I can hear, very clearly, my mother telling me not to throw stones. I loved throwing stones. I still do love throwing stones. Well, actually, it’s not throwing stones I love; it’s throwing anything: cricket balls, boomerangs, Frisbees, sticks, discuses, anything, anything at all. If it can be thrown, I like throwing it.
And my mother was always telling me not to throw things. Somebody might get hurt.
I remember, one day, watching two boys who were usually friends throwing stones at one another. They had had a disagreement and so they stood some little distance apart throwing stones at one another. I think the correct term was “pegging rocks” at one another. And I was horrified. These two boys were genuinely trying to hurt one another. These “friends” were now enemies and their weapons were stones. Their aim was to hurt, to maim, to kill.
When I threw stones it was not for these reasons. I threw stones for fun; to see how far I could throw or how accurately I could throw, just for the sheer exhilaration of feeling my arm turn over and loose some projectile into space. But not to hurt someone, not to maim, and most definitely not to kill.
This morning we hear of stones, stones turned loose to kill. We hear of Stephen proclaiming his Lord and dying his death: “Lord, do not hold this sin against them. Father, forgive them; they do not know what they do.”
Stephen, of course, is the church’s first martyr, the first of countless followers of Christ to suffer and die for their faith.
What are we to do with Stephen?
I ask this question because I have a small problem: it seems to me that Stephen is sometimes held up as a yardstick against which we should measure our discipleship. Have you been stoned for your faith? No? Then perhaps you’re not a true Christian. Have you suffered for Jesus? Have you carried your cross? That kind of thinking.
This morning I want to tell you that I do not subscribe to a Christianity which claims that suffering is the mark of the Christian. I want to say that pain is not God’s way of testing our faith. I am going to insist that the God I worship and love is not in favour of “pegging rocks” to sort out the true Christians from the false.
I asked my wife, “Is suffering ever good?”
Her answer was, “It depends.”
Now, I ask you, what sort of an answer is that? It depends! It depends … on what?
And Carol’s answer is, “Context.”
She gently reminded me that I have three wonderful children. And there was some suffering involved in that. I was there for all three births and so I know that there was some suffering. It’s not called labour for nothing. It was jolly hard work! And Carol worked hard, too.
When something good and beautiful and downright wonderful comes out of it, then hard work, a little suffering may well be worthwhile.
But what about when nothing good or beautiful or wonderful results: is suffering okay then?
This, of course, is a very twenty-first century question. The people of Jesus’ time would never understand this question. The people who surrounded Jesus could no more have made sense of this question than we might understand Aramaic.
Jesus and his disciples lived in a world where ninety percent of people lived from hand to mouth. Peasant farmers survived on their meagre crops, as long as drought and warfare did not decimate them; medicine was little more than witchcraft; life itself was fragile in the extreme and suffering was inevitable. It was the norm and not the exception.
The possessed and lame and blind and bleeding people Jesus met were not rarities; they were commonplace. It was Jesus’ compassion and gift of healing that were exceptional. Jesus’ actions suggested, against all the odds, that suffering is not God’s way.
Stephen was not stoned because that is God’s way; Stephen was stoned because that is humanity’s way. God offers healing not stones.
I say again, “Suffering is not God’s test of our faithfulness.”
Jesus said,
God has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour
And the very next thing Jesus does is go to Capernaum and heal a man with an unclean spirit, and then he goes to Peter’s mother’s house and heals her. Suffering is not God’s way.
What does all of this mean for us?
I said last week that this week I would say something about the Close the Gap campaign.
What were you doing at 9am on Wednesday, 13 February? Do you recall Prime Minister Mr Rudd delivering his historic apology to the Indigenous people of our land? Do you recall him pointing out the gap in life expectancy between Indigenous Australians and white Australians? Do you recall his promise to help close that gap?
The Prime Minister was not the first person to identify that the original peoples of this continent die on average 17 years before their white counterparts. Nor was he the first person to elucidate the educational, material, social and other disadvantages which daily confront and daily harm one significant part of our population. While we acknowledge the ills of the past and express our regrets about some of those things, it is the present ills which we can do something about.
The Close the Gap campaign is about making a commitment to establish, for the first time in two hundred and twenty years, equality between the first peoples of this land and those who settled here and who made for themselves a country of great wealth and advantage, but who did so at the expense of others.
When our gospels are so full of stories of Christ reaching out to people in need, what do you imagine his response would be to our social injustices? Would Jesus reach out a hand to touch and heal an Indigenous person? Would Jesus weep at the death in custody of a young black Australian? When Jesus says, “I go to prepare a place for you”, can you hear him making that claim for aborigines every bit as much as for you and me?
And what are we, as followers of Christ, to do?
Here is another stone throwing image: have you ever seen a stone thrown into a pool of water? Can you see the circles of ripples spreading out from the point of entry of the stone, spreading further and further, reaching out to the very limits of the pool?
That, for me, is the image I want to take with me when I think about closing the gap. The little stones of conscience that each of us can toss into the pool of indifference in our society can spread like ripples, touching and influencing far beyond the limits of our imaginations.
Where Stephen spoke out to proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ to the people of his time, we too can proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ for the Indigenous people of our time. Where Jesus brought life to those he touched, we can seek to bring life through our support of the Close the Gap campaign.
