“Meeting God again…for the first time” (St. Luke’s: Friday, April 20th, 2018; Acts 9.1-20; Ps. 117; St. John 6.52-59)

Breakfast routine.  I don’t know what you had for breakfast this morning, but I grew up eating, among other breakfast cereals, Kellogg’s Corn Flakes.  In 1990, Kellogg’s ran a TV commercial about their Corn Flakes cereal, with the slogan “Taste them again for the first time”.  This commercial was an attempt, on Kellogg’s part, to make this seemingly bland and ordinary cereal seem exciting again.  We’ve all experienced this phenomenon in some area of our lives – whether it be our car, our job, our marriage, our vacation, whatever it may be.  We’ve all experienced the rush and enthusiasm when something is new… only to discover that as time goes by, the initial excitement wears off, and what had seemed so extraordinary and life-giving now seems rather hum-drum and just plain… ordinary.

Zealous Israelite.  Something similar happens to Saul of Tarsus in today’s first reading… with one important exception.  Saul was anything but bored with his faith as a member of God’s people, the people who had descended from Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.  Indeed, a couple of decades later, as he looks back upon what he calls “his former life”, Paul tells the Galatian Christians that he had been “extremely zealous” for his Jewish faith (cf. Gal. 1.13-14).  We may have had the opportunity to come across Christians who are “zealous” for their faith.  Maybe we’ve seen people preaching on the street corners downtown or holding signs with Bible verses printed on them or even people dancing in metro cars, all the while holding a statue of the Virgin Mary (I’ve seen it).  Surely, we think to ourselves, these people are taking things too far.  Well, allow me to suggest to you this morning that these people are nothing compared to Saul of Tarsus.  Of course, in Saul’s time – as in ours – there were many members of God’s people who were perfectly happy with saying their prayers at home and going to the place of public worship on the weekend.  Not every first-century Jew was bursting with determination to protect the integrity of Judaism in the hope of hastening the day when Yahweh would finally intervene to rescue his people and transform the world.  However, if I can put it like this, if one was like Saul of Tarsus – full of pious passion – then Judaism was the religion for you.

Zealous God.  The Scriptures of Israel (“Old Testament”) contain the story of a God who is anything but calm, cool and collected.  The biblical God – Yahweh – is a God on the move; he’s got places to go, people to see, things to do.  As Blaise Pascal put it in the 17^th century,

“Fire. God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and the scholars”.

The biblical God is not an idea; he is a person, active in the affairs of his people and his world.  Yahweh is the Creator.  Next time you’re in – for example – Centennial Park, look around – the God who thought up this beautiful creation is surely not a dull divinity.  Into the garden that he had created, so the book of Genesis tells us, Yahweh placed human creatures with free will.  Talk about setting the world up for unpredictability!  Who knew what these humans were going to do?  They could cooperate with the Creator and enable the creation to flourish, or they could go their own way, serve their own purposes and introduce chaos into God’s garden.  Either way, the Creator would pursue his purposes for his world.  This was the faith of ancient Israel – that they were the people of the Creator, tasked with being the answer to the problem of evil.  Basically, the Jewish Scriptures teach that the fate of the entire world depends on the nation of Israel being faithful to the covenant that Yahweh had established with her.  Ancient Judaism was concerned with nothing less than the transformation of the world into the garden of abundant life the Creator had always intended it to be.  This was not a religion that could be contained within the confines of the synagogue and the home.  This was a religion that was going somewhere.  This was a religion for the enthusiastic and the energetic.  And as far as energy and enthusiasm went, Saul of Tarsus was the poster-boy.  It’s not for nothing that the risen Jesus tells Ananias that Saul is his “chosen instrument to carry his name before the pagans, before kings and before the people of Israel”.  Through the Passion and Resurrection of Jesus, the Creator was doing a new thing within his world.  Yahweh needed someone as fanatical as Saul of Tarsus.  The risen Jesus needed someone who would not back down from a fight – though Jesus makes it very clear to Ananias just how Saul is going to “fight” – “I will show him what he will have to suffer for my name”.

Conversion?  This passage from the book of the Acts of the Apostles is often referred to as “the conversion of St. Paul”.  However, it’s important to realize that when Saul was baptized and became a follower of Jesus, he did not change religions.  He had simply come to believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the Messiah of Israel.  Throughout the book of Acts, this is the point of controversy – is Jesus the promised Messiah or is he a false prophet who got what he deserved?  The first followers of Jesus were all Jewish, they read the Jewish Bible, and they worshipped in synagogues and in the Jerusalem Temple (even after Jesus’ death and resurrection).  The apostle Paul never stopped being a Jew; once he became an apostle, he was simply a Jew who believed that the promised Messiah had come and had saved Israel and that the Messiah’s name was Jesus of Nazareth.  In the decades following the resurrection of Jesus, the tension was high between those Jews, like Saul, who held to the traditional understanding of their faith and those Jews who believed that Jesus of Nazareth was the long-awaited Messiah – both groups were reading the same Bible, they were both claiming to be the true people of God.  This is why we see so much conflict in the book of Acts.  If Jesus is the Messiah, then the Scriptures have been fulfilled and it’s time to summon all nations to allegiance to the risen Lord.  However, if Jesus was a demon-possessed, deluded fanatic, then this new cult that his followers have formed must be crushed.  Those were the options.  Jesus’ death on the cross seemed to favour the second option.  This was the conclusion of the two Emmaus disciples – “we had hoped that he was the one who would redeem Israel, but… obviously, we were wrong, he was wrong…” (cf. Lk. 24.13-35).  However, as the risen Jesus explains to the disciples on the Emmaus Road, the death and resurrection of the Messiah was precisely how Yahweh had planned to fulfill the Scriptures!  Once one’s eyes “were opened” to this basic fact, the Law, the Prophets and the Psalms came alive in new and surprising ways!  God had fulfilled his promises in a completely unexpected way, just as he had always said he would…

Vocation.  This “eye-opening experience” is what happened to Saul on the Damascus Road – he came face to face with the God he thought he had always known, and God turned out to have a human face.  In a moment, Saul was shown that the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob had fulfilled his promises to his people Israel through – and as – Jesus of Nazareth, crucified and risen.  When Saul met the risen Jesus on the road, he met God again, for the first time.  The overall plan remained unchanged – the Creator still intended to transform his broken world; only now his people would be expanded to include all nations and the way of salvation for the world would be the way of the cross and resurrection.  Paul, and all Christians since his time, was called to embody the love of the Creator in the same way that Jesus had embodied it – by suffering now in the hope of future glory.  This is the revolutionary call of our risen Lord – to fearlessly spread the good news that he is alive and that the Creator’s love is stronger than death.  Amen.