Does the road to Damascus seem like a strange place to begin a Lenten journey?

        The incident that occurred there, after all, took place after Lent, after Easter and, in fact, after the Ascension. It’s almost like beginning the story at the end, reading the last chapter of a book before reading the first.

        If you had asked the arch-Pharisee Saul, who was traveling the Damascus road with letters from the high priest—letters which gave him authority to capture and bind any Christians he might find in Damascus—whether this might be a good place to begin a Lenten journey, Saul would have laughed … or scowled.

        “I’m not going to begin the story of Jesus and his followers,” he would say; “I’m going to end it—once and for all!”

          But the story of Saul on the road to Damascus is also a story of new beginnings.  And isn’t that kind of what Lent is all about?  Getting rid of that which binds us down and starting over.

One of the questions I find to be among the most troubling for people to answer is whether they could start all over again.  What if something happened and you had to start from scratch – a new career, a new relationship – could you do it? 

What if some catastrophic illness came your way, an injury that made everything different for you and you had to learn to walk all over again, or speak or feed yourself all over again, could you do it? 

Some of you may be here this morning and on the verge of a change like that – something major – and you’re wondering:  Can I completely re-orient my life and survive?

Maybe the question is, can I let go of my security blanket, whatever it might be, and trust God to lead me?

        Well, that is the question of the day, isn’t it – the one raised in this story we read from the Book of Acts, the conversion of Saul on the road to Damascus. 

This is not an easy story to hear. If we turn back a few pages in Acts we read of the brutal murder of a man named Stephen, stoned to death by and angry mob simply because he believed Jesus was the promised Messiah of God. 

And Saul was there, looking on, giving his approval for the taking of human life.  From there he moved on to become the most feared man the church had ever known – dragging Christian men and women from their homes and putting them in chains and hauling them off to prison. 

By the time we meet up with Saul here in Acts chapter nine, he has been authorized to do whatever it takes to stamp out this Christian thing once and for all.

        But of course something happened out there on the road to Damascus, something that caused Saul to start all over.  For little did he know, he was about to take a fall, about to discover that everything he had given his life to (up to this point) was misguided and misspent and wrong. 

Little did he know he was about to learn that something he thought to be a lie was the truest thing he could ever know, that the blindfold he was wearing had to come off. 

You know – I believe that Saul’s blindness began a long time before he ever met Jesus on that road, and it was a blindness a whole lot more debilitating than the physical blindness he would experience for those three days.  He was blindfolded already (in ways we so often get blindfolded, too)…

        There’s the blindfold of prejudice, for one thing – that blinding (and binding) fear of those who are different from us.  Prejudice is defined as that negative opinion formed in us without grounds or sufficient knowledge.  We jump to conclusions about people, and prejudice takes root in our hearts. 

It’s an attitude of hostility that gets directed against a person or a group or a race based on their supposed characteristics.  And sadly, that is a blindfold we all too readily put on. 

For Saul, it was a deep-seated prejudice against people with whom he differed theologically.  It was simply intolerable to him that religious freedom should be granted to those who had fallen for this lie that Jesus was the Messiah. 

To Saul’s way of thinking it was absolute heresy, the kind of movement that threatened Judaism, at least the Judaism he had known, to its very core.  And contrary to the old adage, what he did not know really did hurt him – him and a whole lot of other people.

        You see, prejudice usually begins subtly, with something small, like suspicion.  We human beings are prone to be suspicious of those not like us, whether it’s those of another social class or race or political persuasion or gender. 

If our collars are blue, we have a difficult time trusting those whose collars are white (and vice versa); if we’re from the country, we can’t be too sure about those city folk; if we are liberals, why, those conservatives make our skin crawl; If we are labor, we can’t trust management any further than we can throw them.

        A couple of days ago I read about a book by a man named Nathan McCall entitled, Makes Me Wanna Holler.  It’s the harrowing (and true) story of what it’s like to grow up in America young and black and male. 

        It talks about what it’s like to walk into a store in the mall and be besieged by clerks (“May I help you?  May I help you?”), not because they want to deliver outstanding service, not because they want your business, but because they are afraid you’ll steal something. 

And what it’s like to walk across the street and have white people in their cars lock their doors as you walk past. 

And to be sailing through a job interview only to decide, when your moment of truth comes, to be honest about some wrongdoing in your past, and watch the interviewer snap his briefcase shut and just like that, interview over, back on the street. 

How could you be convinced of anything except that rehabilitation does not really work (at least not for young black men)?  And what a sobering thing, to read Nathan McCall’s story, to encounter through his words the depth with which racism continues to plague this country.

        And I need to tell you that I believe the time has come for us, the people of God, to confess our sin – the sin of engaging in uninformed suspicion where we so readily jump to conclusions about those who are different from us. 

