The Blind Side

Acts 9:1-19a

Preached by Rev. Trina Zelle

April 25, 2010

Can you imagine the kind of kid Paul must have been?  Of course, as a kid  Paul wasn’t Paul but Saul.  That’s what his mother named him – Saul. When you think about it, a very odd name choice.  Why would you name a kid after the jealous, possibly mentally ill, king who kept trying to kill David of David and Goliath fame. When he wasn’t asking David to play his harp for him that is!

So, maybe it was his name that contributed to what seems to have been Saul/Paul’s very difficult personality.  Can you imagine being in the same fifth grade class with him? No matter how hard you worked, no matter how well you did, you can be sure that the king of the extra credit report would go you one better.  You just know his dioramas used architect quality model trees instead of those little twigs stuck in play dough that everyone else’s had.

From the very beginning – maybe even in utero – but we never hear from his mother -- Saul was an overachiever.  He didn’t just want to do his job well – he wanted to do it better.  Than anyone, even himself.  He wanted to be perfect.  More perfect.  The most perfect.  Like the car manufacturer, he was driven.  To outperform everyone. A Pharisee among Pharisees. 

So, what is it that’s driving him?  Look at how he goes out of his way to get letters of introduction from the religious authorities in Jerusalem so he can take his anti-Christian campaign to Damascus and hound the Christians there.  For that matter, what drives religious fanatics today?  And I don’t just mean the Fred Phelps’s of the world. 

If you’ve never heard of him, Rev. Phelps – whose congregation is composed primarily of family members --  has taken it as his call in life to show up at the funerals of people who have died of AIDS and display a sign that informs the mourners that the recently deceased is even now in hell, being punished for the behavior that brought on the disease.  He obviously never met my friend Jeff who was assaulted and stabbed for being gay.  The blood transfusion that saved his life, also killed him with the AIDS virus. Or maybe Rev. Phelps would say Jeff deserved to be attacked because of who he was.  His newest target are fallen soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan – not because he’s against the war – but because he believes their deaths are the result of the toleration of homosexuality in the United States.

So what is it that motivates folks like this?  The Saul’s and the Fred Phelps’s?  Along with all these “good church people” who appoint themselves to be gatekeepers, deciding who’s in and who’s out of God’s inner circle.

I don’t pretend to understand Fred but I think that Saul thought he was protecting the very essence of Judaism:  “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One.” The last words from dying martyrs lips from pre-Roman times up until today. In their claim that Jesus was God’s Son, weren’t these Christians attacking this fundamental notion of One God? 

I suspect that Saul thought he was upholding the standards of that faith – law and ritual.  Keeping the unclean totally separate from the clean.  Hadn’t this Jesus broken all kinds of ritual cleanliness rules – beginning with the way he healed people – touching them directly for heaven’s sake?  Sharing meals with the unclean. And even worse than that, hadn’t he challenged the sanctity of the Sabbath, saying that the Sabbath was made for human beings not the other way around?  Why hadn’t God just struck him dead then and there.

Well, Jesus had obviously gotten the comeuppance that God intended for him and this would all be a closed book if it weren’t for those pesky followers of his.  Continuing to spread rumors.  Acting as if he had never been killed.  Worse, saying that God had raised him from the dead!  This was obviously getting out of hand and someone had to put a stop to it.

Saul, the over achiever to the rescue.  He  obviously believes in establishing a wide perimeter.  He not only wants to keep his own backyard free of these heretics, he wants to clean up everyone else’s back yard too.  Only then, will his world feel safe.

And one more thing.

Saul feels pretty inadequate.  Like Luther sixteen centuries later, he has tried to find salvation through the law and he has found it wanting.  Or rather, found himself wanting.  He can’t do it.  No matter how hard he tries, he does what he’s sworn he’d never do and he doesn’t do what he’s bragged he’s committed to. 

He’s not a very healthy or happy person.

In fact, he seems close to despair.

Now there are a number of ways to react when things don’t turn out the way you want them to. You can blame yourself and try harder.  You can rethink the whole endeavor. Or you can try to force everyone else measure up to what you’ve been unable to achieve yourself.

Well Saul has already tried to live under the law and found it an impossible task.  We know this from some of his later letters under the pen name of Paul.  And he’s not about to rethink the requirements of the law.  He’s too “religious.”  So he goes for the controlling others option and goes after people who have found another way to God.  They even call themselves people of the new Way – an obvious play on the “the Way” which was another way of saying the Torah, in his day.

