Her name was Emily. Well, actually her name wasn’t really Emily. The program I was listening to changed her name and her voice so that she wouldn’t be recognized. Emily, you see, is a witness.
Not like a courtroom witness. She wasn’t in the witness protection program or anything like that. She is a paid witness. A marketer paid to give testimonies on behalf of products like video games. But in order to give witness in a way that people will listen to her, she has to pretend to be somebody else.
Emily’s company pays her to create fake user profiles on social networking sites like Facebook. If you are in the Facebook world you know that the face you present you present to the world is on your profile page. If you want to you can post your birthday, your relationship status, your favorite quotes, favorite hobbies, favorite TV shows. And you can post a picture of yourself. And there you are.
Only when Emily posts for her work, she isn’t there. She is creating somebody who doesn’t exist. She uses a fake picture. She researches an area so that she can sound like she’s really from there. She tries to choose associations so that, if you live in the place she’s researching you might think, “Hey, I think I might have gone to school with that girl and she wants to be my friend and she lives in my area…sure, I’ll let her be one of my online friends.” Emily even makes sure to include a few typos in her profile just so you won’t think she’s not real. Which she isn’t. Because she’s really just an imposter posing as your friend so she can slip in references to how cool Call of Duty 15 is.
Only she is real. Emily herself is a real person. And she feels badly about how she’s making a living. She cannot show her true self even though she sometimes gets involved in the lives of the people she befriends. Once she got invited to a Thanksgiving dinner. “In a way that was sad,” she said, “because that was such a nice gesture to make to someone who they really didn’t know. They just wanted to know we had somewhere to spend Thanksgiving.”[i]
This is where we are today in our crazy world. Online marketers are hiring real people to be fake people online so that they can hype real products to real people who want their fake friends to be real friends. And these marketers are doing this because they know that people will trust people that they think they know over advertisements on TV or radio. They know that we are hungry for real witnesses in the world.
So what does that mean for the people of God who are struggling to be real witnesses? At this point you may think you’ve got the whole sermon figured out. You may be saying, “I know where Alex is going with this. I know what he’s going to do here. He’s going to take this example from the real world and say, ‘Look how terrible this is that poor Emily has to be a fake Facebook friend.’ And then he’s going to contrast that with being a witness for Jesus, which means that we have to be authentic and be our selves. Emily’s world – bad. Being yourself for Jesus – good.” You might be thinking that, but you’d be wrong. What I want to say is that, if you’re going to be a witness you’ve got to be somebody else.
Not that I think you’re not qualified for the job. You are. We are all God has to work with in this world. And not that I think you should go create a fake profile to start telling your friends about Jesus. That is bad. But the scripture lesson from Acts for today tells me that when you become a witness for Jesus, you’ve got to be somebody else.
We’ve been talking about the Holy Spirit for these last few weeks and we have looked at how the Spirit inspires new communities and transforms relationships – how the Spirit makes Jesus present in the midst of us. Today, though, I want to look at how the Spirit empowers us to be witnesses and to be somebody else.
The witness in the story from Acts is a man named Stephen. Stephen was a deacon in the church and evidently one of those early Gentile converts to Christianity. That’s important because to this point the Christians had been identified as a subset of the Jewish community. Christianity was branching out, though, and lots of new people were coming into the new church. The Spirit was doing this.
Stephen was just trying to be faithful to what Jesus and the Holy Spirit had done to them, but it got them in trouble. The leaders couldn’t stand it. Partly because Stephen was accusing them of not enforcing the law they were supposed to be upholding and partly because Stephen was claiming that he was standing in the long line of God’s prophets and they were standing in the long line of those who rejected the prophets. They were furious at Stephen and the Bible says they were grinding their teeth.
That’s where the lectionary reading for today picks up. Stephen is facing this angry mob of religious leaders and suddenly he has a vision. For the whole chapter before this he has been telling the story of Israel’s history and how God has continued to speak to the people in each new generation and called them to something new, from Abraham leaving his home to travel to a new land, to Joseph going to Egypt and saving his family, to Moses leading the people out of slavery, to David and Solomon. That’s where Israel had been, but now Stephen has a vision of where God’s people were going. He looks up into the heavens and he sees the glory of God and Jesus standing at the right hand of God.
