Reverend Jonathan Waits
Sermon: The Fruit of Boldness (Acts 6:1-8:4)
Date: July 2, 2023
A few years ago, I picked up a copy of David McCullough’s book, 1776. It’s a gripping story of the events of that incredibly consequential year in the history of our nation. The story, however, is not what you might expect going into it. When we think about the year 1776, our thoughts are mostly shaped by the momentous event that happened on July 4 and which we are in the midst of celebrating, with the main events coming on Tuesday. That, of course, was the day we officially declared independence from the British crown, establishing ourselves as a sovereign nation.
Yet if someone were to imagine that everything went smoothly and easily from that point forward for our now nascent nation, they would be entirely incorrect. Reading McCollough’s book gives a pressing sense of the true desperation of our situation and the extraordinarily fragile nature of the freedom we had risen up to claim for ourselves. The book ends on a grim, hopeless note. The infant American people suffered mightily through that year, experiencing far more setbacks and painful defeats than anything that much resembled victory. What’s more, the British authorities made a point of going after the men who penned their names to that original document. The final line of the Declaration of Independence said, “And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.” The British made sure a great many of them paid the price of those first two things. They may have taken a bold stand for freedom in that sweltering conference room in Philadelphia, but they would pay dearly for it.
This is something like what followers of Jesus have been experiencing since the beginning. His people have often taken bold stands to advance the message and mission of Jesus. But this doesn’t mean their efforts went smoothly or easily. In fact, more often than not, the rule of history has been that boldness from the church results in persecution from the world.
Well, this week brings us to the fourth part of our teaching series, The Story of Us. This summer we are walking through the story of the church as told in Dr. Luke’s gripping narrative in what we know of as the book of Acts. The story of the church is truly an incredible one. It is the story of how God worked through people not so different from you and me to create and expand the movement through which He intended to advance the message and mission His Son came to inaugurate. Realistically speaking, the church should never have even gotten off the ground. It proclaimed a view of reality radically different from anything the world had ever known and which should have been pounded into the dust by the wealthy and the powerful. Instead, though, in the span of 300 years it conquered the largest and most powerful empire the world had ever known up to that point in history. It didn’t stop there, though, and as I mentioned last week, the movement of Jesus is today the largest and fastest growing in the world. People all around the world give up literally everything in order to join this movement—our movement. This is the story of us, and it’s an awfully good one.
At this point in the story we have seen how the church exploded into existence from nothing. We have seen how a group of demoralized and defeated men and women who thought they had lost everything and were fearful for their own lives were empowered by the news of the resurrection of Jesus from the dead and the indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit, and began proclaiming this message to the world around them. They spoke it and they lived it together which created this incredible community that drew people in like moths to a flame. Eventually, though, they began to face some obstacles to moving forward. As we saw over the last couple of weeks, though, they powered through each of these, whether external or internal in origin, by boldly remaining glued to the message and mission of Jesus, and taking it with all the seriousness it deserved. They did not allow anything to sway them from the path and constantly looked for ways to boldly—which is not the same thing as foolishly by the way—proclaim the resurrected Christ and His kingdom. Hearing what they did to advance the Gospel should encourage us. That’s why Luke told this story.
Now, there are some parts of this story coming up in the next few weeks that are really exciting. We’re going to see God do incredible things as the church continues to pursue a path of faithfulness in the face of a growing opposition from the world. But before we get there, I want to take just a minute and set a bit of the other side of the story in front of us this morning. You see, when Jesus’ followers rise up to boldly take courageous, God-honoring stances that fly in the face of what the culture currently pronounces as good and right—something the church was doing then and which it still is in the business of doing today—the world is going to respond, and the response isn’t going to be pretty. Two weeks ago we talked about being bold. Last week we talked about taking the church with the seriousness it deserves. This week I want to show you what can—and often does—happen when we do it. If you have a copy of the Scriptures handy this week, find your way to Acts 6 and we’ll take a look together at this next part of the story.
The story opens with the church continuing to grow and grow and grow. The church is growing so much and so quickly that it starts to run into an entirely new kind of problem: organization. Remember Luke’s comment that the church members shared everything in common and used their collective resources to help meet the needs of their neighbors? Well, one of the neediest social groups back then were widows. The place of women in this society was awful. A woman by herself was in a terribly difficult place. While there were a few exceptions, she generally couldn’t work, couldn’t own anything, couldn’t buy anything. She was on her own and there really wasn’t much in the way of help available to her. It was only natural, then, for the church to take serious efforts to meet their needs. One of these was food. As a result, there was a daily distribution of food to widows.
