"Just Whose Conversion Is This?"
April 22, 2007: 3rd Sunday of Easter, Year C
The Rev. John MacIver Gage, senior minister
United Church on the Green, UCC: New Haven, CT
www.unitedchurchonthegreen.org
Scripture;
John 21:1-2, 15b-19
After these things Jesus showed himself again to the disciples by the Sea of Tiberias; and he showed himself in this way. Gathered there together were Simon Peter, Thomas called the Twin, Nathanael of Cana in Galilee, the sons of Zebedee, and two others of his disciples. . . . Jesus said to Simon Peter, "Simon son of John, do you love me more than these?" He said to him, "Yes, Lord; you know that I love you." Jesus said to him, "Feed my lambs." A second time Jesus said to him, "Simon son of John, do you love me?" He said to him, "Yes, Lord; you know that I love you." Jesus said to him, "Tend my sheep." Jesus said to him the third time, "Simon son of John, do you love me?" Peter felt hurt because he said to him the third time, "Do you love me?" And he said to him, "Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you." Jesus said to him, "Feed my sheep. Very truly, I tell you, when you were younger, you used to fasten your own belt and to go wherever you wished. But when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will fasten a belt around you and take you where you do not wish to go." (He said this to indicate the kind of death by which he would glorify God.) After this Jesus said to him, "Follow me."
Acts 9:1-20
Meanwhile Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest and asked him for letters to the synagogues at Damascus, so that if he found any who belonged to the Way, men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem. Now as he was going along and approaching Damascus, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, "Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?" He asked, "Who are you, Lord?" The reply came, "I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. But get up and enter the city, and you will be told what you are to do." The men who were traveling with him stood speechless because they heard the voice but saw no one. Saul got up from the ground, and though his eyes were open, he could see nothing; so they led him by the hand and brought him into Damascus. For three days he was without sight, and neither ate nor drank. Now there was a disciple in Damascus named Ananias. The Lord said to him in a vision, "Ananias." He answered, "Here I am, Lord." The Lord said to him, "Get up and go to the street called Straight, and at the house of Judas look for a man of Tarsus named Saul. At this moment he is praying, and he has seen in a vision a man named Ananias come in and lay his hands on him so that he might regain his sight." But Ananias answered, "Lord, I have heard from many about this man, how much evil he has done to your saints in Jerusalem; and here he has authority from the chief priests to bind all who invoke your name." But the Lord said to him, "Go, for he is an instrument whom I have chosen to bring my name before Gentiles and kings and before the people of Israel; I myself will show him how much he must suffer for the sake of my name." So Ananias went and entered the house. He laid his hands on Saul and said, "Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus, who appeared to you on your way here, has sent me so that you may regain your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit." And immediately something like scales fell from his eyes, and his sight was restored. Then he got up and was baptized, and after taking some food, he regained his strength. For several days he was with the disciples in Damascus, and immediately he began to proclaim Jesus in the synagogues, saying, "He is the Son of God."
"May God speak through these words and make from them a holy word for us today. Amen."
Sermon:
He was a devout man. He was a zealous man. He was an ardent and faithful follower of God and had been all his life. So he thought he understood. He thought he knew what God wanted, and he was ready to do it, whatever it was. He was ready to step outside his comfort zone, even to flout conventional morality in order to carry out that divine will. But then God spoke. The Lord's Own Self spoke to him, called him by name, and he realized in a flash that he didn't and he wasn't. He didn't understand and he wasn't ready, not for this. This was unthinkable, that everything he thought he knew could be turned inside-out and upside-down in a moment. He fell down, dumbstruck. He sputtered and spit. "But, no, Lord, no... Don't you know? Don't you see...?".
But God kept right on speaking through his protestations. "O my child, my child, it is you who do not see. Must I lead you by the hand, like a blind man? Do you really not know me? I am the Lord, and my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways. Like the wind, I blow where I will, and my will is my own, alone. Now get up and go into the city and do as I say, for I have a plan for you..."
And so Ananias got up and went and found everything just as the Lord had said. He found Saul, soon to be Paul, waiting for him, blind and helpless like a baby, and there Ananias baptized him as a follower of the Way of Jesus, and immediately something like scales fell from his eyes and then, then his sight was restored, then he could see.
