Stephen, the one commemorated this day each year, was the first recorded person after the Jesus’ ascension into heaven, to be slain for his faith in Christ. The biblical story of Stephen and his martyrdom is recounted in the Acts of the Apostles, Chapters 6 and 7.

In brief, Stephen was a deacon, a preacher, and a miracle worker who drew numerous people in ancient Palestine to the Way of Jesus Christ. The issue that became the flashpoint for a quasi-trial of Stephen before the Sanhedrin–the Jewish governing body for religious matters, in that Rome was in charge of all else–had to do with the Temple.

Piecing together the dispute from a one-sided account is a little tricky, but it appears that Stephen proclaimed that worship of the True and Living God was not inextricably linked to a or to the Temple! It ended up a little like suggesting to a group of conservative patriots that one could be true to America without pledging allegiance to the Flag.

In addition to Stephen’s seeming disrespect or at least disregard for the centrality of the key and defining symbol and structure of Judaism (and, FYI, Stephen himself was a Jew), there were also those pesky implications! After all, if the Temple is not essential to the worship of God, then…how essential are Temple personnel? How essential is economically supporting these people, this building, and any related projects?

Stephen, with a logic that inflamed rather than cooled his accusers’ passions, pointed out that Abraham–the founder of their faith–never worshipped in a temple; that Moses had a tabernacle for the people, which was movable and made of canvas; and that even Solomon who built the First Temple (subsequently ransacked and destroyed by the Babylonians) was told by the prophets that God does not live in any structure made by human hands!

The angry mob had heard enough and did not even wait for a decision by the Sanhedrin before dragging Stephen to the outskirts of Jerusalem and stoning him to death. Yes, they surrounded and pelted Stephen with rocks, stones, pebbles until his body was crushed and he bled out. Scripture also tells us that a young man named Saul (who later became the apostle Paul) witnessed this public execution.

What happened to Stephen reminds us, at least once a year, that maybe, just maybe, buildings are a convenience and not a necessity when it comes to any part of our Christian faith–that a church is not the “House of God”; that  the more we act differently in our religious structures than we do anywhere else, the more we are, fact, seeking to contain and domesticate God, confining the imagined reach of the Divine to those walls at that particular address.

Druids and Wiccans have believed for millennia that the gods/Goddess cannot properly be worshiped inside, within any structure made by human hands. It seems that Stephen would have agreed–certainly to the point of saying that the symbol is never the thing that it symbolizes. Ultimately, a building is an arrangement of materials (bricks, mortar, steel, wood, etc.), period; a flag is cloth with a design on it, period.

But of course this kind of thinking makes it all the more difficult to centralize control over people, to get people to believe that the persons found in such buildings are imbued with “special” spiritual authority, to keep people from going off and creating their own means and places of worship (which then can lead them to trust their own experiences of the Divine, and to establish their own belief systems), and ….

True, that if there is no fencing, how does one protect the sheep?! Perhaps, though, despite certain Psalms and parables found in Scripture, people aren’t meant to be sheep after all.