This kind of thing sounds and feels really good in theory. Reality, though, tends to be a bit more complicated. In reality, organizational challenges combined with personal biases can quickly make a mess out of what started out as an entirely noble venture. Well, as the church grew, this very thing started happening. Look at 6:1: “In those days, as the disciples were increasing in number, there arose a complaint by the Hellenistic Jews against the Hebraic Jews that their widows were being overlooked in the daily distribution.” The believers were letting their natural racial biases affect how they were doing ministry. Good thing nothing like that happens much today… In any event, the problem got bad enough that a complaint was raised and the church faced her first organizational crisis. How were the leaders going to handle this?
Reading this part of the story we are tempted to take it lightly. Of course overlooking the widows who had a Greek background in favor of those with a Jewish background wasn’t right. The solution was easy: quit doing that. But as you read this, you get the sense that with the possible exception of the threats against their lives, this was the single biggest challenge the church faced in these early days. And, given what I said a couple of weeks ago about mission-focused groups like this tending to double down in the face of external obstacles, this was the first challenge that had the potential to fracture the internal unity of the group, at which point it would have collapsed under its own weight. Even Ananias and Sapphira didn’t pose this kind of threat. So how were the apostles going to handle this? Well, the natural response would have been for them to wade in waist deep, seek to resolve things by both example and command, and set some clear policies in place to hopefully prevent future issues. This would have been a strong show of leadership and would have preserved their power in what was quickly becoming an organization rather than merely a movement. Almost any leadership guru today would have said the same thing. What they actually did, though, comes as quite a surprise.
Let’s take a look at this starting in v. 2: “The Twelve summoned the whole company of the disciples [for the first church business meeting] and said, ‘It would not be right for us to give up preaching the world of God to wait on tables.’” In other words: “We’re not getting involved in that. It would not be right for us to stop doing what only we can do in order to get involved with what somebody else is perfectly capable of doing.” Continuing in v. 3: “Brothers and sisters, select from among you seven men of good reputation, full of the Spirit and wisdom, whom we can appoint to this duty. But we will devote ourselves to prayer and to the ministry of the word.” Do you see what’s happening here? They essentially look at the church and say: “Yep, we have a problem. You deal with it. Pick out the people you want to deal with it, and we’ll bless them to go deal with it so we can focus on what only we can do.”
Come back to the story with me and think for a minute about how radical a thing they did here. The apostles had a perfect opportunity to consolidate their power. Culturally they would have been considered fools for not doing so. Today, we would have written them off as arrogant elitists. They weren’t willing to stop standing up front and getting all the attention in order to serve these poor widows and probably orphans too? What a selfish, high-minded decision! How dare they refuse to come down off their high horses in order to attend to the needs of the least, last, and lost around them. The people needed to be able to see their leaders leading and here was a perfect chance to do so and make it personal. They shouldn’t have been leading that movement at all until they had their fill of humble pie. They weren’t following Jesus’ example any longer. They were failing it.
Yet the apostles understood something very important that Paul would later bring out in his letters: every single member of the church has a role to play in the body. If one person tries to take on the work that should be done by someone else, the whole body is set off kilter and is hamstrung in its ability to accomplish the more important task of advancing the Gospel message. As it turns out and although for a different reason, the apostles’ reaction to this challenge would be just as bold today as it was back then. Yet look what happens as a result of their decision in v. 7: “So the word of God spread, the disciples in Jerusalem increased greatly in number, and a large group of priests [that would be the guys who should have been the most vigorously opposed to the movement] became obedient to the faith.” Indeed, when we take the church seriously and apply Gospel boldness to the challenges we face, great things can happen.
And the thing about boldness like this is that it’s infectious. When people see other members of a community taking bold steps to advance the mission of the community, they are often driven to pursue similar expressions of boldness. Social peer pressure can work in a positive way like this. It’s the “everybody’s doing it” phenomenon. Usually this doesn’t play out very well, but if the thing everybody’s doing is boldly living out the life of Christ the net effect is really positive. Furthermore, when a church actively looks to raise up new leaders from within its ranks, there is always a good chance of finding some. In this case, the first church struck gold.
One of the leaders called before the apostles to be tasked with resolving the organizational issues in the daily food lines was a man named Stephen. Stephen turned out to be a powerhouse on par with the apostles themselves when it came to advancing the mission of the church in the public square. And, since he was probably not a native Hebrew, he appealed to a totally different demographic than the apostles. Stephen—who, ironically, is never actually mentioned as serving tables, you know, the thing he was appointed to do—goes out and follows the apostles’ lead in boldly advancing the mission of Jesus. Boldness drove the church through challenges and kept it running right on down the road.
