3 Sun of Easter
May 5, 2019St. John’s, Winnsboro
Opening
In preparing to preach I considered whether I could preach on Cinco de Mayo. I asked Mary Pat what that date conjured up for her – and she put me to shame by remembering a delightful time we had in one of our early dates, enjoying beer and dinner alongside the Honolulu harbor. I thought, well, probably not.I considered also one of the major (for me) features of the gospel reading. It is eating eating breakfast by campfire on a lakeshore beach, just after dawn, with the smell of just caught Brown and Rainbow trout wafting up from the skillet. After 60 years I still carry that memory and can smell the smell. I still associate it with a Resurrection appearance of Jesus. For that reason I have often preached on it on the 2nd Sunday after Easter. I decided to try preaching on something I have shied away from all these years.
Paul’s conversion
There are really a variety of reasons for avoiding Paul and his conversion. You know the story because the writer of Luke’s gospel, in his Acts of the Apostles, composed what became the definitive version. Paul who had been famous for persecuting Christians, got knocked off his horse, was blinded, ended up with Ananias who healed him in the name of Jesus. From that point on Paul is a changed man. No longer a fierce persecutor of Christians but now a seemingly equally fierce defender.His conversion became fairly quickly in Christian history the very model of what conversion ought to be. Augustine essentially followed his model some 300 years later. Luther some thousand years later followed the same model.
I met a famous theologian once who decided to go to seminary because throughout his youth he never experienced that kind of conversion and ultimately he decided that the only way he was going to get to be saved was by going off to seminary.
So important in the earliest days of the church was Paul’s conversion that an account of it appears a number of times. Paul refers to it in his own writings at least twice, maybe more. 1
In his later writing that we know as the Acts of the Apostles, Luke tells the story of the conversion 3 times. The first time in his account of the early years of the church. Again as he tells the story of Paul’s speech at the time of his arrest. Then a third time as he relates Paul defending himself to King Agrippa.
Avoiding Paul
I have shied away from preaching directly on Paul’s conversion all these years at least in part because I was aware that I was not sure whether I had had a genuine conversion experience. I met lots of folks from seminary days, colleagues and parishioners through the years, who thought it was nonsense to expect to have such conversion experiences.I remember an exchange I had with another priest at a gathering of clergy. I made the statement that I thought conversion was at the heart of what it meant to be a Christian. By Conversion what I meant was a change, a shift, a turning around, an awakening that caused something to happen in a life. This other priest was truly horrified to think that one had to have a “conversion”. The priest, obviously, thought that what I meant was that one had to get knocked off a horse, go blind, etc. – so to speak.
Furthermore, I was taught (and I believed) that my job as a preacher in the church was to preach the gospel. I was not to preach myself, what I thought or felt, but rather the gospel that had been delivered to the church. The assumption of many is that that means preaching from one of the 4 gospels? It was not until the 1990’s that I decided that the gospel was much bigger than what was contained in the 4 books of the gospels. I became convinced that Scripture itself contained the gospel as God intended us to have it, so I regularly began to preach from the Old Testament and the Epistles.
That didn’t really help with the fact that I still thought of Paul’s model of conversion as the only one that was really genuine. I think it was basically the model that one heard from many Evangelical preachers – Billy Graham being perhaps the most famous.
That really led to another reason for resisting preaching on Paul. I became aware of a tendency to see the Gospels as a particularly Catholic view of the Christian Message and Paul’s writings as a reflection of the Protestant view of Christianity. I didn’t really want to neglect one over the other.
Conversion
So what happened? I became aware over the course of a number of years that there were in fact many different kinds of conversion experiences. Paul’s version was not normative. It was just his experience.Some variations
I met a former soldier after I moved to Hawai’i. He had survived nissei imprisonment in Minnesota. What that means is that although he was a soldier in the US Army at the time of Pearl Harbor, he was rounded up and sent to a Prisoner of War camp. At the battle of Monte Cassino he was wounded and eventually sent back to the states. Later, after becoming a judge in Hawai’i, a deranged man barged into his judge’s chambers and fired a gun at him. Only because he was moving out of his chair at the moment the gun was fired did he avoid a bullet through his heart.He attributed all of it to God’s protection. He was telling those stories, repeating them, up until the end of his life. They were in effect conversion stories. He understood them to be exactly that.
