This is certainly a jarring start to the day after
Christmas, the failure of the people to listen to the prophets, the story Jesus
referenced as the nadir of the history of the people of God, Zechariah the
prophet killed in the temple. Everything
about this story reeks. The priest died
and the people did homage to the king, they turned away from God to put their
trust in the king, a man who had done right during the days of Jehoiada, father
of Zechariah who had saved Joash from the murderous intentions of his
grandmother. Zechariah is trying to call
the king to righteousness but there was apparently no longer anything to keep
the king from reverting to type, acting just like his grandmother, Zechariah
was likely a blood relative of the man, not only the son of the man who saved
him as a child, raised him, and later set him on the throne. Murder in the house of the Lord? It can't get much worse, but we know it did
in the crucifixion of the child whose birth we celebrated yesterday, the
Messiah, more than a prophet.
In the epistle we see the choosing of the deacons to serve
at table so that the apostles can be about the work of preaching and teaching,
devoting themselves to the Word and to prayer.
There is a need for this in the church, a group set aside to be devoted
to the Word and a group who handles the needs of those who cannot do for
themselves and to tend to the pastoral care of a congregation.
Today is the day we remember the stoning of Stephen, one of
those seven men chosen as deacons in the early church. Stephen wasn't stoned, however, for being a
bad waiter or a bad administrator of relief programs for the poor, he was
stoned to death as Zechariah was, for calling the people to account for their
rejection of the truth. In Stephen's
case, the Truth was a person he proclaimed, Jesus. It's funny, the first martyr was a deacon and
the first true evangelist to take the Gospel out of Jerusalem intentionally was
another deacon, Philip. We are all
called to be willing and able to give an accounting of the hope that is in us,
not just those devoted to the Word. The
work of training up, catechizing, equipping the saints is preparation for the
work of evangelism.
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