Two Rivers Pastoral Charge
May 1, 2022 - 3rd Sunday of Easter
Scripture: Acts 9:1-20
Have you ever had a Road to Damascus experience? A time when God dramatically intervened in your life and changed your path from this way to that way?
This is one of the most dramatic stories of transformation in the whole bible. Saul was one of the people who were persecuting the very earliest church. This story, along with all of the book of Acts, is set in the first years after Jesus’s resurrection. Jesus had died and three days later he rose from the dead; then 40 days after that he ascended into heaven. And then his disciples – they were gifted with the Holy Spirit and they were able to preach and teach Jesus’s message, and the church was growing in leaps and bounds in those early years. This is the story of the Book of Acts.
But the church, even though it was growing rapidly, was still a minority in the land. They didn’t have any institutional power. They weren’t in favour with Rome. They were an off-shoot of Judaism – a minority religion on the fringes of Empire. But people were drawn to the message that the early church proclaimed – a message where everyone is welcome, where everyone is accepted, where everyone is equal in Christ; a message that you are loved and you are called to love others; and a community that shared all of their possessions so that no one went without.
People were so attracted to this message, that the established groups felt threatened. People like Saul were worried that this new and radical movement was going to take over from the status quo, from the established faith. And so Saul and others were trying to get rid of this movement. Saul and others were making it very difficult for the Jesus-followers to gather, and had even resorted to murder when Stephen, one of the deacons in the church, was stoned to death for proclaiming this new way of being in the world.
And our story this week begins with Saul on the road to Damascus – on the road from Jerusalem heading north to Damascus carrying papers that would allow him to arrest anyone who was following the way of Jesus. But as he was traveling along, a blinding light engulfed him, literally blinding him, and he heard Jesus saying, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” When Saul is persecuting the church, he is persecuting the body of Christ. But Saul, who never met Jesus when he was alive, doesn’t recognize the voice and he cries out “Who are you, Lord?” He hears a reply, “I am Jesus, who you are persecuting” and he receives instructions to finish his journey and wait there for further instructions. And for 3 days Saul sat there, not able to see, not able to eat, not able to drink.
But by the end of the story, Saul has been transformed. By the end of the story, Saul is no longer persecuting the church, but instead he has regained his sight, he has been baptized and he is now travelling around proclaiming the good news of Jesus Christ to anyone who would listen.
But I would suggest that there is a second, equally dramatic, transformation happening in the story that we heard.
Ananias was one of the leaders in this very early church – one of the leaders in the group of people who were being persecuted and murdered by Saul and others. This way of living that he knows as The Way is in a precarious situation, at risk of not surviving to the next generation.
Then one night Ananias was awakened by the voice of Jesus calling out to him. Unlike Saul, Ananias immediately recognizes the voice and replies, “Here I am, Lord.”
Can you imagine the shock that Ananias must have felt when Jesus told him to go and find Saul, the one who was causing so much pain and heartache, and to lay hands on him and heal him?
If I had been in Ananias’s place, I suspect that my first reaction would have been – “you want me to do what? You really want me to go and heal the person who is causing so much suffering? I would rather celebrate the fact that he isn’t going to be able to cause us harm!” Ananias puts it slightly more eloquently than I would: “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 to bind and arrest all who invoke your name.”
But Jesus, the Risen Christ, persists. He tells Ananias that he has a plan for Saul, that Saul is going to change, and he is going to carry the good news into the world.
And here is our second moment of transformation in this story – Ananias goes. He goes to the place where his sworn enemy, the sworn enemy of the whole church, is staying; and he lays hands on Saul, and prays for Saul’s healing, and that Saul might be filled with the Holy Spirit.
I’m fascinated by this story of double-transformation – Saul from someone persecuting the church and murdering its members into someone carrying the Good News of Jesus into the world; and Ananias from someone who was afraid of Saul and celebrating his affliction into someone who was able to love and heal his enemy.
Earlier this spring, we wrestled with Jesus’s teaching that we are to love not just the people who love us back but we are to love our enemies as well. It’s a challenging commandment. It is easy to love the people who love us back. It is easy to love the people who think like us, who act like us, who pray like us. It is harder to love people who think and pray and act differently than we do. And it is almost impossible to love our enemies; to want the best for people who don’t want the best for us. Yet this is what Jesus tells us that we are to do. Love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you.
We wrestled with this teaching back at the end of February, and now the bible gives us a story of two people who were able to do just that; a story of two people whose lives were transformed so that they could love more fully. Saul’s love expanded to include Jesus and the whole church; Ananias’s love expanded to include Saul, the persecutor.
I started by asking if you have ever had a Road to Damascus experience. Most of us don’t have a moment of being blinded by a flash of light from heaven, and when we regain our sight we are on a different path than the one we had been on. But for many of us, when we follow the way of Jesus, when our hearts are open to being transformed by the Holy Spirit, our lives undergo transformation from one way of being to another.
One of my professors at AST. Rev. Dr. Sally Shaw, compared the transformation of our lives to the transformation that stones undergo. You can re-shape a stone by taking a chisel and a hammer to it, and cracking it open – this might be comparable to what happened to Saul and to Ananias. But you can also re-shape a stone by putting it into the ocean and letting the waves and the sand gradually smooth out and polish and round the surface of the stone. That might be comparable to the process that more of us experience.
But we are being transformed and shaped by the Holy Spirit, even if our story is less dramatic than Saul’s or Ananias’s. The Holy Spirit is always stretching our hearts open so that we can love more fully, more broadly, more expansively than we did before.
And so the question that I invite you to ponder this week is, how is the Holy Spirit calling you to love more fully? As we are being transformed more and more into the Body of Christ, who are we being called to love; and how are we being called to show that love?
And may the Holy Spirit guide us and lead us to that place. Amen.
Stones Shaped by the Ocean
(Lawrencetown Beach)
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