“The Road Through Damascus”
Rev. David E. Gray
Bradley Hills Presbyterian Church
5th Sunday of Easter
May 10, 2009
Acts: 9: 1-20; Matthew 25: 34-40
As we continue through the season of Easter, considering the post-resurrection appearances of Jesus, we have, up until now, been focused mostly on those in the city of Jerusalem. Today we move to another interesting place, Damascus. Damascus is about 140 miles from Jerusalem or 4-5 days journey in Biblical times. Many historians consider it the oldest continually inhabited city on earth, 7,000 years old. My mother-in-law spent part of the first week of Easter this year in Damascus.
If the Easter season is about how Jesus changed from death to life, and about how our lives are changed as a result, then Damascus is important to our Easter season. There is perhaps no greater metaphor in the Bible for personal change than what happened on the Road to and through Damascus. Reading now from this familiar story in Acts 9 and God’s holy word.
Why doesn’t Jesus appear to us now as he did in the Bible? We have heard these past few weeks about how Jesus appeared directly to Mary, to Cleopas, to groups of disciples, and now to Saul and Ananias. How many of us have had such an experience? We hardly ever hear of people seeing Jesus on the metro or at a stoplight and when we do we usually don’t take the person seriously. Not that God couldn’t reveal Gods-self in that way, but God seems to have chosen not to.
In our Reformed tradition, we tend to emphasize the community’s experience of the presence of Christ over the individual’s. We don’t have altar calls, private baptisms or communions disconnected from the broader community. Our prayer of commitment at the end of our celebration of the Lord’s Supper is a community prayer as the opposed to having individual times of commitment. We focus on how when two or more are gathered in Christ’s name, Christ is present. There are large and rapidly growing Pentecostal and charismatic denominations in America and around the world which do emphasize a more direct experience of Christ. On this and other subjects, too often, our different Christian traditions can be critical of the experiences of others. The history of Christianity is full of highly religious people who are able to find faults in the beliefs of other religions. That is in part why the Protestant Reformation produced so many denominations.
In our second lesson we read of two highly religious people who thought their way was the right way of serving God and they were highly critical of the other. You might have heard a lot about how Saul already, the man whose name was changed to Paul after his conversion, who went on missionary journeys and wrote more of the New Testament than anyone else. Saul grew up in Tarsus, in Turkey, a Jew in Roman areas, and became quite fervent in his faith. Saul went to Jerusalem to study the law and became a Pharisee. He was taught that the greatest threat to orthodox Jewish tradition was a Jewish sect that followed of a rabbi named Jesus. Saul saw many faults in this new religion, so like Anakin Skywalker in the final Star Wars movie, he tried to stomp out Christians wherever he could find them. In our lesson, Saul was on the way to Damascus to do just that. One of those Christians hiding in Damascus was a man named Ananias. Ananias was also a religious man, a follower of Jesus, one of the seventy disciples referenced in Luke 10, and a future Bishop in Damascus. Ananias wanted to strengthen the church by keeping it under the radar in Damascus so it couldn’t be noticed and persecuted by men like Saul. Ananias saw the many faults in Saul.
So the first glimpse we have of Saul and Ananias is that they, like many in the fractured modern church, emphasized the faults in other religious people rather than their strengths. Why do religious people look for the faults in others?
There is a story of three religious men, three pastors, who were out fishing together. One said, “You know, being a pastor is difficult, you never get to let your hair down, so let’s tell each other our greatest fault and then we can support each other. He went first and said, ‘My greatest fault is with gambling, at least once a week I’ll sneak out of the parsonage to play cards all night.’ The second pastor said, ‘My greatest fault is not paying my taxes, I haven’t paid them for years.’ The third pastor sat silently. Finally one of the other two said, ‘Come on now, we spoke up, we aren’t going back until you share your greatest fault with us.” Finally, the third pastor couldn’t take it any longer and exclaimed, “ok, my greatest fault is that I love to gossip, and I can’t wait to get off this boat.’
If God gave us more direct statements today of how to act in each situation, perhaps we’d have fewer disagreements and would be less interested in faults. Our lesson tells us that God did speak directly to Saul and Ananias and told them that they both were at fault in their attitudes towards each other. God told Ananias to go help minister to his enemy, Saul, and God led Saul to join the church in Damascus.
But absent more direct statements from God on how we should act, our tradition teaches that we find our connection with and understanding of God in community. In worship, in Christian education and in the life of the church.
This morning our Session heard from twelve young people who will be making a procession of faith to be confirmed as active members of the church during worship next week. This is both an individual and a community act. I am very proud of them and I know you are too. Many of them were like me and many of us when we joined the church, there is a stirring of the Holy Spirit to give faith but their joining this church is about the community. For many of us, we are Christians or Presbyterians or members of Bradley Hills because of our parents. On Mother’s Day, it is valuable to recognize the importance of family tradition to our faith journey. Our Presbyterian Confession of 1967 reads that “to be reconciled to God is to be sent into the world as God’s reconciling community.” Our tradition holds that if we believe that what happened on Easter Sunday reconciled humanity to God, then we are sent into the world not alone, but as part of a reconciling community.
I believe that Jesus does come to people directly at times still, that we can be guided by God in prayer and that the Holy Spirit does speak to us over time.
