What Happened in Damascus?

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Text: Acts 9:1-20

Our scripture today starts with lines drawn in the sand.

Us verses them.

The faithful, orthodox, Jewish leader vs. the rebellious believers of the Way.

Division.

Destruction.

And everyone so sure that they were on the side that was right.

You know, on this national holiday weekend, I can’t ignore how this kind of “us” vs “them” language echoes the kind of nationalism we find too often in the world. 

We, the shining city on a hill have been blessed by God.

And in defense of our beloved nation, we’ll come after anyone who disagrees with us.

Anyone who is a threat to our way of life and our values.

That is what Saul was doing, after all. 

He believed in his tradition, in the law, in who God had called him to be.

And he was willing to defend it all with his very life… taking other lives if he had to. 

If you weren’t with him… you were against him. 

But in the same way, that “us” vs “them” mentality was present in the followers of the Way of Christ. 

When Ananias receives a calling from the Lord to go to Saul, his very first response is to name that man as doing evil… compared with the saints on his own side. 

Good verses bad.

Right verses wrong.

Insiders verses outsiders.

Both have cause for why they believe what they believe.

Each can point to actions of the other that would justify their own positions.

There is that old adage that there are two sides to every story and today, I certainly don’t want to get caught up in excusing either side from their actions.

Nor do I want to say that there is not, in fact, a good… a standard… a godly measure of how we should be that we should all be held up against. 

Maybe more of what I’d like to note is a simple observation from Stephen D. Jones, “not many of us are ‘breathing threats and murder’ against our opponents.  However, we have all been on wrong paths… We have all been headstrong, stubborn, blinded to our own ambition, selfish to meet our own need…”[1]

And in part, I think this story of what happens in Damascus is a reminder that God is not interested in the lines that we have drawn.

God is not interested in the labels we throw at one another. 

God doesn’t care about our nationality or pedigree or longevity with the faith.

God is not interested in our us verses them arguments.

In fact, God flips all of the scripts and expectations on their head to change everyone’s lives and instead orient us towards life in the Kingdom of Heaven.   

In our Acts study book, N.T. Wright calls Saul a “hardline, fanatical, ultra-nationalist, super-orthodox Pharisaic Jew.”

And yet… he’s the guy that Jesus calls to reach out to the non-Jewish, Gentile community. 

Ananias is likely a newcomer to the way of Christ.  Damascus was about 135 miles from Jerusalem and you can’t imagine that in this short of time that the good news about Jesus would have taken a very deep hold this far out yet. 

And yet, this non-Israelite is the one who Jesus calls to go to Saul.

This non-apostle, non-deacon, ordinary, regular guy is the one who God uses to heal Saul and who baptizes him with the Holy Spirit. 

In many ways, God is telling us that it doesn’t matter who you are or where you come from or what your story was… 

You, too, just might be called into this inside-out, upside-down, community of Christ.

No one is safe from God breaking in and disrupting everything you thought you knew about your life. 

And that… well… that’s a little terrifying. 

As a pastor, I sometimes shy away from this story about Saul’s dramatic conversion because it really is just too incredible.

He is a guy who literally makes a 180 degree turn in his life.

He goes from persecuting Christians to preaching the cross of Christ.

His old life dies on the Road to Damascus and three days later, he is born again as an apostle of Jesus. 

There are very few of us who can compare our stories with his and William Muehl writes that this can give us a bit of a “faith inferiority complex.”[2]

Or, maybe even more than that, we fear something coming along to cause such a dramatic change in our lives.

Over these last sixteen months, we experienced what it is like to have life come to a stand-still and have everything that we knew to be “normal” upended.

It isn’t something we seek out unless we are desperate or at the end of our ropes.

Maybe that’s why we identify a bit more with Ananias in this story.

You know, the ordinary fellow, going about his day, who gets called to walk down the street and pass along a message to his mortal enemy. 

What… that doesn’t happen to you on a regular basis?

I just have to keep telling myself that the main character in this story is not Saul. 

And it’s not Ananias. 

It is Jesus Christ. 

For many chapters now, the disciples and apostles have been talking about Jesus.

But he shows up and calls these two individuals to action. 

This is a word about how our Savior continues to show up in the lives of unexpected people to challenge us and push us beyond everything we thought we knew and understood.

Beyond our boundaries and borders and beliefs.   

And sometimes, that happens in a heartbeat – like it did on that road to Damascus.

But sometimes, it happens over a lifetime. 

Sometimes, truth comes to us in a dream or a sign or a message…

But sometimes it comes through a friend who has the courage to tell it like it is. 

