  And every year, I look in vain at the Scripture lessons assigned for this day, knowing that they will provide no easy Trinitarian explanations.

For example: what on earth does the Creation account from Genesis have to do with the Holy Trinity?  Now, some folks will tell you that the Trinity is right here in the story, simply because God speaks in the plural: “Let us make humans in our image…”  But that’s a stretch, I think.

And so, I struggled with this text, and was about to throw in the towel, lost in the clouds of historical and philosophical arguments, when somewhere from the primordial mist of this ancient story, another idea began to surface.

But before we get there, let me say this about Genesis 1: this is not some scientific account about how God created the world.  This story is not in competition with science or current estimates about the age of the universe or the origins of life.  Instead, this beautiful and elevated ancient prose is theology.  And that means it is a story seeking meaning about God, and about us, and how and why we came to live in such a marvelous world.  And more than that, this story contains an essential building block for understanding the nature of God, including the idea of the Trinity.

The writer says that after everything else was created, we came along.  But there was something different about us.  The writer put is like this: “Then God said, “Let us make humans in our image, according to our likeness…” “So God created humans in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.”

And that, dear friends, is the bedrock of any good theology.  It is the starting place of any doctrine worth believing.  Before anything else we might be, we are bearers of the image of God.  And that means that something essential about God can be known just by paying attention to us – and, I might add, to the rest of creation.  But the church has been so fixated on the idea of Original Sin, of everything that we are not, that we barely give the image of God shining in us a second thought.  In fact, I don’t think we really believe it.  But we should.

There is a marvelous Jewish proverb that goes like this: “Before every person there marches an angel proclaiming, 'Behold, the image of God.”  Now, is that what you say to yourself when you look in the mirror?  Me neither.  But what if that were the place we all started in our thinking about God and ourselves and everyone else?

And if it is true that our best pulses and attributes reflect something essential about God, then we must conclude that God is somehow relational.  And it must mean that God is community.  And God is interdependence and cooperation.  God is dynamic love and movement and flow and malleability and growth and change.  And that must mean that God comes to each of us according to our needs.  It’s not many gods or different gods.  It’s just a God who is not static and will not be contained.  Because neither are we.

Here’s an example: most of you relate to me as your Minister.  That’s how you see me.  And you know something about who I am and what I think and how I live based on that particular role and your particular needs.  It’s the real me.  But it’s not the only face I wear.  Marcos relates to me in another way altogether.  He knows other sides of me.  And my family of origin knows yet other sides.  And my friends and colleagues, others still.  All of these are me, but just not all of me.  And the same can be said of you.  You all play different roles in life.  And so, the same can be said of God – not because I am creating God in a human image, but because WE HUMANS reflect something true and essential about the One who made us.

The Holy and Blessed Trinity is not something to button up.   The Holy One is either a lived experience in all the days and moments of our lives, or nothing at all.  That’s theology, from the ground up.

So, is God Father, Son, and Holy Spirit?  Absolutely.  But God can also come to us as mother and advocate and coach and friend and brother and sister and wind and fire and wonder and awe.  God will not be contained by our labels.  Just like I cannot be contained by labels.  And neither can you.  We are all much more than meets the eye.

And so is the One who made us, whose very image and likeness we all bear.

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STARING INTO SPACE

5/17/2026

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Sunday, May 17, 2026 – Ascension Sunday
First Congregational Church of Cheshire
© the Rev. Dr. James Campbell

Acts 1:1-11

In the first book, Theophilus, I wrote about all that Jesus began to do and teach until the day when he was taken up to heaven, after giving instructions through the Holy Spirit to the apostles whom he had chosen. After his suffering he presented himself alive to them by many convincing proofs, appearing to them during forty days and speaking about the kingdom of God. While staying with them, he ordered them not to leave Jerusalem but to wait there for the promise of the Father. “This,” he said, “is what you have heard from me; for John baptized with water, but you will be baptized withthe Holy Spirit not many days from now.”

So when they had come together, they asked him, “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” He replied, “It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” When he had said this, as they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. While he was going and they were gazing up toward heaven, suddenly two men in white robes stood by them. They said, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.”

It was a warm summer night.  My little brother and I were out in the backyard playing, when suddenly, I noticed a very bright light in the sky – much bigger than an ordinary star or planet.  We were both transfixed by this shining orb.  But then something strange started to happen.  The object appeared to grow larger and larger as if it were descending upon us.  When it got to be about the size of a baseball to the naked eye, my terrified little brother screamed and ran into the house.  But I was either fearless or stupid or hypnotized, because I just stood there transfixed, waiting to see what would happen next.

