A Way Forward

A Way Forward The Dover Church
April 18, 2010– 3rd Sunday after Easter Scripture: Acts 9:1-20

In my opinion, the only person more misunderstood by Christians than Jesus is the Apostle Paul. In these days of 12-15 minute sermons, it is difficult for a preacher to convey just how important Paul is for understanding Christian discipleship and living a vibrant and meaningful relationship with God. Paul requires a lot of cultural explanation and is rarely easy to categorize. In the good old days of 1-2 hour sermons we could dive right in, but luckily those days are past.
Of all the things there are to know about Paul, there seem to be two things that most Christians and even non-Christians think they know, both of which are usually misunderstood. First, there’s the story of Paul’s conversion which we heard this morning. Lots of people use the phrase “A Road to Damascus experience” to describe a sudden eye-opening and completely life changing moment. The problem is that that is not what happened to Paul on the Damascus road. He had an eye closing life changing experience that took him years to get a grip on.
The second thing everyone knows is what they have heard at weddings, Paul’s words about love in his first letter to the church in the Greek city of Corinth. So people think that Christianity is all about feeling the way we felt on our wedding days, all warm and fuzzy. Except Paul wasn’t writing to couples in love. Paul was writing to a church in conflict, people in serious disagreement. This is how you work out your irreconcilable differences over the long haul.
The really important question is this: “how in God’s name did the angry, even murderous, Paul on the Damascus road get to his love song to the Corinthians?” That, my friends, is THE QUESTION, because in learning the answer we can learn the Christian way forward and how to actually walk it. Paul came an enormous spiritual distance in his long walk with Jesus. Every journey, as they say, starts with that first step, so let’s start with Paul’s first step, the divinely applied kick in the seat of the pants which Paul needed to get him started. That’s a perfect image for me, because that’s exactly what most of us need to get started: God’s boot in our backside.
So how did Paul come to be on the Damascus Road in the first place? Paul first appears under his pre-baptismal name of Saul in the Acts of the Apostles, helping out at the stoning death of the first Christian martyr, St. Stephen, in Jerusalem. It’s a short reference: “Then they dragged Stephen out of the city and began to stone him; and the witnesses laid their coats at the feet of a young man named Saul. While they were stoning Stephen, he prayed “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.” Then he knelt down and cried out in a loud voice, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.” When he had said this, he died. And Saul approved of their killing him” (Acts 7:58-8:1). For those of you who have read Khalid Husseini’s books about contemporary Afghanistan, The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, the future St. Paul sounds a lot like a Taliban fanatic.
Paul never knew Jesus before the Crucifixion, but he hated the disciples after the Resurrection. Why? For the simple reason that they were, in Paul’s opinion, getting Judaism all wrong and leading people away from the right path, which is to say, Paul’s path. Being very devout, Paul took it upon himself to crush this non-conformist Jewish sect. He was the scourge of the disciples in Jerusalem and, as we have just heard, had now turned his attention further afield to Damascus. Going down that road with arrest warrants in his purse, filled with certitude and rectitude, Paul had no idea how seriously stuck he was. Paul thought he had found a way forward towards God. His plan made sense to him and many others like him. It fit into everything he knew about God and being a faithful person. But he was stuck, so stuck that he didn’t even realize how stuck he was. If we were to have asked him, “Paul, are you stuck? Going the wrong way? Perhaps mistaken?” I am pretty sure that Paul would have thought we were either stupid or insane.
Now isn’t that how life is? How our lives can be? How our lives have been? How our lives maybe are right now? We think we are on a way forward, maybe even the way forward into or towards God, when really we are just stuck, going around in circles, going the wrong way, banging our heads against a wall, just plain lost.
The problem for most us most of the time is simple. We allow our lives to live us, doing what we think we ought to do and have to do, trying to work hard and be smart enough to take care of ourselves and our families. That’s what we know and are familiar with. That’s how everyone else’s life seems to be, so that’s what we do too. Maybe God and something more isn’t even on our radar screens all that much. Yet in all the conversations I have had with people about faith over the years, it always seems to come down to one thing: a feeling that somehow something is missing, that there has to be something more, that time is going by too fast, that some deeper and richer and more beautiful meaning, some transcendent purpose is out there and they are missing out on it.
Which is where the divine kick in the seat of the pants comes in. This is what it often takes to get us moving. This is what it took to shake Paul up enough to get him out of the familiar, the voice out of the sky: “Paul, what are you doing?”
Paul had two very important things going for him. First, he really loved God. Second, he really wanted to get his relationship with God right. Those are two enormously helpful starting points. Jesus took Paul’s burning love of God and used it to take Paul in the exact opposite direction he had been heading. If Paul hadn’t loved God so much, he would have never gone to the places he didn’t want to go and to the people he didn’t want to know. Without that desire for God, Paul would have never allowed himself to be taken so completely out of his comfort zone. But he did, and out there he learned how to live the love he wrote of to the Corinthians in ways he never even imagined. Out there, Paul found the God he loved so much and lived the relationship he desired so deeply.
What does that have to do with us? Like Paul, God in Jesus Christ offers us a way forward into love of God, neighbor, and ourselves. What I have learned, just like Paul, is that way forward is never the easy path, the path we want to take. In fact, it is usually the exact opposite. What’s more, it is never quick or easy. After this episode in his life, Paul spent three years in the Arabian dessert getting the hang of it. Then he spent the rest of his life working out the implications of it all. In other words, there is no quick fix to really knowing and loving God.
So why bother? Why want to get unstuck? Well, for one thing, there’s God to get to know. I have come to know that I can only really know myself and others and love myself and others and be happy in my life to the extent that I know and love God. That is enormously motivational for me.
And there’s something else. As I have grown in this way I have come to look at the world around me in a very different way. It used to be that all the stuck places in our world used to really burn me up. All the stuff with Israel and Palestine, racial conflicts, gender conflicts, fundamentalists and progressives, liberals and conservatives, consumers and environmentalists, you name it, used to just get me angry, scared, frustrated, and confused. They repelled me. Now I know they are invitations for me to walk into, bringing my little energy of love. Jesus came to save us so that we might save the world. Jesus offered us a way forward so that we might shape a way forward for all creation.
Let me give you an analogy. How many of you have practiced yoga? How many of you do some sort of exercise for your cardio-vascular health? The whole point is to go right up to your yoga edge, the place that is tight and hurts, and hold it. That’s where the openness and lightness is to be found. The whole point is to get right to the point where your muscles burn and your breath is heavy and stay there. That’s where the health is.
And the same is true for the spiritual life. There is truly a way forward. Look at your lives. Where are the places, spiritual and emotional, where you really do not want to go in your lives? Who are the people you do not want to love? What are things you cannot imagine yourself wanting to do? These, my friends, are the guideposts to your first steps into God. If you feel yourself getting angry or uncomfortable or wanting to tell me what an idiot I am, then you know you are right at the threshold. I’ve been there. I know. It’s going to feel like the Crucifixion at first but the Resurrection really is on the other side. Like I said, usually it takes a kick in the seat of the pants to get going. Hopefully this sermon was a little nudge, first for each of us as individuals, then for all of us as a church, and finally for all of us as the church for the world.