"Road Trip" - Sermon for the Third Sunday of Easter

Road Trip
Easter 3 – Narrative Lectionary 4
May 4, 2014
Grace, Mankato, MN
Acts 9.1-19

Narratively speaking much has happened since last week’s post-resurrection appearance of Jesus to Thomas and the other disciples. After being in the Old Testament last fall and working up to the Jesus story at Christmas in John since then, we’re now in the time of the early church, which tells us how the fledgling church works out the good news. We’ll make one exception to the narrative flow when we reach Pentecost Sunday when we will read about the outpouring of the Holy Spirit in Acts 2. Meanwhile, the apostles have come out from behind closed doors, the message of Jesus is spreading, and the religious establishment is feeling no less threatened. They are now responding, again, in kind.

To the forefront of the religious backlash comes Saul, a man on a mission of the murderous kind. Not content to have the followers of Jesus, the Way, scattered abroad, Saul goes after them and hunts them down. Proof of the old saying, “If you want to make God laugh (or cry), tell God your plans,” God gets Saul’s attention in a big way in what has come to be known as a “Damascus Road experience.” The term is so well known that many people use it even though they have never read the story in the Bible. The point is that God turns Saul around in dramatic fashion and he now becomes one of the good guys.

It’s a great story and full of possibilities for preaching, if not for applications to the life of faith. Not the least of them is that God can and does use someone whom we believe to be evil personified. But today I want to use Saul’s dramatic story to think about how God works in our lives. We need to take care we don’t make this story normative experience for all peoples and times. I suggest that instead most of us experience a life of continuous, small conversions rather  than a huge, dramatic one, and that even the dramatic conversions are preceded by important smaller steps that lead up to the dramatic one.

I have often spoken about my own experience of coming back to the church after my atheistic or agnostic years. From Confirmation to young adulthood I rejected the church and those in it as hypocrites. As I grew older and was invited back to the church, I realized the questions I had about God and faith could be answered only within the church, and in May 1978 I rededicated my life to Christ. What I may not have mentioned is that I still remember that day standing in front of the mirror, expecting something dramatic to happen. It didn’t, and I wondered if I did something wrong. Years later, I realize that God most often works differently than I expected.

You see, the fact is that God had been working in my life up to that day in 1978, bringing me to that point. Perhaps more importantly, God has continued to work conversions in my life. Focusing on a particular experience at a day or time is like asking someone how their marriage is going and hearing a response that focuses on their wedding day, not how they have grown since then. In fact, even as someone who has been a pastor for 17 years, I find myself in a different place then when I was ordained. For example, I had always thought that baptism was the gateway to Holy Communion, but now I think that Communion can be a gateway to baptism and participation in the life of faith. Likewise, God has been working on me in some other subtle and not so subtle ways, for the better I trust.

Saul’s experience on that Damascus Road shows that God does with us according to who we are, meets us wherever we are, whoever we are, and guides us into becoming who we truly are. The lasting mark of conversion is not a date marked on a calendar but the unfolding story of one’s life. Frankly, Saul’s conversion experience is worth telling because of what he did afterward, more than the event itself. So our question today is, “Where is God gently (or not so gently) ‘converting’ you right now?” Know that the risen and living Christ is present in each of our lives, working in, with, and though us for his purposes and glory. For Christ is risen; Christ is risen, indeed; alleluia. Amen.