From Enemy to Brother

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April 10, 2016 - Third Sunday of Easter

Acts 9:1-20

¹Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest ²and asked him for letters to the synagogues at Damascus, so that if he found any who belonged to the Way, men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem. ³Now as he was going along and approaching Damascus, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. ⁴He fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, "Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?" ⁵He asked, "Who are you, Lord?" The reply came, "I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. ⁶But get up and enter the city, and you will be told what you are to do."⁷The men who were traveling with him stood speechless because they heard the voice but saw no one. ⁸Saul got up from the ground, and though his eyes were open, he could see nothing; so they led him by the hand and brought him into Damascus. ⁹For three days he was without sight, and neither ate nor drank.

¹⁰Now there was a disciple in Damascus named Ananias. The Lord said to him in a vision, "Ananias." He answered, "Here I am, Lord." ¹¹The Lord said to him, "Get up and go to the street called Straight, and at the house of Judas look for a man of Tarsus named Saul. At this moment he is praying, ¹²and he has seen in a vision a man named Ananias come in and lay his hands on him so that he might regain his sight." ¹³But Ananias answered, "Lord, I have heard from many about this man, how much evil he has done to your saints in Jerusalem; ¹⁴and here he has authority from the chief priests to bind all who invoke your name." ¹⁵But the Lord said to him, "Go, for he is an instrument whom I have chosen to bring my name before Gentiles and kings and before the people of Israel; ¹⁶I myself will show him how much he must suffer for the sake of my name." ¹⁷So Ananias went and entered the house. He laid his hands on Saul and said, "Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus, who appeared to you on your way here, has sent me so that you may regain your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit." ¹⁸And immediately something like scales fell from his eyes, and his sight was restored. Then he got up and was baptized, ¹⁹and after taking some food, he regained his strength.

For several days he was with the disciples in Damascus, ²⁰and immediately he began to proclaim Jesus in the synagogues, saying, "He is the Son of God."

Sermon: “From Enemy to Brother”

There was once a young woman named Rebecca.  She lived in Jerusalem around the time a particularly well-known rabbi, Jesus, healed and preached in that place.  Rebecca was the sort of person many of us try to be.  She cared for her family selflessly, and always seemed to put others first.  She believed what that rabbi Jesus proclaimed when he said, “love the Lord your God with all your heart and mind and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself,” but more importantly, she lived it.  She was a follower of The Way – that is, The Way of Jesus Christ. 

Because of this, Rebecca’s name made its way onto a list.  This was not a list of people to honor or celebrate.  This was a punishment list, a hit list, one given to the Pharisee Saul by colluding priests who wanted to see the most influential followers of The Way silenced. 

Saul was always the silencer – an expert at middle-of-the-night arrests and abductions, he knew how to make a problem disappear.  Let’s just say he wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty, and whether he was power drunk or really did think that’s what God wanted from him, he was never sorry.  It wasn’t his fault the world was the way it was – a place with no room for an equalizing dreamer of a Messiah that caused nothing but trouble for the authorities.

Rebecca’s name was on the latest list, and she would’ve been just another rounded-up criminal on that invented rap sheet.  Saul carried her name as he walked that Damascus road, breathing threats and murder, ready to do whatever it took to eliminate these Jesus followers. 

But Jesus had other plans.  He was fed up with Saul’s fear mongering and violence in God’s name.  Jesus was not, and is not, in the business of condemnation.  Jesus is in the salvation business.

And that day, Jesus was busy!  He wanted to do what he does best – save.  Now, if we tell this story as one of a single individual, Saul, blinded by himself and suddenly coming to “personal” faith in Jesus Christ, we have it all wrong. 

This was not a personal salvation story – salvation rarely is, no matter what televangelists tell you.  This salvation was for Saul, yes, but also for Rebecca and all the other saints named on that hit list.  And it was for Ananias, a follower of the The Way who was saved from his fear when he was asked to play a key role in the saving of his enemy. 