The object continued to grow until it was about twice as big as it had been before.  Then it seemed to stop in its descent.  It just hovered there.  And then, without warning, it shot across the sky and disappeared over the horizon.  Slack-jawed and convinced I had witnessed a real, live U.F.O., I ran into the house to tell my parents what I had seen.

They likely thought I was full of beans, since, as a kid I had a very vivid imagination.  But then next day my mother told me that there had been a report on local radio about that strange object in the sky.  Apparently, my brother and I were not the only ones to have seen it.  Hundreds of people did.

So, what was it?  Who knows?  What are all these strange objects that people – including pilots and military personnel - continue to see in the sky? Who knows?  All I do know is that that event left its mark on me.  I have never forgotten it.

And I guess that I have been looking up ever since.  To this day, I will stare at the moon and feel strangely drawn by its mysterious pull.  I still stare at the stars – mystified by their twinkling fire.  And sometimes, I wonder: what am I looking for?  What am I longing for?  And how am I connected to all of that?

Science says that we are connected to all of that.  On YouTube, there is a video entitled: “We Are Stardust.”  It’s one of those entertaining compilations of sound bites that have been turned into a coherent piece of music via a computer program.  In this video, some famous scientists are talking about how the entire Universe, including us, is made up of the rich guts of exploded stars.  In particular, this video has Neil deGrasse Tyson singing over and over again: “We are part of this Universe.  We are in this Universe.  The Universe itself exists within us.”  We are part of this Universe.  We are in this Universe.  The Universe itself exists within us.”  And then the video concludes with this profound statement: “We are stardust in the highest exalted way.”

And maybe that’s why so many of us are taken with the sky.  Maybe deep down inside, we know that we are part of all of that.  Maybe that’s why we think of God as being up there somewhere; up there where the stars are. Maybe, when we stare into space, we’re just trying to see where we came from.

The lesson from Acts today is about some other folks who saw a strange sign in the heavens that left them looking up.  The setting of this story is 40 days after the Resurrection of Jesus.  And during those 40 days, the Risen Christ had appeared to his friends on multiple occasions, walking and talking and eating with them.  But now that post-resurrection earth-time was about to conclude.  And perhaps sensing that, the disciples tried to hold onto him.  They pressed the Lord for some very earth-bound details.

“Lord,” they asked, “is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?”  But that question itself reveals a certain lack of understanding and spiritual maturity.  Had they not, with their own ears, heard Jesus say that the Kingdom of God was already inside of them?  Had they not understood that they were to participate in building an alternative Reign of God?

Well, Jesus replied by saying that it was not for them to know the details about how or when such things would be concluded.  But, he said, they would play a part in it.  The Holy Spirit would come upon them.  They would be given power to do the works of Jesus to the ends of the earth.

And then, just about the time they wanted to ask some follow-up questions, Jesus was suddenly and without warning lifted up off the earth and disappeared into the clouds.

Well, the disciples were no doubt dumbstruck – eyes up, mouths agape.  Luke, the author of the book of Acts, reports that they were left gazing up into the heavens, incredulous.  Suddenly, two men in white robes appeared and asked what might be the most superfluous question in all the New Testament: “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven?”

Well, where else were they supposed to look?  Where else would you look?  I would want to see where Jesus went.  I might even want to go with him, soaring through the clouds and away from the troubles of the world.

That has always been our temptation – to build our religion primarily in the sky, in the bye and bye, over yonder, up in heaven.  But those pesky angels keep sending us back down the mountain.  Back to the real world.

And that has been the sermon I have preached on Ascension Sunday, for most of my ministry.  I have paid scant attention to what happened in the sky and have stayed focused on life back down the mountain.  But it’s a lop-sided interpretation.  And without ever meaning to, I have dismissed as secondary the glory of smply staring into space; the spiritual practice of lifting one’s head, of dreaming and hoping for something better.  And I have failed to connect the two – the sky-gazing and the earth-dwelling as two sides of the same spiritual life.

And so, I wonder: did Jesus invite his friends up the mountain, into the clouds, precisely because he wanted to them to have that numinous experience as a counterbalance to the hard edges of living in the real world.  And maybe that is what we try to emulate each week in this room – a moment of glory and awe and peace and joy before you go back down the mountain and back to the challenges of your life.

This week, I got an urgent text message from an old college friend, asking me to pray.  She had just heard that her beloved and historic church building was on fire – one of my worst nightmares about our beloved and historic church building.  And so, I did pray… for her, for the congregation, for the firefighters, for the town.

