Conversion in Two Directions

Acts 9
May 8, 2022

Luke tells us about a frightening human being named Saul. Saul is convinced he is right, and others are wrong. He is furious that a small but growing movement of dissidents have distorted his religion. Saul is a Jew, not only a Jew, but a Super Jew. He has studied the Bible, memorized the commandments, learned the many ways they have been interpreted, and reached his conclusions.

For him, faith is crystal clear. His mind is fixed. He is a true believer and does not believe in negotiation. Some would call him a radical conservative, an extremist, but Saul perceives himself as the bearer of the True Tradition. And no one will convince him otherwise. He knows what he believes and believes what he knows. And his clarity is so sharp that anybody who disagrees with him must be eliminated.

Say hello to Saul of Tarsus. We meet him at the end of chapter seven, where he approved of the killing of a man named Stephen. Stephen was equally uncompromising, which infuriated Saul and those around him. Stephen had been seized and brought before the council on trumped-up charges. He was accused of saying things that he did not say. But he was also accused of talking about Jesus.

The council believed the best way to get rid of this Jesus talk was to get rid of Stephen, and Saul of Tarsus agreed. As the trumped-up crowd picked up stones to murder Stephen, the clouds opened. He had a vision of Jesus and said so. This ignited their anger – and after they got rid of Stephen, they thought they would get rid of everybody else who was talking about Jesus. Saul of Tarsus led the charge. He and his thugs were pulling people out of their houses, binding them in chains, sending them off to prison, and telling them to be quiet.

And then, says Luke, about noon one day, as Saul rode his horse on the road toward Damascus, something happened. There was a bright light. A loud Voice. A question taken from his own Jewish scriptures: “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” He couldn’t see a thing, so he asks, “Who are you, Lord?” And it was Jesus – same Jesus that Stephen had seen, same Jesus he was trying to scrub from the tongues of people like Stephen.

It had been attempted before: they thought if they could eliminate Jesus and erase his name, they would be rid of him. Guess what – what we have is another Easter story. The Christ appears, without any warning. And Saul, who thought he could see so clearly, had to be led away by the hand. His eyes were open but there was too much light in them.

This is a big story. Luke tells the story three separate times in this same book – here in chapter nine, also chapters twenty-two and twenty-six. Just like my stories, it gets a little better every time it's told. It grows because it’s a turning point. The man who tried to snuff out Jesus becomes one of his most devoted followers. He did a complete turn-around. Little Saul becomes a towering figure in the early Christian circle, traveling the known world, planting new congregations, and composing many of the documents in the New Testament. To keep himself humble, he changed his name from Saul (named after Israel’s first king) to Paul, which translated means “tiny.” It’s a tremendous change.

Now, let’s pause there for a second. Once in a while, we hear about people like this. We’re stunned to hear the news, astonished to see the change.

We had a kid on my high school class. Tommy had freckles and a devilish grin. Often in trouble. If there was a fight in the lunchroom, he may have sparked it. If someone smelled a smoking cigarette at football practice, we knew who it was. The teachers were on to him and sent him down to sit outside the vice-principal’s office. Who knows why he did? He was always getting in trouble.

Tommy didn’t do well in school. Got mixed up in things. Didn’t go on to school, took a job as a bartender in town. Then he discovered he could add significantly to his income if he sold a little cocaine on the side. He thought it was a promising career. It might have made him a whole lot of money if he hadn’t sold a few grams to an undercover cop.

And then, something happened. I’m not sure of what it was. Went off the grid for a few years, cut his shaggy hair, ended up as a student in a Bible college. Now, for the past twenty years, he has been the chaplain for a minor league baseball team. He prays with the ball players before every game, teaches them the Bible, listens to their troubles, prays with them some more.

This is the same guy. Or is it?

What happened? The classical answer is conversion. His life straightened out, or turned around, or was turned upside down. It’s hard to say – it’s his life, his change, his conversion. It’s not finished. It’s never finished. But he’s a different person inside the same skin.

Sometimes we hear these stories, and they are extremely dramatic. Someone is heading into the ditch of destruction and then they change. Or they say they do. Call them “born again” or second-chancers or whatever, they almost become celebrities. Often the churches treat them as celebrities. They are the closest thing we have to Saul, who became the Apostle Paul. It’s tempting to start believing that people should get knocked off their high horses just like Saul, that what happened to him should be a requirement for every believer.

