St. Stephen (Mid-week Message)

 

Feast of Stephen (Dec. 26) 

 Fr. Tony’s Mid-week Message

Today is the feast day commemorating St. Stephen, the first Martyr and one of the original seven deacons of the Church. 

His story is told in Acts 6-7.  A division arises in the Church, at that time completely Jewish, between speakers of Aramaic and Greek.  The Greek speakers, Hellenists culturally distinct and accommodated to the larger Gentile culture of the Roman Empire, believe that there has been unfair discrimination against their community:  widows who speak Greek have not been receiving distribution of alms for the poor. The apostles, not wanting to get into the middle of a potentially vicious argument, opt out with the excuse that they are too busy preaching the gospel and cannot take time to “wait on tables.”  So they ask that seven be appointed to make sure the distribution works.  Seven are named as “servers” (the Greek word is “deacons.”)  Tellingly, all of them have Greek, not Hebrew names.    Stephen is the first-named among them. 

The Seven’s ministry was obviously more than simply table serving:  Stephen immediately gets into trouble because he is such a stirring preacher, working mainly among non-Christian Hellenized Jews.  He is arrested and hauled before the Sanhedrin.  Clearly a passionate advocate, he gives an extremely barbed speech that so outrages his listeners that they hustle him out of the city and without benefit of trial stone him to death.  As he is dying, he prays for his persecutors. 

Saul, later called Paul, stands by and consents to Stephen’s murder. The Christian community in Jerusalem, taking fright at Stephen’s death, scatters, and for the first time moves beyond Jerusalem and its immediate environs. Stephen’s steadfastness and forgiving prayers made an impression on Paul and bear fruit in his later conversion and ministry.

St. Stephen’s Day was placed as the day after Christmas probably because of St. Stephen being the first of the martyrs.  Large households in England that would keep their servants working on Christmas to make a proper feast began to give them the next day off, sending them to their own homes with boxes filled with foodstuffs and wine for their own day-late Christmas feasts.  Thus “Boxing Day” came about, with the expectation that gifts for the poor in general would also be given. 

 

Anglo-catholic priest and poet John Mason Neale in 1853 had this Boxing Day tradition in mind when he wrote his song about Duke Wenceslas I of Bavaria, posthumously named king and saint, and loved by the people of Bavaria and the Czech lands because of his works of mercy.  In the song,  set to the tune of an old Latin spring carol about the flowers blooming in April, “Good King Wenceslas” goes out on “the Feast of Stephen”” to give “flesh, … wine,” and “pine logs” to a poor man in the snow.

 

Given Stephen’s ministry to the marginalized and advocacy for them and the Gospel, it is fitting that such care of and advocacy for the poor are memorialized in Neale’s carol about St. Stephen’s Day.

“Therefore Christians all be sure, wealth or rank possessing, ye who now would bless the poor, shall yourselves find blessing.” 

Blessings on you all for the twelve days of Christmastide. 

--Fr. Tony+