At Journey's Start

This is the sermon preached by Rev. Don Van Antwerpen to the congregation of Unfinished Community on Sunday, May 4, 2025, drawing from Acts 9:1-18

Let’s be honest; the story we just heard - Saul’s conversion on the Damascus road - this is really the only story from the New Testament outside of the Gospels that any of us remember, right? 

And that shouldn’t be all that surprising to realize, because there are only a bare handful of stories that really have all that gospel energy and excitement; maybe Pentecost, with the tongues of fire and Google translate being invented a few thousand years early and all that, but that’s really it, because the truth is that most of the rest of the New Testament is just…so…BORING. 

It’s true!

Once we clear the gospels, and get into the book of Acts, the fist thing that happens is a convening of the leadership team of the first church to hold an orderly election to fill a vacant position and - other than Pentecost that is - it really sets the standard for what the rest of the New Testament is; letters and lectures. 

So when we get stories like that, stories that have these big, dramatic, transformative moments, moments where God steps out of the clouds like a dime-store Zeus and just changes everything, radically and immediately, we absolutely love them. And chief among them is this story of Saul of Tarsus, dedicated Pharisee of the Shammai school, member of the ruling elite and fanatic, dedicated to pursuing the “followers of the Way” (which is what Christians were originally called), and dragging them to Jerusalem in chains for judgement, torture, and perhaps even execution. 

And this brutal persecutor, this impossibly cruel man who delighted in chasing down people he saw as heretics, this absolute fundamentalist and all-around metal dude, has this life-changing experience where he gets blinded, then healed by some random dude at the behest of God, and then goes on to live a good and pious life as a representative of God’s patient and careful love, free of his former extremist as a brand-new convert to the open, affirming, and accepting team Jesus. 

But…that’s not what happened here. 

First of all, though we rarely ever talk about him, Ananias was not just “some guy.” This was a Christian, one of the original Christians at that. In the Catholic tradition, he is understood to be the first Bishop of Damascus, and after he was killed his remains were supposedly taken to Rome and interred in the Basilica of St. Paul. 

So…big name. 

And as one of the early, big names among the “followers of the Way,” Ananias absolutely knew who Saul of Tarsus was. Which is why, despite responding so quickly and openly when the Lord came to him in a vision, despite knowing that the Almighty had come to him personally with instructions, instructions he knew were based in the infallible, impossible goodness of God…

…his immediate reaction to to being asked to help Saul was, “Are you kidding me, God? THIS guy?”

So Ananias overcomes his fear, and his concerns, overcomes doubts so strong that they inspired him to doubt the Almighty directly to the divine face, heads to Damascus and sits with Saul of Tarsus, Saul the Persecutor, Saul the Shammai Pharisee, Saul the Evil; Saul the binder and torturer of Christ’s followers. 

He sits with him. Talks with him. And, at the behest of God, heals him.

At which point Saul pops right up, changes his name, and gets on with a life of piety, patience, and dedicated service to the Lord, right?

Well…not so much.

You see, it’s so easy, so tempting to think that change happens immediately. It’s tempting to think that who we were ceases to exist the minute we make a change, the moment we determine in our hearts that things are going to be different. It’s tempting to think that God steps into our lives and with a snap of the divine fingers, everything changes - with no work needing to be done on our part - and we never have to worry about the things of the past ever again.

It’s tempting, isn't it. 

But it just doesn’t work like that. 

You see Saul here - and I say Saul because you might’ve noticed that this famous name change doesn’t actually happen here - doesn't magically become a new person overnight. His conversion happens here at the beginning of chapter 9, but we don’t see him pop up again until Chapter 13, where we find him testing out his new name. And right away, the first thing we see from is him turning to some magician, some streetcorner preacher hawking some other religion down in Paphos, and saying, “You son of the devil, you enemy of all righteousness, full of all deceit and villainy, will you not stop making crooked the straight paths of the Lord?”

In fact, the only real reason we know about Paul at all is because he decided that the apostles running the church in Jerusalem were totally full of it, refused to participate in the church they were building, and took off into Greece, Italy, and Africa so he could start founding brand-new churches of his very own. That’s where we get all the letters which make up the majority of the New Testament; they’re there because Paul skipped out on the early church entirely to do his own thing, which meant that he wasn’t around when the Romans came calling and exterminated everyone else. 

Lucky him, but let’s be honest…that doesn’t exactly sound reasonable, measured, patient, and compassionate, does it? Doesn’t really sound like someone who’s been knocked flat on his ancient middle-eastern backside by a direct encounter with the Almighty and miraculously turned into a totally different person, does it?

Kinda sounds like he switched from being an extremist for the persecutors of Christians into being an extremist for Jesus, doesn’t it?