But just because God does not appear as frequently or as directly as God seemed to in the Bible, that does not mean that God has stopped speaking. The story of Saul teaches me that God speaks through other people to mold us.
We talk about the Road through Damascus this morning because what happened inside Damascus through the community there is as important as what happened to Saul individually on the road. After Saul was blinded, our lesson is really about God working through the community. God said, go into the city “and you will be told what to do.” Saul was led into Damascus and spent three days resting with the community there. Ananias, as part of the church in Damascus, laid hands on Saul so he would regain his sight and be filled with the Spirit. God was working through the community, through Ananias. Then the community baptized Saul, which became his entrance point into the covenant community of faith. Then for several days he stayed with the disciples in Damascus. The role of the community of faith is critical to Saul’s story. Saul didn’t receive the content, the instruction, and real clarity about his future, until he entered into the community of God. It was through other people that Saul really saw Christ at work.
We might say we want a clarifying experience like Saul’s. But be careful what you wish for. Saul was literally knocked down at first, experienced blindness, and had to be led into the city of Damascus.
Sometimes life knocks us on our backs, and blinds us to everything but the pain we feel, or the illness we face. The job is lost or the relationship goes sour and like Saul, we realize we need someone to hold our hand and lead us.
The community of faith, the church, becomes critical at moments like that. At some point it will be our turn to be knocked flat like Saul and to be in need of someone who represents Christ to us. And in those moments, the moments when we realize that the church is the extension of Christ to us, that we realize that we can be the extension of Christ to others.
There is a wonderful book called The Prison Angel about an amazing person named Mary Clarke. As reported in the book and written elsewhere:
“Mary grew up living right next door to actor Cary Grant in an exclusive Beverly Hills neighborhood. Life was prosperous, but not happy. She married twice, raised seven children, but her relationships proved challenging. In her 50’s, Mary felt God calling her to serve God and humanity in a new way. She drove down the road to Tijuana, Mexico, to the gates of the La Mesa prison, one of the most infamous prisons in Mexico, and asked the warden to allow her to minister to some of the nation’s most hardened criminals. That was thirty years ago and she is still there.
Like Saul, Mary’s name changed, hers to Mother Antonia. For the first few years that Mary lived in La Mesa, her bed was located over a raw sewer drain, and the stench was so unbearable that she slept with a surgical mask over her face. Her days were often eighteen hours long, spent feeding, giving medicine to, and talking with criminals, guards, wives, children, and the dying.
Mary loved and loves what she does. While she had been depressed before she says, ‘I have not been depressed one day in thirty years (since I’ve been here),’ she said. ‘Perhaps sad, but never depressed.’
What made Mary decide this was her calling? Mary relates a dream she once had. In the dream as she tells it, Mary was at Calvary (the location of Christ’s crucifixion) and a Roman guard approached her, telling her that she was going to be crucified. Terrified and filled with dread, she prayed that God would take her away so she would not have to suffer. However, the Roman guard approached her again and said, ‘You don’t have to pray. There’s a man here and he wants to take your place.’ She saw a man standing in a white robe, and when he looked at her, she understood that he was going to die for her and that she wouldn’t owe him anything in return. But then the Roman guard said, ‘He needs you to stand by him.’ She began to cry, protesting that she hated violence and couldn’t bear to watch someone being crucified. The guard said, ‘Woman, he’s there in your place.’ Mary says, ‘Suddenly, I loved more than I feared. I ran behind him and knelt down and took his face in my hands. But he didn’t have a face any longer—it was blank where his face should have been.
Over the years in the prison, Mary would often hold the face of a dying inmate and think, ‘Look, Lord, I’m with you again, and I’m never going to leave you.’”
The face was blank in her dream. Christ becomes real to Mary each time she looks into the face of a person in pain.
We can focus on the faults of others and the differences in how people understand God, but that leaves us empty. As we are all made in the image of God, we have more similarities than differences. We can wish for a direct revelation from God, but we cannot force that. As Mary Clarke experienced, we see Christ in each other. We can pray for God to hold our hands and guide our feet. But we can hold each other’s hands when life knocks us down and guide each other’s feet when, like Saul, we need someone to walk with us.
At the end of the day, how we treat each other reveals a lot about how we really feel about God. Matthew explains that whatever we do to the least among us we do to Christ. On the Road to Damascus, Jesus told Saul that in persecuting the Christian community, Saul was persecuting Christ himself. Ananias was scared at the prospect of meeting Saul, but when he saw Saul through the lens of Christ, he was able to call him "brother."
There is an anonymous poem that I love that spells out how one person experienced God as a fellow traveler on the Road of life:
“Twas not just the words you spoke
To you, so clear, to me so dim
But twas that when you spoke
You brought a sense of Him
In your eyes He beckoned me
And in your smile His love was spread
Until I lost sight of you
And saw the Lord instead!
When we lose sight of each other’s faults and see the Lord instead; when we look at each other, at people who are different from us, who are in need or with whom we have disagreements, and see the Lord; when we look back at our own faith journey and realize that God has been with us the whole time, holding our hands and guiding our steps through others, then, like Saul and Ananias, we can see life in a new way. And then, everything else starts falling into place.
Thanks be to God. Amen.
