Thursday, November 22, 2018

Seed of the Church

Thursday, November 22, 2018

Saul was one of the witnesses, and he agreed completely with the killing of Stephen.  A great wave of persecution began that day, sweeping over the church in Jerusalem; and all the believers except the apostles were scattered through the regions of Judea and Samaria.  Acts 8:1(NLT)

When you’re in eleventh grade and your life revolves around football practice, games, math tests, and wondering if you’ll get into college, it would hardly dawn on you that something history-shaping is happening 1600 miles away in Dallas.  
Today is the 55th anniversary of the assassination of President Jack Kennedy.  There have been volumes written by the press, investigators and conspiracy-theorists, about this event.  But that day, I just thought it was strange that football practice had been cancelled.  In the upcoming days I watched the funeral and unfolding drama of the accused assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald being shot by Jack Ruby, live, on-camera.  All of it was bewildering and incomprehensible to a 16-year-old whose depth of thought didn’t reach past watching Andy and Opie make sense of Aunt Bea and Barney every Monday evening. 
Digress about 1800 years and you have Tertullian, 2nd century Christian author who wrote of the overwhelming persecution of believers that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.[2]  Trying to make sense of the stoning of Stephen a century after the fact, Tertullian had the hindsight perspective of the wave of persecution that swept over Jesus’ disciples, and how that blood-bath scattered believers everywhere.  And in the flight to avoid torture and death, the Gospel was carried around the world.
And this is a scenario that has been played-out over and again in history.  Every time there is a move to stamp-out the church it is like pouring water on a grease fire; the Kingdom of Christ spreads with ferocious faith, despite the threats.
It’s strange to think how such events as the stoning of Stephen, as well as the modern-day assassination of a president can inspire movements.  Kingdoms topple, paradigms shift, hearts are rearranged – all because evil wants to strut, but God shouts back with calm resistance.
In the case of Stephen and the early church, Saul was part of the mob; he was given the coats of the execution mob to hold.  But he probably yelled encouragement to inflict death on Christ’s witness, Stephen.  Sometime later it was Saul who would have his heart and life rearranged after a meeting with Jesus on the Damascus Road.  Jesus gave him a new name, Paul, and we have that name affixed as author to roughly one-third of the New Testament scriptures as evidence of just how drastically a life can change when the blood of a martyr becomes a seed in your history.                                                
Jack Kennedy was not a martyr for the cause of Christ; he was hardly what you’d call “a saint”.  He was a politician…beloved and despised by political types, but a fallible human being with a reputation of infidelity.  We don’t know much about Stephen, other than he was a well-respected leader in the early church, who didn’t keep his mouth closed when he had the opportunity to be a witness for Christ; neither did he keep silence when they threw the stones to knock the life out of his body.  Stephen died begging God to forgive his killers.
For You Today
A question that comes to mind for us all is to what star would you hitch YOUR wagon?  Would you leap into a movement for a president, gunned-down, heroically-promoting his political agenda?  Or would it be to join Stephen, a nobody, erased by an angry mob, simply proclaiming the agenda of a Heavenly Kingdom?
Which seed would you plant?
You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road; have a blessed day.

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[1] Title Image: Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons Rembrandt (Public Domain)
[2] Apologeticus, Chapter 50

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