Conversion - A Sermon for Easter 3C based on Acts 9

This was my message for today (April 29, 2007).  It is based on the story of Saul’s conversion.  You can the read the scripture text from Acts 9 here.

I remember now the time, I can show you the place.
Where the Lord saved me by his wonderful grace.
But I do not know the how, and cannot tell you why.
But he’ll tell me all about it . . . in the by and by.

This was the chorus of a song I remember singing in the church I attended as a child and youth.
Members of the Bloomfield Church of God were big on remembering the place, day and even time when they committed their lives to Jesus.
Church services would often include testimony times, during which members would stand up and say something along the lines of:
I just want to thank God that I have been saved, sanctified and filled with the Holy Ghost.
I remember when I gave my heart to Jesus,
and ever since that day my life has never been the same.
Thank God, I’ve been borned again.

You see, we were big believers in being born again.
And this was way before the idea became a part of popular culture.
In 1976, former Watergate conspirator and convicted felon Charles Colson wrote a book using as its title the phrase “Born Again,”
In it he described how he came to Jesus while serving time in prison for his crimes.
Later in that same year you may remember that Jimmy Carter described himself as born again, the first time for any future US president,
in of all things the first Playboy magazine interview of a U.S. Presidential candidate.

Being “born again” became a popular thing to be.
In the mid-seventies about one-third of US citizens claimed this description for themselves,
but by the year 2000, this had risen to more than 45% of Americans.
Even Ronald Reagan called himself a “born-again Christian.”
This from a man who never attended church while President,
and who was a lifetime Presbyterian,
and who here has ever met a born-again Presbyterian?
But the people in my little hometown church knew all about being born again.
I remember the night my dad and I attended a church service there for the first time.
It was during a revival,
and at the end of the service some of the brothers and sisters in the faith gathered around my dad to pray him through to salvation and victory.
Five or six or more people surrounded him and began praying out loud that he would turn his life over to God.
I saw tears running down my dad’s face,
and I began to cry too until one of the women of the church came and took me to the church kitchen and gave me some milk and cookies.
And though I can’t really tell you what happened after I left,
I do know that after that night my dad was a changed man.
He stopped drinking and smoking and cussing.
He started attending church every time the doors were open,
four or five times a week,
and a few years later he started preaching himself.
Something happened to my dad that night,
he was “born again,”
and given a new lease on life . . .
transformed from the old Jimmy Humes into someone new and different.

One word for such a change is “conversion,”
and our reading this morning from Acts records one of the greatest conversion stories ever told.
It is, of course, the story of Saul’s conversion.
Saul of Tarsus, who in time would become the apostle Paul,
the author of almost half of the books in the New Testament,
and the single most influential person in determining Christian theology and doctrine,
did not begin his life as a follower of Jesus.

If you remember, we first met Saul back in Acts, chapter 7.
Here we find the story of the stoning of the first Christian martyr, Stephen.
Near the close of the story are the words,
” … And they cast him [Stephen] out of the city, and stoned him:
and the witnesses laid down their garments at the feet of a young man named Saul.” (Acts 7:58).
A short time later, however, Saul becomes more than a bystander.
In Acts 8 we read:
But Saul was ravaging the church, and entering house after house,
he dragged off men and women and committed them to prison.
And by the time we get to today’s reading,
we find that Saul has a heart filled with hatred and murder.
He also has a pocket full of letters from the religious authorities in Jerusalem to the synagogues in Damascus .
Those letters gave Saul the authority to do what wanted to do most of all -
to search out and round up any believers in Jesus living in Damascus.
Those letters gave Saul the authority to put any Christians he found in chains and haul them back to Jerusalem to face trial there.
Those letters gave Saul a free pass to persecute and destroy the new and growing Church.

