C
Easter 3 BFC 2016
Acts
9:1-20
April
10, 2016
The right Rev. Bill Hawk has been leading a study
during the week of Rachel Held Evans’ book, Searching
for Sunday. The Sunday adult forum
has also been listening to a presentation by Evans for a church conference
titled, “Keep the Church Weird.”
Understand that Rachel comes out of the Christian evangelical tradition
which so strongly values a fall on your knees,
professing-Jesus-as-your-Lord-and-Savior conversion experience. But she wrote a poem, included in her book,
that may explain her move away from that same evangelical tradition. She wrote:
It will
bother you off and on, like a rock in your shoe,
Or it will startle
you, like the first crash of thunder in a summer storm,
Or it will lodge
itself beneath your skin like a splinter,
Or it will show up
again—the uninvited guest whose heavy footsteps you’d recognize anywhere,
appearing at your front door with a suitcase in hand at the worst. possible.
time.
Or it will pull you
farther out to sea like rip tide,
Or hold your head
under as you drown—
Triggered by an
image, a question, something the pastor said, something that doesn’t add up,
the unlikelihood of it all, the too-good-to-be-trueness of it, the way the lady
in the thick perfume behind you sings “Up from the grave he arose!” with more
confidence in the single line of a song than you’ve managed to muster in the
past two years.
And you’ll be
sitting there in the dress you pulled out from the back of your closet,
swallowing down the bread and wine, not believing a word of it.
Not. A. Word.
So you’ll fumble
through those back pocket prayers—“help me in my unbelief!”—while everyone
around you moves on to verse two, verse three, verse four without you.
You will feel their
eyes on you, and you will recognize the concern behind their cheery greetings:
“We haven’t seen you here in a while! So good to have you back.”
And you will know
they are thinking exactly what you used to think about Easter Sunday
Christians:
Nominal.
Lukewarm.
Indifferent.
But you won’t know
how to explain that there is nothing nominal or lukewarm or indifferent about
standing in this hurricane of questions every day and staring each one down
until you’ve mustered all the bravery and fortitude and trust it takes to
whisper just one of them out loud on the car ride home:
“What if we made
this up because we’re afraid of death?”
And you won’t know
how to explain why, in that moment when the whisper rose out of your mouth like
Jesus from the grave, you felt more alive and awake and resurrected than you
have in ages because at least it was out, at least it was said, at least it wasn’t
buried in your chest anymore, clawing for freedom.
And, if you’re
lucky, someone in the car will recognize the bravery of the act. If you’re
lucky, there will be a moment of holy silence before someone wonders out loud
if such a question might put a damper on Easter brunch.
But if you’re not—if
the question gets answered too quickly or if the silence goes on too
long—please know you are not alone.
There are other
people signing words to hymns they’re not sure they believe today, other people
digging out dresses from the backs of their closets today, other people ruining
Easter brunch today, other people just showing up today.
And sometimes, just
showing up - burial spices in hand - is all it takes to witness a
miracle.[1]
One of the great stories in our larger Christian
tradition is before us this morning.
Saul, a faithful Jew, said to be a great persecutor of the people who
are part of a movement within Judaism called “The Way”, is on the road to Damascus
The voice identifies himself as Jesus,
and, after hearing this voice from the heavens, Saul stands with his eyes open,
unable to see. Ananias, living in
Damascus and a disciple of this same Jesus, has a vision in which Jesus tells
him about this Saul who is coming to him; and the mission and ministry Jesus
will give to Saul. When Saul arrives in
Damascus, Ananias lays hands on Saul and the scales or flakes literally and
metaphorically fall from his eyes. Once
blind, Saul now sees, newly awakened and enlightened. Saul is baptized and begins to proclaim Jesus
as the Son of God in the synagogues.
We know this Saul later becomes the
apostle Paul, through his letters to many communities who also aspire to be
disciples of this Jesus. Paul is the
most prominent author of much of the New Testament., perhaps the most
well-known letter writer of all time. Because scholars date the Biblical gospels
anywhere from the year 60 CE to the year 150 CE, Paul’s letters are some of the
earliest Christian literature we have, written at the earliest in the late 40s
CE into the 50s CE.[2]
By contrast, the story we have before us from the Acts
of the Apostles was written some thirty to fifty years after the apostle Paul wrote
his letters. The author of the Acts of
the Apostles writes this book in the form of a legend where all of the apostles
appear bigger than life, all of the apostles march arm in arm together into the
bright and shining future, and Christians are being baptized in household after
household as this sweeping, growing exponentially movement through the Roman
Empire. In reality, we know that the
Christian cult was rather small within the Roman Empire and Paul’s letters
detail the all too often diversity and conflict in the early Christian
movement.