Like that church organist who said to a preacher, “I played the organ for thirty-eight years, heard a sermon every Sunday, and could have snoozed for all twenty minutes of it. But then I found Jesus and I’m a different man.” The preacher said, “What do you think we were trying to pound into your thick head for the past 38 years?”

And this is where I need to step in and slice away a little evangelical nonsense. Nobody finds Jesus. Nobody! But sometimes Jesus finds us. Let’s keep the grammar straight. We’re not the ones who do the converting. It’s the Risen Christ who interrupts Saul’s domestic terrorism. It’s the Easter Jesus who says, “Saul, why are you persecuting me?” It’s the living Lord who shines so bright that self-assured Saul must reassess everything he assumed to be true. It’s Christ who lets him know that all that energy Saul was squandering on destruction must now be redirected toward building something different, something new.

Yes, let’s keep it straight. According to the Bible, it is God we meet in Jesus who speaks, it is God who calls, it is God who interrupts, it is God who meddles in our plans, it is God who redirects, it is God who changes the lives that we clung to as if they were our private possession. If you’ve ever gone through a change in your life, especially a good and positive change, I have to wonder if God was behind it. Or in the middle of it.

But here’s the thing, in this wonderful, expansive story, Saul isn’t the only one who get interrupted and changed. Who else is changed? The church, as represented in Ananias, one of the saints of Damascus. Did you notice? Jesus speaks to him too. “Get up and go to Straight Street,” says the Christ. “Look for a man named Saul and pray with him.”

Ananias says, “Wait, we’ve heard about this guy. He is Doctor Evil. He’s hunting us down. He’s trying to snuff us out.” He understandably concerned. Frightened, in fact. Like Saul, he thought he had the entire world sorted out, parsed, and categorized: Saul, sinner; church, pure. But the Risen Christ says it again. “Go!” So he goes. And no doubt, it took some time, conversation, prayer, and patience to work it through.

As Luke the storyteller says in his modest way, “For several days, Paul was with the disciples in Damascus.” How did they spend that time? I don’t know, but I can guess. They had to compare their stories, listen to one another, apologize, and forgive, pray, and take a big Spirit-filled breath – because we’re talking about change, and change never comes easily.

We often refer to this story as the “conversion of Saul,” but it’s also the conversion of the church to welcome someone like Saul. Saul had been hunting down the Christians; now he was becoming one. Ananias would have excluded Saul because of his reputation; now he was commissioned to welcome him. And there’s anyone who is behind it all, it’s the Risen Christ, the One alive at the center of all reality. And it is his intrusion upon us that calls us to change, to wake up from all the bad dreams, to welcome the dreaded outsider as a fellow human being.

It is all dramatized when Ananias meets his feared opponent for the first time. Remember what he calls him? “Brother Saul.” Isn’t that something? The enemy becomes a brother. So the main character of this account is not Saul, even though he gets a lot of ink. And it’s not Ananias, who overcomes his own reluctance. The main character is not Saul, not Ananias, but Jesus – Jesus, who largely stays out of sight, yet seems to be directing some of the action. It’s Jesus, who is not “found” but who does the finding.

All of this suggests some implications for our own faith and life. Let me suggest a short list of three:

1) Never dismiss anybody. Never write anybody off. If Saul could get knocked off his high horse and find his life redirected, it could happen to anybody. This is the great surprise as the story unfolds of Saul-then-Paul. Everybody is astonished. “Is not this the man who made havoc in Jerusalem?” Isn’t this the same person? Yes, it is, but it isn’t. When God shakes somebody’s shoulder, they wake up. If you genuinely want to be faithful, pray for God to shake you awake.

2) Never think for a minute that your judgment is correct. It may be right, it may be wrong, but it will certainly be incomplete. We do not know all that God is doing in every situation, because this is God who works in a variety of platforms and situations, all simultaneously, the same God who is not finished with any of us nor with anybody else.

3) Third, stay open. If God can work in any of us, if God can work for good in any situation, this could play havoc with all our well-established notions of certainty. We like to predict, or capture, or classify, or even contain where and what we’d like God to do. Chances are, God has other plans, and they are better. It is God’s job to save the world, and ultimately it is God’s responsibility. For our part, we open our arms like a sailboat and hope to catch the wind of where God’s Spirit is blowing. And then we will be part of something we never imagined.

Should all of this happen, we just might discover that Saul and Ananias have not been the only ones interrupted if not converted. God is also working in you and me. Far from finished, but still working.

(c) William G. Carter. All rights reserved.