All around us, God is moving…

God is pushing us beyond our artificial divisions…

God is opening up our eyes…

God is calling us out of our privilege and bias…

Jesus stands before us, waiting for us to stop breathing threats and running from enemies and to start working together for a Kingdom that is far wider and more expansive than we could ever imagine. 

May it be so. 


[1] Jones. Stephen D. Feasting on the Word, Year C Volume 2, p 403.

[2] William Muehl, Why Preach? Why Listen? (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986), 11.

Spirit of Household Salvation

Religion is social.  Religion is corporate.  Religion is political.

As Christianity spread in the time of the apostles and beyond, it was often not the work of one-on-one conversations and personal confessions of faith, but of corporate conversions… of whole nations turning from one religion to another. 

I did some reading this week about the reformation in Norway in the 16th century.  Up to this point, Norway had been a Catholic country… being converted in the 9th century through the faith of Olav II, their beloved king who was later sainted. 

But with political allegiances changing, suddenly a union between Denmark and Norway was on the horizon.  And Christian III, king of Denmark was lining up to take his place on the Norwegian throne. 

The problem… Christian was a Lutheran.  He had been taught by Lutherans.  He had even traveled as a young man and heard Martin Luther speak in person.  And so his goal was to establish his kingdom as a protestant haven.  

The first step, of course, is to get rid of the Catholic leadership.  In 1536, the Catholic bishops were kicked out and replaced with Lutheran bishops appointed by the new king.  Archbishop Olav Engelbrektsson tried to resist these reforms and keep Norway from being united with Denmark.  There was even talk about establishing Christian’s younger brother John as king… since he remained favorable to the Catholic faith.   The Archbishop tried to do everything he could to resist the change, even helping to plan the assassination of an earl who was traveling to Norway to discuss the union.  Engelbrektsson ended his days in exile.

While all of this was going on in the realms of bishops and earls and kings… What do you think the everyday person was thinking.  Overnight they were transformed from Catholics to Lutherans. They didn’t have a say in the matter, they may not have even noticed a real difference. They were converted, wholesale, as a group.

In our world today, this makes no sense to us. Faith is so private and individualized. We make our confessions and trust in a personal Lord and savior.

But historically, this is the exception and not the norm. For much of history, faith has been a corporate… A communal experience.  Your religion was based upon the faith of your father or master or lord or king.  Your flavor of Christianity was not based upon the nuances that you chose, but the political affiliations and personal whims of someone higher up the food chain.

We could argue for days about whether it is better for faith to be personalized as it is today in our nation, or a corporate experience as it still is in some places today. 

We certainly have known the advantages of being able to have our own say about our faith.  You can know our God personally… you can turn to the scriptures and can find out for yourself what they contain.  You get to decide whether or not you join the church or go to church

But I believe this isn’t an either/or question.  There are some things about having a communal expression of faith that we have lost.  As we dive into this chapter of Acts, we might be able to figure out how not to throw the baby out with the bath water.

David Matson argues that we could see the entire book of Acts as a story about houses….  We start out the narrative with the disciples gathered together in a house and the story ends with Paul under house arrest on an island, telling the stories of faith to those who will come and visit.

Then, throughout the journey of the disciples, they travel from house to house, sharing the faith they have received.  We have heard of Peter and Cornelius, Paul and Ananias… and here in this chapter Paul and Silas meet up with two different families in the city of Philippi.

One of these households is led by a woman named Lydia.  The bible tells us she is a dealer of purple cloth – a wealthy woman trading a rare luxury commodity.  We know nothing of her husband, but she does well enough for herself that either he isn’t around or isn’t relevant to the story.  She is the head of the household.  And when she hears the story of salvation in her place of prayer by the river, she invites Paul and Silas back to her home and her whole household is baptized. 

The second household conversion happens after a Roman jailer experiences a miracle.  He had locked Paul and Silas up in jail under strict orders to keep them secure.  When an earthquake shakes their bars loose in the middle of the night – he is convinced his life is over.  With the prisoners escape, he will be punished and killed.  Just as he is about to end his life – Paul calls out from the cell… they had not left, even though they could have.

The jailer is so overwhelmed that he wants to know about the faith that has sustained them in difficult times, the faith that has allowed them to be so calm in the midst of distress.  He takes the two back to his home and he and his entire household are saved.

What can we learn from these two tales? 

First:  Lydia and the soldier both experienced conversion outside of their homes…. but took their faith back home with them. And not only that… they took people back with them. 

Now, it would be important here to mention what we mean by a household.  In the Greco-Roman world, the household was the place of residence of a family, but also of all the slaves and grown children under the master of that household’s authority.  The household could be rather large and encompassed all of a person’s business, social, and familial relationships.  The pater familias had unilateral authority over his wife, his children and his servants.

