Called To Follow by Rev. Gabrielle Martone at Pearl River United Methodist Church on Sunday 1 March 2020
Jump to
Scripture of the Day
Sermon
Acts 22:1-21 NRSV
”Brothers and fathers, listen to the defense that I now make before you.” When they heard him addressing them in Hebrew, they became even more quiet. Then he said:
”I am a Jew, born in Tarsus in Cilicia, but brought up in this city at the feet of Gamaliel, educated strictly according to our ancestral law, being zealous for God, just as all of you are today. I persecuted this Way up to the point of death by binding both men and women and putting them in prison, as the high priest and the whole council of elders can testify about me. From them I also received letters to the brothers in Damascus, and I went there in order to bind those who were there and to bring them back to Jerusalem for punishment. “While I was on my way and approaching Damascus, about noon a great light from heaven suddenly shone about me. I fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to me, ‘Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?’ I answered, ‘Who are you, Lord?’ Then he said to me, ‘I am Jesus of Nazareth whom you are persecuting.’ Now those who were with me saw the light but did not hear the voice of the one who was speaking to me. I asked, ‘What am I to do, Lord?’ The Lord said to me, ‘Get up and go to Damascus; there you will be told everything that has been assigned to you to do.’ Since I could not see because of the brightness of that light, those who were with me took my hand and led me to Damascus. “A certain Ananias, who was a devout man according to the law and well spoken of by all the Jews living there, came to me; and standing beside me, he said, ‘Brother Saul, regain your sight!’ In that very hour I regained my sight and saw him. Then he said, ‘The God of our ancestors has chosen you to know his will, to see the Righteous One and to hear his own voice; for you will be his witness to all the world of what you have seen and heard. And now why do you delay? Get up, be baptized, and have your sins washed away, calling on his name.’ “After I had returned to Jerusalem and while I was praying in the temple, I fell into a trance and saw Jesus saying to me, ‘Hurry and get out of Jerusalem quickly, because they will not accept your testimony about me.’ And I said, ‘Lord, they themselves know that in every synagogue I imprisoned and beat those who believed in you. And while the blood of your witness Stephen was shed, I myself was standing by, approving and keeping the coats of those who killed him.’ Then he said to me, ‘Go, for I will send you far away to the Gentiles.’”
So this is Paul and his narrative, going back to the church leaders of this movement called The Way, right? So the church, as we understand it, didn't exist in Jesus's time and in the years after Jesus's death because Christians were being persecuted. Christians existed under ground. Hiding because of people like Paul because Paul is a really, really, really good Jewish man who was educated under the most profound and most revered scholars of his time, his goal was to round up all of the people who were following the way, the Christ followers, and to beat them, and imprison them, and to get rid of them.
That was his whole mission. His whole mission was to persecute the people that he did not like and who he felt believed differently than he did. And he starts getting these letters from the people in Damascus that there are more of those Christians here, come take them out. And so Paul, on his way to Damascus, has this profound experience with Christ where he is stopped in his tracks and Jesus speaks to him. Why are you persecuting me? And he's blinded. And he has to be led from the middle of the road where this encounter happens to some random house of a person he's never met before and some dude named Ananias is supposed to come and heal him.
And I will tell you that when you read more of Acts, you get Ananias's story who is a devout Christian, who when God says to him, "You have to go to this house and heal this guy," Ananias's response to God is, "Absolutely not. That dude is killing my brothers and sisters. That guy in a very real way is my enemy. I absolutely will not go to some random house and heal him." And God, in God's profound way of making us do things we don't particularly want to do, convinces Ananias that Saul has changed and Ananias goes and lives into his fear and his anxiety about what Saul could do to him and heals him.
And when the scales are removed from Paul's eyes or Saul's eyes, he is a believer. All of a sudden he realizes that what he was doing in the persecution and the attacking was not where he was supposed to be. All of a sudden he realized that in Jesus Christ, God had done something profoundly different in the world. And Saul changes his name to Paul and gets worried about going back to Jerusalem because if he goes back there, everybody knew that this guy was the one who killed the Christians. And so the Jews were not going to be on his side because who believes a conversion quite like that? And the Christians of the time certainly were never going to trust him because you're going to throw us in prison and have us murdered. So Paul goes, "I've had this profound experience, where am I going to go now?" And God says, "I will send you to the Gentiles. I will send you away from the land that you knew, away from the culture you understand, and I will send you out into the world, and you will tell my story."
