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January 18, 2009
First Friends Meeting
Acts 9:1-9
‘Saul/Paul’
Doug Gwyn
We’re continuing our look at the personalities and groups that
made up the earliest Church. None stands larger than Saul of
Tarsus, who became Paul the apostle. He was extremely
controversial in his own day. He continues to be controversial
today. Even Christians either love or loathe Paul, defend him or
fear him. When you read his letters in the New Testament, you
encounter a very strong personality.
Saul of Tarsus was a Hellenist. He had come to Jerusalem from
Eastern Turkey, Although he was a tent-maker by trade, he knew
some Greek philosophy. But he moved to Jerusalem to study with
the leading rabbis there. He became a purist, an zealous defender
of the laws of Moses. Saul was so extreme he probably raised
eyebrows among even the most orthodox. As the Jesus movement
began to spread among Jews in Jerusalem, Damascus and Antioch, it
was not the chief priests of the Temple but Saul of Tarsus leading the
way to stamp it out. What began as a spontaneous lynching of
Stephen became systematic persecution of Christians under Saul.
Later, as a Christian, the apostle Paul wrote many criticisms of the
laws of Moses. As Gentile Christians, we have to be careful how
we read these criticisms. When we read Paul, it sounds like the
law is nothing but torment, because you can never fulfill it
perfectly. But it’s not a torment to most Jews. It
can be the source of very joyful living. I think we can safely
say that the law became a torment for Saul. Besides tormenting
himself, he began to torment others he thought were doing worse.
And clearly, Saul looked at the gospel as a dangerous corruption of the
Jewish faith, a contagion to be stopped at all costs.
So Saul got some letters from the high priest in Jerusalem allowing him
to go to Damascus and clean out the Christian infection there.
That’s where the passage Tim has just read begins. As Saul
approached Damascus he was struck down by a blinding light. And
he heard a voice saying, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute
me?” “I am Jesus, whom you are
persecuting.” Notice that Jesus doesn’t say,
you’re persecuting my followers, or you’re persecuting my
message. You’re persecuting me. This is not a Jesus
who is safely off in heaven nursing his wounds. This Jesus is
embodied in the men and women who believe and follow him. Saul is
persecuting Jesus as he persecutes them.
Now, Saul’s conversion is such a pivot-point of the Christian
story, we get it three times in the Book of Acts. We get
Luke’s original telling of it here. Then we hear Paul
recount the story twice, in Chapter 22, when he’s arrested years
later in Jerusalem, and in Chapter 26, when he’s on trial at
Caesarea. We hear some further details in these two later
accounts. In the last one, Paul says that there on the road to
Damascus, Jesus said “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting
me? It hurts you to kick against the goads.” This
version suggests that Saul is not only persecuting Jesus in the
Christians he’s arresting – he’s persecuting Jesus
within himself. His hatred of his Christian Jewish brethren is a
projection of something that’s bothering him, goading him on the
inside. And he’s tormenting himself as he kicks against it,
as he resists it within and persecutes it without.
This is a key insight. All his striving to be a great scholar of
the law. All his striving to be perfect in his observance.
It’s been a vain, fruitless, and finally a destructive
obsession. He has tried to conquer himself and other people
around him, and has no peace. He finally has to be knocked the
ground, blinded by the light before he can turn around, see the
truth. Righteousness is not something we can achieve –
that’s self-righteousness. Righteousness is something we
surrender to. It is something we learn to let work through
us. We learn to yield to goodness toward others, not to wield it
as a club against others. Until we learn that, we know nothing
but torment.
That goodness within is what in Quaker tradition we call Christ within,
the light in each person, or that of God in every one. Christ is
the new and greatly improved version of each one of us. And
it’s right here in us all along. But we either fight it or
ignore it. The young George Fox struggled and suffered until he
heard a voice say “there is one, even Christ Jesus, that can
speak to thy condition.” He had listened to every preacher
and mystical teacher he could find, but this voice came from
within. The light is something we look right past. We
ignore it, repress it in favor of things that seem better, perhaps even
more spiritual. The early Quaker Isaac Penington was a brilliant
intellectual and mystic. But he had no inner peace. He was
intrigued by these Quaker yokels from the North who visited his home in
London. He didn’t really respect them, because he could
easily out-debate them. Still, he saw the inner peace and
spiritual power they had, which he so painfully lacked. When he
finally heard George Fox preach, he finally began to get it. He
writes that when he began to tune into the light, seed of God within
himself, he realized it had been there all along. But as he put
it, it seemed so “weak and contemptible” So he kept
looking right past it. He kept looking for something more
mystically sublime, more intellectually elegant.
We ourselves may be plagued by self-righteous perfectionism like Saul,
or intrigued by intellectualism like Isaac Penington, or plain selfish
pleasure-seeking and ambition. We don’t find rest, we
don’t find fulfillment until we surrender to that quiet, humble
light that shines in each of us. It’s a very inward,
personal discovery – unique to who you are. But it’s
not just that. It works out through the way we live our
lives. For Saul, it was a profound shift, from making other
people suffer for the gospel, to suffering all kinds of persecution
himself to spread the gospel. But Saul/Paul was an extreme
personality. For most of us, it’s less extreme. For
some, the breakthrough comes through parenting. For others
through their vocation in the world. For others, through
volunteer service to others, work for peace and justice. These
things make our conversion real. But the change itself begins at
the deepest place in us. Something we have repressed must live in
us and lead us.
Early Quakers were persecuted and imprisoned by the thousands.
More than 450 of them died in prisons or from mob attacks. George
Fox wrote a poignant letter to the government, pleading for the release
of his Friends. But he shrugged, until you release “the
hidden man of the heart,” you won’t release my
Friends. That release is what changed Saul that day on the
Damascus Road. And what changed Saul to Paul changed the destiny
of the Church in the years to come.
Among our modern Quaker saints, many of us treasure the writings of
Thomas Kelly. Kelly is another good example. The beautiful
spirit we know from A Testament of Devotion is only the Thomas Kelly of
the last 3-4 years of his short life. He was a good person before
that. But he was academically driven. Finally, he completed
an excellent PhD dissertation in philosophy at Harvard and was ready
for his oral defense. But that academic pinnacle turned out to be
his Damascus road. He froze up, he blanked, he couldn’t go
through with it that day. He tried to reschedule but wisely, his
dissertation committee refused. It sent him into a period of deep
darkness. But out of that darkness came the brilliant light of
those final essays of his life. There’s real intellectual
brilliance in A Testament of Devotion. But it’s below the
surface, almost entirely hidden, in service to his witness to Christ.
The experience of darkness helps us finally see the light. When
Saul finally saw the light there on the Damascus Road, it blinded him
to everything he once knew as light. Paul had trouble with his
physical sight for the rest of his life. But his spiritual sight
got better from that day on. And Paul never became exactly a
mellow guy. He continued to generate a lot of conflict around
himself. He provoked some people to violence against him, but he
never again used violence against others.
Jesus too had provoked some people to violence against him. He
accepted it in order that they might see themselves more clearly and
change. It finally changed Saul. And in turn, Paul had the
same effect on others. We see the same effect carrying on through
Christian history. Martin Luther King Jr. learned the same lesson
from Jesus and Paul. Fifty years ago, America saw white people
persecuting and physically attacking King and other black civil rights
activists. We began to see ourselves more clearly, and we began
to change.
This gospel is a powerful thing. It can unlock the power of God
in each one of us. It can free us from the worst persecutor
– ourselves.
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