Accordingly, if you were with us for the Jesus
Seminar and the teaching of the Early Christian scholars, Art Dewey and Bernard
Brandon Scott, you may remember that mainline Christian Biblical scholarship
considers the apostle Paul’s conversion or transformation experience in the
Acts of the Apostles not an apt description for what really happened to the
apostle Paul. How do we know this? We know this because the apostle Paul,
himself, describes his experience in much the same way that the Biblical
prophets described God’s call to them.
Was that call transformational?
You bet. But it happened less as
a conversion and more as an evolutionary unfolding of God’s plan for Paul and
his call as an ambassador or emissary for the Jewish faith.[3]
Christian tradition has used this story, from the
Acts of the Apostles, as the authoritative telling, thus suggesting that Paul
transformed from a hardened, Law-giving Jewish Pharisee to a grace-filled,
compassionate Christian missionary.
Paul’s conversion or transformation story has become iconic in
developing a whole tradition of necessary conversion experiences within
Christian tradition--tent revivals, altar calls, light-blinding messages from
heaven that tell us we have been “saved.”
Can I get an alleluia?
I don’t want to diminish the true
conversion/transformational experiences people have had in their lives. I think many are very real. But there are some real dangers in the Acts
of the Apostle story being the only story for how Christian faith works in the
world.
The first danger is that Christianity somehow trumps
Judaism. Once Paul had his vision, he
left his Judaism behind. And that is
certainly not true. Paul always affirmed
himself as a Jew. We need to remember
this for fear of thinking that the God of the Jews is this Law-giving,
graceless rule-maker while the God of the Christians is this compassionate,
forgiving, loving God. Both versions are
found in both testaments. And one of the
most loving, grace-filled preachers I know is Rabbi Sharon Brous of the IKAR
community in Los Angeles.
The second danger is that if the Acts of the
Apostles story is the only one we have, maybe we are all required to have some
dramatic conversion experience to show our Christian mettle. The more dramatic, the better. I remember people from Campus Crusade for
Christ and Intervarsity Christian Fellowship bringing forward the beefiest
football player to tell us, “I was caught up in alcohol, loose livin’, and
drugs until Christ came into my life.”
In a small town like Metamora, Illinois, with multiple undefeated and
state championship football teams, high school football victories were
delivered by Jesus in return for the stud quarterback giving his life over to
Christ in conversion. And man, I wanted
to be that stud quarterback. I watched
person after person paraded in front of me, with more and more dramatic stories
of how they had gone from using drugs to running out into the snow . . . without
a coat . . . in tears, to convert and confess Jesus Christ as their personal
Lord and Savior.
That was my problem though. I could not deliver that emotional conversion
experience. I tried. It just never seemed to take, and I wondered
whether I, myself, was a Christian. What
was wrong with me? As an unconfident,
sometimes thinking-too-much athlete, I needed all the help I could get. And then, when we played our biggest high
school baseball rival, I saw the opposing pitcher praying before the game! Who would Jesus pick now? I had to hope the opposing pitcher was a
Jew. No, he was just Hal McIntyre, a great
left-handed pitcher who taught me how to pitch and became a great friend in
college.
Again, I do not mean to downplay the
real life experiences of conversion others have experienced. What I learned though, as I told my story, is
that not everyone has one of those grand conversion experiences. Some of us experience God calling us to
evolve and grow throughout our whole lives long into deeper relationships with
God, neighbor, and the good earth.
I think reading passages, like this
one from Acts, as a literal event that happened to Paul has shaped and formed
the Christian tradition to understand conversion as necessary to claim Christian
faith. What if faith and the call to
faith presents itself slow, steadily, and sure—like water shapes rock? Did the dam break because the water built up
over time? Or did it break because the
water found a weakness in the dam’s infrastructure and collapsed it in a single
moment? Maybe both? Is Paul transformed? Or does his faith develop and evolve? Maybe both?
The great Christian philosopher,
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, not only a Jesuit priest, but also a world renowned
paleontologist and geologist, spoke of faith in evolving terms. Teilhard de Chardin, even though he was
offered an officer’s post in World War I, decided instead to be a
stretcher-bearer, carrying the wounded and dead from place to place, seeing the
most gruesome of all life. Even
witnessing these atrocities, Teilhard de Chardin had this deep and abiding
faith in the future of faith and humankind.
Speaking and writing at the turn of the 20th Century, he believed
in the holiness of evolution, that God continues to be at work in life.[4] As a faith-filled paleontologist and
geologist, Teilhard de Chardin spoke of physical and spiritual matter, real
substance. He wrote, and I love this
phrase, that we are this mix of physical and spiritual substance, that the
human is “matter at its most incendiary stage.”