This is yet another time in which God reaches into history and does the things that none of us want or expect God to do. Because he takes his hand and he puts it into the messiness of our lives and says, "The people that you have spent your whole life condemning will actually be the people who bring you salvation." God does this time and time and time again where God lifts the broken people, where God lifts the people that we would not have expected to carry us through to salvation. Lifts the people who are low lives and on the margins and people we don't particularly like and God raises them to a place in which we are humbled and reminded that God works in mysterious ways and we are not in control.
And the reason that you and I are all sitting here today is because of this guy. We are Gentiles. We would not have been included or understood to have been included in this Jesus movement if it were not for Paul. If Paul did not go out to the people who were not Jewish and said, "You too belong in the Kingdom of God," we would not be here. So for as many ways as I also think Paul is wildly problematic and he says lots of things I wish he did not say. And lots of things that I have spent most of my career trying to help people understand the context of what's happening. Paul is the reason that I get to stand here today.
Paul had a really great life. When he was studying under the Jewish scholars, and when he was living a life of power and prestige, he had everything going for him. Anytime you have the capacity and ability to be able to throw people in cages, you are living a very interesting and power filled and in your eyes a good life. But all of a sudden Paul is stopped on the road and reminded that his persecution is contrary to what God calls him to do. So this is when we begin to truly see that Paul has a new birth, a new changing of who he is. When he realizes that by throwing people to the wolves and the lions and persecuting them, what he has been doing in fact is contrary to God's will, even though he was so convinced that that's what God wanted from him.
He humbles himself completely and is sent to far off lands to proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ. A changed man. Now I will caveat by saying, Paul says lots of problematic things. Paul says lots of things to people in a variety of different contexts that are contextual, and I want you to think about it like this. You all have different personalities, not just as individuals, but in your own self. You have your work personality and you have your home personality and you have your church personality, right? Now, we hope that they're all in line with each other, but the person that you are at work is not always the person that you are at home, right?
I'm going to assume so. I'm going to assume that you have a little bit more professionalism than maybe you do when you're sitting around at your house with your family, right? I want you to imagine if people took the emails that you sent at work and the texts you send to your family and put them together in a book and a thousand years later, say, "This is the same person." Right? If you receive an email from me, my best friend works at the conference office and when I email her, I email her like I'm emailing my best friend, right? We put our inside jokes in there. We put the way that we would normally communicate with one another. We have this weird thing, ready? Here's another weird thing about Pastor Gabrielle. We call each other moose. It's like a thing we've just been doing for the 13 years that we've been best friends, so every email from her is, "Hey, moose."
Even when she's emailing me about church stuff, the emails I send to the Bishop are very different than that. I do not refer to the Bishop as moose, okay, but I'm still the same person writing, right? Paul's letters were written to very particular people in very particular contexts. It would be like if I preach the exact same sermon everywhere I went, it would fall short with some folks because you are a different community than the communities I have served before. So just remember as you're reading Paul, it's all about the context and he does say very problematic things. I understand, I wrestle with him every day. But what we learn from Paul is that we are not always right. I know that's hard to hear. Sorry. Even at the core of who we are, the deepest convictions that we hold are not always right.
There are things that you can be holding onto for decades and years because this is what you have always known that are not the most correct, that are not the most godlike, that do not offer a freedom and peace and love and fullness of life to everyone who you meet. We learn from Paul that we are not always right. We also learned that we can change, right? You know that old saying of you can't teach an old dog new tricks. Paul proves otherwise, okay? You can change. You can be different. You can have profound experiences in your life that take you on a total 180 from where you had been before. It is okay. No matter how long you have been alive or how long you have held onto a certain set of beliefs to change them. Your previous self does not define your current self.
Sometimes it's really hard for us to let go of the people that we have been before because that was comfortable for us. On Friday night, at one point in my life did the walk to a mass which is a spiritual retreat and you're sequestered for 72 hours and it is a deeply profound experience. I mean we are at a gathering this last Friday night and I was with a very good friend of mine. His name is Kevin. He's our lay director for the community, and Kevin shared his testimony of being an addict and how the Ananias community has helped him be able to be sober for eight years. And how profound it is to be able to have a community who sees you not because of who you were, but because of who you are. To have a community who surrounds you and does not count your sins against you, but wishes you the fullness of life for where you are right now.
And afterwards we got to talking about the way that the labels that the rest of the world puts on us can often feel like a box. Like somehow we are stuck in this thing because this is what the rest of the world tells you you are. But here's the other thing that we talked about. Addiction is really comfortable, right? When you learn coping mechanisms, and I say this as a person who has an eating disorder and who is in recovery, right? Which is an addiction in and of itself. The coping mechanisms that you come up with are really comfortable. It is really easy for me to live in my eating disorder because for decades, well, half a decade and a half, it was really comfortable for me. I knew how to be that girl with an eating disorder.