The next morning, I searched the internet for news of that fire.  And it was far worse that I had feared.  The historic Trinity United Methodist Church in Madison, Indiana had been largely destroyed.  Stained glass and pipe organ and walls hallowed by generations of prayer, all gone in a matter of hours.  And my friend was numb with grief.  And that made me grieve.

Later in the day, I was thinking about all of that, and about the transitory and often painful nature of our lives here on earth.  I was lost in those thoughts when rather unconsciously, I looked up into the sky.  And there I saw the white flowers of our dogwood against a brilliant blue sky, decorated with puffy cloud.  It was just so beautiful that I stopped in my tracks, like that kid who was once transfixed by that shining and mysterious orb.  And then, this verse seemed to drop into my consciousness: “Our help is in the name of the Lord, who made heaven and earth.” [1]

And it was a moment of pure glory – glory even in a world where churches burn and innocents suffer and creation groans and power is abused.

So, why do we stand looking up into the heavens?  Because we need it… for life back down here on earth.

[1] Psalm 124:8

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IT’S A MATTER OF PREPOSITIONS

5/10/2026

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Sunday, May 10, 2026
First Congregational Church of Cheshire
© the Rev. Dr. James Campbell

John 14:15-21

“If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever. This is the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive because it neither sees him nor knows him. You know him because he abides with you, and he will be in you.

“I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you. In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live. On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you. They who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me, and those who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love them and reveal myself to them.”

As most of you know by now, I recently spent a week on the Scottish Island of Iona with a group of about 35 people, all of whom were there to study Celtic Christianity with the scholar, John Phillip Newell.  As part of that experience, every morning at 10 AM, in the Village Hall, Dr. Newell would give a lecture based on his book Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul.  Those lectures were fascinating on many levels.  But, as is often the case, it was during the more spontaneous Q&A sessions that followed, that some of the more memorable things were said.

For example: on one of those mornings, Dr. Newell told us about a recent conversation he had with another theologian I admire named Matthew Fox.  During this conversation, Dr. Fox dropped a bomb.  He said that the Nicene Creed had a gigantic hole right in the middle of it.

Now, in case you don’t know, the Nicene Creed is considered a definitive creedal statement about what it is that all Christians are supposed to believe.   It was adopted at the Council of Nicaea, called by the Roman Emperor Constantine I, in the year 325 CE.  And ever since, this creed has been a foundational document for the church.  And even though we Congregationalist are non-creedal by nature, meaning that we don’t require adherence to a creed in order to be a member of the church, the Nicene Creed remains the unspoken foundation of our theology too.

And so, to hear someone say that it has a big hole right in the middle of it intrigued me, to say the least.

So, what is this hole, this significant deficit in the creed?  Well, according to Fox, it is the stunning failure of the authors to make any mention whatsoever of what Jesus actually said or taught or did.  Instead, this creed, like almost every other creed, including the Statement of Faith of the UCC, is simply a recitation of particular beliefs ABOUT Jesus.  For example, the Nicene Creed declares that Jesus was born of the Virgin Mary by the power of the Spirit.  But then in the very next sentence, it jumps all the way to Jesus being crucified under Pontius Pilate.  And then it continues by stating that he suffered and was buried and the third day he rose again.  He ascended to the right hand of the Father and will come again to judge the living and the dead.

Do you see what just happened?  We went from birth to death as if nothing really important actually happened in between.  Now, how Jesus was born and why Jesus died are important points of theological discussion.  But when those events are isolated from Jesus’s actual ministry and words, then, frankly, what difference can those events make to everyday people in an everyday world?

Because intellectual assent to certain faith claims has never made a good Christian out of anyone.  It’s mostly just made arrogant and self-satisfied Christians who enjoy neat little packages.  But real faith in Jesus is not about accepting some dogma.  It’s not some intellectual test we need to pass.  A religion ABOUT Jesus might be interesting, but it’s just not the same thing as the religion OF Jesus.  It’s a matter of prepositions.  And those prepositions make can all the difference in the world.

A religion about Jesus certainly mattered at the Council of Nicaea.  When faith was boiled down to what everyone had to think as opposed to the way Christ followers should live, well, then, the Roman Empire could slap the name of Jesus on anything, and did – even on those things that directly contradicted what Jesus said.

And that has always been the temptation for a religion ABOUT Jesus.  And in all the intervening centuries, many empires have done the same.  In our own day, Christ has been co-opted for the accumulation of wealth and power – even though Jesus said blessed are the poor and the meek.  Nationalist fervor is labeled Christian.  A war can be declared holy.  Cruelty and hatred can be disguised as sincerely held religious belief.  And all of this is permissible because a religion ABOUT Jesus is not the same thing as the religion OF Jesus.