This thing that they had witnessed – the story they had heard – it was too important to keep to themselves.  As the heads of their households, they knew that this faith was not something that only belonged to them but it was meant to be shared.  They opened up not only their hearts, but their whole lives to the power of God. They made sure that this new conversion in their lives extended to EVERY part of their life – their children, their wives, their servants.

When we experience faith and conversion, do we run home and tell our families?  Do we share that faith with our employees?  Do we allow God into every part of our life? Do we make room for him in our homes, in our work, in the places we go to socialize?

One way that we could reclaim this idea of household salvation is to simply open up our whole selves to his power…

Secondly, the scriptures tell us that their whole households were baptized.  The act of baptism is personal.  More than a blanket statement that a whole nation is now Lutheran instead of Catholic, to baptize a whole household means that each person would have come before Paul and Silas to recieve the water.  Young and old. Rich and poor. Slave and free.  The head of the household would have lined them all up and said – you are going to do this. 

It sounds a lot like mom and dad getting the kids dressed up for church and dragging them kicking and screaming to the family pew. 

But it was important in that time and place for the whole household to believe the same things.  In the Greco-Roman world, your household worshipped one god among many.  To bring in idols or religious artifacts related to another deity would have caused your primary god to be jealous.  A master of a household would have had strict control over the faith of those under their authority. 

That sounds harsh to us today, until we realize that every day we make choices about what our family stands for and what we consume. 

We make choices about what food we eat, what television shows are allowed to be watched in our houses, what activities we will or will not participate in.  For a family that is trying to eat healthy, McDonald’s french fries are strictly forbidden.  For a family trying to instil good values in their children, much of MTV might be off the list.  We set rules and boundaries every day and each of those decisions says something about who we are and what we believe.

We also practice in our tradition infant baptism.  And when we baptize children, we are making promises on their behalf.  We are holding their faith for them. We are making decisions about their relationship with God even though they are not even aware of God’s presence yet. 

When we do so, we promise to raise them in the church, to hold that faith for them and to teach them until the day comes when they can accept or reject that faith for themselves.

Until that day comes, our job is to feed them properly (so to speak). If we believe it, we should live it, and live it in our whole lives.

If we think back to the tale of the Norwegian Reformation, the short version of the story goes:  The King appointed a new Lutheran bishop.  The old Catholic bishop appointed a new king… and as we all know from the Ollie and Lena jokes that we sometimes tell, the Lutherans won.

Someone, somewhere up the  food chain made a decision about the faith of the people.  And at the time, they had no say.  At the time, they may not have imagined what it meant.  But as time has gone one, Norwegians by and large identify themselves as Lutherans.  They lived into the faith that was handed to them.  They have claimed it as their own. 

In the same way, our children and grandchildren might live into the faith that we hold if we continue to bring them to this place… if we nurture them in the traditions that have sustained us… if we lead them to the Christ we have come to know and love. 

Your faith extends far beyond your life.  It extends to all of your relationships.  It extends to your family and friends and into every part of your life.  Let Christ in. Let Christ change you.  And let Christ have your relationships also. 

the Christian journey

How do you understand the following traditional evangelical doctrines: a) repentance; b) justification; c) regeneration; d) sanctification? What are the marks of the Christian life?
Whenever I think of the Christian life, a quote I heard Anne Lamott give (whether or not it actually originated with her) comes to mind: God loves you just the way you are… and loves you too much to let you stay there. The Christian faith journey is just that – a journey, a process of discovering our true selves as created by God. In many ways, these four doctrines are lacking because they don’t acknowledge one that must precede them – God’s prevenient grace that allows us to see our need for repentance. The wonder of God is that the instant we recognize our sinful state is the same moment justifying grace is extended to us; in acknowledging our sin we are given grace by which we can be transformed. This begins a lifelong process of growth and transformation and practice and mistakes and setbacks and return to God for forgiveness and renewal and going on to perfection that makes the Christian life.

We can see evidence of that growth through the three very basic and simple virtues – faith, hope, and love. Working on these papers, a quote was shared with me from Teresa Fry Brown that claims, “Hope hearing the song of the future. Faith is the courage to dance to it.” I would add that love is inviting others to take your hand and join in. We were created for relationship with God and with the rest of creation. Unless we are willing to take a leap of faith and actively participate in the transformative love of God, unless we are willing to have hope in the promise that all of creation will be renewed, we are denying the precious gift we have been given and continue to be in need of God’s grace.

Photo by: Stephen Eastop