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The Fifth Sunday of Easter
May 18, 2014
St. John’s Church, Kingsville
The Rev’d Fr. Timothy E. Kroh
In the Name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen .
During the Great Fifty Days of Easter, we don’t have a reading from the Hebrew Scriptures except for the Psalm. Instead we hear from the Acts of the Apostles, where we find St. Stephen, one of the seven first Deacons, enduring a brutal execution for his faith. Acts shoves a dangerous shadow into the joy of Easter.
Stephen, filled with the Holy Spirit and giving great witness to Jesus Christ, is stoned to death by an angry crowd. Hearing the Good News as Stephen preached it, they covered their ears and shouted. Isn’t that a frightening image? They couldn’t imagine that God would stoop down to our level and become manifest in Jesus, live among human beings, die on the cross and rise again.
St. Stephen is what we call the ‘proto-martyr” of the Church, the first to die for his faith in
Christ. And although it seems so removed from our reality, the world is still making martyrs of the faithful. In the nation of Sudan right now, a young woman, Meriam Yehya Ibrahim, 27, sits in prison with her two-year old child. Miriam is also eight months pregnant. Mariam has been sentenced to die because she will not renounce her Christian faith. Although she was raised a
Christian, her absent Father was Muslim, and that is all the Sudanese court needed to condemn her to death. As she waits and the world watches, she is just one example of how following Christ can be costly; deeply costly beyond anything we could imagine.
Seeing that the world is still a place where God’s kingdom is opposed, do our hearts become troubled? Yes, very often they do. We wonder how we can build our faith to the point where we can believe in a different world – where we can believe that God is everywhere and in everything, even in the midst of hardship and suffering and pain.
As they threw stones at St. Stephen, he responds with words that parallel the words of Our
Lord as he is dying on the cross. The difference between Stephen’s prayer and that of Jesus is subtle; Stephen prays that their sins would be forgiven, and Jesus, containing within himself the fullness of God the Creator and Spirit, offers immediate forgiveness to those who crucified him,
“for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). The one who lives as a disciple of Jesus patterns his life after the life of Jesus; and the one who identifies his death with the death of Jesus must also forgive like Jesus.
So following Jesus is a challenging and sometimes costly enterprise. How can we be equipped to stand in his footsteps, to live and live and forgive as he did? We can listen to St. Peter’s words in the epistle, and believe that we can access the pure, spiritual milk that God offers us.
That’s where we can begin again, regardless of how old we’ve become in Christ. We are offered that nourishment in many ways – through prayer, through the fellowship of the Church, through good works done with compassion in the Name of Christ, and through the Sacraments. The most powerful way of growing in the spirit is through sharing the Holy Eucharist, where Christ dwells in us and we dwell in him; where we are in Christ and Christ is in us; where we are at perfect unity with each other because we both receive and become the Body of Christ. This is the deep well of

2 power that helps us continue looking for ways to build that Kingdom of heaven here while we wait to take our place in the world to come.
When we begin to believe that we are indeed one with Christ, and that Christ does indeed dwell within us, we find ourselves doing amazing things. We might first think of those people like St.
Stephen or Miriam who are willing to give their lives for what they believe. But then we must also think of ourselves who may be called to build the kingdom in different ways, through teaching, through our love, through the example of our integrity and genuineness, through our compassion and forgiveness, through the love of Christ which flows through us as the living stones of God’s holy temple.
Our Gospel today is among my favorite passages of scripture, and the hope that is within us is that there are many dwelling places in God’s kingdom, enough for us all. But our Gospel doesn’t end with that promise. When Thomas asks to see the Father, Jesus reminds them that he and the
Father are one. In the typical theology of St. John’s Gospel, the unity of God and Christ is stressed and repeated over and over again, and those who have seen Jesus, Thomas and us, are reminded that in Jesus, we have all seen the Father.
If Jesus and the Father are one, what does that tell us about God the Creator? God is like Jesus, who will sit down with five thousand strangers and share a meal handed from hand to hand, starting with almost nothing, and somehow where is more than enough for everyone. God is like Jesus, who was reviled, persecuted, tortured, and executed, and yet spoke words of forgiveness to his tormentors.
God is like Jesus, who taught us that the kingdom of God would come not with political or military power, but through love and compassion, by touching the unclean, feeding the hungry, healing those bound by disease, inviting the outcast, reconciling enemies, always seeking to forgive and to be forgiven; all done for the sake, and through the love, of Christ.
The Kingdom here will never be finished, it just continues to grow through you and through me, through every child of God reborn through Baptism. Evil will never cease trying to destroy the goodness of those who seek to bring this Kingdom into the world. And so we need to continue building ourselves up, but also to work together, pray together, become that holy nation, a holy community, right here with those sitting with and around you.
Jesus never promised a safe and trouble-free life for those who followed him. He was always very honest about the fact that “the world” would most often cover its ears and shout, and sometimes throw stones. But we believe that we are chosen and called to do this work. That's a very challenging and occasionally costly call, but there's a huge payoff: when we seek to follow our resurrected Lord, and to be at unity with him, then we are living stones of God’s holy temple, sharers in Christ’s royal priesthood.
Each and every one of you is called to take your share in bringing this sacred kingdom into the world. The Good News is that Jesus has promised never to leave us. In him, we are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people, in order that you may proclaim the mighty acts of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.
In the Name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen .