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The following message is delivered by Reverend Dr. Bruce Wheeler Thielman. Today's sermon is entitled "On Painting Your Own Portrait." We shall continue in worship by giving reverent attention to the reading of God's Word as it is recorded in the book of the Acts of the Apostles, the sixth chapter.

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I begin the reading at the verse which is numbered eight. "And Stephen, full of grace and power, did great wonders and signs among the people. Then some of those who belonged to the synagogue of the freedmen, as it was called, and of the Cyrenians and of the Alexandrians and of those from Cilicia and Asia,

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arose and disputed with Stephen. But they could not withstand the wisdom and the spirit with which he spoke. Then they secretly instigated men who said, 'We have heard him speak blasphemous words against Moses and God.' And they stirred up the people and the elders and the scribes. And they came upon him and seized him and brought him before the council and set up false witnesses who said,

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'This man never ceases to speak words against this holy place and the law. For we have heard him say that this Jesus of Nazareth will destroy this place and will change the customs which Moses delivered to us.' And gazing at him, all who sat in the council saw that his face was like the face of an angel." And may God bless to us and to our understanding this reading from his word. Amen.

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Pray with me. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Of all the great masters, Rembrandt van Rijn painted more pictures of himself than any of the others. We have more than 1,200 of the canvases of Rembrandt. They are in most major museum collections in the Western world. And in almost every one of those collections, you will

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find at least one of the master's pictures in which he himself, Rembrandt, is looking out from the canvas at you. The last of his self-portraits was painted in 1669 and hangs today in the Hague. It's a picture of a very soft and gentle-faced old man who is still committed, body, soul, and spirit, to the search for beauty. Now there is a very real sense in which all of us paint at

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least one great painting in our lives. And that painting is a self-portrait. And our thoughts and our deeds, the things that we do secretly or the things that we do in the open, these are the strokes of the brush. These are the colors that fashion the self-portrait we are painting. And then one day, oftentimes without our expectation, the picture is finished and it is framed by death.

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And from that day on, it can never be changed. Now I ask you to think with me today about a man who painted such a masterpiece in his self-portrait that even his enemies, when they looked upon him, saw him as looking like an angel. I refer to Stephen. The scriptures say, "And gazing at him, all who sat in the council saw that his face was like that of an angel." Stephen was a

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very good man. He was one of the first seven elected to be deacons in the Christian Church, and he gave himself to loving and healing deeds of ministry and power. But the enemies of the Christian faith organized against Stephen, and they bribed false witnesses to bring testimony against him, and they brought Stephen to trial. And after they had done their worst in telling

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lies about him, Stephen proceeded to preach one of the greatest sermons recorded in all of the New Testament. You will find it in Acts chapter 7. And he pointed out on the basis of this sermon that these men of the council were in opposing him, opposing Christ, and that they were in all things murdering the love of God. The decision of the council was that Stephen should be stoned to

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death. He was taken out, and even as the stones were stinging his body and knocking him into deadening unconsciousness, he prayed, "Lord Jesus, receive my spirit." And then, looking at those who were gathered about him, hurling the stones, he said, "Oh God, do not hold this against them." And the witnesses, gazing at him, saw that his face was like that of an angel. Now many have

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pointed out across the centuries that the face is, in a very real sense, the mirror of the soul. The face reveals what is in the heart. It reflects what is in the spirit. So the question that I would like us to think about together this morning is this. How can we so paint our self-portraits that when others look at us, they will see an angel? How can we live to so reflect in our

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consciences the very divinity of God? And I would propose to you that in order to answer this question, we use Stephen as our example. First of all, Stephen was a man of great faith. In Acts chapter 6, verse 5, one reads, "Stephen was a man full of faith and of the Holy Ghost." Now the world maintains that seeing is believing, but Christian faith affirms that believing often precedes

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seeing. Just as Edison believed that he could create a light bulb before such a light bulb had ever been created, even as Edison's mother believed that her son should complete school, even as his teachers, on the basis of his work, wanted to expel him from school for good, even as these moved ahead on the basis of that which they had not yet fully observed, even as these

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did this, they demonstrated faith. As we approach this Thanksgiving time, we are of course thinking much of the pilgrims. It was on September the 16th in the year 1620 that the pilgrim fathers boarded their little ship, the Mayflower, at Plymouth in England and sailed for our shores. Sometime later, William Bradford, who was at that time the Massachusetts governor, wrote of those

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pilgrim fathers, "So they committed themselves to the will of God and resolved to proceed." They were moving out onto a sea where none of them had sailed before. No member of the crew had ever crossed the ocean that was before them. They were moving to a land which none of them had ever seen before. But in the face of all of these things, they had a deep and profound faith that they were

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moving in the love of God, and though they had not yet seen, still they went ahead. I remember one blistering hot day in Fatima, Portugal. I had gone to visit the shrine of Our Lady of Fatima, which is a magnificent building. And in front of this building is a large courtyard, slightly larger than a football field. And this courtyard is covered from end to end and side to

