According to a study conducted by political scientists at Louisana State University and the University of Maryland,
"Just over 42 percent of the people in each party view the opposition as "downright evil." “Nearly one out of five Republicans and Democrats agree with the statement that their political adversaries “lack the traits to be considered fully human — they behave like animals.””
But their line of questioning did not stop there. They continued by asking, “Do you ever think: ‘we’d be better off as a country if large numbers of the opposing party in the public today just died’?”
And some 16 percent of Republicans (or 7.9 million voters) and 20 percent of Democrats (that translates to 12.6 million voters) do think on occasion that the country would be better off if large numbers of the opposition died.
(As reported in the NY Times)
Every human being is living out of a story.
Saul had a story. Saul’s story was that the Israelites had been corrupted by bad ideas. They had been tarnished by interaction with the wrong kind of people. Saul has the pure ideal - what you believe matters a great deal. How you live matters.
For Saul, it was crystal clear. The right way of life is threatened by these bad people, who worship not the true God, but a man, a criminal killed by the death penalty. These people are are not just wrong, they are evil. They are warping the truth and leading good people astray. They must be stopped. Saul is a righteous man. He is full of righteousness. He is morally right, his cause is just, he is virtuous and true, upright and worthy. And he gets lots of props for it.
Nobody decides to be self-righteous. But we live out of stories that perpetuate it. I am this so I am clearly not that. I identify with this group, so by default, and sometimes gradually, I agree to abhor that group. I hold to this ideal, am guided by these good and right principles, so how can I associate with those who do not hold to what is good? I am confident of my rightness, bolstered in it, secure beyond doubt by all the things that keep reinforcing my story, and therefore I am dead certain of their wrongness.
Left to our own devices we will all seek to justify ourselves at the expense of others. This is, by the way, sin. Disconnection from God and each other. Left to our own devices we will seek righteousness at every turn; we are so very tempted to be right. We will make enemies faster than friends, and they’ll last longer.
Saul is going to Damascus with a story.
He’s a zealot for the faith, drawing on the stories in Hebrew scripture of those whose holy zeal pleased the Lord, and who turned Israel away from their sin and corruption and back to God. He is fanatical and relentless, invested and dedicated,and has become a rather famous heretic-hunter. A few chapters back he held the coats and watched while the Jesus-follower Stephen was stoned to death. Because with evil spreading like this, perhaps it might be better if large numbers of these folks just died.
Saul had a story, and his life had one mission: to stamp out evil and stand up for what is good and right and true. Imagine if Saul had had a Twitter feed. All that he could accomplish today!
We are almost through our year on grace, friends. And our theme right now is grace infinite – grace that comes to us, and through us, and keeps going, never running out. Grace is the way God interrupts our story and gives us a new one. God either meets us in our places of death and nothingness, or requires that something in us die and we face our nothingness, so that we might find real life.
Saul is on his quest for God, guided by his story, firm in his ideals, righteous and true. And it’s all going as planned when suddenly, in a blinding light and voice from heaven, he is confronted by voice, who calls him by name. Saul, why are you persecuting me?
Who are you? He answers.
And God, the great I am, answers him with a name.
I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.
Get up and enter the city and you’ll be told what to do.
And Saul is thrown into an identity crisis.
An identity crisis is when the story you are living no longer works for you.
All you thought made the world make sense no longer holds up.
A person in an identity crisis is a person without a story.
Saul’s story is taken from him. He is a person without a story.
Directionless and helpless, he is led by the hand into the city like a frightened child. For three days he lives in darkness, confusion and fear, unable to eat or drink.
Then the voice of God calls out again.
But this time it’s Ananias, one of the community of Jesus-followers, whom God calls by name.
Ananias.
Here I am, Lord. He answers, all faith and eagerness, just like the prophet Isaiah, Here I am, Lord, send me!
Everyone has a story, and Ananias is no exception.
He is a follower of Jesus the Christ. He is ready to do as God commands. He also knows who Saul is. And he and his community have every reason to despise and fear him.
Saul is the enemy. His ideology is wrong, his beliefs are dangerous, and, if the rumors are to be believed about what he has done, he may even be lacking the traits to be considered fully human — he behaves like an animal, after all.
God tells Ananias to go to this certain street to a certain house and find this certain man, Saul of Tarsus. This man is praying and has seen a vision of Ananias coming to lay hands on him so that he regains his sight.
But Ananias balks. Perhaps he hasn’t heard correctly. Perhaps God is not informed as to exactly who this person really is, what evil he’s done. Certainly God cannot mean for Ananias to help this man. He’s the enemy.
Our stories are very, very powerful.
‘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 from the chief priests to bind all who invoke your name.’
But God says, Go, I have chosen him to be an instrument to bring my name before Gentiles and Kings and the people of Israel, I myself will show him how much he is to suffer in my name.
So Ananias goes, even though it could be a trap. Even though this person is someone he has good reason to fear and distrust, in humility he goes to share in Saul’s death experience.
He goes in the ministry of being with someone in an identity crisis.
Ananias arrives and finds Saul in his paused state of weakness and waiting, a man without a story. Ananias places his hands on Saul, and touching him, he calls him, “Brother Saul” and says, “the Lord Jesus Christ, whom you met on the road, has sent me so that you may regain your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit.”
And when they encounter one another, it’s Jesus they meet.
