Telling the stories that change us

Psalm 40:1-10

Growing up, I used to think I needed a better testimony. It’s no good to just say you grew up a pastor’s kid and kind of always knew God.  I would simmer with righteous jealousy whenever I heard someone really lay it out there, drug addict and homeless, and God saved them from all that and gave them a new start. Or filthy rich, self-serving lawyer who met Jesus and gave it all up to go into youth ministry.  God, of course, is capable of saving people from all sorts of things. Their things just seemed way more interesting, and way more important to be saved from, than mine.

This is our last unit with the Psalms – what Brueggemann calls, "Psalms of New Orientation." In many ways, these are the testimony Psalms. We started the summer with Psalms of Orientation – which praise the reliability of God’s goodness and the order of creation. Then we moved into Psalms of Disorientation – those prayers that invite us into our experience when all trust in God’s goodness and the world’s dependability and order crumbles. 

Now we come to Psalms of New Orientation.  In some ways they are a return to where we began, except that after disorientation there is no going back.  These prayers of the specific goodness of God who saved them from specific trouble, prayed by those who’ve been through death and come out the other side through no fault, or power, of their own. And they give God complete credit for it all.  These are testimony songs.

There is this inexplicable moment in the Psalms of Disorientation, when the Psalm goes from anguish and despair suddenly to gratitude and effusive praise for God’s salvation.  Sometimes that’s because the person or community is healed from sickness, released from bondage, defeated an enemy army, or some other clear, “give me the microphone I’ve got a testimony” type of redemption has occurred.  

Other times the circumstances don’t actually change at all –their reputation isn’t suddenly repaired or their power returned to them, but something has shifted.  They are brought from oppression to freedom, even in the midst of a difficult situation.  

In either case, the credit goes to God.  And what is called for in the moment is gratitude.

These are songs of grace.  Psalms of new orientation can’t come on their own.  They are only the new life after the death, the new story after the old.  They are what is born after what has been lost.  A different kind of trust, a new kind of faith-  one that has been tested and formed, let go and given back as a gift.  Many are directly related to struggles in the own Psalmists’ lives. But many look back to specific acts of God’s deliverance generations earlier, such as God bringing their ancestors out of slavery in Egypt five hundred years before. Retelling God’s faithfulness then becomes a way to celebrate and recognize God’s faithfulness now.  

 “I waited patiently,” our Psalm begins, and God saved me. 

God is the one who acts.  And what we call “waiting patiently” may not have looked so patient at the time. We’ve seen the first half of some of these and it looks a lot more like arguing and blaming and cajoling and begging than patient waiting.  This is like a little kid throwing a tantrum at the store, wanting only to be home, and when it’s all done and he is safely at home, he might say, Mommy brought me home.  I knew all along that she would.

Of course, looking back, we are much more sure that God will act than we might have felt in the moment, but that is our prerogative.  We get to say, “I knew God would do it, and God did.”  That doesn’t make us liars.  It makes us changed.  

The action of God is so powerful and transformative that not only does it change the present and gives us a new future, it changes the past too.  God’s grace is a time traveler; God’s intrusion reframes the narrative.  The action of God was coming all along, even if I couldn’t see it. I waited patiently and God delivered me.  After we have come out the other side, the story that has changed us changes.  

Let me give you an example of this. While I’ve had a lot of wonderful jobs, and plenty of tolerable jobs, I have also had two jobs in my life that sucked the life out of me.  One of them was while Andy was a Ph.D. student and I was the sole breadwinner.  They were both difficult and draining.  I felt trapped - my soul slowly being sapped.  I might say it in a Psalm as,I struggled through frustration and confusion, not knowing my purpose or contribution, but God saved me.  I was a patient and willing recipient of God’s grace.  

Now I wasn’t, actually, at the time, either patient or particularly receptive.  I was impatient and miserable, and I felt stuck.   But looking back at these things, we can say, “I trusted God and God delivered me,” even when it happens the other way around: God delivers us and we learn we can trust God to do so.

Because not only did God deliver me from those places, by my either quitting or getting fired, and not only did God give me ways to make money to support us where I felt happier and freer, but also, it turns out, I received valuable wisdom and meaningful growth from having suffered through those two jobs.  

Truly, not a week goes by that I don’t directly apply skills or insights from one or the other of those experiences. God used them to make me a more genuine human, a more attentive noticer, a more intentional leader, and a pastor who knows that whatever good happens here among us is because of God and not me.  Knowing this makes me far less likely to hang my own worth on how “well” the church is doing, which is much better for you all too.  

So my Psalm of new orientation about this would probably end with something like, I praise you, God! You are relentless about redemption! Praise the Lord, who uses everything in our lives, and doesn’t let even a single drop of it go to waste.