In today’s Gospel lesson, Jesus parses out the differences very clearly.  This passage begins with a rather stark statement.  Jesus said, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.”

Now, when I hear the word “commandments” I almost always think of the Big Ten – commandments, not basketball.  And I also know that there are 600+ more commandments where those came from.  This book is full of commandments.  So, do I need to keep all of them in order to show my love for Jesus?

Jesus, the faithful Jew, never disparaged the Law of Moses.  But, like other great rabbis of the time, Jesus did give the Law a fresh spin.  In particular, Jesus often pointed out what was underneath all of those commandments.  And for Jesus, it all boiled down to love and justice and how we live with one another.

And that is why Jesus could say just a few verses after this one: “This is my commandment – that you love one another.”[1]  In another place, he said that to love God and neighbor was the fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets.[2]  And much later, a famous follower of Jesus named St. Paul would summarize it like this: “Now abide faith, hope, and love.  But the greatest of these is love.”[3]

“If you love me, you will keep my commandments.”  “If you love me, you will love one another.”

Now, maybe knowing this doesn’t make you feel any better, because you know how tough it can be to love.  And you know that love is often confused with weakness.  And you know that the world is cruel place where love seems to make little difference.

And so, it is that one of the great tragedies of our age is that most folks don’t really believe in the power of love anymore.  We’ve given up on it.  Many churches have given up on love.  Prominent religious and political voices have given up on it – no matter what Jesus said.

And because of that, this call to love one another is not for the faint of heart.  But neither is the Christian life.  Because true love is a discipline.  Love is action far more than feeling.  Love is something that we decide to do, that we struggle with, that we strive for, against the tide, moment by moment, day by day, person by person.

That’s the only way to love.  Otherwise, the concept is so big that you get lost in it.  Love loses its power when we think in terms of the whole world.  But not when we think of the person right in front of us - the polite one and the one who just cut the line at Big Y.  The one who thinks and votes like you and me, and one who doesn’t.  The ones who is kind and gracious and sweet, and the one whose pain spills out in everything they do and say.

That’s what Jesus did.  He met the needs of those who were right in front of him.  He loved the people that were right in front of him.  That’s the religion of Jesus.  It’s a matter of prepositions.  And those prepositions make all the difference in the world.

“If you love me,” Jesus said, “you will keep my commandments.”

[1] John 15:12

[2] Matthew 22:37-40

[3] I Corinthians 13:13

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THROWING STONES

5/3/2026

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Sunday, May 3, 2026 – Easter 5
First Congregational Church of Cheshire
© Rev. Dr. James Campbell

Acts 7:55-60

But filled with the Holy Spirit, he gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God and Jesus standing at the right hand of God. “Look,” he said, “I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God!” But they covered their ears, and with a loud shout all rushed together against him. Then they dragged him out of the city and began to stone him, and the witnesses laid their coats at the feet of a young man named Saul. While they were stoning Stephen, he prayed, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.” Then he knelt down and cried out in a loud voice, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.” When he had said this, he died.

I’ve always loved to collect stones.  I’ve carried them back from the rocky coast of Maine, the mountaintops of Brazil and, most recently, from the holy island of Iona.  For me, stones are the very best kinds of souvenirs, not just because they’re free, but more because a stone is a piece of that place that you actually get to bring home with you.

In the Bible, stones almost always associated with something good.  Psalm 18 declares that “the Lord is my rock and my fortress.”  The epistle of First Peter proclaims that Jesus Christ is the living stone; the cornerstone of our faith. And to emphasize that point, when I was a kid, we sand this marvelous Gospel song: “Jesus is rock in a weary land, a shelter in a time of storm.”  So, stones are good things, solid things, reliable things.  In the right hands, they build cities and bridges and homes.  But in the wrong hands, stones are deadly.

And that is the situation we have in today’s rather shocking passage from the book of Acts.  For some odd reason, the lectionary only lifts up the dramatic conclusion of this story, without telling us how Stephen got into such an awful predicament to begin with.  So let me catch you up to speed.

The early church was growing very rapidly.  And at the mother church in Jerusalem, the twelve apostles simply could not do all the work anymore.  This became crystal clear to them upon the occasion of a major church fight between the Jewish Christians and the Greek-speaking Christians.  The Greek-speakers were sure that there was discrimination against them.  They claimed that their widows were not getting a fair share of the church’s food distribution.   And so, the apostles were called in to settle the dispute.