No idea will save you. No rightness or righteousness will save you. Only encounter with the person of Jesus Christ. Jesus did not give Saul an ideology, a superior insight or a moral high ground. He gave him a person: I am Jesus.
I am Jesus whom you persecute.
I am Jesus whom you now meet in the touch and ministry of another.
I am Jesus who crucifies your story and gives you another in its place.
And from there Saul finds himself welcomed into the community of Jesus- followers, that just a few days earlier he had intended to destroy. And they find themselves welcoming in this one they knew as their oppressor who had been intent on their destruction.
And the grace of God meets them all in the person of the other.
When Saul comes to the Damascan community of Jesus-followers, he is no longer the invincible warrior for God, fighting for what is right. His self-righteousness is gone. His upbringing, education and training in reason or argument cannot bolster him. His undisputed faith or stellar reputation are now meaningless. His legendary courage and rock solid conviction of purpose are worse than worthless here.
All of Saul’s somethingness has been stripped away.
He comes vulnerable. He comes in his nothingness.
He comes only as a person, among persons.
And they receive him.
They release their idea about him and receive him as a person.
They give him a bed, and meals, and friendship. They tell him the resurrection stories and talk about their own trust and transformation. Instead of revenge or retaliation for the death of Stephen, instead of fear and shunning and self-protection, they see him and receive him as a person and love him.
In the Body of Christ, Saul experiences the risen Messiah. The voice who called out to him from the blinding light is given hands, and faces, and names, flesh and foibles and families. They become his ministers, and they receive each other as Christ.
In the presence of their enemy they surrender their own story and receive a new one. It’s a story of healing, nurture and blessing. And forgiveness. They forgive Saul. And his story is reframed and retold, as God’s interruption of grace always does.
Now he looks back at his life and sees the damage he has done, and the futility of his self-righteousness, and the truth of his belovedness and belonging to God and to these others.
Who are you, Lord?
I am Jesus, the person whom your ideas persecute.
I am found among those you are persecuting.
And so are you.
Your identity is given to you, your story is restored, in the ministry of shared weakness and death, in the encounter between persons.
We don’t want to see each other as persons. Marshall Rosenberg, the founder of Non-violent communication, says, "It's hard to believe that those who are doing things far outside our value system are human beings like the rest of us. It's very challenging."
We wont give the benefit of doubt to each other because we are afraid.
Perhaps we’re scared of an identity crisis.
What if we lose our story? What if this person makes me change my ideas?
What if accepting this person is the same as accepting their ideas?
What if their false and dangerous ideas spread to the people I care about?
What if, by seeing them as human, equal and beloved, our story is corrupted, and we no longer know who we are?
The human temptation is always toward self righteousness. It is always toward building our own somethingness. We are always tempted to write our own story. To build and maintain our own identity. To form our own I am from our ideas and accomplishments.
But the Christian life is one of being knocked to the ground and given an identity crisis, and then a new story.
Saul dies to his story of zealous righteousness, and awakens to his story of grace, experienced alongside these others whom he had seen as enemy. This experience is so transformative that it becomes his story, his life message, his purpose. Everything he had been about up till now is seen anew through the lens of amazing grace. Throughout all the letters he ends up writing and all the places he ends up going, before the Gentiles and Kings and people of Israel he speaks to, Saul tells his story as a recovering self-righteous-aholic who has been saved by grace.
We find out a few verses later that Saul’s name is changed to Paul – which means, “Humility,” perhaps the last name that he, or anyone else, would think to give to this man. And yet, he lives into it – even up against his own reoccurring instinct toward self-righteousness, which he names, grace is the story he keeps living and telling. And it turns out Ananias' names means "The Lord gives grace."
We call this story, “the conversion of Paul.” But it’s also the conversion of Ananias, and the conversion of the Damascan community of Jesus-followers. It’s the transformation of all of them. To follow Jesus is to welcome Christ in the person of their enemy. To serve God is to come vulnerably to be cared for by God at the hands of their enemy.
Everyone is living from a story. In any other story we have about ourselves, our jobs or families, our educations or accomplishments, in what we’ve lost or survived, it becomes easy to start thinking, “I did that. I earned that. I survived that. I guess I was great.” It’s easy to see ourselves as the good and others as the bad, easy to place ourselves above, over and against one another.
But you can’t do that in a story of cross and resurrection. You can’t get comfortable in the rightness of your ideas in a story that keeps sending you back to your sin, back to your nothingness, to find there the person of Jesus Christ, who meets us with grace and forgiveness and belonging we can’t earn.
You were in sin and Jesus found you. That is the story of your life. That is the story of Saul’s life now. And we have the freedom to live now out of this story. Inside all the other stories in our lives- our jobs and our families, our communities and the things we care about and pursue, inside them now we live this story: that we are sinners saved by grace. Like good and holy Saul, like faithful Ananias and the Jesus-followers of Damascus, we are always in need of conversion.
Where is Jesus saying to you today, I am Jesus whom you persecute?
Or, I am Jesus whom you meet in the touch and ministry of another?
Or, I am Jesus who crucifies your story of righteousness and gives you a story of grace in its place?
Grace comes to us, and through us, and keeps going, never running out. In grace, Jesus calls us by name and gives us an identity crisis. Then the Holy Spirit brings us to other persons, to find there between us the very person of Christ. Our story of disconnection from God and each other is crucified, and we are given a new story, of belonging to God and belonging to each other.
May God resurrect us again.
Amen.
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