Thursday, 7th Week of Ordinary Time

Acts 6:1-15

Conflict is at the heart of today’s reading from Acts: conflict within the Church, and conflict between the Church and world.

This is one time where you need to be careful about taking a piece of scripture and just dropping it into our current situation. Don’t bother us about “serv[ing] tables,” when we have to focus on prayer and teaching, it sounds like the twelve are saying. Today, of course, we all share in “prayer and the ministry of the word.” And “serving tables” for the poor and neglected is as much the “business” of the Church as praying and preaching.

Still, it is interesting that the leaders of the Church chose to deal with conflict by stressing the foundation of prayer and the reading of Scripture. At that moment, the Greek-speaking Jewish Christians and native Jewish Christians were reminded of what they shared besides food. That’s one reason why I offer Morning Prayer, and encourage common prayer through this blog. The more we pray with each other, and for each other, the less we will be able to caricature each other, to ignore each other, to demonize each other. It is this praying with and for each other that sustains our relationships with each other when we are in the middle of a conflict.

And, ironically, the first “deacon,” Stephen, was not confined to serving tables. God also called him to a ministry of teaching, which brought him into a conflict that would make him the first martyr. Today’s reading ends just before Stephen begins a long speech that will so enrage his hearers (one of them a man later known as Paul), that he will be stoned to death. I suspect that Stephen knew what was coming. And yet we read today that “all who sat in the council saw that his face was like the face of an angel.”

I think that they saw a light in Stephen. I think they saw a serenity that allowed him to speak the truth, not defensively, but without anxiety. Too often, we become so emotionally invested in a position or opinion that disagreement with our position seems like a personal attack, and so we respond in kind. As we speak of the Good News of Jesus Christ, let us never forget that we are simply messengers. And let us pray for the serenity of Stephen, who knew that the argument was not his to win, but God’s.