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