Like the apostles, Stephen is hauled before the religious leaders, but this time on false charges. You see, when the world steps out to oppose us, we should not ever expect fair or just treatment. Yet he continues following in the apostles’ footsteps and offers this incredibly bold response to their question as to whether or not the charges were true. The reality is that all he had to do was deny the charges, or better yet, use his great wisdom to explain why his opponents’ distortions of his words weren’t true, and they probably would have let him go. He opts for boldness, though, and in the longest recorded sermon in Acts, he turns the tables on the religious leaders and shows by appealing to the ancient Hebrew Scriptures how it is the broader people of Israel, including their leaders, who are guilty of opposing God in their resistance to the Gospel message. And at this point we want to stand up and applaud Stephen for speaking truth to power. He displays incredible moral courage here. He shows this remarkably bold willingness to call things what they are. And what happens?
I’ll tell you in just a second, but let’s go back to our nation’s founding. In the nice Hollywood-ized ending to the story told in films like The Patriot, we defeated the British in a great victory and set about refining the greatest and longest-lasting national constitution the world has ever seen. We claimed our freedom and set ourselves on a path of becoming what author, Bill Bennett, calls the last best hope of humanity. We won the war and we all lived happily ever after. So then, in the Hollywood version of our story, after Stephen makes his great speech to the religious leaders, drops his mic, they quietly back down, the crowd changes its mind, and the church grows to dominate the world. Sounds great, doesn’t it? Too bad that’s not what happened.
Look at the story with me at the end of chapter 7. Starting at v. 54: “When they heard these things, they were enraged and gnashed their teeth at him.” Stephen didn’t change any hearts or minds with his boldness. He just gave them confirmation that what they wanted to do was the right and necessary thing to do. And what was that? Jump down to v. 58: “They dragged him out of the city and began to stone him.” Stoning is a pretty brutal way to die. It’s when people gather around you so you can’t escape and throw big rocks at you until you die from the wounds. Now, from a churchy perspective he had a pretty incredible death scene including a vision of Jesus Himself and offering forgiveness to the people actively throwing rocks at him with the intent of killing him. But the point is that he was killed. He was bold for the faith…and he was killed for it. Painfully. Stephen, this man who was bold for the faith, became the first person to die because of his decision to follow Jesus.
Then things got even worse. Look at what happened next. From the beginning of chapter 8: “On that day a severe persecution broke out against the church in Jerusalem, and all except the apostles were scattered throughout the land of Judea and Samaria. Devout men buried Stephen and mourned deeply over him. Saul, however, was ravaging the church. He would enter house after house, drag off men and women, and put them in prison.” So, not only did Stephen’s boldness result in his own death, but his death actually proved to be the final crack in the dam holding back the flood of persecution waiting for the church. It gave way, exploding persecution all over the Jesus followers. We rightly celebrate boldness on the part of followers of Jesus. We are rightly encouraged by it. It inspires us to pursue similar expressions. But when our boldness sets us in opposition to the world, things are not always going to go well for us in the short term. You see, sometimes, boldness sparks persecution.
Well, what are we supposed to do with this? I think there are three ways to respond. The first is anger. This man stepped out to boldly advance God’s cause. The apostles had been doing this. In fact, they had gotten brought before the council twice so far and gotten off with nothing more than a beating. Okay, yeah, they paid their pound of flesh, but not like this. Why should we boldly step out there when this is the kind of thing that’s coming? Jesus needs to do a better job of taking care of His servants. Okay, yeah, Stephen had a vision of Jesus, but how about a vision of Jesus he got to then describe to people in order to make his witness even more powerful. The injustice of all of this combined with the apparent inattention of God—especially considering that this was the lynchpin that resulted in persecution finally being blown all over the church—makes something inside of us seethe with anger. I mean, come on, the church was just starting to organize so that it could be even more effective in its witness to the city. It was going to form committees and set policies and establish a set home base of operations so that it could really refine its efforts and connect even more people to Christ. Oh wait…maybe our anger isn’t quite so well-placed as we thought. I mean, good organization is critical for the church today, but it also brings a temptation to focus more and more of our attention on internal organizational issues rather than outward, kingdom advancing ones. Sometimes boldness sparks persecution, but we have to be bold first to find out if that’s going to happen.
