Being Open to Divine Change

By

Reverend Litton Logan

April 22, 2007

Scriptures:

Acts 9:1-20 (NRSV)

¹Meanwhile Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest ²and 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. ³Now as he was going along and approaching Damascus, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. ⁴He fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” ⁵He asked, “Who are you, Lord?” The reply came, “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. ⁶But get up and enter the city, and you will be told what you are to do.” ⁷The men who were traveling with him stood speechless because they heard the voice but saw no one. ⁸Saul 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. ⁹For three days he was without sight, and neither ate nor drank.

¹⁰Now there was a disciple in Damascus named Ananias. The Lord said to him in a vision, “Ananias.” He answered, “Here I am, Lord.” ¹¹The 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, ¹²and 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.” ¹³But Ananias answered, “Lord, I have heard from many about this man, how much evil he has done to your saints in Jerusalem; ¹⁴and here he has authority from the chief priests to bind all who invoke your name.” ¹⁵But 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; ¹⁶I myself will show him how much he must suffer for the sake of my name.” ¹⁷So 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.” ¹⁸And immediately something like scales fell from his eyes, and his sight was restored. Then he got up and was baptized, ¹⁹and after taking some food, he regained his strength.

Saul Preaches in Damascus

For several days he was with the disciples in Damascus, ²⁰and immediately he began to proclaim Jesus in the synagogues, saying, “He is the Son of God.”

Sermon:

          This morning we hear the Lukan account of the conversion and commissioning of the Apostle Paul that was written about 18 or 19 years after the Apostle’s death.  Luke’s traditional story of Paul’s conversion differs significantly from the Apostle Paul’s account in Galatians 1 wherein Paul makes only a passing reference to his conversion experience. 

          Therefore, I would point out that Paul’s conversion story in Luke is part of a greater Lukan scheme of dramatic conversions that begins on the Day of Pentecost with Peter’s remarkable confrontation of the Men of Judea and all who live in Jerusalem that resulted in the conversion of 3,000 Jews to the Gospel.  Then in Acts 8:4 we read of the story of Philip preaching to, converting, and baptizing Samaritans, both men and women.  Later we read the story of Stephen’s encounter with an Ethiopian eunuch and his conversion and baptism, and finally we have the story of the conversion of Saul of Tarsus, the arch Pharisee. 

Luke makes special uses of conversion stories to portray the movement of the Gospel of Jesus Christ from Jerusalem and the Jews, out to the Samaritans, people who considered themselves descendants of Abraham and people of God’s promise, and finally to an Ethiopian eunuch, who may symbolizes a further extension of the Gospel to the outer fringes of Judaism among people known as “God Fearers”.  A God Fearer was a person who subscribed to the moral and spiritual tenets of Judaism but was not willing to become full converts to Judaism.  Other scholars believe that the Ethiopian eunuch symbolizes the final movement of the Gospel out in to the non-Jewish world.  I believe we could conflate the two perspectives without compromising Luke’s intentions.

          As much as Luke uses dramatic conversions to emphasize the movement of the Gospel out into the entire world and to all people, I think there is something else at work.  As we look at the people who were converted, we see the power of the Gospel’s affect as it moves out and along a line of diminishing Judaism, if you will, only to come full circle back to pure Judaism in the conversion of an overly aggressive, militant Pharisaic Jew—Saul of Tarsus—who persecutes the people of the Way of Jesus.

          At this point, let me mention that the people who have experienced these conversions that I’ve mentioned are for the most part religious people.  They were Jews, Samaritans, possibly a believing non-Jew, and the Apostle Paul.  These are not people outside the pale of religious sensitivities.  However, they would have been people, who prior to an encounter with the disciples and the Gospel, would have most likely not seen any need to change their religious and spiritual orientations in accordance with the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  What I mean is best illustrated by the story of a cantankerous old man.

This crabby old guy sat in on a meeting of his church's administrative board.  The following recommendation was made: "Our church is one hundred years old.  Let's observe this by having a centennial celebration."  The old man raised his hand.  "I'm against it," he said.  The chairperson asked, "Why?" The old man said, "For the simple reason that we've never had any centennial celebrations before.  Why should we now?"

          These folks in Acts were good church folks because they used the classic church excuse to avoid change--we’ve never done it this way before, and we don’t need to change.

