There’s a lovely scene in Tracy Chevalier’s book Girl With a Pearl Earring. The story she tells is the fictional back story of the mysterious girl in Jan Vermeer’s famous painting of a girl with a pearl earring. The girl’s name is Griet, and she comes from a Protestant family in Holland. Because her father, who was a ceramic tile-maker, has gone blind in a kiln accident, she has to leave her house and go to work as a maid in the Catholic home of the Delft artist whom we now know as one of the greatest masters of oil on canvas.
Griet is describing one of Vermeer’s paintings to her father when she is home for a visit. The artist has taught her how to see what he does when he paints. She tells her father about the baker’s daughter, who stands by a corner window facing the viewer but looking out into the street. She is wearing a yellow- and-black fitted bodice of silk and velvet, a dark blue skirt, and a white cap that hangs down in two points below her chin. And then she tells her blind father that when you look at the cap long enough, you see that he has not really painted it white, but blue, and violet, and yellow. “But it’s a white cap, you said,” her father replies. Yes, that’s what is so strange. It’s painted many colors, but when you look at it, you think it’s white.[1]
When you come to church Sunday by Sunday, you should hope that the preacher will have looked long enough at the text and found in it the many colors that allow you to see what you were at first blind to. A preacher is partly a docent, don’t you know?! We try to point out things to you that open your eyes to see what you might not have seen without us.
Of course, behind the preacher is the Holy Spirit of God, who opens our eyes to begin with. And our hearts. Opens us up where we were closed. Opens us to see clearly. Opens us up to see our way. Opens our eyes and hearts to see our way … clear.
When we look at Luke’s story in the book of Acts about Saul’s Damascus Road conversion experience, we are likely to see it only as we are conditioned to. If you grew up a Baptist, or like me in a Baptist-like evangelical tradition, you probably see it pretty much one way. And that’s not a bad way—even if all we do is see it in black and white, missing all the colors and shades that make it so much more interesting.
I don’t know about you, but I always saw this story as the very definition of a personal experience of conversion that had to happen to me and to everyone in something like this way if my relationship with God were to be authentic. I remember thinking as a kid growing up in a Christian home that I was supposed to be a good boy who did what Jesus wanted me to do, but somehow I had to take a turn for the worse along the way so that I could be more like Saul and get stopped in my tracks by a flash from heaven and a voice that called out to me to be converted.
I remember testimony night at our little church. Anyone? Testimony night? The people groped for words to make their spiritual experiences fit this pattern. It was always a little dramatic and featured God talking to them in the unmistakable voice of Jesus.
And that’s good to a point. We Baptists do think of ourselves as living today the same story as those we read about in the New Testament. When we read the Bible, we don’t think we’re reading a history book; we think we are reliving in our time the history-making experience of the early church. Somehow the story of Saul’s conversion is our conversion story, too. We all should have a personal experience with our Savior Jesus. We don’t think being a Christian is just going to a church instead of a synagogue or mosque. We don’t think being a Christian is just about being able to say the Apostles’ Creed or follow the teachings of one of the world’s greatest moralists. We have to be changed by a personal encounter with God in a way that makes a difference in the way we live. We think, in other words, we have to be converted like Saul.
Matt Marston, one of our pastoral residents, is preaching in view of a call this morning at a church in Georgia. He actually prepared two sermons that we looked at this week, so I’m not sure which one he preached. (Youth is a wonderful thing. I never do that.) In one of those sermons he talks about feeling that Jesus had called out to him as a young boy and told him he wanted to save him. So Matt made his profession of faith to all the affirmation of his family and church family. Later that week, his mother asked Matt how it had gone that week since his conversion. Matt reflected on his week at school and told his mom that it hadn’t gone too well. He’d had to be saved five more times that week.
Saul’s conversion models a good conversion experience for us, not because we have to have dramatic experiences like his Damascus Road experience, but because if God could save the worst enemy of the church, God can save any of us. The church that Saul was going to Damascus to persecute had to be wondering if Easter had really taken. If Jesus was raised from the dead, how come the church was still under attack? Saul’s conversion was not just a gift to him but also to the church, which needed to see and hear that Christ was indeed alive and at work changing everything for good and for good. If Christ could convert the worst enemy of the church, then it wasn’t that everyone who would be converted had to have the same dramatic conversion story; it was that no matter how far gone you are, Christ can reach you and change you.
