HOW'S YOUR CONVERSION GOING?

A Sermon for the Third Sunday of Easter, Year C

Acts 9:1-20

He had a bright sparkle in his eyes, rugged skin and impressively long, dishwater blond hair that he always held in place with a bandana tied across his forehead. Scott was the proverbial hippy guy, which I thought was really, really cool given that it was the 1980s when I met him. 

I had only read about the hippies in history class and seen one once. Just once. On a ten-speed bicycle whizzing through my neighborhood, his long hair in two thin pigtails. The neighbor boy yelled: “Look! It’s a hippy!” But by the time we all ran out into the road to get a closer look, all we could see were his pigtails flying out behind him. An elusive, mythic creature.

Scott, therefore, afforded my very first opportunity to talk with an actual hippy. I was stoked. 

My best friend, Martha, had driven me in her oversized chavelle to a little, fundamentalist, store-front Christian fellowship called The Narrow Gate. While our peers were presumably out getting drunk, Martha and I spent our high school days hanging out with the hippies and assorted weirdos of The Narrow Gate. It was awesome.

I remember the first conversation I had with Scott. He’d been a major drug addict and then had gotten himself clean because of Jesus. Scott didn’t hold back any of the lurid details of what it was like to be a junkie. My innocent eyes were opened.

But then he talked about how God saved him. Literally. Saved his life. And his sparkly eyes practically popped out of his head. 

I had never heard anyone speak with such a first-hand knowledge of God. He talked like he knew God. Really knew God. The way you know your best friend. Or your mom. And he was just so happy. It seemed like he glowed. Yes, yes, I could perceive the forcefield around him. Scott was a radiantly glowing happy hippy. I didn’t know what to make of him.

Later I said to Martha: “Can we ever have that kind of faith—like Scott has? I mean, do you have to be bad to be that good?”

And Scott’s wasn’t the only conversion story. I heard lots of them down at the Narrow Gate. They always had stories.

“I was lost but now I’m found. I was blind but now I see.” I grew up singing those lines in Amazing Grace but I had never met a Lutheran who talked like that for real. It was more like: “I was Lutheran and then I was Lutheran.” What did we know about conversion? 

And, frankly, I was a bit jealous of those bad-gone-good people who seemed to get grace a whole lot more because they used to be so far away from God.

In today’s passage from Acts, we hear the conversion story of Paul. He, who had been a zealous persecutor of Christians, is dramatically struck down in a lightning storm on his way to Damascus, spoken to by the voice of Christ and blinded by the light. 

I love the painting of this story by the artist Caravaggio (pictured above). Paul is depicted—in Caravaggio’s signature theatrical lighting style—lying flat on the ground, hands in surrender to the overwhelmingly bright presence of Jesus. He’s low down on the picture plane, implying he’s fallen clear off his tall horse. And it seems like the most prevalent thing in the painting is the rear end of the horse as it stands there in the light. Maybe I’m reading into it but I get the sense that Caravaggio was giggling to himself as he painted this indicating that backside of the horse—that’s what Paul was until Jesus struck him down. 

But this incredible moment changed him. Even his name changed from Saul to Paul. He stopped killing Christians. Quit cold turkey. And became the writer of about half the New Testament, the major shaper of Christian thought, and the world’s most famous missionary.

Okay, I’ll admit it. I was a little bit jealous of Paul, too. What a conversion experience! Come on, I was a drama geek. Now that’s a conversion.  No wonder Paul was hair-on-fire-crazy to share the news of Jesus’ resurrection with the whole of the ancient world. I mean, who wouldn’t be?

But poor little me. Poor me. I never got to be bad like Persecutor Saul or like Hippy Scott in his drug days. 

My problem, I decided, was that I’d always been Lutheran. How in the world was I going to have a conversion of my own?

Paul later wrote to the Christians in Corinth: “If anyone is in Christ, they are a new creation and the former things have passed away. Behold all things have become new.” (2 Cor. 5:17)

According to Paul himself, you don’t have to have a fall-off-your-horse, hear-the-voice-of-Jesus, blinded-by-the-light encounter like he did to become new. You just have to be in Christ. That’s it. That makes you a new creation whether you were ever a hippy or not. That makes you risen with Christ. That converts you.

Do you ever reflect upon your conversion? How were you converted? 

Do you even consider yourself converted, particularly if you were raised in the faith—baptized as an infant like Jazlee-Jo and her toddler brother, Carszn will be today? How can we be converted if we have always been in Christ, even before we were aware of it?

But here’s the thing: The Holy Spirit is never done with us. There is never a moment when the Spirit looks at us and says: “Yep! Got that one finished.” and moves on. No, the Spirit doesn’t knock off at five o’clock. The Spirit never tires of the work-in-progress projects called you and me.  Always. Always. We are being reshaped into the likeness of Christ. 