Now this language is so familiar to people who have grown up in the Church that we just gloss right over this. It’s like Stephen starts quoting the Apostle’s Creed. “I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son our Lord, who is seated at the right hand of God the Father Almighty and who shall come again to judge the quick and the dead.” But we forget what this image meant to the early Church and what it ought to mean to us.
It’s not just abstract language and a formulaic way of saying things. This was the vision that kept the persecuted Church alive in the midst of its darkest days. Not a therapeutic Christianity that talked about how Jesus is my best friend. Not a militant Christianity that talked about destruction. The image that the early Christians took with them was of God in glory and Jesus standing or seated at God’s right hand.
This goes beyond reason. It goes beyond history. The comfort that Stephen got when he faced the mob was a vision of God and Jesus. And this is what makes him so serene as they set out to kill him. He knows that it’s not about him anymore. He is a witness and he sees what the universe hangs on. It’s the love of the Trinity. That’s it. And having seen that love, his story suddenly becomes absorbed into Jesus’ story. It’s almost as if he’s becoming Jesus.
Listen to the story of his death and see if doesn’t sound like Jesus’ experience at the cross. When Stephen tells them about his vision, the crowd members stop their ears so that they don’t have to hear it. They cry out in a loud voice and they run at Stephen and grab him and drag him out of the city. They take up stones and they start to pelt Stephen with the stones, but even while he’s being beaten to death by these stones, Stephen kneels. It doesn’t seem to be the stones that make him kneel, he just kneels. He prays that God will not hold the sin of his murderers against them. Even as he dies, he wants them to know the beauty that he sees. Even as they give in to the evil that consumes them, he knows what they can be in God’s eyes.
When Stephen becomes a witness, he becomes somebody else. He becomes the one he’s proclaiming. And he doesn’t have to be deceitful about who he is. He doesn’t have to have anxiety about who he is or how he’ll be perceived. He’s an untroubled witness because his life is so transparent to Jesus that he becomes Jesus.
There’s one other character in this small story, though. He’s standing there as the crowd drags Stephen out for his execution. He’s watching with approval as they do the deed. They throw their cloaks at his feet – he’s the coat clerk for the first Christian martyrdom. It’s a young man who stands in for us. His name is Saul and later his name will be changed to Paul, the great apostle who will take the message of Jesus to the whole world.
He’s the one who gives me hope in this story. The crowds are too cruel and too possessed by their hatred for me to relate to. Stephen is too pious – I pray that I could respond as well to such a thing, but how many of us could? But Saul – there I see myself. Witnessing the worst that the world can do to assault truth and beauty and heaven itself, but still harboring the possibility of change.
Saul becomes the Apostle Paul by developing a relationship with the Jesus he had persecuted. Paul will spend days, months, years in prayer and seeking out Jesus. Paul will do the dirty, troublesome work of keeping Christian communities focused on who they are and why they exist. Paul will become a faint image, growing ever brighter, of the Jesus he proclaims.
That’s what Jesus asks of each one of us. Here’s the thing about Emily. She feels badly about what she’s doing because however realistic she makes her fake profile, she can never be authentic with the people she is trying to talk to. She can only be a deceiver. She may be able to have interactions with others that they value, but at the end of the day, she’s just engaged with them for one reason – to get them to buy a video game.
Witnesses for Jesus are not asked to be unreal. They are just asked to stay close to Jesus – to develop practices of prayer and Bible Study and small group accountability so that they can meet other people with the love of Jesus – as if they were Jesus. At first it will feel unnatural. That’s why Paul uses the image of putting on Christ – like a jacket that may not fit when we put it on. But eventually we grow into it. We start to think less from our anxieties and worries and more from our confidence that God can use even us. We stop letting sin distort our vision of who we are and we start to embody the love of the Trinity – the power of the Holy Spirit.
And one day we become somebody else – somebody made perfect by God’s love in Jesus Christ. It’s the work of sanctification – that grace-filled work that God does in us once we give our lives over to God’s love. And somehow people can see – even in us…even in us the Jesus we proclaim.
We may never have to suffer like Stephen. But we do face the choice of Saul. Are we going to stand by the coats and watch what the Holy Spirit is doing in the world? Or are we going to let it fill us? Who’ll be a witness for my Lord? Thanks be to God.
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