SUNDAY SERMON: Unbelievable Change
By Rev. Stephen Baldwin
NT: Acts 9.1-20
The great writer GK Chesterson once said, “To love means loving the unlovable. To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable. Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless. Faith means believing the unbelievable.”
The story of the Christian faith is unbelievable. There are all sorts of people who have staked their lives and their careers on proving it. My hat is off to them for their commitment, but I don’t think it can be proven. It must be believed. And I’m the first to admit that it’s…hard to believe sometimes.
Hard to believe God’s son would be born in a rural desert to a teenager and a carpenter. Hard to believe he could survive being hunted by pharaoh. Hard to believe he would turn the other cheek all those years. Hard to believe when he turned water to wine and raised the dead. Hard to believe the crowds of people who came to adore him. Hard to believe those same crowds abandoned him when times got tough. Hard to believe he died on a cross. Harder still to believe he was resurrected. And hardest of all to believe that more than 2,000 years later his church still lives and his name is still spoken every single day in prayer. It’s unbelievable, in the best sense of the word.
One of the most unlikely turns the story of Christianity takes is after Jesus’ resurrection. He rises from the dead and comes to visit his disciples. Once he’s reminded them to continue his work, he leaves. He ascends to heaven to be with God. It wasn’t that the church was in shambles when Jesus left; there wasn’t much of a church then. It didn’t really exist without Jesus. Jews lost their temple. Again. Christians were a teeny, tiny group under the leadership of Peter, James, and others. Their leader just died, came back, and then left.
A guy named Saul was a zealous Jew, who devoted his life to preserving Judaism from those he believed were trying to distort it. From people like Christians.
We first meet Saul in Acts 7, where he was present for the stoning of Stephen. Saul not only witnessed it; he approved it. It was done at his command to try and protect the traditional faith.
Verses 1-2 of chapter 9 say, “Meanwhile Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest and asked him for letters to the synagogues at Damascus, so that if he found any who belonged to the Way, men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem.”
“Still,” the scripture says in what seems to be a very important word in the story. Saul was still breathing threats. The resurrection wasn’t magic. The ways of the world are still pressuring God’s people.
God’s people weren’t called Christians yet. Saul says they belonged to “The Way.” The Jewish authorities, including Saul, did not recognize them as their own. They saw them on a different path. “The way,” which is ironic considering that everything changes while Saul is on “the way” to Damascus.
A bright light blinds him. The voice of Jesus speaks from the light, saying, “Saul, why do you persecute me?”
We often talk about Saul being converted to Paul in an instant. As if the light flashed and his mind was changed forever. That’s not exactly true. He is guided, while still blind, to town. After several days and some prodding by a disciple named Ananias, then his eyes were opened and his life forever changed. He joined the disciples who he spent years fighting, was baptized, and proclaimed Jesus the son of God. The man who once persecuted the faith becomes its leader.
The story of our faith is unbelievable, in the best sense of the word.
Did you know that Paul wrote nearly half the New Testament? Or that it has far more of his sermons and theology in it than it does of Jesus? The man who wanted to keep Christianity from spreading ended up spreading it across the globe.
It’s an unbelievable story about an unbelievable faith. But the story really isn’t about Saul or Paul or the early church so much as it’s about God. The story teaches that God changes our world. People can change, because God can change them. Saul becomes Paul. The prosecutor becomes the defense. The blind see. The deaf hear. The last become first. God can change things!
We all have blind spots. Paul was blinded by his own sense of purity. It’s an important lesson to be aware of our blind spots, lest we become what we fear. We live in a day and time when ideological purity tests are the norm. If someone doesn’t agree with us all the time, we cancel them, cast them aside, devalue them.
What if Jesus says to you, “Why are you persecuting me?” Would we be as surprised to hear that as Saul was?
God can change things. As unbelievable as that seems, we best believe it. Amen.
