What Would You do to Save Someone?
Readings: Acts 7
How far would you go to save someone? What would you do?
I remember as a young child I had a bit of a hero complex. I dreamed of dying to save someone’s life. Maybe from a burning building, or a collapsing cliff, or from a bullet. Even with all the hardship and bullying I experienced, I still had a pretty idealistic sense of society and so I thought about this as an absolute good and a perfect kind of love. That is until the question came up, but who is it that you are saving?
It didn’t strike me till much later, but this began a bigger question, you can save someone’s physical life, but how do you save their lived-out life?
In some way, that is a question that is consistently in the background today, but few are willing to ask. We want people to have freedom and to live their own lives and to pursue happiness and all that lovely stuff, but we also know that we and all people need to live better. We often say, live your life, as long as you're not hurting anyone. Even if it was possible that our endless pursuit of my happiness didn’t hurt anyone, which it does, we must also recognize that we are meant for much more than just not hurting anyone. We are called to live fruitful lives and call all people into account to do the same. Today, we as a society most visibly call our leaders, but we need to realize that we are all leaders, we are all meant to be held accountable.
Last week as we watched these Jewish Freedmen use their freedom to oppose, argue, manipulate, lie, and imprison, Stephen, a Christian who was serving food and miraculously working for God, we saw how important it is to have Jesus Christ free our hearts and not just our bodies. Even if it feels like we are following Jesus through pursuing freedom, or love, or some other good idea, we need put Jesus Christ first as our Lord and Savior. We saw how bodily freedom can still lead to spiritual, mental, emotional, and social imprisonment. We already looked at last week how this shows us that leading people to Jesus is the primary way we help people.
But today, we are looking at how far we are meant to go to help people. Last week as Stephen was put on trial, you will notice that Stephen is mysteriously silent. Here they are putting him on trial, throwing around horribly untrue accusations and we don’t hear Stephen speak up at all. They have already threatened death numerous times and yet Stephen waits. This is a strange kind of strength. Why wouldn’t he defend himself? Why wouldn’t he try to save his life?
I think the only answer is that for Stephen this trial isn’t primarily about him. This is actually a trial between God and them and Stephen’s primary goal is to save them, not to save himself. It honestly feels like he forgoes any sense of his own life and is living for them and for God. Just look at what he says. He doesn’t talk about himself at all, he does try to show the good of his work, or anything like that. He goes to their history with God. He doesn’t have some well-crafted argument. He doesn’t even argue that Jesus was present the whole time. He tries to point their way to see what they are doing.
Through his words, Stephen shows them how often God comes down to us, how often God’s followers don’t have a home, how often his leaders are rejected, how God’s people are enslaved or mistreated, and very gently he shows them how all of this was pointing to Jesus as God, a homeless prophet that would be rejected and mistreated. In my understanding, he is putting a mirror up to what they are doing, through their own history. He is showing them their own fault through things they know, associate with, and agree with, so that they too might repent and turn to Christ.
Of course, this could save him, but that is not his primary purpose, or he would have gone about it a much different way. Instead, this is about saving them. This desire of his is especially made clear in Stephen’s last few moments. As he is literally in the process of being stoned to death, he says, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them”. It has always been about restoring their relationship with God.
It would seem that Stephen does everything that he can to save them and God helps as he gives Stephen the words, the strength, the love, and a vision of heaven; remember God even made Stephen glow like an angel. This vision of Jesus sitting at the right hand of God is for Stephen’s comfort to welcome him home, but I believe it is also for the listeners and for us. This should have reminded all those listening of a passage from the book of Daniel when Daniel himself was enslaved in Babylon. A great hope that one like the Son of Man would come to overthrow the leaders and beast of the day. A hope these Freedmen would probably remember, but it is also the hope for all humanity so it is for us too.
This should remind us that Jesus himself referenced this very passage as he was put on trial by the religious leaders. We should also remember how Jesus himself died on the cross, and see that Stephen does something very similar. He prays that God might receive him, he cries out and then he asks that these people might be forgiven. You see by entering into this saving work and by doing everything he can to save them, Stephen is literally carrying on the work Jesus started on the cross. He is living out the supreme and ultimate love that we have known in Jesus and that we are all meant to live into.
Remember what Jesus commanded, “Love one another as I have loved you”. We see today that this is not some light command. This is not some superficial command. This is a kind of love that puts our lives on the line to save the souls of those we meet and bring them back to God.
Now let's face it, we don’t usually face death for our faith, but we are meant to put our lives on the line nonetheless. In some ways, this is a harder call, because it is a life lived out that we sacrifice. It is not one moment of strength where we push and then join Christ. In some ways I get the early Christians desire for martyrdom, I think I had a little bit of that in my dream as a child. But we have a different kind of martyrdom, we can put our social lives on the line, our emotional, our financial, and more. We have to live with the consequences, but the joyous part is that we also get to live with the positive consequences. We get to see people fed, God take hold, people redeemed, grow in deeper relationships, and more at the same time we might lose friendships and experience resentment and hurt, but the positives really do outweigh the negatives; we have to know and recognize this.
From our very baptism and confirmation, we recognize a call to lay down our lives for God. We are meant to die to everything else and turn to him. This is not a call we can take lightly because it literally means saved lives, ours, and those around us. The hardest thing is that we have to keep pushing ourselves in how far we will go to save another and ourselves. It might be at first your saving work is in simple conversations, in serving people and inviting them into community, but there will be a time where you will have to stand up to something wrong, in them, in yourself, in society and that may lead to sacrifice, but we do all of this with the hope of saving them and bringing them closer to God.
