Oak Chapel United Methodist Church

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A hate-crazed boy points a shotgun at his schoolmate, a young girl. He knows her. She has a reputation around school for being a religious person. With bitter scorn he asks, "Do you still believe in Jesus?" She thinks a moment and replies, "Yes, I do." These are the last words she ever speaks.

At her funeral service, Dr. Frederick Graham says that, for her faith, she will go straight to heaven. I am startled. For I suddenly remember that the very earliest Christians believed exactly that. Martyrs go immediately to their heavenly reward.

Those first Christians, like Christians today, held differing opinions about exactly what happens after we die. They all looked forward to it; they all agreed it would be wonderful. But they differed on the details. The most common scenario was that believers would die, and "sleep" for a while (that was their word), until the great day of resurrection. You know, that "great getting' up morning," when the dead in Christ shall rise and "the saints go marching in." But martyrs, those who died for their faith, they said, would not have to wait. They would be taken up immediately into the everlasting arms of God.
 

Stephen: The First Christian Martyr

Stephen was the first Christian martyr. He was a waiter, by profession, and a trusted member of the earliest Christian Church: a small group of people who met every Sabbath on the porch of the Great Temple in Jerusalem and discussed among themselves how a poor carpenter from Nazareth was the Jewish Messiah -- the Christ. They were considered by most to be a new, quirky sect of Judaism, one faction among others. Harmless.

But trouble developed almost immediately. The heady new wine of Christ burst all the old wineskins. Stephen was called before the High Priest and his compatriots and ordered to explain himself.
 

Stephen's Unexpected Response

Instead, Stephen told them their own history, but with a twist: the Jews had always rejected the seers and prophets God sent to help them, he said, and now they were rejecting God's only Son. They did not like hearing their history told that way, so they took this young man out and stoned him to death. Always the world's way. If you don't like something, kill it. If you can't suffer another to be happy in Jesus, shoot her. "That'll put an end to it," the world thinks.
 

A Lesson from Littleton, Colorado

Our whole nation came face to face with death in the past two weeks. Funeral after funeral, casket after casket. Just as Jesus looked death in the eye, and said a loving and careful goodbye to his friends the night he gave them bread and wine, we have also faced the reality of death. Jesus was the first to die. All the rest were simply following their Lord.

We will probably not be called as martyrs, but we all must still come to terms with death. Fourteen young people, so vibrantly alive one moment, forever gone the next. Or a husband or wife, a mother of father, or (God-forbid) a child. How quickly they can be taken from us! And we, too, must die. Unsettling.
 

Life is Urgent

The one indisputable fact about life is its brevity. We have a limited amount of time. Whether we leave this place in our 30s, or 40s, or 90s, our lives are still mere nanoseconds in the great expanse of time. That fact (that life is short), leads to one of two conclusions. We can say that our lives, short as they are, could not possibly be very important. So we should forget all the rules and do as we please. Life is short. Have fun. (The Epicurean philosophers put it famously: "Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow ye shall die.") But that could lead to moral anarchy -- everybody doing his own thing. Or we might conclude, because life is so short, that we have to make each moment count. ("Teach us to number our days," cries the Psalmist.)

Not to waste time. Not to "fritter" life away, as my grandmother might have said. But that can lead to compulsive/obsessive behavior. It's too heavy. There's never enough time. We can't relax and enjoy the beauties of life. We're too busy trying to accomplish something.
 

Living Life as God's Person

The martyrs, like Stephen, would not have thought life short (or long, for that matter). Life, for them, was infinite: We begin with God, go through an earthly period, like a bird flying in through one window and out through another, and then we return to God for eternity. Only in the darkness for a short while. The Bible says Stephen's face "shone like the face of an angel" during his ordeal. Naturally. He was not leaving life; he was leaving this earth to be with his Jesus. Good always comes from martyrdom.

The coats of the stoners were laid at the feet of Saul (who becomes St. Paul aftwer being touched by Stephen's courage). Many Jerusalem Christians, as the result of Stephen's stoning, fled to Antioch and took the faith with them -- started a church there. It is in Antioch that the word "Christian" is first applied to the followers of Jesus, for they are not seen (in this gentile city) as part of Judaism, but as a new religion. Were it not for Stephen's stoning, we gentiles might never have found our way to Christ.
 

Good Might Yet Come from Littleton

I would not presume to say what good might come from the catastrophe in Littleton. Already it has caused America to examine her moral and spiritual foundations. Perhaps more good will come. It's too soon to know.

We have all seen, once again, in this tragedy, how fragile life is. And how short. It will do some good, if we learn from this not to put off important things. Dr. Benjamin Segal, a surgeon and teacher at Yale, spoke this week in Baltimore. He told us about something he likes to do to people. When the time is right, he looks at a person very seriously and says, "If I were to tell you, right now, that you had fifteen minutes to live, what would you do." He's gotten all kinds of answers. One man said, "I'd go buy a half gallon of mint chocolate chip ice cream and eat it all." But usually people say something like, "I'd find all the people I care about, and tell them how much I love them and how much I appreciate all they have done for me."

And then Dr. Segal says, "What are you waiting for?" That's one of the lessons we should learn from all this death, "What are we waiting for?" If you have been hesitating to say something important to someone, do it today. Life is short and very fragile. If you have been waiting to receive Christ into your life, do it today, at this communion table. For our lives are like grass, today it flourishes and grows, tomorrow it is cut and thrown into the oven. We only live a very short time. And may God have mercy on our souls.