Jesus’s redemptive work that day included a little drama for dramatic Saul, flashes of light and blindness to boot, in order to get it into his hardened heart that something was really about to change.  Saul wasn’t told to pray a little prayer and accept Jesus into his heart.  He wasn’t told to make a large donation.  He was told to go to the city, with the help of his travel buddies, and wait. 

At the same time Ananias, one who would surely find his name on one of those hit lists before long, was told to go and find Saul, this muscle of the mighty Pharisees and lay hands on him.

Ananias, no doubt shaking the whole time, did what Jesus wanted him to do.  He laid hands on the one whose hands had hurt so many of his friends.  He prayed.  Most powerfully, he called his enemy, “brother,” something that I think took away that blindness more than anything else.   Saul, who had enslaved many, was freed from his own prison of hatred.  He would become Paul, a faithful follower of The Way in his own right.

But what if Ananias hadn’t played along?  What if he had said to Jesus, “You know, Lord, I appreciate that you want to save this guy, but some people are just too far gone.”  Would Saul have ever regained his sight?  Would he have ever believed Jesus was the Messiah?  Would he have picked up that list with Rebecca’s name on it, and gone back to his old murderous ways?

Thanks be to God, we will never know.  Thanks be to God, Ananias did the ridiculous work of evangelism: no, not “presenting the gospel” like a neatly-wrapped package.  He lived the gospel.  He called his enemy brother, and the scales of blindness that Paul hadn’t even realized were there all his life fell away, and he was baptized into a family like none he had ever known. 

He could finally see that “there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, no longer male and female; for all of us are one in Christ Jesus.”  He was saved.  And so was Rebecca, and so was Ananias. 

And, if we’re honest, this makes some of us a little nervous.  Because some of us don’t remember what it was to not be saved.  Some of us never had a Damascus Road experience, or at least recognized it as that.  Some of us can’t remember a time we didn’t place trust in Jesus, in varying degrees of faithfulness. 

But our anxiety comes from a misguided reading of this text: a reading that tells us that Saul becoming Paul was a personal, private moment of clarity.  A reading that tells us that Paul never struggled with his violent and us-verses-them predispositions once he became part of The Way.  A reading that tells us that salvation is all about eternal life with Jesus and not about this life, here, now, today.

The heart of this powerful passage is surely salvation: salvation as a radically communal activity, initiated by God, not us.  Rebecca and others on that hit list never even knew they what they were saved from!  But they were saved from the violence of Saul all the same.  And that salvation changed everyone for the better – it changed Ananias’ understanding of Jesus’ reconciling work from a nice story to a profound experience.  It softened Saul’s deep-seeded hatred of the non-conformists (though we know it didn’t eliminate that entirely – he was still human, after all). 

We all need this sort of salvation.  A salvation that we did not earn or orchestrate, but that happens spontaneously and surprisingly, sometimes without us even realizing it until years later. 

A salvation that tears down the dividing walls, the hostility between us, making us one. 

A salvation that makes the scales of blindness, which distort our view of ourselves and the other, fall from our eyes with the help of those we often demonize most. 

A salvation, not just for some heavenly home, but for this war-torn earth in which Jesus decided to make a home. 

Salvation for us happened over 2,000 years ago, in the reconciling work of Jesus.  But it is not a once-off event.  It is a moment-by-moment turning away from the things that blind us from seeing one another – hatred, indifference, busyness, pride, bigotry. 

It is a moment-by-moment turning towards the God who is always ready to forgive and hit the reset button on our life. 

Every single moment is a saving moment.  Every single road is a Damascus Road, whether we recognize it or not.  Every single breath is an opportunity to breathe threats and murder or grace and compassion.  Every single choice determines whether we are the ones on the list with Rebecca, or the ones holding the list, ready to act as God’s misguided enforcer.    

Who will we be – Saul or Paul?  Or perhaps Rebecca or Ananias?  Or better yet, ourselves!  People stopped in our tracks by God’s grace, ready to live as changed followers of The Way, who will change the world.

Glory be to the Creator, and the Son and the Holy Spirit, as it was in the beginning and ever shall be, world without end, amen.