I am weary – in the midst of our present national debate on matters of sexual preference or the justification of war – weary of Christians who make pronouncements that have not passed through the crucible of a relationship with someone with whom they differ.  Such blanket assumptions (on both sides of the issue) that are so polarizing and damaging. 

We need to acknowledge that it is so often from subtle beginnings that the paths of hatred and inhumanity come, meaning God needs to break in on our blindness and take the blindfolds away.

        What we’re talking about, here, so often, is the blindfold of convenience (that’s another word for it), of choosing the path of least resistance in our dealings with others. 

Saul didn’t need to be so ignorant about the people he persecuted.  He could have been opened up to the truth of who Jesus was if only he’d been willing to seriously examine the claims of Jesus against the promises of God, even within his own tradition. 

But instead he chose to walk in ignorance – to settle for the little he already knew rather than embracing what God might be revealing that was fresh and new and life-giving.

        And we would have to admit that the path of convenience has a strong hold on us, doesn’t it?  It’s so much easier to stay with what we know and play it safe. 

I remember a story I heard a long time ago about choosing convenience.  A guy named Charlie Trimble invented the first hand-held GPS, Global Positioning Satellite device, a gizmo able to tell you your exact latitude and longitude no matter where you are standing in the world. 

Well, Charlie was visiting Africa one time, just north of Nairobi, where the locals had set up a big tourist area – souvenir stands, food booths, and a big sign saying welcome to the equator. 

Except that when Charlie looked down at his GPS, it showed they weren’t quite at the equator; it actually was up the road a ways.  When he informed the leaders of the community that there was a mistake, that the real equator was a mile from where they had it marked, one of the leaders said, “Oh, we knew that.  It’s just that the parking  up there is terrible.”

        We know that to be true, don’t we – how often the convenience blindfold keeps us from going where Jesus wants us to go.  We become intellectually lazy, willing to let television or talk radio or other expressions of popular culture do our thinking for us. 

And when that happens it’s like a ring gets put in our nose and a blindfold over our eyes and we get led around by foolish notions – notions about who God is and notions that lead us to fight over the wrong things and bring harm to the work of God’s kingdom. 

And once again, we need God to break in our blindness and take the blindfold off. 

        What I find so profound about Saul’s conversion is that God called this monster, of all people, out of his own hatred and self-righteous convictions, to start all over again, to begin a whole new way of life. 

You see, Saul knew he was right.  He knew it was right to stamp out this heretical little sect called the People of the Way. 

Even Ananias knew what was right; it was right to stay away from this madman Saul who was taking his sisters and brothers off in chains to await their deaths.  But God called.  God called.

        You and I know it is right to maximize our earning potential and get the best job and work hard to provide material things for ourselves, and then God calls – calls us to turn around and give what we have to someone in need. 

You and I know it is right to buy the good things of life for our families and put them first, and then God calls – calls us to give the first fruits, a tithe, a tenth of what we have been given, first to God, that we might not forget whose we are. 

You and I know it is right to plot and scheme against someone who has hurt or angered us, and then God calls – calls us to pray for that one and to forgive. 

Life with God just doesn’t seem to work according to plan (not our plan, anyway), but thank God for that…

        One of my favorite theologians, Eugene Peterson, the man who wrote “The Message,” has a definition of responding to God’s call in our lives, the call to start over, that I find to be so clear and true.  It’s actually a definition of repentance.  He writes:

                Repentance is not an emotion.  It is not feeling sorry for your sins.  It is a decision.  It is deciding that you have been wrong in supposing you could manage your own life and be your own god.

It is deciding you were wrong in thinking you had, or could get, the strength, education or training to make it on your own.  It is deciding you have been told a pack of lies about yourself and your neighbors and your world. 

And it is deciding that God in Jesus Christ is telling you the truth. 

Repentance is the realization that what God wants from you and what you want from God are not going to be achieved by doing the same old things, thinking the same old thoughts. 

Repentance is a decision to follow Jesus Christ and become his pilgrim in the path of peace.  Whenever we say no to one way of life that we have long been use to, there is pain.

 But when that way of life is, in fact, a way of death, a way of war, then the quicker we leave the better.

        That’s what happened to Saul out there on the road to Damascus.  And it can happen to us, too.  It can happen to us, too.

        As we begin our Lenten journey – I invite you to take the time to examine your life and don’t wait for God to knock you off your high horse. 

Don’t wait to be blinded by the light.  Just turn around.  Give up what is keeping you from having a healthy relationship with God.  And embrace what God wants for you…

For I promise – while it might not be the path of least resistance, it is the path that most assuredly gives us life!

        Amen!