We are poised to become, in our growing and evolution as a collective
consciousness, on fire with God.
Beyond humanity, long before the phrase was popular,
Teilhard de Chardin not only pointed us to the biosphere and the connectedness
of all things, but to the noosphere, a collective consciousness that was
ever-awakening, ever-flowering, ever-growing, and ever-evolving.[5] Humanity is not fully developed in a
collective way, and so we are called, as Paul was called, to grow and evolve in
transformation.
Maybe you have had that singular conversion or
transformational experience in your life which has brought you to Christian
faith and to this place on this Sunday.
Or maybe, like me, your faith in Christ’s resurrection and its meaning
began with questions and doubts that evolved over a period of time, something
that nagged at your soul, and keeps nagging that you just can’t get rid of. I think the understanding that Paul’s faith
may have been more evolving than conversion helps me identify myself as a
person of faith. Certainly God seeks the transformation of our hearts and minds
from a world consumed by greed and violence.
But perhaps your faith is one that has
evolved, developed, unfolded over time through questions and doubts you may have
had. And today, during this season of
Easter, maybe you came hoping to find a community of people who are doing their
level best to develop, unfold, and evolve as well. Converted, transformed and transforming,
developing and evolving, God may be the rock in your shoe that will not let you
go. I hope you are aware that there are
many more people in this congregation who strive not for comfort in their faith
but for that rock in their shoe, that nagging question, which brings them
deeper and deeper into the Heart of God.
One of the regular spirituality emails
I receive is from spiritual director, Christine Valters Paintner, referred to
as the “Abbey of the Arts.” In an online
retreat she was providing, she used the words “the soul’s slow ripening.” It is a reminder that within the desert,
Celtic, and Benedictine traditions the soul’s ripening is “never to be rushed
and takes a lifetime of work.” Ripening
is a slow and organic process—proof that the transcendent and divine is found
in the everyday. Paintner refers to the
life of St. Gobnait, one of the women saints in the Irish tradition. In a dream, St. Gobnait is told to make a
journey to her place of resurrection.
She would know that she had found that place of resurrection after she
had journeyed long enough to see nine white deer.[6] It is a long journey one must undertake to
find one white deer. She was required to
find nine. In an evolving faith, one
that continues to grow as it did for the apostle Paul, we do not seek the one
time experience so much as witness our soul ripening and unfolding throughout
our lives. Let us begin, as a people, to
journey in such a way that we might see how God is bringing an evolving growth,
an unfolding, a slow ripening to our collective soul so that we become for God
in our resurrection together, matter at its most incendiary stage, on fire for
God, full and sweet and ripening.
Amen.
[1] Rachel Held Evans, “Holy
Week for Doubters,” March 27, 2013, http://rachelheldevans.com/blog/holy-week-for-doubters.
[2] Mark Goodacre (Associate
Professor of Religion at Duke
University
[3] In
Krister Stendahl, Paul Among Jews and
Gentiles (Minneapolis: Fortress
Press, 1976). One of the most revelatory
books I read in seminary was Krister Stendahl’s text, Paul Among Jews and Gentiles. Stendahl
argued that Paul’s letters make it clear he understood his experience not as a
conversion but as a call. Paul did not
believe he was leaving his Jewish faith, but believed he was being called
deeper into his faith tradition.
Stendahl points out that elsewhere
in the Acts of the Apostles and in Paul’s own letter to the Galatians (Acts
26:16-18 and Galatians 1:13-17), Paul references his experience by using
language similar to the calls of prophets like Ezekiel, Isaiah, and Jeremiah.[3] In the story we have before us today, Ananias
is told by Jesus that he is calling Paul to a specific mission to, with, and on
behalf of the Gentiles. Such a mission,
that the Gentiles might know salvation, corresponds with Scripture in Ezekiel,
Jeremiah, and Isaiah that corresponded with living in a messianic time.(
Ezekiel 2:i,3; Jeremiah 1:7; Isaiah 35:5, 42:7,16, 61:1) Paul remains a Jew. But he grows and evolves. He plumbs the depths of his own tradition to
understand his particular call as a missionary to the Gentiles.
[4] “Transcript for Teilhard
de Chardin’s ‘Planetary Mind’ and Our Spiritual Evolution,” Krista Tippett
interview, with Ursula King, On Being,
December 19, 2012.
[5] “Transcript for Teilhard,”
On Being.
[6] Christine Valters
Paintner, “Abbey of the Arts,” April 2, 2016.
No comments:
Post a Comment