If, as our last round of Psalms taught us, questioning God’s goodness is a valid and vital part of faith, then so is accepting it, celebrating it, and telling about it when you see it and feel it.  It doesn’t stop with the asking, or the saving, or even with the praising, it must come full circle – others must know the truth of your life- the story of your being saved.  We don’t just belong to God, we also belong to each other. Which brings us back to testimony.

Your story is part of the story of God.  It is the story not of one who did it all on their own, nor is it the story of one who lost it all.  It is the story of one who has been saved. Saved by God. Given a new life, new beginnings.  

When you speak of your salvation to others, your humanity that has been lost, overlooked, starved, dead, trapped in the desolate pit, stuck in the miry bog – it is reestablished. Your place is restored, your voice is remade. These Psalms remind us we are no longer defined by our striving or our struggle, but by our participation with Christ in God’s life. 

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, I once was lost but now I’m found!

You put a new song in my mouth, O God, a song of praise and thanks!

But I’m not talking about just a one time conversion experience, rehearsed and rehashed to compare who got the better before and after photo.  There is not just one Psalm of New Orientation.  God doesn’t just save us once.  This happens over and over, throughout our lives.  “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, God’s mercies never come to an end.  They are new every morning.” (Lamentations 3:22-23) 

We all have testimonies. We all have Psalms of new orientation inside us.  Many, many of them.  We just don’t know how to sing them, or haven’t thought to.  

We have all been saved by the intervention of a God who leans in close and hears our cries.  But we don’t always recognize it.  And even if we do, we rarely either give God praise or tell others what God has done for us. 

Maybe we’re afraid it’s bragging, or could jinx our good fortune, or isn’t as impressive as a story as it ought to be.  Maybe we’ve been more on the lookout for things like dumb luck, or our own prowess and skill, and haven’t learned how to give God credit- or feel silly or naive doing it.  I suspect mostly it's that we are just moving so fast in this life we don’t stop to notice the hand of God; we're out of practice recognizing it, and expressing the gratitude we feel.

Let’s do it anyway. Let’s assume, like the Israelites did, like David did, that God is involved in it all.  Let’s imagine God is always more present, more available, more engaged, more invested, than we can conceive of.  

Let’s practice with each other waiting patiently when we’re in the pit, and when we’re delivered out of it, rejoicing unabashedly and telling about it to all who will listen.  

And let’s practice listening and receiving each other’s stories of deliverance, being the people who believe you when you say you experienced God. We will be the people who celebrate when you experience life out of death, because we know this is real, and because it points all of us back to the truth of our belonging to God and each other that can only come from God.

Sometimes we might do this with our day or with our week, look for God’s action to express gratitude.  But like the long gaze back of the Israelites, what it might do for us to look back at our lives – ten years ago, let’s say, or twenty, or forty even, and recognize some of the times that God saved us? 

Can you seek out a time in your own story when you felt lost, or stuck, or dead, and newness came, God intervened, hope was born where there was none, and quite apart from anything you could have cooked up?

Can you see where you might have been heading one way and you were led another way instead?

Were you saved from a toxic relationship? 

Given a new start after an illness or injury took away what you thought made you you?  

Did you find yourself in a new place where you didn’t know anyone, and kind and wonderful people came into your life?  

Did a rejection from the school you had your heart set on, or the job that was perfect for you, mean you ended up in exactly the right place that you may never have chosen otherwise?  

Did the pain over losing a spouse, or a child, threaten to swallow you whole and shut you down for life, but somehow, now, you are living, even with joy?  

Were you lost in addiction and released from its grip and every day keep choosing that freedom?  

Did you make a choice that caused great pain to others, and later find forgiveness and a new start?

Were you reunited with a long-lost childhood friend, or reawakened to a discarded passion or interest you got to pursue later in life?  

There is no end to the form these stories of God’s faithfulness and saving can take.  As the Psalmist says, You have multiplied, O Lord my God,
   your wondrous deeds and your thoughts towards us;
   none can compare with you.
Were I to proclaim and tell of them,
   they would be more than can be counted.

Let me be clear that celebrating God’s deliverance doesn’t mean we are saying everything in our life is great right now. This Psalm itself veers back into pleas for help.  Speaking out about what God has done for you in the past in no way undermines a fresh experience of God’s absence, or the need for God’s intervention again in your life. 

This is the paradoxical faith of the Israelites, that they can sing praises for God’s faithfulness in the past, even while begging God to please be faithful now.  It is, in fact, a basis for their pleas.  

So if that is where you are now, in a place of struggle or anger with God, I invite you to do two things.  One, read the rest of this Psalm.  Pray with it this week.  The Psalms are filled with words to bring you into your experience where God can meet you.  This prayerbook has been used by people like us for two thousands years to help us plant our feet and face God with whatever we’ve got. 

But the second thing I invite you to do is to take this moment to look back on your life and seek out times of God’s salvation.  Look for stories – your own stories – that show you who God is and what God does.  