In Luke’s Gospel, Paul stands as a culminating example of God’s power to facilitate the kind of change in people’s or a person’s life that will not only prepare them to except the Gospel of Christ but will equip them for God’s service, that is, if they will surrender their will to God and be open to divine change.  At his conversion, Paul joins an elite group of God’s reprobates such as Moses, Jacob, David, Solomon, and other odd characters like some of us here whom God has called and equipped for divine work.

          There has been much speculation that the psychological forces that drove Paul to be a rather fanatical Pharisee along with his witnessing the death of Stephen may have made him a prime candidate for some sort of abnormal psychological event—his Damascus Road experience.  To such speculation I say, ”Phooey.”  In truth, none of us can speak to such things so let’s stay with Luke’s story. 

Paul’s experience of the resurrected Jesus was no transitory thing--it was a totally life changing experience, one that would eventually cause his death.  Paul, the Jew, the Pharisee, kept most of his personality traits and idiosyncrasies after this event as witnessed in other parts of the New Testament.  However, his life purposes and mode of living were radically altered all because he acquiesced to God’s call in his Damascus Road experience.  One might say, Paul changed churches but he kept the same pew. 

          When one looks at the history of our Christian faith and its various leaders, prophets, preachers and scholars, we readily see that God regularly chooses the most unlikely people with the most unlikely personalities and hang-ups to do God’s work.  For instance, Saint Augustine.

Augustine of Hippo was one of the greatest of the Latin fathers of the church as well as one of the more influential thinkers in Western Christianity.  He was raised by a devote Christian mother but became a lecherous and debauched character, who dibbled and dabbled in various forms of Gnosticism and paganism for years.  Yet all these things, as he said, left his soul restless until he returned to his mother’s Christian faith.  In his turning to Christ, he became as fanatical and self-effacing as he had been licentious.  Augustine became a bishop of the church and his writings put forth many of the moral, theological, and spiritual understandings that inform our Christian lives today. 

          I could detail many of the sins and shortcomings of great Christian persons.  However, in the final analysis we must come back to the fact that when God touches our lives and if we are open to divine change, God will forgive our sins, call us to service, equip us, and use us, that is, if we are willing, to be open, and to submit to the pain and the on-going struggle of divine change.

          There in is the rub—the willingness to struggle to give up our sense of control, to subordinate our will to God’s, and go through the pain of change.

          Divine change may come slowly to some of us and we, like Mahatma Gandhi, if we are open, may often have our minds changed on certain topics as we grow in our faith and service.  An aide of Mahatma Gandhi once asked him how he could so freely contradict this week what he had said just last week.  The great man replied that it was because this week he knew better.—editorial, Detroit News. 

After Paul’s Damascus road experience in Luke, he was physically and mentally helpless, unable to see, dependent on others for everything.  By his own account in Galatians, Paul spent three years in his newfound understanding of Christ before he ventured to Jerusalem to meet the Apostles and launch his ministry.  If we are open to God’s claim on our lives, and we apply ourselves to knowing and understanding God’s will and ways, we too will begin to change as the Holy Spirit gradually takes hold and works in our lives.  However, know this, we have the power to arrest God’s changing of us. Therefore, it is imperative that we remain open to the Holy Spirit, second-to-second, moment-to-moment through out our lives.  In so doing we fulfill our greatest possibilities and potentials in Christ along with experiencing life’s greatest joys.

          The pathway of a true, divine change such as Paul’s will lead us to move beyond our staid and comfortable religions and our self-centeredness and selfishness into a global Christ-likeness in our attitudes and perspectives.  Like Paul, Peter, Stephen, and Philip we will come to see the divine potential in the faces and lives of those who are different from us, maybe even avowed enemies. Paul’s Damascus Road experience may not be normative but his struggle and its results are or can be if we are open to divine change in our lives. 

          In our response to God’s call, spiritual struggle and change are a given.  Our struggle with our lower natures and prideful-ness will not be complete until, as the Apostle Paul tells us, we put on the complete nature of Christ in death.  So, get comfortable with the struggle as God moves us along the pathway of divine change.  This pathway of change will lead us to accept the unacceptable, to reach out to the impure, the different, and the immoral in the power of the Holy Spirit.  God understands our struggles and God’s grace covers all sins, failures, and it promises to empower us in kingdom service.  We are not supposed to be perfect, just faithful to the struggle.  I pray that we will always be open to divine change and the struggle that began the day we experienced the touch of God and admitted we needed the Christ in our lives and ends the day we stand face-to-face with the Christ.