Paul needed ongoing work after his big conversion. He struggled immensely, whining in his letters with things like: “I do the thing that I do not want to do but the thing I do want to do, I do not do. Horrible guy am I!” (from Romans 7:15-20) I think Paul understood that conversion is a life-long process not just one memorable moment. Even for him.

So if someone asks me about my conversion, I ask: “which one?” Now I realize that I have been being converted all along. I don’t need to be jealous of anyone else’s conversion. Martin Luther explains in the meaning of the Apostles Creed that day after day a new self should arise to live with God. I’ve had lots of conversions because every day is a new one. Every day God draws me away from my selfish ambitions, knocks me off my high horse and sets me on a different course—a course of Love. Beyond my wildest imagination. That’s what God opens my eyes to. That’s life in the risen Christ.

Paul didn’t choose his conversion. He didn’t set out to do some kind of self-help 21-day faith challenge he could post about on Twitter. He was going his own, angry way when he was struck down, blinded, and sent into Damascus like a helpless little child instead of the avenging warrior he had intended.

Christ said to him: “Go into the city, and you will be told what to do.”  That must have been terrifying for Paul because it seems he had never been told what to do—he was the one telling you what to do. Now he would be taking the marching orders. Not giving them. And from then on he did march in a new direction.

Still. Paul’s not extraordinary as he was quick to admit.  Yes, he was God’s vessel but more like a cracked pot. Throughout scripture, we see God’s many weird choices for servants. The fact is: God can use anybody. Even you. Even me. 

My friends, this isn’t about us. It is about the call to be converted to the extraordinary and altogether different way of God. It’s the call to listen and obey when God tells us what to do. And it comes to us because we are God’s children, claimed in the waters of baptism. It comes to us day after day, regardless of our worthiness—whether or not we’ve been a horse’s behind.

Even though you don’t often get this question in a Lutheran church, it is a valid one that deserves asking: How's your conversion going? How is God transforming you? How are you becoming a new creation as you are risen with Christ? 

You might want to be on the lookout for this divine action in your life. Just sayin'. Because it often happens when you least expect it. As God’s child you can be certain that the Spirit is busy each day converting you because there’s a lot of work out there to be done. And Christ is counting on you.

May you say YES to this ongoing conversion and may you sally forth into the future to do this work with courage, a joyful twinkle in your eye and perhaps even with your pigtails flying out behind you. Amen.

@2016 Laura Gentry

AN OUTRAGEOUS SERMON ABOUT LOVE

A Sermon for the 4th Sunday after Epiphany

 Corinthians 13:1-13 • Luke 4:21-30

Our Epistle reading for today from I Corinthians 13 is America’s most popular wedding verse. I’m sure you’ve heard it at many a wedding. And because it is so popular, you might kind of think of it as cliche and tune out when it’s read, assuming it to be the feel-good Hallmark card of the New Testament. 

But here’s the thing: this text is not about romantic love. Sorry, happy couples, this letter wasn’t written for you. No, it was sent to the early church in Corinth, a community in conflict. What’s love about? Paul says love is actually most important when people can’t stand each other. If we want to be followers of Christ, we need to learn how to love even though it’s not the fun or easy thing to do.

Just before this passage about love begins, in verse 12:31, it says the love is “a still more excellent way.” In the Greek, this phrase has even more punch. It could be translated something like “love is beyond measuring.” In this troublesome congregation, people were busy measuring their worth against each another. It was all competition and backbiting. They wanted to one-up one another with their great spiritual gifts but Paul wants them to see that they need to move past this way of relating and into a different way, a way that is not about such measurement but instead, is a steeped in love beyond measuring. 

That’s the kind of love that ought to shape our lives together as the church. If we do great things but don’t have love, Paul proclaims, we are like a clanging gong. It’s empty. We’ve missed the point. Today’s our annual meeting. We will be looking at our church business, our budget, our various ministries. Let’s keep these words in mind as we conduct our meeting. What do our building and our budget and our missional strategies matter if we don’t have love? First and foremost, we are called to be a community that lives out the love of Christ.

Okay, okay, so we’re supposed to love but what does that look like? According to this letter, it is active. Love is the subject of 16 verbs in a row here. In English it kind of sounds passive: “Love is patient. Love is kind.” Don’t start yawning yet, though, because in the original Greek it is more like: “Love shows patience. Love acts with kindness.” See the active tense of the verbs? Throughout these phrases, love is an action-filled thing, not a warm gushy feeling that we have for people who are like us. So you see, this passage isn’t so Hallmarkish after all! It’s a very difficult teaching. Love requires a lot of us.

