The Price of the Truth/
On Why to Become a Fanatic

As we continue to experience the Word of the Lord together, Let us Pray. You are the truth we seek, gracious one. You are the way, and you are the life. As we seek you in truth and in life, we ask for your guidance along the way. Speak Lord, your servants are listening. If these words are not Your Word, may they be forgotten and come to naught. But if they be Thy Word, may they adhere to our hearts, forever transforming us from glory into glory, into the creatures you would have us be, Thou who art our Rock and Redeemer, Amen.

Last week I preached on the lectionary section of Acts. It was in the second chapter, and was about what the church is called to be. This week we find ourselves again in weekly lectionary section of Acts, this time in the 7^th chapter. And as last week, some context will prove helpful.

The story that is found from chapter 6 through the first verses of chapter 8 are about Stephen and Philip. Stephen is not an apostle, he is just a follower of Christ, a disciple if you will. He is arrested and is brought in front of the religious leaders. He is accused of blasphemy, by claiming that Jesus is the messiah. He makes a speech after the accusation which basically says, ‘How can you accuse me of blasphemy, look at you.’ And we pick it up there. So, hear now The Word of the Lord as it comes to us in Acts. Listen. Acts 7.51-8.1. The Word of the Lord…Thanks be to God.

Other than Jesus himself, Stephen is the first martyr for the faith. Stephen asserts that Jesus is the exalted Lord, by calling him the Son of Man and saying that he sees the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God in verse 56. This is truth, and by proclaiming it, Stephen seals his fate.

I’m not sure which is scarier. Is the loan singular act of a mob against one person for speaking their mind scarier, or is the mob mentality that will strike down many scarier? On the one hand, you create the fear that if you happen to be standing around, and happen to speak your mind, and that happens to offend the wrong people, you might be struck down on the spot. On the other, there would be a group of people seeking out people of a certain creed, pulling them out, and then putting them out. Neither idea appeals to me much. And both represent something terrible.

But either way, the message from Acts is clear. Stephen had a vision, he spoke the truth, and he got killed for it. In this chapter in Acts, we learn that religious freedom is important. We live in the land of religious freedom, where we can speak our minds without fear of being killed, or made to take it back, or made to look foolish. Back then, Stephen was made to look foolish for his beliefs, and when he didn’t take it back, he was killed. Even today in other lands, standing up for the truth is something that can get one in trouble.

At Princeton Theological Seminary, from whence the really great preachers come, there is a cafeteria, obviously. Outside of Princeton Theological Seminary’s cafeteria, a place in which I worked for the three years I went there, there is a bronze plaque inscribed with the names of Princeton graduates, who, like Stephen, paid for their vision in blood.

Walter Macon Lawrie – Thrown overboard by pirates in the China Sea, 1847.

John Rogers Peal – Killed with his wife by a mob at Lien Chou, China, 1905.

James Joseph Reed – Fatally beaten at Selma, Alabama, March 11, 1965.

When you read these, a few things pop up almost instantly. First, the early church was not the only one who suffered the loss of martyrs. There is a general thought that martyrdom stopped when Constantine made Christianity the official state religion in the 4^th century. But many folks have been killed for visions of the kingdom of God since then. Second, beware to the spouses of pastors, preachers, visionaries, and ministers. They will throw you off a boat just for associating with someone who sees into the kingdom, and tries to speak the truth about the reality of it. Third, along with the danger today, this hits home. 1965 in a neighboring state. Our country that reports religious freedom is condemned by this plaque for letting a pastor be killed 40 years ago in the state that shares our state’s largest border. A pastor had and shared a vision of the kingdom of God here on earth, where all people are created equal, and lived that truth and got killed for it.

We still don’t exactly live in the country of religious freedom, not exactly. We may be as close as a society can get, but by nature, and history backs this up, when folks see the real visions of the kingdom of God, they are met with much skepticism. And with good cause. All I have to do is mention Heaven’s Gate and the Hale-Bop comet, or Waco Texas and the Branch Davidians, or Jim Jones and the People’s Temple of Jonestown, and you have the same impression implanted in your mind. It is the impression that we all have, and that the media played up highly. Either the followers of things like that are under the hypnotic spell of a maniac, and are the victims of an insane leader who led them to this insanity. Or, the followers of these people are mostly poor, ignorant, oppressed people whose suffering made them easy prey for the alluring promises of a crazed person. In other words, both theories assume that in the modern world, only insane people would die for what they believe, and that only insane people have visions of the kingdom of God.

In the United States, we have “freedom of religion,” which means we are free to exercise our faith – as long as we do so within certain limits, as long as I don’t become a fanatic – like the poor, deranged folk at Jonestown, or in Waco Texas, or in Rancho Santa Fe, California who committed suicide rather than forsake their belief. While we have the freedom to be religious, it does not seem to involve freedom to die for what we believe, because only an insane fanatic would do that.

The story of Stephen reminds us who practice our religion in the proper polite, civil, mentally balanced manner that once there were Christians who quite joyfully parted with possessions, family, friends, even life itself to remain faithful. Stephen is portrayed here as a hero of the faith, a quite rational person who died for the same faith by which he lived. Not to die for what you hold most dear would seem, to the church of Acts, to be the essence of irrationality, even insanity.

The trick, you see, in being willing to die for something is to make sure you die for something that is true. The Jim Jones’, the David Koreshes, and the Marshall Applewhites all find a people willing to die for their beliefs. What makes it sad is that the truth was not with them. Stephen was not a suicide, for he knew that his life belonged to God, that his life was held in the hands of God. If we lived like we knew that our lives were held in the hands of God, if we had the courage to seek the truth and to envision the kingdom of God, how would things be different? How would our world be different? How would our personal lives be different? How would our Norcross Presbyterian Church be different?