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.