Then, at the end of this reading, it makes the boldest claim of all: “Love never ends.” Paul names three most important values to the church: faith, hope and love. These summarize the life of the church, which is why we chose them to be in the Our Savior's Lutheran Church mission statement: “Making Christ known by inviting all to grow in faith, hope and love.” Yet, Paul reminds us that even among these three great things, love is the greatest. Love is what will remain. We are drawn into that love which is offered by God and we are reformed into people who work together despite our difference to share that love.

It is too bad that we as a society assume love feels good because the love to which we are called rarely feels good. It’s a demanding task that is set before us. And it is not a request, it’s a mandate that we love. 

I think this talk of love is still too abstract. So let’s turn to Jesus to see more clearly what it means to love. Did you check him out in today’s Gospel lesson? There he is chilling with his own peeps in his home synagogue. This is his community, the place he was raised. He’s come back now as an adult, as a rabbi, and he’s teaching the scriptures. Jesus opens the scroll and reads to the congregation from Isaiah. They are poetical words the people would have known well. They speak of God’s promise to release, redeem and heal those who have been cast off by society. And then Jesus declares that this scripture has been fulfilled in their hearing. Wonderful! They all rejoice and think highly of their hometown boy because they think it means they are the ones who are going to get released, redeemed and healed. After all, they have been living under the oppressive Roman occupation for so long and now their time of political liberation has finally come. No wonder they are excited.

Jesus, however, doesn’t mean it this way. He goes on to clarify. No, he basically tells them, when I talk about God coming to free the oppressed and bless the poor, I’m not talking about you! I’m talking about God blessing the people you don’t like, the people you don’t want to be near, the people you are afraid of, the ones you call enemies.

Just to drive the point home, Jesus recalls a couple of familiar stories from the scripture where God gave a blessing not to Israel, but to Israel’s enemies. Then suddenly the hometown crowd is no longer happy with him. In the same way they were all initially excited about Jesus’ teaching, they are now all upset with him. Upset doesn’t capture their outrage, you see, because they turn into a lynch mob and try to kill him. This is Mary and Joseph’s boy—the village kid they’ve watched grow up—but he’s made them so mad they want him dead.

Their sudden violence is hard to understand. Why do they get so furious so fast? It’s because Jesus is redefining God’s love. It’s not just for you, he reminds them. It is for everybody. Everybody. Now Jesus brought up Israel’s enemies in the stories he told, but what if he were here today in our context and he talked about our enemies? What if he said something like: 

“American People, I know you are afraid, but your persistent desire to keep people who aren’t like you away, your disdain for the poor, the addicts, those in prison, those with a different sexual orientation, your discrimination against people of color, your attempts to keep Syrian refugees and Latin American immigrants out of your country, your hatred of Muslims, your desire to build walls instead of bridges—well that’s just wrong! That’s not God’s way. That will never be God’s way. God loves all people—even dangerous people. There are no exemptions. Listen to me: God loves all people and you have to deal with that!”

This is an offensive message, right? Can you hear the offense? It is truly outrageous! That's why it sends Jesus’ congregation into a rage and they try to throw him over the cliff of Narareth. See? Love is not a sentimental thing in the way Jesus lived it. There’s no Hallmark about it. It’s actually—dare I say it—a political thing. It calls us to take a stand, to move beyond our fear and to love in word and deed without discrimination. Do they deserve love? Doesn’t matter. Love them anyway. “Love,” as Mother Theresa used to say, “until it hurts.”

Now I have been your pastor for almost 15 years and I have been preaching this message of God’s radically inclusive love but I am going to apologize to you today. I’m afraid I haven’t preached it forcefully enough. If I had preached it like Jesus did, I bet you’d have thrown me into the river by now. That's how outrageous Jesus' message is. I’m afraid you think I’m nice. Well I’ve got news for you: I am trying to un-nice myself! As your pastor, I am called to a prophetical role. I’m bound by Christ to preach his message. When I took the vow of ordination that’s what I promised to do. So I’m standing with Christ and telling you that you’re all wrong. I am too. We do not love as we ought. We are so so discriminatory and afraid and so we only love the people we already like. That’s not love. That’s not the more excellent way. That’s just a clanging gong.

But love never fails. And that’s good news, since we’ve apparently gotten an F on the love exam. God’s love overrides our failure to love. In verse 12 of this chapter of I Corinthians, it asserts that we have already been fully known. God sees right through us and knows how much we have fallen short of our calling to love all people. The Lord knows and yet loves us anyway. That means you and I, despite our earnest attempts, are saved not by our works but by grace. We must always come back to that self-understanding that we are saved by grace. That is the only hope we have of widening our hearts. If God can love me, I can love others, I must love others.

Let us pray: O come, Holy Spirit, and fill our church anew, that we may stand together and we may courageously and actively love all people with your radical, all-inclusive, never-failing, beyond-measuring love. Amen.

© 2016 Laura Gentry