My question to you this morning is this: When the scripture says, "something like scales fell from his eyes," exactly whose eyes does it mean? Saul/Paul or Ananias? Because the original Greek is as marvelously, muddly unclear here as this English translation. That "his" could refer to either man. Of course, common sense tells us we can assume it means Paul—Paul's eyes, Paul's blindness—but then, you and me, we all know what happens when we assume... so I won't go into it. And following the common sense is precisely how both men got into this predicament in the first place, isn't it.? And so the question remains: Whose eyes are opened? Whose sight is restored? Just whose conversion is this anyway?
Saul thought he knew. He thought he knew all about Ananias. He knew Ananias was an enemy of the faith. Whether a willing blasphemer or merely misguided, Ananias was a follower of a false messiah, an untrue image of the one true God. He might claim to be simply "open-minded" to new revelations from God, but in Paul's opinion, Ananias' mind had become so open his brain seemed to have fallen out altogether. And like his lord and master, Jesus, before him, that perversion led Ananias to be a disrespecter of the law and the law's proper representatives and authorities, the chief priests and scribes and Saul's own masters in the party of the Pharisees. And, again, like Jesus, that tendency toward irreverence and instability made Ananias a danger not only to himself but to all the Jewish faithful, even to the nation as a whole, balanced precariously as it was between Imperial Rome and the deep blue sea.
Of course, Saul thought he knew all about Saul, too. He knew that he was on the right side of every question in the carefully circumscribed world of 1st Century Judaism. He was on the side of the angels... and the authorities. As he himself later described the privileges he enjoyed "If anyone else [had] reason to be confident... I [had] more: circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless (Philippians 3:4b-6). Add to that impressive pedigree enough money to afford Roman citizenship and you have a portrait of an impressive young man indeed. And because he was so well trained and well heeled, Saul knew that this new rabble-rousing sect arising in the wake of the death of Jesus of Nazareth was a dangerous cancer that should be cut out of the body of faith with ruthless efficiency. So it was that young Saul, the true believer, volunteered to hold the cloaks of those who stoned to death Stephen, the first Christian martyr. And when the opportunity came up to pursue the enemy all the way to Damascus, rising star Saul jumped at the chance. He knew it was the right thing to do.
At the same time, of course, Ananias thought he knew, too. (Though he's not mentioned elsewhere in the Bible we can apply our theological imaginations to flesh out our picture of the man.) Ananias knew what having a relationship with Jesus had done for him. He knew how cut off he had felt from his faith and from God's Own Self before he encountered Jesus, how because he was not wealthy enough or learned enough or disciplined enough he could never observe the law in the exacting, detailed way the Pharisees insisted he should, if he were a righteous man and real Jew. And so Ananias felt unworthy, less than, even unclean and unwanted by God. But Jesus had changed that. With a word, a touch, an insight, a smile, Jesus had made him feel beloved. Jesus had opened Ananias' lonely heart to God and, so he felt, revitalized the heart of his Jewish faith. And when Jesus was raised from the dead, Ananias knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he was the promised messiah, the one who would restore the kingdom of Israel.
And, oh yes, Ananias knew Saul, too. He knew the attack dog of the religious right all too well. Of course he had heard how Saul had stood calmly by, so eager to be helpful, as they executed Stephen for preaching the good news of God's love in Jesus the Christ, but Ananias knew firsthand how from that day on Saul had taken to "ravaging the church by entering house after house; dragging off both men and women and committing them to prison" (Acts 8:3). It was Saul's dogged persecution, in fact, that had forced Ananias to flee his home. And he knew that Saul wasn't yet satisfied. No, everyone knew Saul was still "breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord," and so had sought and received official permission to pursue Ananias and his sisters and brothers in the early church all the way to Damascus in order to bind them and drag them back before the authorities in Jerusalem to face trial and imprisonment and worse. So when he heard that Saul had met with an unfortunate accident on the road to Damascus, that he had been stuck blind and made as helpless as a baby, Ananias didn't go mourning the man's loss. He thanked God for the miracle! He knew it was the right thing to do.
So, needless to say, it comes as something of a shock to both men when it's Ananias who gets drafted to bring Saul a little tender loving care, to help him, maybe even heal him, and, worst of all, baptize him and receive him into the flock of God's faithful. But, as we all know, some days it is just hell being right, especially when God is still speaking—God won't shut up, in fact—but day by day is shedding more light and truth on all our carefully analyzed positions, all our most deeply held opinions, on everything we think we know. It's not that we can't know anything—we wouldn't get far in life not knowing anything—but as Paul himself would later confess, it's just that "now we see as in a mirror dimly," now we know only in part.