And then we’re going to tell them.  We are going to practice it now: the noticing, the thanks, the telling and the receiving of these testimonies.  Let us sing a new song.

  

We did this together in worship on September 1.  

You can do this at home with these prompts:

I was…

Then God…

I praise the Lord, who…

Try thinking of a half dozen or so.  

Share them with someone. 

Share them here in the comments, if you’re willing.


This is the fourth of a four part series on the spirituality of the Psalms.  
You can read the rest here: 
Part 1 - A life well-lived
Part 2 - Starting and ending this way
Part 3 - Praying the dangerous ones 

The story of your life

Acts 9:1-22

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.

The Community of an Untidy Calling

Acts 9:1-22

I once read a very helpful parenting book that suggested you identify your particular weakness, your problem that could trip you up as a parent of a preschooler.   As I read through the various descriptions, I recognized right away that my key weakness was: the need to be right. 

It has always been part of me – I can’t stand people thinking something is true which clearly isn’t, I have a compulsion to correct misinformation when I overhear it in someone else’s conversation and bad grammar when it’s in my own conversations, my husband taunts me by purposely (or accidentally??) singing lyrics wrong, and the worst thing for me is when someone thinks something about me, my motives or my actions, which is not true. 

As a parent this means I can get into some ridiculous arguments and battles of will because I wont just let something hang out there that is, in my opinion, wrong.  And I can be a little defensive, and a little quick to lecture, a little too prone to “I told you so.”  It also means I am passionate, and care about justice, and don’t punish unfairly, just so you know the whole picture and don’t get me wrong, here. 

But I learned that my preschooler could trigger me easily by insisting that I was wrong about something, or complaining that I didn’t care about him, or announcing that I wasn’t telling the truth. 

I think Saul was a little like me.  He needed to be right.  He probably could quote both the Torah and the local traffic laws, he ate kosher perfectly, kept his elbows off the table and reported to the neighborhood watch any suspicious activity right away.  But even more than needing to be right, he cared deeply what was right and hated passionately what was wrong. In fact, he was fanatical and relentless about upholding right and stamping out wrong, this famous and feared heretic-hunter.  He was invested, dedicated. And involved- he held the coats and watched a few chapters back while they stoned Jesus-follower Stephen to death.  He was pleased to see this thing unfold that would keep their religion faithful to God and teach a lesson to these offshoot imposter-followers. Probably prayed this prayer on his way to Damascus: Help me get these people who’ve got it wrong, who are so warping your truth and leading people away from you.  His life had one mission: to stand up for what was right and get those who were wrong. And it’s just that simple.

I watched the presidential debate the other night – an hour and a half of each candidate claiming they were right and the other was wrong, over and over again.  And during it, I thought of a friend of mine whom I deeply hurt during the last election by a side comment, meant to be funny, that highlighted our differences of opinion, that made her feel belittled or dismissed, and which has made things between us awkward ever sense.

A few weeks ago I sat with the session of a church that has discerned that to be faithful to their calling and their understanding of God’s word, they need to leave our denomination.  And they were filled with anger, hurt, pain, sadness, and frustration as they sought to do what they felt was right.

And this week I feel fresh sadness about a relationship in my family where, while we don’t ever speak about it to each other, I have heard and know that in the eyes of this person I love deeply I am wrong in my faith, so very wrong that God will judge me harshly one day for being a teacher of wrong faith.  And this person is so sure they are right that there is no way to even broach the subject without confirming their beliefs in my utter wrongness.  And this situation between us feels dismal and unfixable.

This paradigm of one side being right and the other side being wrong is pervasive and pernicious.  This story of Saul’s journey to Damascus, the driven and purpose-filled journey to stamp out the wrong in the name of the right, brings right to the surface this burning wondering I have, What happens when we get so far removed from our own humanity, from who God called us to be as children of God, that we stop seeing each other? That we stop meeting each other? That the other becomes to me just a commodity, an object that either stands in my way, or that gives me the agreement I am looking for?  What happens when we make everyone two- dimensional?  When we are so convinced that we are right – and I mean deeply convinced about the deep wrong of the opposite position and the true right of our own – that the people who hold these opinions become enemies? That their opinion can be boiled down into label, an inaccurate punch line that summarizes them so that we can dismiss them:

They’re judgmental and closed, and don’t care for their neighbor.

They no longer believe in Jesus Christ as Lord.

They hate gay people.

They don’t believe the bible is the word of God.

They are warping the faith of the one true God.

He is a dangerous militant whom we should fear and shun.

And so the story of Saul’s journey to Damascus raises the unsettling question, What if the place God calls you to is the heart of the people whom you despise? The ones you’ve already dismissed as irrelevant?  Or dangerous? Or useless?  What if the community God wants to build is with these very people whom you cannot embrace? Saul was about to find this out. But so was the community of believers in his path.