You know, it's really uncomfortable for me being the girl in recovery. Because as bad as I know that all of those coping mechanisms are for me, they are really comfortable. And Kevin and I were talking about how when life gets really stressful and things get out of control in your brain, you want to go to the most comfortable thing. So it's really easy to slip back into the coping mechanisms that you know are bad for you, that you know will lead you down a path of destruction, that you know that you are definitely not supposed to be doing. But it is so easy and so tempting because even though you know it is not going to give you great things, it is going to lead you down that spiraling destructive path. It's really comfortable being someone new is super uncomfortable.
Right? And so for Paul, he spends the rest of his ministry having to deal with this tension of what was comfortable and what is now. It is uncomfortable to have to totally change your life and be a new person, right? I can't be the only person who's sitting in this room right now who knows the story of having to find newness in yourself. Of having to leave your old ways behind whatever they may be in order to find health and fullness in what comes next.
The ways of old are comfortable and easy. That's why we like it so much. Darkness, right, when we live in darkness, we are happy, so we think, and we are comfortable, so we think because this is easy for us. God asks us to step out of our boxes that we have created for ourselves and live a life of change. A life that aligns with loving God and loving your neighbor. A life that says that the darkness does not tell us what is good and what is a right. We are called to change, to have our lives turned around and to struggle with the darkness needing to be easier, or seeming easier, right?
We all know that God in our heads, right, we all know God's way is the way to go, right? Please, for the love of God, do not be like the children. We all know that God's way is the way to go, right? Thank you. Right? We know that in our brains that we should be following God, that we should be walking in the way that Christ walked, that we should be doing all of the things that God tells us is good for us because God doesn't do it so that we can be condemned, right? We don't have rules to live by because God wants to punish us. The rules are there so that we can be comfortable and happy and live in the fullness of life. God says, do not murder because murdering is bad, right? Thank you.
Murdering is bad. We are not told not to murder because God wants us to keep the rules so that we can be like little soldiers who do all of the things that we are told to do, because murdering is bad for us and it's bad for the world, right? We are told not to covet what somebody else has because when jealousy creeps inside of you, it turns your insides rotten, right? Thank you. Right. So God doesn't tell us not to covet because he doesn't understand the nature of the human mind. He doesn't tell us not to covet so that if we break the rule, he can punish us. God tells us not to covet because God wants what is best for us.
He wants us to be able to live lives that are full and beautiful and bright. He calls us to follow, not in a line so that we off all of the boxes, he calls us to want and desire the best for ourselves so we can live the best versions of who we are. Paul tells us and teaches us that we have to change who we were and live in that uncomfortable life in order to be the best versions of ourselves. While I was in seminary, I took a class on Darwinism and the church, right? Darwinism in theology. Can you be a Darwinist? Can you believe in evolution and be a Christian? That is a whole other sermon topic. I'm not going to go into that today, but one of the things that I learned from that class is that the goal of evolution, the goal of human progress, the goal of species progress is to be the best version of yourself, right?
So the striving of creation is to be the best version. That's why things continue to evolve because you the species is constantly trying to be the best version, so that you can live and thrive in the best way. God is calling us to do the exact same thing. The purpose is for us to thrive, to be the best versions of who we are, to love the Lord our God, and to love our neighbor, to be well cared for. To care well for others, right? Our goal in life is to thrive. We do not thrive if we are stuck and the people that we used to be and the things that were comfortable for us in thinking that we can never adapt or change or evolve, right? You can't be the best version of yourself if you constantly go back to the things that hurt you.
So God calls us to follow Christ, to step out of the darkness and into the light, to step out of the uncomfortable things and the oppressive ideas and the desire to follow power and money and fame and fortune, and to step into thriving, right? Because while Paul goes on his journey to the Gentiles, as we continue to see throughout this series, we will see that while Paul struggles and there are hardships, Paul is thriving. And because Paul is thriving, the church begins to thrive. And even in their struggles and their conflicts and their issues, that moment in which Paul is blinded and is made to see again, the entire movement of the church changes. And the Christians go from being people who live in fear to people who live in hope.
So my challenge for you this week as we move through Lent is what do you need to lose in order to thrive? What do you need to walk away from in your life in order to thrive? If God were to knock you out on your way to work or your way to Bible study, or your way to whatever thing you have going on in your life this week, what is it that God is saying you have to get rid of this? And what steps can you take into the light? What steps can you take to leave the old shell of who you were and to find the version of who you are called to be thriving in this life? Not constrained by the ease and the comfort of the darkness, but fully blossoming in the light today and every day. Amen.
Explore services in this series