But God—well, God knows everything and knows us fully (1 Corinthians 13:12) and is revealing that everything to us piece by piece, as a mother bird feeds her chicks in the nest. That's the price we pay for worshiping a living God, one who cannot be bound to just any one page in a book, any one period in history, any one people in any one land. Following in the way of Jesus, who was crucified, dead, and buried but is now alive means learning to question even our most cherished assumptions—about life, death, what's good, what's bad, who's in and who's out and just what it is God is up to. We must learn to expect the unexpected.
We must even learn that leopards can, in fact, occasionally change their spots, or rather, God can change them. Sure, Paul had it hard. Sure, he was blinded by the light and forced to come face to face with the resurrected Jesus—the way, the truth, and the life—whose followers he was persecuting. But poor Ananias, that faithful disciple, he had to learn that even Saul—Saul of all people, who had persecuted him and his sisters and brothers in the newborn church, who had helped to kill beloved Stephen, for Christ's sake!—Saul could be a changed, could become a new creation, Paul, an instrument of God's own grace "before Gentiles and kings and the people of Israel." And as the prophet Jonah learned as he sat and pouted outside a perversely repentant city of Ninevah, bearing up under our own undeserved suffering is a snap compared to enduring the seemingly similarly undeserved redemption of our enemies.
The God's honest truth, though, is that it's never been a question of just either/or. This isn't just Paul's conversion or just Ananias'. It's both/and. God is busy working through them both to convert them both. It's not that Paul becomes just like Ananias, any more than Ananias becomes like Paul. But together the two of them become part of something entirely new: the church, this leaky boat, this provisional vessel founded on God's covenant promise to Israel, widened in Christ to embrace not just one people but all people, everywhere in love. Hand in hand, Paul and Ananias come to know what they did not, could not know before. The wonder-working power of the risen Christ cures both men's blind spots and gives them a new vision of what is possible, how this world is being transformed, and just who is included in God's grace. In that moment, they realize they are on a journey together.
In our world today, being God's pilgrim people, committed to the journey between the now and the not-yet, never resting too long on our laurels but rather chasing God's "yet more light and truth" across the horizon, is hard, hard work. Increasingly we are told that there are only two sides to every issue, the right side and the wrong side, our side and their side, and we must choose, now, and forever. Dialogue has been replaced with debate, and debate with diatribe, and acrimony is a spectator sport. In this polarized atmosphere, if we stay open to learning something new, we are accused of waffling; If we are prepared to be proven wrong, we are weak; and if we engage in conversation with the other side, the "dark side," we might as well be fraternizing with the enemy.
Now, lest I be accused of the sin of radical relativism, I should say that of course I believe in right and wrong. Life's not a game where anything goes. Sin is real. Evil is real. People get hurt. Lives are destroyed. As God's people, we are called to choose what is good and reject what is evil, just as we asked the Chris and Di to do as part of Hunter's baptism this morning. And I understand that as we work to discern one from the other, conflict is inevitable. We are a diverse people, how can we not disagree? But I am concerned that the focus of all this current contentiousness seems not so much how we can find the best way forward for all of people, to expand the commonwealth of all persons, but, more simplistically, how we can convert the other side, to make them—the right, the left, the conservatives, the liberals, the greens, the blues, whoever—just like us.
But the truth is, God is working to convert all of us, as Paul and Ananias learned, much to their chagrin. In God's house there may be many mansions, but there is only one side: our side. Because God is for us, for all of us. And so God is making us better, all of us, better together. As Paul himself went on to write in his second letter to the contentious Corinthian church, "All of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image," that is, the image of Christ, "from one degree of glory to another" (2 Corinthians 3:18). Therefore "we regard no one from a simply human point of view," since, "if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see everything has become new! All this is from God, who reconciled us to God's Own Self through Christ, and has given us this ministry of reconciliation" (2 Corinthians 5:16-18).
A pretty thought, to be sure, pure poetry. But most days I prefer Paul's blunter advice in his letter to the Romans. It just seems to capture the appropriate spirit somehow. He writes: "Brothers and sisters, welcome those who are weak in faith," in other words, welcome the foolish, the ignorant, the stupid, the pig-headed, the just plain wrong—"but not for the purpose of quarreling over opinions." After all, "who are you to pass judgment on servants of another?" For we are all servants of God, and "it is before their own lord that they shall stand or fall. And they will be upheld," those other children of God, "for the Lord is able to make them stand" (Romans 14:14). For friends, I am here to tell you: with God, all things are possible—a compassionate conservative, a discerning liberal, even a progressive church. Ours is a ministry of reconciliation and a life of constant conversion. Thanks be to God.