The Kitchen Sink
An occasional piece of paper
April 22, 2007
Vol. 10 no. 16

Everything But...
           There are too many stories in the big city... what TV program used to say that? There are too many stories in the Bible to absorb and digest, so we have to choose our menu. That is not meant to be a pun on the story of Jesus’ seashore breakfast -- it’s just the way it is in the big city.
           Saul (Paul) is on the road to Damascus bent on no good. He will encounter the same Jesus as the disciples but through an entirely different medium,. An explosive light and an invisible voice only one person could hear is the physical shape of Saul’s dramatic conversion of conversions. For a significant number of Christians, this is the only way one legitimately meets Jesus - with lights and explosions and disembodied voices, and by ending up flat on your face.
           In the colonial churches of the mid-1600’s, the harsh life of their errand into the wilderness routinely wrenched Damascus Road experiences out of the faithful. But by the next generation when life was easier and more civilized, fewer and fewer knew the road to Damascus. Inevitably, the church elders needed to devise a “Half Way Covenant” to preserve the church. As long as one lived a moral upright life, children could be baptized and communion received even if they were not born again.
           For the disciples it was a quiet clearing away of the fog, a Jesus who at first they did not recognize until, as is Jesus’ habit, they ate fish together. Sure, it was a remarkable meal, one to remember after the Big Fisherman was unable to land anything and then at Jesus’ direction netted 153 large fish - one of every known species. They met Jesus just by eating and that method still works.