On the Road
Galatians 1:11-24; Acts 26:9-23

January 21, 2007


Given the religious and political environment of today, we should be proclaiming with pride our status as one of the Peoples of the Book. Along with the Jews and the Torah, the Muslims and the Qur’an, and we Christians with the Bible, we are united by an overlapping heritage, both in ink on parchment and through common ancestors of faith who have pilgrimaged over the same desert routes, all three gathering in Jerusalem. The status, People of the Book, was initiated by the children of Islam - a fact that I wish more would take note of today - in recognition that all of us live out of a sacred book - and that indicates a peculiar way of living and thinking.

A book requires a story, demands one almost, and very often a particular story has a way of describing and defining where we have been, who we are, and where we are going. The Christian Church has been adopted by many stories of the Bible in many places.

The most pervasive story has been the Exodus of the enslaved Israelites led by Moses up out of the land of Egypt through the Red Sea, wandering in the wilderness, and finally entering into the Promised Land. Oppressed peoples have especially identified with this story, and in particular the Black Church. It is not that they retell the story as glorious history past, but they recognize they are still living the Exodus with the memories of bondage and persecution, the fresh and strange taste of freedom, and knowing that they are still wandering straining to catch a glimpse of the Promised Land.

When one entered the library of my seminary, Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California, on the wall inside atop the door was a remarkable painting of the Ethiopian version of the story of Solomon and Sheba, a series of brightly coloured panels depicting the sequence of events. One panel about two thirds of the way through showed Solomon and Sheba in bed - where do you find that in church art these days?! The next panel shows their son, Menelik, as an infant, the founder of the Ethiopian dynasty, the ancestor of Haile Selassie, the Conquering Lion of Judah, and others. This story has become the national epic of the Ethiopian people and Church, sustaining one of the oldest Christian cultures in the world. Just a story.

Today, we have heard just such a story that has shaped and molded the entire Christian Church. What happened on that road to Damascus has not left any branch or interpretation of Christianity alone. No Christian is left unconverted.

Except for the Exodus, no story is told so often. Three times the author of Acts,Luke, recounts the events. First in Chapter 9 is the third person account of what happened to Saul, a man zealous for his faith intent on performing a genocide of faith upon those who believe a little differently. Ananais is zealous for God in another direction and reintegrates Paul into God’s community, and then Paul fades away from the narrative for several chapters.

Chapter 22 records Paul’s address in Jerusalem in which he recites his story along pretty similar lines. That sermon enraged those who opposed the Way and sent him inevitably on his fated road to Rome. Chapter 26 is Paul’s appeal before an empathetic King Agrippa, who sends Paul reluctantly on to Rome. Finally in Galatians 1 - the first version written - Paul speaks directly in his own voice.

The original story mentions this fellow Saul sporadically, even parenthetically, until suddenly he is requesting warrants to arrest and imprison followers of the Way in Damascus. People knew he was coming - we always know the worst news first.

Paul was intent upon communicating first of all how vicious and vindictive his former faith had propelled him to become. Paul never tried to hide his past; it was an amazing, incredulous part of who he was now. It was not an indication of how far he had come, but how far God and Christ had carried him. If God can drag me out of such despicable depths to where I am now, then watch out, you and your failings are a piece of cake for God. He admits that he was so precocious a student in the faith of Abraham that anybody who was not with him was against God and therefore worthy of death. We still hear such sentiments - Christian, Jewish, Islamic flavours - what have we been reading into our Book, O People of the Book? In the name of God, Paul was anxious to destroy those who preached God and moreover he was zealous to destroy the memory and witness to Jesus, opposing the name of Jesus, God Himself as Paul would now proclaim.

This Gospel he is now preaching and trying to live is not a human invention and tool by which to manipulate others. He wasn’t taught the Gospel, no matter how wise the teacher, but received it through a revelation from Jesus Christ. That would get him in some trouble, because there are always going to be those who believe that unless you were there and knew and talked with Jesus himself, your faith is second hand and not as authoritative. Paul cleared the way for every Christian afterwards, including you and me, that we can experience the full force of the grace and power of Jesus.

Paul was on his way to Damascus with the authority and commission of the chief priests, a kind of religious “007” license. At high noon a light brighter than the sun stunned Paul’s party to the ground, and took away any authority Paul pretended to have. They did not see anything except too much light, and it was a voice that addressed Paul, in his native Aramaic no less.

“Saul, why do you persecute me?” was the only question. All Paul ever says is “Who are you, Lord?” Paul, for all of his learning, did not know or recognize the voice of God. Jesus speaks and redeems Paul, giving him a mission to preach to the Gentiles, an assignment not without risk. Gentiles were considered less than human, people to be avoided as unclean and demonic. Paul knew full well that to approach a Gentile, especially with kind and generous intentions, was virtually a denial of God’s covenant. And so here Paul was, pleading for his life with Agrippa - Luke’s successor to Pontius Pilate - having narrowly escaped being torn apart by a mob and not for the first time.

Paul said nothing really to Jesus and Jesus really didn’t say much to him. There wasn’t any exchange of doctrinal concepts that Paul would use in his complex letters describing the theology of the cross and resurrection. In the twinkling of an eye, Paul’s way of thinking and orientation to life was turned around completely, that’s what being converted means. As he began on that road everything revolved around the traditions of Moses; now he read and saw and experienced everything in the fulfillment of Jesus. The world had not changed, but center of the universe had changed.

In 1965 a young Harvard Divinity professor Harvey Cox wrote The Secular City, a book that changed the way people looked at the Christian endeavour. Cox celebrated the modern city with all its diversity and anonymity as a place where the Christian Gospel could authentically be proclaimed and lived, reviving Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s call for a “religion-less Christianity.” It is still considered on the shortlist of the most influential books in 20th-century theology.

In the late 1970’s the local ministerial association convinced Harvey, the high priest of “What’s Happening Now,” to deliver a series of lectures. We were anticipating some new pearls of new liberating thought that would blow our minds out. They were blown all right - Harvey entitled his lectures “Born Again.” Liberals generally disdain the evangelical insistence upon a specific born again experience as the only sign of authentic faith, in part because of the tendency to reduce faith to such a narrow field and then the ballyhooed indiscretions of some of its loudest proclaimers. Harvey showed us that being born again, turning our perspective completely around, is the basic movement for all of the Christian family. The Gospel is not a natural activity; you will have to change sometime. To paraphrase the Wheaties cereal motto, “Christians are made, not born.”

It would be a lot easier if Christians were born and we could just nurture them along the Way, and many of our churches have worked awfully hard to make it happen that way, hoping to structure a way of life so that we do not have to change. The only thing we can really do is resist change, and frankly we aren’t very good at it, because people and the world change anyway despite our most clever attempts at resistance. To believe that we can be conservative is to pretend that Paul’s experience on that Damascus road was a fairytale dream, while we gently ossify.

The notion that one must be zapped in broad daylight and instantly be changed to be a true Christian is a sign that one’s God is too small. Sure, Paul’s obsessed personality perhaps required a good stiff bolt to switch his poles, but I have known many more people who are born again in long, slow contractions over years. They are born again and again and again, in stages seldom discernible to anyone, least of all to the individual.

Paul may have had his poles switched on that road around 33 A. D., but it wasn’t until the year 47 that he really becomes a main player in the Christian community. He didn’t write his first letter until 51 or 52, so it took a long time for Paul to mature in his faith and in his thinking. I believe he continually was being reborn throughout his life and ministry. That is our story too.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
at St. Paul's Anglican Cathedral
Regina, Saskatchewan