Texts: Jeremiah 1:4-10; Acts 9:1-22; Matthew 19:27-30
Over the last two weeks I have been speaking about the need of the Church in this modern world to recognise that the centuries of Christendom have ended: that we can no longer expect that people will consider themselves Christian simply because they were born in a so-called Christian country. We can no longer expect that most people will have their infants baptised. I'm not sure that any study has been done on this issue, but my guess is that today fewer and fewer parents who are not themselves members of a church even consider the possibility of having their children baptised.
So in the future, I have been suggesting, if the Church is to gain new members it will need to be through adult conversions and baptisms, which, of course, are exceedingly rare in most Anglican Churches. In other words, we will have to regain the wisdom and practice of the early Church, the Church of the first three centuries of our history, before Constantine & Co made Christianity virtually compulsory throughout the Roman Empire. We may find that task daunting: people no longer feel embarrassed about rubbishing the Christian faith. For some reason, it is still not okay to rubbish other faiths, from the other great world faiths, to the frankly bizarre, but it's now okay to dismiss the Christian faith as childish, unscientific twaddle.
Given that intellectual and social environment, we might feel that the task of bringing adults to faith is beyond us; and I was pondering this issue this week as I watched the marvellous sight of the inauguration of President Obama, and saw him standing on the steps built by slave labour not all that long ago. As he said himself, his own father would probably have been denied service in the restaurants of Washington just 60 years ago. Who would have thought attitudes of millions of Americans could be changed in such a short period of time? Who would have thought that the dream one of the great prophets of our time, Dr Martin Luther King, would come to fruition in our own lifetime?
Such is the power of truth; such is the power of proclaiming the truth, of seeing the vision and explaining it to others; such is the power of God's will for this world. And where was that truth proclaimed through all those years, the dark periods of American history as well as its better moments; where was the vision seen and kept alive; where was the will of God declared over and over again? In the Church, by people who share the faith we proclaim here in our church this morning. The Civil Rights Movement, and before that the Movement to Abolish Slavery, was born in the Church. Not that all members agreed, not that our record in the Church is spotlessly pure. Far from it. But good people, people of true faith, carried the torch of truth in that country, and millions of people were in the end able to overcome their history, their fear of the other, the stranger, and to overcome all that had divided them for so long, and elect a president on merit, without regard to ethnicity or other marks of tribalism.
Who would have thought it possible? How often we heard that comment from ordinary Americans this week. And who would have thought it possible that Saul of Tarsus would turn out to be, in the words of the Lord spoken to a highly doubtful Ananias, "This man is my chosen instrument to carry my name before the Gentiles and their kings and before the people of Israel." Saul was a man on the way up; a Jew, well-versed in Greek, and the holder of Roman citizenship. He was a brilliant scholar, and would in time have become a famous Rabbi. In worldly terms he had everything required for a brilliant career and a successful life. And then suddenly he threw it all away; and the obvious question is, why?
Well, we know his answer to that question, and the Church has been preaching that answer for two thousand years. The official, orthodox answer is that, one day, on the Road to Damascus, he encountered the Risen Christ, and his life was turned upside-down. That's his answer, and our answer, to the obvious question of why such a gifted and well-connected young man, with a brilliant career ahead of him, should suddenly abandon the lot and become an ardent preacher of the Christian gospel. And my challenge to those who would rubbish this official answer is simply this: what is your answer? How do you explain the transformation of Saul of Tarsus, arch-persecutor of the Church, to Paul, the greatest of all the apostles of our history?
Let the doubters scoff. Better still, let them read the Scriptures for themselves and ask a simple question: does the scriptural account have the ring of truth about it or not? If the New Testament is a spin job, designed to show the Church in the best possible light, why is this story of St Paul's conversion recorded in the way it is? Why do we find Ananias speaking back to the Lord in the way we do? Ananias, a godly man of prayer, apparently thinks that Jesus has not kept up with developments, and does not know that Saul has been persecuting the Church, so he tries to correct him! It's a nice comic touch, and has (to my ears, anyway) a ring of truth about it.
Perhaps even more telling is the reaction to Paul by the saints in Jerusalem. St Luke puts it this way: When he came to Jerusalem, he tried to join the disciples, but they were all afraid of him, not believing that he really was a disciple. Does that have the ring of truth to it? It sure does to me! They thought he was trying to infiltrate their group, to do it harm. There is no suggestion that these great leaders of the Church in Jerusalem were blessed with great spiritual insight, and immediately saw in Paul a fellow servant of the Lord. They smelled a rat, and they tried to get rid of it.
Saul/Paul was a hard nut to crack. He was not an evil man, but a godly one. In his own way he was following what he genuinely believed was the right course. He had dedicated his life to God. He was a great scholar of the Scriptures; he was a man of prayer. He was convinced that the Christians were heretics and blasphemers and he was determined to stand up against them. Whatever happened on the Road to Damascus convinced him utterly that he had been wrong, and so he changed direction (repented or was converted, to use church language). And what happened then? Believers ministered to him, and brought him to baptism, and the rest, as we say, is history.
I finish where I began. We need not doubt the power of the gospel to convince adults of its truth. We live in an age of astonishing change, not all of it good, but some of it marvellous. Those of us who lived through the so-called Cold War – I was in the Sixth form at the time of the Cuban Crisis when many people believed that the end of the world was a real possibility – never believed that we would see the Berlin Wall come down. It came down – in part, through the work and prayer of a Polish Pope. This week we have seen an equally astonishing event. Good does overcome evil. Right does prevail against wrong. God is working his purposes out in and through history. Those who believe it, proclaim it, and work and pray for it, are, in the new President's phrase, on the right side of history.
Just as so much of American history seems to be embodied in President Obama's personal story, so today we celebrate St Paul, one man whose personal story encapsulates the history of our faith. The truth of the Gospel of Christ was so powerful that it transformed Saul's life, and overcame all intellectual, cultural and religious convictions and prejudices of one of the greatest and toughest human minds. And did you notice how it started? Not with words of condemnation or a demand for an apology. It started with a question: Why are you doing this? That's where, perhaps, we need to start. To invite the cynics to reflect on that question. Why are you doing what you're doing? Why are you doubting? Why are you going in this direction?
Those questions are just as relevant to people today as they were in Paul's day. And the answers are just as important.
No comments:
Post a Comment