Looking back on this time in his life,
Paul would later described his feelings,
“I myself was convinced that I ought to do many things in opposing the name of Jesus of Nazareth.
And I did so in Jerusalem.
I not only locked up many of the saints in prison after receiving authority from the chief priests, but when they were put to death I cast my vote against them.
And I punished them often in all the synagogues and tried to make them blaspheme,
and in raging fury against them I persecuted them even to foreign cities. “
For this reason I journeyed to Damascus with the authority and commission of the religious leaders. (Acts 26:9-12)

But as another has said,
Saul, the despiser of Jesus,
Saul, the persecutor of the Church, never made it to Damascus .
Instead, Saul, for all intents and purposes, died on the road to Damascus,
struck down by the blinding revelation that this Jesus whom he persecuted was in very fact the One Christians said He was:
That Jesus was the Christ, the Son of God,
the Lord of all and the Savior of humankind.

Will Willimon has said that many
“Christian preachers have imagined Saul’s possible inner turmoil,
his possible doubts about his mission.
They have had him searching for something more fulfilling in his life,
something which might better explain how this story ends,
Forget it.
There is none of that in the story.
Saul isn’t searching for anything except these Christians.
He isn’t filled with inner doubts and uncertainty.
He has no doubts at all about the will of God and what he ought to be doing with his life.
He is a full-time theological authority,
conducting investigations, holding court,
and helping to make Israel safe again for God.”

But then he hears the voice of Jesus call his name,
and his routine, his life, his self-confidence is shattered.
His whole world view has been turned upside down.
And in a mere moment of time,
this powerful and intelligent and resourceful man is made totally helpless.
He opens his eyes only to find that he is physically blind,
and he has to rely on his friends to take him by the hand and lead him to Damascus.
Once there he can’t eat or feed himself either,
and he has to rely on the kindness and help of strangers.
It is like he has been born again.
Saul, the chief persecutor of the church has died,
and in his place we will soon see Paul,
the greatest apostle the church has ever known.
To paraphrase Paul’s own words in Colossians,
“For Paul has died, and his life is now hidden in Christ’s life.”
In other words, Saul is no longer his own,
He belongs to Jesus.
He has undergone a radical conversion,
a dramatic transformation,
and he will never again be the same.
This reminds me of a story I read earlier this week during my sermon preparation time.
A pastor told of how a life-long friend of his hit bottom,
spun out of control,
and found himself headed the wrong way down the Interstate at 100 miles an hour.
In other words he fell from his prestigious position as an up and coming lawyer into the depths of alcoholism.

The pastor stated that the good news was that the man was now on the road to recovery, thanks in large part to a loving wife and children,
as well as the good work of Alcoholics Anonymous.
But on his way back to life, the man said that among the many things that surprised hi along the way,
perhaps the most surprising stuff of all had to do with the church.
You see, he had always been a church-goer of sorts,
but like many “smart” people,
he had always thought of himself as being above it all.
Church was for losers, for intellectual wimps.

One day while taking to his pastor, the man said,
“You’d be surprised at what I’ve learned about God lately.”
“Like what?” replied his pastor.

“So many things,” he said, “I had heard all my life in church have suddenly,
like a flash of blinding light,
become real to me.
Words, little Christian slogans,
that I’ve heard all my life,
are suddenly, amazingly real, deep, true.”
“Like what”

“Like being born again.
Or like ‘you can only find your life by losing it.”
Or say like, ‘take up your cross daily and follow me.’
Through my pain,
by hitting bottom I’ve met God,” he said.
“And who is the God you have met?” the pastor asked.

“God is,” he said, “a mean, relentless, devastating friend,
who won’t have us until we are down on our knees,
whimpering like a baby, so weak, stupid and helpless.
I don’t know whether I’ve been born again or [whether] I’ve died.”
(Pulpit Resource, Vol 23, No. 2, pp. 20-21)

In my opinion, this man did both.
He died to himself so that he might be born again to new life.
But just in case you may be tempted to think that such submission to the divine would signal the end of struggles,
guess what . . . it doesn’t get any easier when you finally give yourself over to God’s relentless pursuit.

