Sunday after the Ascension, 2010

Text: St. John 15:26-16:4

The Rev. Jerry Kistler

St. Stephen’s Reformed Episcopal Church

Montrose, Colorado

“The Necessity of Martyrdom”

These things I have told you, that you should not be made to stumble. They will put you out of the synagogues; yes, the time is coming that whoever kills you will think that he offers God service.

I’ll never forget a series of photographs I saw displayed in a magazine some years back, in which a young Arab man who had become a Christian was attacked by a mob of young Muslim men armed with metal pipes and knives in order to carry out their Sheria law. The first picture showed the Christian man trying desperately to fight off the attack. The next picture showed him being beaten down to the ground by the others swinging their pipes. The third picture showed the Christian man being stabbed multiple times in the chest and abdomen. And the fourth showed the young man lying on his back, bloodied and bruised, eyes still open, dead on the street with a crowd now celebrating around him.

I was struck by the way this young Christian man seemed so at peace the whole time he was being attacked. I studied his face in each of the pictures and he seemed almost to be smiling, even in the last picture when his eyes looked as if they were beholding eternity.

But a chill ran up and down my spine as I looked at those pictures, and I began to be physically sick. Not because of the gruesomeness of the crime, but because the thought began to run through my mind: Here was a man, my brother in Christ, who was killed simply because he was a Christian… like me. Could this possibly be what God might expect of me some day? And how would I react in the face of my own martyrdom? Could bloody and brutal deaths possibly be what God wants for his people?

Jesus, before He left this earth, told us what to expect from the world if we faithfully followed Him. He said that we would be hated by the world, and in fact that the world would kill many of us. And not only that, but that many would justify the killing of us on the ground that they’d think they were doing God a favor. That’s certainly how we see it played out in history, isn’t it?

The initial persecution of the church was at the hands of the Jews, who were zealous to stamp out Christianity as a dangerous heresy. And so it was, at the death of the proto-martyr, St. Stephen, that those who cast the stones laid down their clothes at the feet of the young Pharisee named Saul, who was consenting to Stephen’s death.

But in the martyrdom of Stephen, we see the far-reaching effects and the purpose God has in allowing the death of his saints. Immediately following the death of Stephen, it’s written in Acts 8:1ff that, “At that time a great persecution arose against the church which was at Jerusalem, and they were all scattered throughout the regions of Judea and Samaria… Therefore those who were scattered went everywhere preaching the word…” You see, the effect of the first organized persecution of the Church was to move the Church out of its comfort zone, out of Jerusalem, so that it would begin to fulfill the very mission Christ had given it at His ascension: that “you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” Far from defeating the Church’s mission, the initial persecutions moved the Church forward in her mission.

That continued to happen through the successive waves of the Roman persecutions. There were ten official persecutions of Church under the Romans, which began with Nero, who of course blamed the Christians for the burning of Rome, and in his sick sense of justice had many of them covered in pitch and lit as torches to give light for his garden party. Under Nero you also have the martyrdom of the apostles Peter and Paul.

But with each successive wave of persecution, the Church actually grew in numbers. The effect was the very opposite of the intent. Rodney Stark The Rise of Christianity estimates that Church grew from probably about one-thousand people in the year 40AD to 33 million by the year 350. That’s an average growth rate of 43 percent per decade. That’s absolutely astounding!

What would cause Christianity to have this amazing expansion? Stark says that actually “Sacrifice and stigma were the dynamo behind the rise of Christianity—the factors that created strong organizations filled with highly committed members ready to do what needed to be done.” Or as Tertullian more colorfully put it: “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.” He said to the Roman officials, “The oftener we are mown down by you, the more in number we grow; the blood of Christians is seed.” Why? Because, on the one hand, sacrifice and stigma tended to eliminate those who were not truly committed—the hangers-on, the people who were Christians in name only —while on the other hand the high costs tended to increase the sense of value the Faith had among those who embraced it.

But then in the fourth and fifth centuries, this spectacular Christian growth was followed by an equally remarkable collapse. The churches which were poised to take the gospel throughout Africa, of example, suddenly faltered, stumbled and soon disappeared without a trace. What happened?

What happened was the Edict of Milan—Constantine’s edict that made Christianity a legal religion, and in reality the favored religion of the Empire. And with that Christianity ceased to be costly. It was a great victory, but also a great defeat.

