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"Softened Hearts"
Sermon by Dr. Kit Schooley
given April 22, 2007
on Acts 9
I am at the University of Virginia, at a reunion of my alma mater, for which I won’t want to recall the number, because it was so low! I am involved in the kind of conversation that happens when I fail to plan where I’m going and who will be there with me. For I am stuck with a person who is speaking with some passion: the subject is “Who is saved!” and the question is: “Am I?”
She (my conversation partner) is examining, no, investigating me, as I have failed to recall, with any accuracy, these three things; the date, the time and the experience that proves the bona fides of when I was saved. I am saying: “I was baptized by the Rev. Allen in a small church in Easton, PA, and it was there that somehow, later in my childhood, it seems to me God claimed me, and I agreed.”
My conversation partner now strides confidently into the theology of this event in my life and I find I am not able to clearly recall, or even invent, which I plaintively wish I had made for this hour; so that I could point to this appointment as reason for wrapping up this experience under the microscope.
I try a more inventive response involving something about a flower bud and the petals opening, which finally reveals the center portion, suggesting that at some point the bud had turned into flower—how hard it is, is it not, to determine when it was no longer bud and now a flower, just like it was hard to determine when I was merely God’s child, but now definitely, God’s rebirthed, reborn, child?
Conversations like these come back to some of us when Acts 9 is read. Many have traveled a road to faith not so dramatic as Paul’s trip to Damascus. Paul’s experience was unexpected, startling, a real knockout!
My favorite version of this story is offered by Fred Buechner, a favorite commentator for many of you. Buechner offers an immediate, unvarnished view:
It was about noon when he was knocked flat by a blaze of light that made the sun look like a 40-watt bulb, and out of the light came a voice calling him by his hebrew name twice. “Saul,” it said, and then again: Saul! Why are you out to get me?” And when he pulled himself together enough to ask who it was he had the honor of addressing, what he heard, to his horror, was, “I’m Jesus of Nazareth, the one you’re out to get. It was pretty clear to this old Christian-baiter that if Jesus had what it took to burst out of the grave like a guided missile, he could polish off one bowlegged Christian-baiter without even noticing it, and Paul waited for the axe to fall.(1)
Christians tend to compare their own rebirth, conversion, commitment experience to Saul’s. Not all of us, of course, talk easily, or especially clearly about what happened in us and to us on the way to becoming Christian. But often we say that our conversion was—or was not—a Damascus Road one. On Palm Sunday we confirmed six youth of the congregation here in this very place. Each confirmand was told their experience does not need to be a Damascus Road experience, although it can be. There are many paths to faith—and that spotlight from heaven is but one of them.
One aspect of Paul we overlook here is: violence is a key issue. Saul is characterized in the opening verses as a man of violence. He is young in this story, perhaps in his 20s; we have been introduced to him two chapters earlier as he who held the coats while Stephen was stoned. Saul approved of that execution, and is later pictured dragging men and women believers from their homes to imprison them, and perhaps see them to their deaths.
So, even if we describe our own experience as similar in some way, it pales next to the drama of the that kleiglight from heaven.
Into this life, comes this past week. We have been suffering endless inches of rain and our moods are gray and, first weary, then frustrated. The weather is mostly what is on our minds. Then news of a shooting, in Blacksburg. Two are dead. Saddened, it adds to the dreariness of our week. Hours pass, then we are ripped from our gray world into a darker and more frightening one. 31 more killed, slaughtered, by a lone gunman. A student gunman. A twenty-three year old gunmen, who then takes his own life.
It is the privilege of religious leaders to speak in times like these. We speak in pulpits all over America today. “What confronts us is the unlimited harm one person can do. One person can snuff out the wonder, the joy and the love of millions.” (2)
But there, in the carnage, is, unexpectedly, the world as God sees it—a clearer view of life we could not hope to possess. At an absolutely gorgeous location in the Blue Ridge mountains, trees painted with bloom, is a school populated by youth filled with their own fragile glories, their passionate adorations of life; yet “at the same time of the idyllic scene, we see their passionate living cruelly mutilated by violence, horror, terror. We saw it Tuesday, and Wednesday, and Thursday. We saw it the way that God sees it every day. It broke our hearts, did it not? It breaks God’s heart. It is the cost of love. (3)
The Church, in her story, has known violence of the worst ilk. Just listen to Ananias plead with God to not have to confront the violent, hated Saul. Ananias, filled with resistance to facing up to the one who had come to his town, is no match for God. God specializes in resistance, in those of sound mind who sincerely believe there is another who could better address the problem…right the wrong. Resisting God is legion. The Bible is filled with resisters—Moses, Amos, Jeremiah, Jonah, Peter—who were first called, then cornered, then told, in no uncertain terms: you are my servant, you will stop this resisting and go where I send you.
What each of them had, is also what we have, a community of people around them, who have gathered for a long time; a community that has weathered storms, seen fear and terror, struggled to survive, and finally, worked out ways to live a life, offer forgiveness and tease out the threads of hope and peace. A community that knows the danger of hardened hearts, the danger of violence, the danger of hatred. Communities that know we would rather forget the terrors, rather suffer cheap grace and remain bitter, despairing. Communities that know these ways: first bind us, then gag us, and finally strangle us.
We have seen the world like God sees it this week. We glimpse God’s perspective, and it is spectacularly different than our own. And that is a gift to us, believe me. It was also God’s view that Saul, a real thorn, could be used in ways to love, not destroy; and Ananias, who is really each of us, made all the difference. He brought justice, reflection and the promise of God’s presence. It is what we are challenged to do amidst this violence that has bloodied our lives. Not only for ourselves, but for all we meet. It is the cost of love.
What might it be like to glimpse God’s picture of the world every day? The picture in which the people of faith are straining—ready to throw in the towel for first Columbine, then the Twin towers, now Virginia Tech assaults our hope, destroys our love. What must be it like to be God craving our surviving, our not giving up, our finding ways to pass through this and keep saying to the world—a dangerous world most days: “I still travel the road, believing that I am, whether filled with a born-again heart, or a heart committed to God all my life, ready to display a wise, patient and softened heart, when this world, with devils filled, threatens to undo us."
Amen and Amen.
NOTES
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Buechner, Frederick, Peculiar Treasures, p. 129.
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“The Cost of Love, remarks make on Duke Chapel steps on
Tuesday 17 April, 2007” by Rev. Samuel Wells, Dean of the Chapel -
ibid.
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