Acts 9 illustrates this as well in the person of Ananias.
Can you imagine how Ananias must have felt when God called him to go and help the terrorist Saul of Tarsus regain his sight –
and there is no other word for Saul at this point in the story.
He was a terrorist,
the New Testament equivalent of Osama Ben Laden,
murdering the believers as quickly as he could lay his hands on them,
and so it is nor surprise that Ananias is more than a bit incredulous that God would ask him to go and help the one who had been persecuting the small group of believers and putting them to death in the first place.
This single, solitary man, this ordinary man,
this man of little importance says, in effect,
“Excuse me, Lord, you want me to what?”
Can you imagine what was going through his head as Ananias made his way down Straight street to the house where his perceived enemy lived?
How could he believe that he wasn’t going to die?

Like many of us it probably didn’t occur to Ananias to initially think that God would ask him to do something dangerous.
Ananias wasn’t prepared for that.
Neither are we.
But nevertheless, Ananias was called to trust God on this one and did not refuse to do the one thing he could do – pray and lay hands on Saul.
Ananias risked his own life.
He stuck his neck out,
and you could argue that Ananias was the lynch pin upon which the whole history of the early Christian church turned.

And if Ananias isn’t example enough,
we can turn back to Saul/Paul’s life once again.
In time Paul will go on to become a missionary to the entire known world of his day,
helping to establish and build up countless churches all over Asia Minor.
And as I said before,
over half of our New Testament is composed of his letters to various churches.
And Paul’s understanding of who Jesus was and is became the very foundation of Christian theology and doctrine.
And it is all because he has been blinded by the light of God,
answered the call of Christ to begin a new life, with a new purpose.

But all this came with a very high price tag.
Later on Paul would recount in his own words what he endured and suffered:
Five times I have received from the Jews the forty lashes minus one.
Three times I was beaten with rods.
Once I received a stoning.
Three times I was shipwrecked; for a night and a day I was adrift at sea;
on frequent journeys, in danger from rivers, danger from bandits,
danger from my own people, danger from Gentiles, danger in the city,
danger in the wilderness, danger at sea, danger from false brothers and sisters;
in toil and hardship, through many a sleepless night, hungry and thirsty,
often without food, cold and naked.
And, besides other things, I am under daily pressure because of my anxiety for all the churches.

And yet Paul endures.
Even more, he thrives.
Late in his life, Paul finds himself under house arrest for the umpteenth time.
He is on his way to Rome to appeal his conviction to Caesar himself,
an appeal that will fail and which will lead to his own execution.
And yet somehow during all this,
Paul would find the sheer audacity to write:
I have learned to be content with whatever I have.
I know what it is to have little, and I know what it is to have plenty.
In any and all circumstances I have learned the secret of being well-fed and of going hungry, of having plenty and of being in need.
I can do all things through him who strengthens me.

And just what was the basis for this strength?
What gave him the courage, the fortitude, and the wherewithal to endure and even to prosper under circumstances that many, if not all of us,
would be crushed under?

His foundation was a simple promise made to another on his behalf:
As God said to Ananais in today’s reading:
This man is my chosen instrument to carry my name before the gentiles and their kings and before the people of Israel.
And I will show him how much he will suffer for my name.
But further, Paul knew he had been chosen and called by God,
and he knew that though those chosen will suffer,
nothing could ever separate them from the one who had chosen them in the first place.

Paul said it best himself:
What will separate us from the love of Christ?
Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?
No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.
For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.

That my friends is the true meaning of being born again.
That is what conversion is all about.
Coming face to face with the almighty and never ending love of God in Christ Jesus and saying yes to it –
yes to that love and its power to transform our lives,
yes to that love and its ability to shape us and empower us for service,
regardless of the obstacles we face in life,
and yes to a love that will not let us go, ever.
Do we dare say “yes” to this relentless, pursuing love?
And maybe even more to the point,
are we ever really able to say “no?”

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