The victory had been accomplished by compromise with the world. Constantine granted Christian clergy freedom from all taxes. As a result there was a great influx into the ranks of the clergy from those of the curial class who wished relief from the heavy burdens which were crushing them. Christians were given the best jobs, so even wealth could be hoped for by converting to Christianity, where persecution had tended in the past to give pause to only the most committed. So now many were seeking admission into the Church and were swelling the ranks for other than purely spiritual motives.

But then there were the Islamic invasions of North Africa in the Seventh through Tenth Centuries. As a result there was a mass exodus of Christians from there, which proved to be a fatal blow to Christianity in that region. Christianity had become a religion of worldly power, and now that there was a greater power, it just ran away or collapsed under it. The military victories of the armies of Islam seemed to many to prove that Islam was under the favor of God. Many moved over to Islam for the worldly reason that it was better to identified with the new ruling class.

We need to learn from this situation, because I believe we find ourselves in a very similar situation. It is because we have a religion in the West that has had very little cost involved that we see an ever decreasing commitment to the high ideals of the Faith: things like the sacredness of all human life as bearing the image of God; or the costly ideal of absolute celibacy apart from the sacred bonds of matrimony—the union of one man and one woman for life as the only God-ordained “lifestyle” for the practice and enjoyment of sexuality.

We’re seeing the erosion of high ideals in our culture in the Church everyday in the West. But not in places like Africa today, because in one sense, they don’t have the luxury we have to play around with all sorts of “revisionist doctrines” and “alternative lifestyles.” Their fighting for their lives; they’re fighting for soul of Africa. And they’ve come to know, through much suffering, that the only thing that can give them victory in that battle is the Faith of Jesus once delivered to the saints as authoritatively contained in the Scriptures, defined by the Creeds, and lived out in the lives of faithful Christian people for two-thousand years.

But we’re so far advanced from them! We’re so much more civilized! We’re so much more moderate and tolerant in our faith here in America. That may be why, as Bishop Sutton has said, the American Church does not have martyrdom in its history, and why, as a result, the Church in America is tending towards decline.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, in his famous address to the graduating class of Harvard University in 1978 said this: He said that in the West

“The majority of people have been granted well-being to an extent their fathers and grandfathers could not even dream about; it has become possible to raise young people according to these ideals, preparing them for and summoning them towards physical bloom, happiness, possession of material goods, money and leisure, towards an almost unlimited freedom in the choice of pleasures. So who should now renounce all this, why and for the sake of what should one risk one’s precious life…?

“Today, well-being in the life of Western society has begun to reveal its pernicious mask…Should I be asked whether I would propose the West, such as it is today, as a model to my country, I would frankly have to answer negatively. No, I could not recommend your society as an ideal for the transformation of ours. Through deep suffering, people in our country have now achieved a spiritual development of such intensity that the Western system in its present state of spiritual exhaustion does not look attractive…..Six decades for our people and three decades for the people of Eastern Europe; during that time we have been through a spiritual training far in advance of Western experience. The complex and deadly crush of life has produced stronger, deeper and more interesting personalities than those generated by standardized Western well-being.”

Bottom-line: America has lost its soul through comfort and ease. That may be changing. God may be beginning to chasten His people in the West. We can see it in pastors be sent to prison for preaching against homosexuality, and laws being passed in Canada which are tending in the same direction, making it a hate crime to speak against homosexuality. We can’t be that far behind.

The Sword of Islam has been raised in the West again, and one day we may be called on to suffer like that young Arab Christian even here in the United States.

Our faith is becoming more costly, and that’s a good thing. But we must not shrink away from it because it involves a cost. We must embrace it all the more, that our faith may grow in strength and purity.

St. Peter writes, “Beloved, do not think it strange concerning the fiery trial which is to try you, as though some strange thing happened to you; but rejoice to the extent that you partake of Christ’s sufferings, that when His glory is revealed, you may also be glad with exceeding joy. If you are reproached for the name of Christ, blessed are you, for the Spirit of glory and of God rests upon you… For the time has come for judgment to begin at the house of God; and if it begins with us first, what will be the end of those who do not obey the gospel of God?” (I Pet. 4:12-14, 17).

Persecutions of the Church are never a mistake; they’re never by accident. They are designed by God to purify, to strengthen, to move forward His often recalcitrant Church, that it may carry on its mission to the world.

God “grant us wisdom, grant us courage for the facing of this hour.” +