I knew a man who was an agnostic for many years. He was angry with God over the loss of his daughter many years earlier. He was a church organist his whole adult life, and working for the church he would admit to a kind of grudging qualified “belief” in God – but certainly not a trust in a God who cared about him. Then he experienced a severe illness. He weathered the treatment and remission of multiple myeloma. he looked death in the eye – and he found that he had changed. He reported to me after his recovery that he now believed entirely in a God who cared about him – he found that while he could intellectually question just about anything, he couldn’t deny love. All the rest is …
When I was not yet ordained I struggled with what I was to do with my life, what direction I was to go. I prayed. I fasted. I sat by myself in a beautiful sacred space at Notre Dame’s chapel. And I heard a voice, “I don’t care what you do as long as you love me with all your heart, mind, your soul, and your strength.” I was changed in that moment.
I read stories about inspirational figures – Desmond Tutu, Mother Teresa, George Fox (the founder of the Quakers) – people who have known from an early age that they were different, devoting their lives to God and making huge differences in their world – although at times the difference might not be felt for centuries. There came a time in each of their lives when they had to put everything on the line. There was a moment of conversion to decide whether they would see their vocation through to the end.
There was a time when I was waiting at the altar-rail for “healing” in my life. It didn’t come in the way and in the time that I was expecting or I wanted it. A dear friend questioned about whether I was really turning to God or just wanting it on my terms. Conversion can be like that.
One place that I have seen over and over again the phenomenon of an infinite variety of ways to experience conversion has been in the many people I have known through the years who suffered from alcoholism or drug addiction. I began wrestling with the impacts of alcoholism in my family in the 1980’s. I slowly became aware that addictions of various kinds affect everyone. Everyone in this room I know has been impacted by alcoholism or drug-addiction. It could be that it is a parent or a child who is addicted. It could be an aunt or a neighbor. It is everywhere.
And here’s the amazing thing. There was discovered about a century ago a method for dealing with addiction. It’s called the “twelve step method.” Some of you may know about it. But here’s the amazing thing I became convinced of. The 12 step method is not just a 100 years old. It is paraphrase, a good summary, of what it means to be a Christian. All of Christian spirituality can be found summarized in those 12 steps. And they start with – yep, a conversion experience.
One summary of the 12 steps reduces them to 3. I think you’ll see what I mean.
- I can’t …
- God can …
- I think I’ll let Him !
A moment of decision. Will we continue to coast? Is that good enough?
How do I want my obituary to read? What do I need to change in order for that to be accurate?
This kind of questioning is at the heart of turning towards the life that Jesus was presenting to us in the Gospel. That’s what the Gospel is. Choose life or choose death. Jesus asks questions of us – like Jesus asked Peter in John’s gospel as we heard just a few minutes ago.
- Simon son of John, do you love me more than these?
- Dale, do you love me more than all those ways you’d rather go?
- Well, then, if that’s the case. “Tend my sheep”
That being the case: go and share the good news. Or, as the 12th step puts it:
“Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics (including everybody) and to practice these principles in all our affairs.”
Note
The Third Sunday of Easter Color: White Assigned Readings Lesson 1: Acts 9:1-6,(7-20) Psalm: 30 Lesson 2: Revelation 5:11-14 Gospel: John 21:1-19lectionary
Acts 9: Saul, Saul why do you keep persecuting me … Ananias
Revelation 5: “Worthy is the lamb …”
John 21: on the beach, fried fish … Peter, “Do you love me.”
Not included the explanation for why writing the gospelWilliam James
An important American writer of a century ago wrote about the American religious experience 2are there an infinite number of ways?
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