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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