If you are still waiting for the sky to light up and a clap of thunder to stop you in your tracks before you hear the voice of Christ, relax. You may hear a still small voice instead. You may be converted more gently than violently. Some people are saved by having the wheel jerked for them just before they go careening off a cliff, and others find they’ve have been falling asleep at the wheel and just drifting off the road onto the soft shoulder before they feel the wheel being turned for them, and they wake to see their way clear. Whether your conversion is grand and dramatic or small and gentle, the important thing is that you know you’ve been losing your way and hadn’t seen it until Christ made himself known to you and allowed you to see your way clear.
Seeing the way and seeing clearly are small hints that Luke gives us to understand this story. Listen again to the way he tells the story. Saul is “still breathing threats and murder” against the people of the Way. This is what they are called, the early Christians—people of the Way. Jesus said he himself was the way, the truth, and the life. That would mean something profound to a Jew that we are apt to miss. The Torah, the Law of God encoded in books of Moses—the first five books of the Old Testament—was part story and part rules for living. The haggadah is the story part. To be the people of God is to know God has chosen you and called you out of Egypt to make God’s name known to the world. But the way you would do that is by keeping the law. The halakah is the Law, the commandments of God that define the manner of life for the people of God. The word literally means The Way. So, when the early Christians are called followers of The Way, they are saying that the Way of the Law is embodied now in the risen and living Jesus Christ. They follow his Way because he is himself the Way.
Saul couldn’t see this as anything but a threat to everything he had known about God. And so he becomes a threat to the followers of this new Way because he can’t see that the new Way is really the old Way now made clear in Jesus. And while he is on his way to Damascus, he is stopped on his way by the one who is the Way.
The first thing that happens is that his eyes are blinded. This one who thought he saw everything so clearly that he could seek to kill those who saw things differently, now can’t see at all. This one who would bind Christians and lead them back to the old Way in Jerusalem to be tried is now unable to find his way without being led. And when he is led, it’s now toward the new Way in Damascus.
Before we can learn anything new, we have to realize we don’t know everything. And what happens to Saul is precisely that. He thinks he knows who’s on what side, and he’s on his way to arrest those on the wrong way. But along the way, he’s arrested by the Way himself.
When Saul hears the Voice, he must be absolutely crushed by the words. Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? Immediately Saul must have known what that meant. He would have thought of another Saul, King Saul, who once pursued God’s anointed one, David. David was hiding behind a rock at one point in the chase when Saul was closing in on him. In the Greek version of the Old Testament, these are the very words David calls out to that Saul. Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? This Saul must have been cut to the quick that he was on the wrong side of what God was doing. God had anointed Jesus as the heir to the throne of David. And now Saul that was opposing Christians who followed the way of Jesus, he was in God’s way.
But notice that there are two conversion stories here. Saul is converted, but so is the church. Ananias also has an encounter with Christ. Saul has a personal experience with Christ that changes him, and Ananias has a personal experience with Christ that changes the church.
Try to imagine Ananias’s situation. Who would be the hardest person for you to welcome into the church as a genuine brother or sister in Christ? Who is your worst enemy? Who do you think is beyond being changed by Christ?
Maybe it’s someone who hurt you. An ex-husband, maybe? Now he says he’s seen his way clear to a new life in Christ. Will you embrace him as a brother in Christ, even if not as a husband? Maybe your daughter who’s worn you down with her addiction and manipulated you time and time again? She says she’s clean now, and she says it’s because she’s seen her way clear to Christ and wants to follow his way alongside you. Can you welcome her now? If you are a political progressive, can you welcome some archconservative as your brother or sister? If you are conservative, can you imagine embracing a raving liberal whom you have seen as an enemy of the Way?
If this story is really to be our story, it will have to be more than a story of personal conversion; it will have to be conversions that happen in and to the church. Sometimes we think we see the way clearly, and we ourselves need to be blinded before we can see the way of Jesus again.
Notice that Saul had letters from the authorities in Jerusalem to exclude those who differed from the way they saw as the way of God. The church today must not become persecutors of those who claim an experience with Christ. We have to use our authority to include rather than exclude. We have to open our eyes and our hearts to receive those whom Christ is calling. Only then will they see their way clear to follow the way of Jesus. Only then will we see our own way clear.