But as I said, the apostles were overwhelmed.  And so, they appointed seven deacons whose job it was to make sure that the food was distributed fairly amongst all the widows.  One of those deacons was a man named Stephen, who, according to the writer, was full of faith and the Holy Spirit – apparently the only two requirements for being a deacon.

Now, at the same time that the early church was growing so quickly, so was the tension between the Jewish followers of Jesus and those Jews who did not follow Jesus.  And, in the midst of all that tension, and the marking of territory, and the vying for power and influence, people did what people always do: they started to spread rumors, and half-truths, and dangerous innuendos about the opposition.  And one of the targets of this whisper campaign was Stephen.

The opposition claimed that Stephen had committed blasphemy, cursing Moses and the Temple, which was a capital offense.  And so they seized him and dragged to the religious court.  But when he was given a chance to speak in his own defense, instead of addressing the charges against him, he began to preach a very dangerous sermon.  He reminded his fellows that God had sent many prophets over the centuries, who, when they spoke real truth to power, often ended up dead.  Finally, Stephen said, God sent a prophet named Jesus, but he ended up dead too.  And it is at this climactic point that today’s lesson from Acts begins.

When the religious council heard Stephen accuse them of killing the prophets, and then claiming to have a vision of Jesus seated at the right hand of God, they were wild with rage.  A mob mentality took over, and this mob rushed Stephen and dragged him out of the city to stone him to death for his blasphemy.

This was a common punishment.  And lots of towns had stoning pits. Historians say that they were approximately twelve feet deep, so that the accused could not escape.  The person was pushed into the pit, sometimes being killed by the fall itself – which, of course, was a mercy.  But if the fall didn’t do the trick, then one of the witnesses, would be lowered into the pit in order to drop a large stone on the person’s chest.  If the accused survived that, then the witness was lifted out of the pit so that the crowd could rain down stones upon the accused until the person died.

Standing in the crowd that day, not stoning Stephen, but holding the coats of those who did and thereby being an accomplice, was a man named Saul.  He would later have a vision of Jesus on the Road to Damascus, and his name would be changed to Paul.  But that’s another story.

Stephen’s story ends in a hauntingly familiar way.  In a direct imitation of Christ, he asked Jesus to receive his spirit, just as Jesus, from the cross, had asked God to receive his.  And then Stephen prayed for the forgiveness of his executioners; something else our Lord did from the cross.  And then Stephen died – the very first martyr of the Christian faith.

This story is shocking for many of us, removed, as we are from the unpleasant details of our own capital punishment rituals, or the horrific tragedies of collateral damage in war.  But the human impulse to throw stones is never really that far away from any of us.

In 1948, the New Yorker published a short story by Shirley Jackson entitled The Lottery.   In it, Jackson weaves a tale about a modern-day stoning ritual in a small American town.  The story is so haunting because she sets it in a fair-like atmosphere, wherein one person is chosen by lottery each year to be stoned to death in order to ensure a good harvest.  This story is brilliantly subversive because it reminds us of our own propensity toward mob violence, and the all-too-common ways that we learn to accept violence and then to actually participate in violence.

Perhaps not surprisingly, when The Lottery was first published, Jackson received hate mail and death threats, sadly proving the underlying premise of her story – that we all have the capacity to throw stones.

I think that most of us reach for those stones out of pain.  You see, some of us have been stoned by judgments that were totally unfair.  For others, religion was the weapon and you were assured that you simply did not belong.  Still others of you been publicly stoned because of your politics or class or race or gender or status – or any of the other things by which we humans seek to divide and conquer.

And if you have ever been a victim of stoning, then you already know how tempting it is, in your hurt and anger, to pick up those same stones and hurl them back with a deadly precision.  Some of us have become quite expert at that.

And that is the tragic history of our race.  It is the cycle of violence that never ever seems to end.

Except that it can.

In the stoning pit, with rocks raining down upon his defenseless body, Stephen did the unthinkable.  He actually did what we are all called to do.  He imitated Jesus.  He prayed for the forgiveness of his enemies, not as an afterthought, but as a direct response to the pain.  And when he did that, the cycle of violence was broken like a fragile twig that it actually is.  And when he did that, the power dynamic was flipped on its head.  And his accusers no longer had any real power over him.  Because forgiveness changes everything.

And it‘s the only thing that can save us when we’re in a pit.

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TRINITY, FROM THE GROUND UP

STARING INTO SPACE

IT’S A MATTER OF PREPOSITIONS

THROWING STONES

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TRINITY, FROM THE GROUND UP

​STARING INTO SPACE

​IT’S A MATTER OF PREPOSITIONS

THROWING STONES

Archives

Categories

STARING INTO SPACE

IT’S A MATTER OF PREPOSITIONS