A different way to God?  Ridiculous!  Blasphemy!  So follow the yellow dirt road.  Yellow like the yellow sand of our own desert.  On to Damascus to set these heretics straight!  On to fame and praise and escape from his own unhappiness.

And right there in the middle of all Saul’s busy-ness comes Jesus.  Before everything goes black, Saul sees a blinding light. He immediately realizes that he is in the presence of deity:  “Who are you Lord?” he asks.

Does he imagine, even for one split second that this is God coming to tell him what a good job he’s done?  If he does, the thought soon passes.  “I am Jesus, whom you persecute,” comes the answer.

And Jesus proceeds to heal Saul of his miserable need for self-justification and its traveling companion, the compulsion to judge others.  Until that moment, there on the dusty road to Damascus, that’s really what his life had been organized around.  Not the law.  Not God.  The need to prove himself worthy all on his own. Instead he becomes a new person with a new name.  Paul, apostle of the heart set free.  Paul, messenger of God’s grace. 

And here’s what I find remarkable – this man who has been so obsessed with his own perfection and salvation, not only finds personal peace and assurance on that dusty road, his restored vision takes in the totality of God’s creation itself.  Listen:  “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God. . in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay. . .We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves. . .”

I believe that a true conversion experience always comes with an expanded field of vision, a generosity of spirit that embraces that which is beyond oneself.  There is a profound letting go.  That’s why reported conversions that lead to increased isolation and narrowness always ring so false to me. 

Before his conversion, Paul’s faith was all about himself and his own worthiness or lack of it  After his encounter with Christ on the road to Damascus, Paul’s faith was all about God’s immense love – not only for him but for the entirety of God’s creation.  With his own redemption as a starting point, he moves beyond it to a proclamation of humanity’s redemption, even those who were not part of his own tradition and community.  As a result of this understanding, Paul becomes Christ’s apostle to the gentiles when the church in Jerusalem are still debating the topic of who’s in and who’s out. 

And it doesn’t stop with human beings.  Paul extrapolates his newfound insight to the natural world as well – itself God’s creation too.  Why wouldn’t fallen creation, be saved as well.  Today, Paul gets well-deserved credit for moving Christianity from being a small offshoot of Judaism to the world religion that it is today.  His understanding of a redeemed creation hasn’t had the same attention paid to it.    

Paul’s theme of creation’s part in the divine plan is echoed many who follow him, including German abbess, Hildegard of Bingen – an immensely gifted woman of the eleventh century --  who came up with the concept of “veriditas.”  Briefly put, the notion that that there is a lush greenness in all of creation that she also described as “the greening power of God.” *

As the tenth child born to a noble family, Hildegard was sent to live in a Benedictine abbey at the age of eight, and lived there the rest of her life.  At the age of forty two, she began to have visions that convinced her of the inter-relatedness of all created things and that there is a profound and life giving power of lush greenness immanent – or suffused through all creation.  Conversely, she believed that the destruction of wet and wondrous life through sin leads to dryness and death at both physical and moral levels. If this isn’t a theology for our time, I don’t know what is.

So -- two great souls of the faith; both with an understanding of God that led them to increased love for, and engagement with, the entire world – including the natural world.  As a child in Presbyterian Sunday School, I learned that our job as human beings was to be good stewards of creation – meaning that we were supposed to take care of it because it didn’t belong to us, Somehow that got lost – or wasn’t considered an important enough topic for adults to consider. 

But it’s still true:  the earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof as the psalm says.  If not, what kind of God are we worshipping?  One who just stumbled onto this cosmos one day and decided to take over? If we understand God as the creator of all that is, how can we not honor all of creation?  If that is not our understanding, what are we doing here? 

How ironic then that many of the folks who deny climate change, and see nothing wrong with slicing off the tops of mountains and sneer at wildlife set-asides, embrace Paul as one of their own, selectively quoting him chapter and verse.

How ironic then, that much of the green movement takes place outside the church, with church folks being identified as antagonistic to that movement – or irrelevant, with nothing to add to the conversation.  But we should be out in front of this issue – as we should be with all manner of issues, from immigration to peace in the Middle East.  It’s in the DNA of our faith if we will only claim it.  St. Theresa of Avila is credited with saying, “pray daily – use words if necessary.”  Starting now, let’s claim our faith by caring for the earth – use words if necessary – but it’s what we do that really counts.  Amen.

*http://www.sistersofmercy.ie/_uploads/news//files/Congregation/two_ecological_prophets.pdf