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side with gravel. Now this gravel is not made up of smooth, round stones. Rather, it is made up of sharp and jagged pieces of rock. And I shall never forget, as long as I live, seeing people crawling on their knees across those jagged stones, leaving behind them two crimson trails of blood from their own body. And as they moved toward the shrine, praying through the beads of the rosary, I found

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myself deeply moved by their devotion and the passion with which they pursued it. And yet, my friends, I must say to you this morning that what they were doing, as good as it might have been, was not an act of faith. It was, in fact, more of a business transaction. And I don't mean to be unkind when I use those words. You see, what was happening was these people were undergoing

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this humiliation, this pain, this hurt, and they were seeking, by doing this, to get God to do something for them through the Virgin Mother. Save their marriage, preserve the health of their ill son, bring peace to the world. There was something that they sought, and they felt that as they moved toward this statue in this painful, hurtful way, they could in some sense obligate God in the sense

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that "I have done this for you, God, therefore you must do this for me." That is not faith. That is a quid pro quo. That is not trusting. That is seeking to obligate. Stephen believed the gospel, that God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, and Stephen understood that the gift of the Son was for him as part of the world. Stephen believed, even though he could not see

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it at the moment, that the Holy Spirit of God was present with him, and that he had no necessity of making any kind of deal or spiritual transaction in order to ensure that the Spirit would be there. Stephen believed that whether he lived or he died, he would be doing it in the present loving arms of God. He was living out what the Apostle John meant later when he wrote, "This is the victory which

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overcomes the world, our faith." Now the second thing that we notice about Stephen is that he was a man who built his life upon the Scriptures. You have only to read his sermon, which is recorded in Act 7, to discover that he had a remarkable mastery of the Old Testament, the only scriptures which existed at that time. He discusses the patriarchs, Abraham and his sons. He talks about

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Joseph and Moses. He discusses the theology of the tabernacle. He talks about false gods. He uses an illustration from the life of King David. He builds the foundation of all that he is saying on the Scriptures, and then on this foundation he raises his charges aimed at the council. "You are standing against, indeed slaying, the love and the compassion of God." What we see in Stephen is not

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only a man who knew the Bible, but who also knew how to apply it. Gianni Granzotto has recently written a new biography of Christopher Columbus. Some consider it the best biography of Columbus ever produced. Very early in this book, in fact on page 39 of its hundreds of pages, Granzotto discusses the five books which most influenced the life of Christopher Columbus,

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and he points out that the one that influenced Columbus' life more than any other was the Bible. Columbus gathered not only all the cosmographical information and astronomical information which he could find on the pages of Scripture, but the Scriptures became the source of inspiration which gave him the courage and the power to move out and sail where no one had ever sailed before.

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In other words, to Columbus, the Scriptures not only helped him to chart the course of his ship, but above all to chart the course of his soul. And that is what we see in Stephen. His knowledge of Scripture so broad and so strong that on it he could erect not only what he believed, orthodoxy, but also what he practiced, orthopraxis. It is really no wonder that Stephen looked like an

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angel. He spent so much time in conversation with them through the pages of the Scriptures. And my friends, we must learn to lean upon the Word of God, to understand that no experience of God that we can have will be for us such a faithful guide across the course of our lives as the Word of God written. This book is the chart for the journey of successful living.

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I'm reminded of what Paul said to those people whom he loved so much in Ephesus. He said, "And now I commend you to God and to the Word of his grace which is able to build you up." Now another thing that we find in Stephen is his superb courage. This is the most basic of all the virtues. I've mentioned this from this pulpit before, but we need to remind ourselves of it

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again and again. There are many virtues which we are to have as Christians, but if we do not have the most basic virtue, which is courage, then when the moment comes that our other virtues are being tested, they will collapse and fall. It is, for example, very easy to tell the truth when you don't have to pay a price for it, when there is no pain or hurt that is going to come from your

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revelation of the facts. But when you're called upon to tell the truth and know even as you tell it that you are going to be wounded in the telling of it, and when you still tell it, that is, when you have sufficient courage to stand by the truth, then your testimony is made more truthful by the courage that undergirds it. We would never have heard of Stephen if he had knuckled under to that

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counsel, if he had lied on the witness stand. His self-portrait would have been smeared with weakness. But instead of that, he stood for the truth and the whole truth and nothing but the truth. He would not sell his character for some clemency. He had the courage of the angels. When any Christian, a businesswoman for example, refuses to take advantage of secret affirmation,

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refuses to take things under the table, refuses to enter into advertising which is false and deceitful, when any Christian, an adolescent, says no to those who would seek to lead them into the world of narcotics, or who refuses to sell himself or herself cheaply on the altar of the flesh, when any student says, "I will not cheat, though everyone else in the class cheats,

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I will not cheat," when any man does not bear testimony about other men except that testimony which is edifying to the spirit, when any man so loves his children that the tenderness of his heart is revealed as much to them as the strength of his character, when any man puts his faith and his family as his great priorities in life, when any person does these things that oft-time require

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much courage, such ones may be conquered, but they will never capitulate. I know, perhaps better than anyone else in this room, that there are some of you, some of us, undergoing great struggles, wounding situations at home, lingering illnesses, joblessness, betrayal by those whom we've trusted, praying and praying and having the heavens seem as solid and as unanswering as brass,

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struggling under the burden of acute depression, tempted on every hand to do those things which are contrary to the will of Christ, so caught up in a world of gloom and hurt that one is led at such times to think that all is hopeless. I say to all of us, we must hold on, for the color of courage is important in any self-portrait. Even if we are called upon to die, and some of you into

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whose eyes I look this day are in terminal situations and know very well that that is so, even then we are called upon to remember one of my favorite quotations from Homer's The Iliad, where Achilles asks himself the question of how a brave man should die and responds with the words, "The brave should so die that no one who hears of the manner of their dying will be weakened by it."