This actually brings us to a second reaction: caution. Stephen didn’t just get burned for being bold, he got burned up. There was nothing left but a good story. Maybe he went too far. I mean, let’s be bold, but sometimes boldness sparks persecution. Why don’t we see if we can find a good medium boldness that advances the Gospel, but keeps us out of the spotlight. Isn’t that a more humble approach anyway? Nobody likes a glory-hog. I mean, the apostles toed the line, but Stephen went sailing right over it. And besides, his boldness didn’t just affect him. Okay, so the apostles were beaten. Nobody else was. But after Stephen’s little bold journey not only did he get killed, other people lost their homes, their livelihoods, their family, possibly even their lives too. How is that right? Sometimes boldness sparks persecution so we need to be wise with our boldness. We need to be bold in tightly controlled (by us) circumstances where there aren’t likely to be negative consequences. We’ll be really bold in proclaiming the Gospel on the church grounds. But, let’s not stray too far from there. I mean, why provoke an argument unnecessarily. Isn’t that unhelpful to the ultimate goal of advancing the kingdom anyway?
Well, if our first two reactions are anger and caution, what’s the third one? In a word, boldness. But isn’t that what got us into this mess in the first place? Yep. Sometimes boldness sparks persecution. It’s true. It’s painfully, realistically, disturbingly true. Jesus guaranteed us that it would. But it’s also the only way to power through the challenges. And here’s the thing about the persecution that boldness sometimes sparks: it can come externally, as Stephen and the church experienced, but it can also come internally as people on the inside try to keep us from taking bold steps that might cause persecution because they’ve embraced one of the first two responses.
Being bold is risky business. When it comes to the church, being bold sometimes means looking for ways to advance the kingdom that are new or different, perhaps more culturally informed than to which many churches are comfortable. There are some churches out there that are very much vested in the way things have always been done (granting that “always” usually only goes back 50 years or so). They respond to bold new ways to advance the Gospel that have perhaps not yet fallen within the world’s crosshairs with fear, trembling, and sometimes, persecution. Sometimes boldness sparks persecution. When this happens, we respond with love and keep boldly moving forward to advance the kingdom as God has directed. When it comes to the world, sometimes being bold means lovingly and humbly proclaiming the Gospel in places where it is not welcome. Other times it means taking public moral stances on issues on which the cultural current runs hard in the other direction. In our current culture, the reality is that the latter happens a lot more often than the first. Sometimes boldness sparks persecution, and given our culture’s rapidly deteriorating ability to handle differences of opinion on many different issues civilly, bold, Biblically-rooted moral stances which are out of vogue with popular opinion are going to draw ire. We can and should expect persecution. Let us be bold anyway. Sometimes boldness sparks persecution.
In the end, then, I don’t know that I particularly want you to do anything with this information. This sermon was more about informing, than stirring you to action. The call to action came over the last couple of weeks. This morning was about making sure you know the possible results of your action before you jump in. Sometimes boldness sparks persecution and from a lot of different directions. If we are going to do it, we need to do it with our eyes open.
And if that feels like a bit of an uncomfortable ending, this passage has a rather uncomfortable ending. In fact, that’s probably not strong enough. This particular story does not have a happy ending. It has a terrible ending. Stephen dies, the church gets chased out of Jerusalem, and a guy named Saul is going house-to-house to find any remaining Jesus followers in Jerusalem in order to put them in prison. We don’t get the Hollywood ending here. It feels a whole lot more like the year 1776 and not 1785. And yeah we can look back and read the whole story and see that the church is still here and Rome’s not, that people name their kids Peter and John and Mary and their dogs Caesar and Nero, and that there are fewer Jews in the world than Southern Baptists in the United States, but these folks didn’t know all that. All they knew is that they took a bold stand and were persecuted mercilessly for it. They didn’t know how the story was going to end. They weren’t bold because of the results it brought them. They were bold because that’s what the kingdom of God calls for. They were bold because the message of the resurrection demands it. They were bold because Jesus was bold. They were bold because boldness is the only thing that drives the church through challenges. And if sometimes boldness sparks persecution, so be it. Here’s the thing: the goal is worth whatever the cost becomes. This is why they stepped out and embraced a lifestyle of boldness. They believed that advancing the message of the resurrected Christ was worth whatever the cost happened to be. And so they were bold. And the church advanced. But even if it didn’t—and they didn’t know it would—that would be okay because they knew they were being faithful to the mission and message of Jesus.
I think that’s a good place for us to leave things for now. Be bold. Pray bold prayers. Think bold thoughts. Ask bold questions. Take bold actions. Sometimes boldness sparks persecution. Persecution is the fruit of boldness. Be bold anyway. Because so is the advance of the kingdom. Your message and mission are unstoppable, and when you sell out to it so will you be. Be bold.