Preached at All Saints, Collingwood, Anglican Diocese of Toronto, 4 May, 2025, the Third Sunday of Easter. Texts for Easter 3C, Acts 9:1-6 (7-20); Psalm 30; Revelation 5:11-14; John 21:1-19
9 Meanwhile Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest 2 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
Before Paul,
there was Saul. Before the proclaimer,
there was the persecutor – a man convinced of his own righteousness, an enforcer willing to use his power cruelly
and violently against those he deemed
subversives and criminals. If Saul existed today, I suspect he’d wear a
ski mask, heavy boots, and military style uniform, armed and empowered to kick down doors and
make arrests and haul people away in shackles to grim prisons from which they
might never return.
We’ve seen
people like Saul on the news, he might be the immigration enforcement agent in
the US or the riot police in countries like Russia or Georgia, wading into
protesters with baton swinging and throwing them into vans. He’s the kind of thug whose bosses are
self-satisfied, smug men and women in high office who boast and smirk at news conferences
and say that the undesirables are finally getting what they deserve.
So while there are aspects of this first lesson from Acts that we can relate to, let’s first put it into context text. The Book of Acts moves us forward a decade or so beyond the events of the Jesus’ death and resurrection. The message of the gospels has spread out of Jerusalem to neighbouring regions, where some Jews in places like Damascus are coming to believe that Jesus is the Messiah. In Acts, such people are not called Christians (that word hasn’t yet taken shape) but they are called followers of The Way.
The Jewish religious
authorities in Jerusalem are worried that things are spinning out of control. They begin to arrest and imprison the
apostles (Acts 5), and one, Stephen, is executed, which is the first time that
we meet Saul (Acts 7.58). Stephen’s
death doesn’t slow down the spread of the gospel, and soon Saul is fully
employed as a religious policeman “ravaging the church by entering house after
house; dragging off both men and women, he committed them to prison” (Acts 7.8). At the beginning of our first lesson today,
Saul has been sent to Damascus wit orders to inspect the Jewish population
there and round up any Jews who are now Jesus followers.
The story of
how Saul becomes Paul is one of the most well known stories in the New Testament,
so that when someone makes a lifechanging decision, we still sometimes call it
a Damascus Moment. In the church we
refer to it as the Conversion of St Paul, an event which is commemorated on 25
January, and while it’s a very important and dramatic story, it’s strange that
we only hear it in church as part of our Sunday lectionary cycle once every
three years.
When Jesus
speaks in this story, he asks a question:
“Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” (Acts 9.4). The pronoun “me” speaks volumes. The “me” is Jesus identifying with the
persecuted church, with the men and women that Saul wanted to arrest and bind
and haul away. Jesus may speak here as a disembodied voice,
but he is very much embodied and enfleshed in those powerless ones who suffer because
of people like Saul and the authoritarian systems that he works for. The “me”
of Jesus represents God’s compassion for and solidarity with those who have no voice
of their own to speak for them.
Jesus can
speak with and for the persecuted and the hunted because he became one with
them on the cross. Since Palm Sunday,
when Jesus entered Jerusalem not as a conqueror but on a donkey, we’ve seen
this strange and consistent way of how God in Christ turns worldly power on its
head and invests ultimate meaning and ultimate hope in an innocent man condemned
to death after a show trial. This same man, exhibited, broken and shamed on a Roman cross, comes out of the tomb
to show that human power is empty and that the imperial apparatus of death is a
hollow sham.
Saul’s
encounter with Christ takes two forms, the first with the disembodied voice on
the Damascus road, and the second with the very real and very embodied Annanias,
the first person he sees when he regains his sight. I say Annanias is Christ because is the “me”
that Saul is persecuting, he is a member of the persecuted church that is the
body of Christ. Saul, who would have hauled this man off to
prison, is now tended by him, is called “brother” by him, and I think this is
the moment when Saul becomes Paul, when he finds his earthly power broken by
the love of Christ which has claimed him and remade him.
There are two ways that this story is helpful to us, I think, one being political and one being personal. Let’s take the political first.
The theologian
Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote that “When Christ calls a person, he bids that person
come and die”. This statement sounds like terrible
advertising for the church, but it’s actually good news. When Jesus calls Paul, Saul has to die. Whereas
Saul would have despised and cruelly treated Annaias, Paul sees him as a brother and an equal, as a
vehicle of Christ’s love, and Paul will spend the rest of his life working out
how those who follow Christ are one body and one family. And likewise, something of Ananias had to
die. When Jesus called him to go to
Paul and tend him, Ananias didn’t want to go, he was afraid of the man Paul
was and probably even hated him, in the way that we fear and hate mortal
enemies. But Jesus wouldn’t let him off
the hook, Ananias had to go and minister to this man, and in the process he
too had to change, even let his old self die so he could truly become Christ’s
disciple.
I think this story from Acts is incredibly relevant at this dark and fearful time that we find ourselves in. Authoritarian regimes seem to be on the march in many cases. There’s a famous line from George Orwell’s 1984, where the chief of the secret police says “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever”. Our Christian faith tells us that this is a lie. The resurrection of Jesus Christ shows that the power of despots is hollow and fleeting. The secret police and soldiers who oppressed Poland before the fall of communism couldn’t defeat a man called Karol Wojtyla, who we knew as Pope John Paul II. Dictatorships inevitably collapse because they can't control the place where God lives, the human heart and the human soul.
Dictatorships do end, but often they end in violence and revenge that create new cycles of violence and fear. Last night I heard a rousing chorus from Les Miz, the one that goes "do you hear the people sing, singing a song of angry men", but the problem with all revolutions is how do you stop people from being angry? Reconciliation seems like the only way, as we've seen in Northern Ireland and South Africa, but it's a slow process. Our best hopes for reconciliation, I think, is to let God into our hearts, so that old selves can die and new selves can be born. I started this homily by imagining Saul as some kind of secret policemen in fatigues and boots. What if we ended by imaging his fatigues and boots and truncheon abandoned in a trash can, and Paul and Ananias together walking into a new future?
Finally, let’s look at the personal. You may have had a conversion experience in your life. It might have been a religious transformation or maybe something less spiritual but important, like from smoker to non smoker.
When we think of conversions I think we tend to think of them as conscious decisions, though in our lesson today Saul doesn’t really get to make any decisions. Instead, he is directly affected by the intervention of Jesus, who, despite seeming to be only a disembodied voice and a blinding light, can still change a life, and even change world history. Not all Christians have a dramatic story to tell like Paul’s, but I’ve known many whose life’s direction changed significantly because they had an experience of Jesus that was very real to them.
On Friday night we witnessed an ordination service, which can be an extravagant display of conversion, but not everyone needs to become a minister to follow Jesus. Sometimes Jesus just forces us to recognize we have to see, stand with, and even love those we didn’t previously recognize as people. If you’ve come to one of our Friendship Dinners, and served and sat with people whom our affluent Collingwood community generally ignores, then you’ve had your eyes opened by Jesus.
Genuinely wanting to know Jesus can be risky. Jesus knows us better than we know ourselves, he understands what holds us back from being our best selves, the people God always wanted us to be. He may ask us searching questions, like he asks Peter in the Gospel today, but those questions come from a deep love and can lead us forward. But be warned that Jesus does want to transform you. You may be on that road already. But if you want to be on that road then I encourage you to consider our course starting this spring, which we call a confirmation course but is actually a course about following Jesus so that we can truly live.
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