Musings on the Daily Lectionary

In today's reading from Acts, the killing of Stephen leads to a wholesale persecution of the first Christians. Acts provides no insights into what those Christians were feeling at that time or what they thought about these developments. But surely they had to have been perplexed. They had sought to be faithful, to do as God had called them to do, and now people were being arrested and even killed.

It's speculation on my part, but I have to assume that it was only much later, in hindsight, that these Christians were able to have the perspective of the book of Acts. In our reading, the persecution of the Church leads directly to the Church spreading out over the Mediterranean world, fulfilling the command of Jesus to be his witnesses "in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth."

Very often in my own life of faith, or my feeble attempts at one, it is very difficult to make sense of events. Sometimes the phrase, "No good deed goes unpunished" comes readily to mind. But I think that some popular notions of faith are very unhelpful at moments like these. Faith has never been about easy platitudes that make everything okay. Faith is about trusting, even in times of terrible darkness, that somehow God's will is nonetheless moving forward. Surely the Christians in today's reading from Acts must have cried out, must have demanded of God, "Why?" or "How long?" After all, they knew well the psalms of lament that that speak this way.

Many times I would like faith to mean that if I do certain things and believe certain things then God will have to treat me favorably. But such easy faith formulas eventually fail us. And when they do, God may open the door to a deeper faith which dares to trust that God is at work even in life's most difficult moments. After all, that is the model we have from Jesus in his prayer at Gethsemane.

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