Easter 3 C

Encounters Along the Road

Introduction

Once, a long, long time ago, there was a man named Saul… He was a holy man, a wise man, a Pharisee and he believed in his church. And what made him angrier than anything was people who were trying to ruin his church, trying to change things, trying to go behind the Pharisee’s backs…

In other words,… he hated Christians.

And Saul’s word held a lot of sway. He was a Roman Citizen, he was a teacher in the church, he was famous for doing the right thing… if Saul did not like Christians there must have been a good reason. Perhaps everyone should turn on them….

We all know people who have more influence on us than others. For me Rick Mercer, the Rick Mercer television show guy… what he says matters to me…

And there are writers I trust, Ministers whose opinions carry more weight for me, friends and family who seem to make a little more sense than the majority…. So I get it. Saul was an influential person; and he mattered.

Think of him as the church’s worst enemy.

See, this is what always fascinated me about Christianity… misfits and troublemakers… murderers and liars… these are the heroes. It makes it seem a lot more relevant to me. If all of the stories we told were about perfect people who God used to convince other people to be perfect… it would have nothing to do with me…

Cooking Fish

(KIDS)… campfire and goldfish… re-tell the story… God’s dinner conversation… you can do anything…

(ADULTS) God works through conversion. It can be a simple story or a complex one… but it is a story in which something happens which changes our minds.

In High School I was a problem kid. I could tell you lots of stories but suffice it to say that I was unhappy. I was unhappy for years… and I did not see much point in this life… one night I was walking home from a party and I saw my backyard… it was all trees and it was the middle of the night and off in the distance was a streetlight creating these odd glowing patterns in the trees… and I thought it was beautiful. Like… amazing…. In that moment I realized that even when things are going wrong, even when life is terrible, there can be beauty. It was the beginning of my conversion….

After the execution of Jesus, after the appearance in the upper room, after the crowds have died down the disciples got out of town… in fact, not knowing what else to do they made their way back to Galilee and back to the nets… fishing was simple, it was what they knew how to do, their careers as religious disciples seemed at an end… so you have to make a living… right.

But God had bigger plans for them.

So we get this scene on the seashore where Jesus cooks them breakfast, reminds them of a few things, forgives them for a few things, and calls them to task. You have bigger fish to fry, is essentially what he is trying to say here….

Falling From Horses

Back to Saul though, remember, the bad boy of the Bible…

Saul was on his way to Damascus in order to arrest some more of these upstart Christians when his life was changed forever…. We are told he had a revelation that knocked him off his feet. Something happened to him that turned his world upside down... and in a good way... It says that in an instant, his life was transformed.

Now in truth, that transformation was probably no more “instant" than was the conversion of the disciples at 

their fish fry breakfast… Sure, this was a moment where everything changed… a moment that changed his mind… but remember who this was… This was Saul, who had studied literature and the law and, when he was still young, he went to Jerusalem to study in the great Rabbinical schools. He was a religious man through and through…

He already spent all his waking hours thinking about how to serve God, about what the right and wrong things to do were… he had been guided by religious convictions his whole life… it was just that, in this moment, he realized that he had got some things wrong.

Now no doubt, even when Saul was a nasty guy, causing much suffering and pain, God was at work in him. So, I'm sure that what he did and what he witnessed contributed to him becoming a better person. But it is true that on that Road to Damascus, Saul finally made a commitment to turning his life around.

Last week when we talked about Peter we talked about someone who was unsure of himself, and found inner strength. But Paul is totally different. Here we encounter someone who is confident, sure of himself, and powerful; and yet realizes that there are things he does not know, there are ways of seeing the world he has not considered, that God is always at work in new ways…

And so he takes on a new role of being the hands and feet of Jesus in the world, and he adopts new name to go with it…. Paul…

What he does as the apostle Paul is a story for another day though…

Of Promises

So we have two stories of call, two stories of conversion in our text today. The disciples on the seashore find out there is more work to be done. Paul on his way to Damascus discovers that he has been doing things wrong and there is more to be done…

You know, once upon a time, to say a Creed like we just did was to swear allegiance. It was a statement of faith which declared for the world to know that you intended to stand with God, with Jesus, no matter what happened.

Think of it, when we read it in church, as a reminder… A reminder of who and what we are… we are followers of Jesus and that means something.

We all have conversion moments, we all have aha moments when we realize things are a little more complicated than perhaps we first assumed, or that there is more work to be done, or that we are happier with the outcome than we thought we would be.

I wonder if we need to take more time to do less… if we need to go fishing, or walk along a road on the way somewhere just taking the time to think… is that something that is missing in most of our lives? Is that where we would hear the voice of God more clearly? Just wondering…

But I have had those moments. I went from wanting to be a soldier to wanting to be a minister in what seemed like the blink of an eye… it wasn’t really. And, even though you might not think so, the motivations for each were the same… I wanted to help people and make a difference. I wanted people to be happier than I was at the time…. I just thought I had it figured out… I would go and fight for a better world… when all of a sudden it seemed to change… but it really hadn’t I had been going to youth group, and talking to ministers, and taking religious studies in school… and… in the twinkling of an eye….

Conclusion

So what is at the edges of your vision? What is gnawing at you?

How about we spend this week thinking about Paul, about what he has to say to us. Can you relate to Paul in any way?  Did you ever realize that you have been really really wrong about something?  Have you ever changed your course completely?  Have you ever had an experience that shook you to your very core? 

Perhaps you've had a Road to Damascus experience or maybe you have slowly grown and changed over the course of your life.

The characters in our Christian story don't always act as fine upstanding citizens. I'm sure that each of us that have had members of our own families that haven't always done the right things. But, in all of that, in each and every person, we can hear God speaking.

What is it that you hear Paul saying to you today?