The Jesus-followers among the Damascus Jews had every reason to turn Saul away.  They had every right to dismiss him or flee. But that is not what happened.  Instead, we witness the astounding hospitality, the strange and inexplicable grace, of God.

Saul came to them not in reason or argument, not even in mutuality; he came in utter vulnerability, in need and confusion.

In the blinding light and voice from heaven he had heard the prophet’s call – just like those of old – God had summoned him and this devout and faithful Jew responded from the deep story of his ancestors of Yahweh who seeks out prophets in just this way.  That part felt right.

But then God sends him to church. To the followers of “The Way.”  To those he was opposing in God’s name.  No other explanation from the divine - Saul manages to get Jesus’ name out of this Yahweh encounter, an introduction which had to be enough to throw him into true cognitive dissonance - but he doesn’t get to properly meet Jesus just yet.   That is coming up. 

So Saul the invincible, now sightless and helpless and led by the hand into the city, unable to eat or drink, lives for three days darkness and confusion, in blindness and fear.  Then Yahweh/Jesus calls again.  This time God tells Ananias, one of the community of Jesus-followers, to go to Saul, his persecutor, and pray for him, that God has chosen Saul for a purpose and Ananias is going to be part of this story.  And Ananias talks back. God, maybe you haven’t heard who this guys is, but he is against us, just so you know.  He’s not one of us, he’s wrong, and he’s out to get us, so… want to give a different instruction? Cuz I’ll totally do what you ask me to do, as long as it sounds right.

But God insists this is what God is asking for, and so Ananias obeys. 

And then the two of them, Saul and Ananias, come together as human beings – shattering the boundary between oppressor and victim, dropping the importance of right and wrong, setting aside what they believed and what they thought they knew, and swallowing enough fear to put one foot in front of the other in humility and obedience to God’s call.  And when they encounter one another, they encounter Jesus.  And then Saul finds himself welcomed into the community of believers, aka, trusters of Jesus, that just a few days earlier he had intended to destroy. 

Instead of revenge or retaliation for the death of Stephen, instead of fear and shunning and self-protection, they share with him healing, nurture, blessing and identity. They give him a bed and meals and friendship and tell him the resurrection stories and talk about their own stories.  And now he has truly met Christ.  In the Body of Christ, he 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. 

And we find out a few verses later that Saul’s name is changed to Paul – which means, “Humility”, and all of his own passion and personhood is taken up into the mission of God and given a new start in this community of care as his life heads in a radically different direction.  And I love the conversion story – especially as someone who grew up in the church without a dramatic conversion story - but that’s its own whole other sermon, and today I am really interested in what happens between them and in this community. When that little band of believers find themselves the unwitting welcomers of Christ in the face of an enemy.  When the God-follower is stripped of his mantle to stamp out the wrong and uphold the right and instead meet God anew and in person.

What is it to be church?  What does it mean to be followers of Jesus, the offspring of this story and those who live it?  

Being Church means we are formed by resurrection and not by being right.  

It means we are people of a crucified and risen Lord, not a particular political party or brand of Christianity.  

It means that in this world where we are constantly encouraged at every turn to label ourselves and everyone else, we don’t define ourselves, God defines us -as beloved children, precious in the heart of God and given the mandate to see and hold all we meet as precious as well.

Ultimately, Saul of right and wrong was not converted or convinced, he was called and he was cared for.  The church is the place where broken people are made whole -in the love of God through the arms and hands and feet and love of human beings.  And God’s Spirit does not discriminate by our politics. Or make sure our theology is all airtight before descending into our midst.  God’s Spirit blows where it will, and the love of God is felt both where we are comfortable and also in the embrace of people we might never, never, never agree with.

Thank God for not being constricted by our human understanding. 

Thank God that my faithfulness and yours don’t have to cancel each other out.  

Thank God that we live in this world, and in this church, together with people we don’t get to choose.  Because most likely we’d choose the ones we agree with. It’s just easier that way. We often don’t even need to like them or want to hang out, we just want to know they are on the right side of the issue, whatever our particular issue might be at the moment. 

But being right can’t hold a candle to being real.   And that’s what this messy collection of lives that makes up the Body of Christ consists of.  Beautiful, broken, sometimes right and oftentimes wrong - a holy and profane hodgepodge of faithful sinners. In real relationships with real people.   

For the grace of God that holds us fast in our brokenness and our hurt, I am so very thankful.  

For the forgiveness of God that heals where I have contributed to brokenness and hurt to my brothers and sisters in the body of Christ, I am humbly grateful.  

And I pray, God of all grace, please, may I let go of the need to be right, and see the face of Christ, however, whenever, Christ might come to me.  

That I might be changed.  

That the world might be changed.  

Amen.