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Courage. It takes courage of the angels to be like the angels. But lastly, we must notice in Stephen that there was a magnificent love. The Apostle Paul, when he wrote to the Corinthians, said, "You may be able to preach like an angel. You may have a wisdom which astonishes and subjugates the world. You may have a faith which is awesome

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to those who do not believe. You may give everything that you have away as an act of profound charity. You may even die in the name and for the sake of and in the spirit of Jesus Christ." But, Paul writes, "If you have no love, you are nothing." More than anything else, love cuts the liniments of the angelic into the character of the person who's painting his own

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portrait. And you remember Stephen, how even as he was being stoned, prayed for those killing him and said, "Lord, do not hold this to their charge." Now you hear some shallow people say sometimes that when you love, you find that in your loving life becomes easier and that you do not know the hurt that you have known before. That is not true. As a matter of fact, each and every time that you

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extend the circle of those whom you love, whatever hurts them is going to hurt you. So the more you love, the more you are going to hurt. And that is the reason we must constantly be examining ourselves to be sure that we are growing in love and growing in forgiveness, that we are permitting the paint of love to be spread across the canvas of our lives, the portrait of our characters by

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the angels of God. I had a very good friend who was a chaplain in the military, and he was flying on one occasion to Cincinnati, Ohio. It was not a military flight, though the majority of the passengers on board were military personnel. He was seated next to a young airman who was a very good friend of his. Now, I personally believe that the Cincinnati Airport is still one of the

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most dangerous airports in America. But 35 years ago when this occurred, it was far more dangerous still. And this happened in the darkness of night with strong gusty winds and a driving rain. The records later showed that the pilot tried to abort his landing, but it was too late and the plane crashed. It broke in half, and the fuel tanks located in the wings began to pour the unused

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gasoline into the fuselage where the passengers were. My chaplain friend, in the total inky blackness, fell for his seat belt and loosed himself. He turned in the direction of where his friend, the young airman, had been sitting and called to him. No response. He reached out, and there was no response to his pulley. So he reached across and unfastened the seat belt of the young man and put

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the young man on his back and began to carry him in the direction of the nearest exit. But he had only gone a few steps when he encountered such a wall of people pressing toward that exit that he knew he could not escape in that way. And all the time, the level of the fuel on the fuselage floor was rising, and he was afraid of imminent explosion. So he turned around, and getting down on his knees,

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with his friend still on his back, he began to climb up the center aisle. I say up because when the plane broke, the half that he was in was left pointing upwards, and so he was climbing a slope, as it were. And suddenly, as he was climbing, he felt himself falling because he had, in the darkness, stepped or crawled through the break in the fuselage. And he fell, bearing the body

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twenty feet to the ground below, shattering his right leg. He got up and lifted up his friend. Imagine that, his leg broken and bearing the weight of this young airman, anxious to get away from the plane, expecting any moment that it would erupt in flame. He went as far as he could, and then he fell on the grass, and he held the young airman close to him. By this time, emergency

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vehicles were coming from the airport, ambulances, fire engines, security trucks, and the like. And there in the darkness, for he could just see the trucks coming toward them, he reached out to feel his friend's pulse. It was still beating, but very weak. And he held his friend tight, and even as he did that, a truck pulled up about thirty feet from where they were, and the headlights of the

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truck fell directly upon the two of them. And my chaplain friend looked at the young airman and discovered that his entire face and chest had been torn away. Nothing but tattered skin, ruptured muscle, gleaming bone, and blood. But even as he saw this, this young airman took his hand and held fast to it. And with his other hand, he reached up, and as a young Roman Catholic Christian, he

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crossed himself where his face and his chest should have been. And he died. And my friend sat there in the cold, driving night rain, holding on to it. And as he told me this, across the dinner table some four or five years after it had occurred, he said to me, "You know, at that moment, when he held on to me so tightly, showing his love, and when with his other hand he crossed himself, showing

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his love of God, in spite of everything, he looked to me like an angel." And as he said that, he began to weep. And I looked at him, and I thought to myself, "Two angels. Two men loving God and loving each other. Faith, scripture, courage, and above all, love. Paint with these, and you cannot produce anything other than a masterpiece."

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Let us pray. O God, as each day we add more pigments and paint to the self-portrait we are painting, sometimes altogether unconscious of what we are about, O dear God, as we fashion this picture, which will represent to the world and to you what we truly are, may we be so dependent upon

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the angels and so guided by the angels that we will reflect in our very countenances that which is angelic. We pray our prayer in Jesus' name, amen. [BLANK_AUDIO]