Life Is What Happens
Acts 9:1-6
Dr. J. Lawrence Cuthill
April 18, 2010
Winter Park Presbyterian Church
John, an avid golfer, came in from the course one Saturday. His wife, Mary, asked him with whom he had played that day. He said, “Oh, no one in particular.” She asked, “Why don’t you play with Bill anymore?” John replied, “Would you like to play golf with someone who throws his clubs, swears all the time, lies about his scores, moves his ball in the rough and won’t stop talking while you’re trying to play a shot?” “Of course not!” said Mary. John said, “Well, neither does Bill.”[1]
Now what does that have to do with our Scripture text? It’s a stretch, but perhaps we could say our golfer and this young Pharisee named Saul are both a bit cantankerous. (Mary) Flannery O’Connor once said of Paul, “I reckon the Lord knew the only way to make a Christian out of that one was to knock him off his horse.” Her point is well taken, but not exactly accurate. Seems that’s what happens with a number of familiar stories from the Scriptures. For instance, it wasn’t an apple that Eve offered to Adam; it wasn’t a whale that swallowed Jonah, and nowhere are we told Paul was on a horse.
What the phrase, “get down off your high horse … or be knocked off,” has come to mean may well have applied to Paul. It means to become humble, to be less haughty. Sometimes people voluntarily dismount, but more often it seems “superior” folk need to be assisted, that is ‘knocked off’.
You will recall Paul was on a tear. Full of righteous zeal and eager to save the faith, he is off to Damascus to cleanse the earth of those fanatic followers of ‘the Way’ (not yet called Christianity). Armed with letters of extradition, his intent was to drag the fools back to Jerusalem to be dealt with by the authorities there. He was unaware of his own fanaticism, and was a picture of intolerance and extreme righteousness gone wrong. He’s a fanatic on a mission.
Finley Peter Dunne says, “A fanatic is a person who does what he thinks the Lord would do, if only He knew the facts of the case.”
Saul had his principles. He wouldn’t stain his own hands with their blood, but he could see that they were properly punished – a very good man in the very worst sense of the word. Convinced. Certain. Doctrinaire and determined. (Somewhere, I heard it said that most of the evil done in the world is by people who are absolutely certain…)
So, off to Damascus on his “high horse” (or camel, which is higher still), Paul went. But the man who left and the man who eventually returned were vastly different, as signified by a change in name. He had what has come to be called a “Damascus Road Experience.” I am put in mind of the words attributed to John Lennon, “Life is what happens when you’re making other plans – when you are on your way somewhere else.”
As alluded to earlier, it’s harder to get some people’s attention than others. For some, it takes a dramatic slap upside the head. For others, it may be far more subtle … noticing recurring themes … coincidences sometimes referred to as “God-cidences”. A word fitly spoken – an engaging story.
It would be a mistake to make Saul’s conversion normative for everyone, a one-size-fits-all mentality. Some of you here got knocked down and it made you look up. Some can’t point to a particular moment where they dramatically stepped across a threshold from non-belief to belief. You just know…
To say everyone’s experience should be the same is to force everyone into the same mold. To be sure, it is the grace of God in Jesus Christ that takes hold of us, seeks us out in manifold ways.
God employs means of reaching people that are commensurate with that individual’s needs. He finds us according to who we are.
Because of what he had done, he was among the most unlikely of saints. He was a monk, but he was also a murderer. His name, in his native Irish tongue, was Culumcille, or “dove of the church.” In Latin, he was known as Columba. He lived in the sixth century A.D. and was largely responsible for bringing Christianity to Scotland. Before that, he lived in Ireland. There he became involved in a dispute with some fellow monks over a handwritten copy of an ancient psalter. A pitched battle ensued, in which many monks and other men died. Columba and his closest associates were banished from Ireland.
Across many waters they came, Columba and his fellow monks. They traveled, most of them, in tiny skin boats called coracles. Some of the coracles were scarcely bigger than over-sized bathtubs.[2]
That brings me to another observation. Often authors and preachers take some liberty with this story. They impute emotions and hidden intentions to Saul. He was a restless man whose zeal was actually fed by a doubt; a hunger … and he was seeking without knowing it. That may well be true, but it’s not evident in the story itself. I hear many say that they are searching for God, and while I wouldn’t be so blunt as to challenge them (many are quite sincere), I find myself thinking “You want to search for God on your own terms. If God could be found by our searching, then it is our efforts that succeed.” In reality, I believe it is more the case that God comes searching for us, but not usually with an “in-your-face” approach. That would negate love, and the role of faith.
You’ve heard the poem “The Hound of Heaven,” by Francis Thompson. Thompson was an opium addict, a vagrant for years until a family took him in and published his poems:
“I fled Him down the nights and down the days; I fled Him down the arches of the years; I fled Him down the labyrinthine ways of my own mind, and in the midst of tears I hid from Him …” But “He followed after with unhurrying chase and unperturbed pace.”
C.S. Lewis grew up very negative about the Christian faith. The Gospels were historical nonsense – appallingly unimaginative and artless, certainly not great literature. Then, as if out of nowhere, in 1931 Lewis wrote, “I have passed on to believe in Christ. It came as a steady unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly deserved not to meet. That which I greatly feared came upon me – I gave in – a most dejected and reluctant convert. It wasn’t intellectual achievement … it was pure gift, grace.”
The great moment actually came as Lewis was riding in the sidecar of a motorcycle on his way to a zoo. Stodgy Lewis bobbing along and yet one of the most articulate Christian spokesmen of the 20th century writes: “When we set out for the zoo, I did not believe that Jesus Christ was the Son of God, and we reached the zoo, I did.” That’s it. He, like Paul, had his detractors, folks who didn’t know what to make of it.
Only God knows the self I’m meant to be. Only God knows the self I
shall, by God, become. Only God can give me a self worth having. And
God does. In those surprising moments when we’re proceeding down our
accustomed ruts, just busy looking after ourselves, and there is, as
if out of nowhere, light, a voice, a summons, and we know we have
been cornered, and we mutter with C.S. Lewis in astonishment, “So,
it was You all along.”
Maybe not that way, but it is possible still. It’s the promise of Easter.
AMEN