And this is Paul’s struggle throughout the entire rest of the New Testament. In nearly all of his teachings, we see him putting great effort towards being kind, patient, and compassionate, while constantly being yanked backwards by this past version of himself that we all thought had been left behind in Damascus alongside those suspiciously scaly eye-droppings. 

Because the truth is…he’s still the same guy. Only the mission has changed. 

We want to believe that Saul could be changed into Paul with a snap of the divine finger and literally no work or effort on his part because we want to experience change without actually having to do the work ourselves. We want God to step down into our world, snap the divine fingers, and have poverty, pollution, bigotry, hatred, death, and destruction all vanish; the wages of sin falling away from us like scales as we open our eyes to a new world. 

It’s quick. Neat. Simple and clean. 

But it’s just not how reality works.

It’s not how things worked for Saul, who would take four chapters just to pull off a name change, and the rest of his life trying - largely unsuccessfully - to figure out how not to be an extremist. It’s not how things worked for Ananias, who didn’t have Saul delivered straight to his doorstep so he could wave his inexplicably magic hands and be done with it, but who had to go to Straight street, figure out where this guy Judas lived, play a game of “spot the blinded Pharisee,” and then perform a miraculous healing on a guy who he knew would tie him up and drag him back to Jerusalem to be executed if he were able to actually see him standing there in the first place. 

And it’s not how things work for us either. 

God’s calling for us isn’t to take the easy way out by declaring a miracle and shucking responsibility for the people we used to be. God’s calling isn’t for us to turn the page and start a whole new story. God’s calling isn’t for us to end the journey of our broken, imperfect, former lives and start whole new ones today, tomorrow, or any other day. 

God’s power isn’t made perfect in the erasure of who we were. It’s made perfect in the embracing of who we are trying to be.

Every day. 

We are going to make mistakes. We are going to fall backwards into the messed up people we used to be. No matter how hard we try to be patient, kind, and understanding, we’re all going to have moments where we find ourselves angrily screaming at some street magician, calling them the son of the devil, while half the town watches us with a mix of bewildered confusion and secondhand embarrassment. 

And that’s ok.

God doesn’t demand perfection from us. God makes perfection come into being through our effort. God takes our imperfect, broken, messed up, confusing offerings and turns them into something beautiful. 

Paul, who once was Saul, was a walking disaster of a man. He didn’t understand how people worked, got in arguments constantly, ignored any of the accountability and authority of the church founded by the very Jesus he claimed to serve, said ridiculously wrong things, did ridiculously wrong things, and was never more than a few minutes away from embarrassing himself dramatically and publicly by jumping down the throat of anyone who even looked like they might be a heretic.

And he’s the single reason why all of us know who Jesus is. 

Every one of us.

All those churches he founded? In between screaming at heretics and general foolish behavior, he was telling them about the Gospel of Jesus. And when he came back to Damascus, he brought with him their letters, their stories of who Jesus is, and how God was working in their communities, and in turn he circulated to them the first written accounts of the life and teachings of Jesus Christ, which were first set to paper in the city of Damascus, by academics in the community that Ananias so faithfully served. 

Those stories circulated because of him, and his stupid mission of his that flew in the face of the accountability and leadership of Christ’s church in Jerusalem. Those stories were told beyond the borders of Israel because he told them, screamed them at anyone who would listen. 

And when revolution happened, and the Romans descended, and the original church was wiped out, all that was left was the legacy of one man constantly failing to get the better of the demons of his past, made perfect by a God who didn’t care that he never mastered himself, didn’t care that he never became some shiny, happy, utterly reinvented, totally new person, and didn’t care that in his heart he was still the same guy he always had been.

Not Saul the Persecutor. Not Saul the Shammai Pharisee, Saul the Evil; Saul the binder and torturer of Christ’s followers.

Just Saul.

Saul of Tarses. A little boy who grew up in the shadow of the temple, and always wanted to love and serve the Lord. 

That’s who God saw. That’s who God honored. That’s who God loved.

And that’s who God sees, every time God looks at you.

Not the pile of mistakes, not the constant overcorrection, not the never-ending struggle to be this perfect image of what you think a good, loving, and righteous person ought to be, not the failures and the missteps, not the scars, the wounds, the hurt or the pain.

Just you, at journey’s start, with no idea what fresh struggles will come today but just ready to try your best in the hope that someway, somehow, God will take your imperfect offerings today, your flawed attempts to be who you think you are meant to be, and turn them into something beautiful. 

So be you. Be imperfect. Embrace your mistakes and lean into this fresh new day, this fresh new week, this fresh new month, and know that no matter how you think things go, no matter how things do go, God loves you. God cares about you. 

The grass withers, the flowers fade, embarrassment disappears like fog, and our mistakes vanish like an analogy I’m far too tired to think of right now, but God’s love for us….that stands forever.