Acts 9.1-20                                                                                                          4 May 2008

“THE GOD OF THE SECOND CHANCE”

A college student once told the wonderful writer Madeleine Engle, “Your books seem to indicate that God is forgiving.” L’Engle replied, “What an extraordinary statement.”  The questioner clarified, “What I mean is that your books imply that God is going to forgive everyone.”  L’Engle smiled and elaborated, “I don’t think that God is going to fail with Creation.  I don’t worship a failing God.  Do you want God to fail?”  The man persisted, striking a nerve that throbs in all of us, “But there has to be absolute justice.”  L’Engle paused, “If you should die tonight, is that what you want?  Absolute justice?  Don’t you feel the need for mercy at all?”

It’s like the Damascus road exchange between raging Saul and forgiving Jesus.  But let’s back up a bit first. In Acts ch. 7, Saul holds the garments of those stoning Stephen to death.  In ch. 8, we read “but Saul was ravaging the church, and entering house after house, he dragged off men and women and committed them to prison.”  Saul had become what Frederick Buechner called “the chief hit man of the Pharisee goon squad.” In ch. 9, Saul is the head of the Crush-the-Church movement in Israel.  Saul is judge, jury, jailer, and executioner, making Israel safe for God. This was the pressing agenda that led him out to Damascus.

Along that road the conversation came out of the blue. “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?”  He doesn’t recognize the voice.  “Who are you, Lord?” he asks. This mysterious voice waylaying his journey has plans for his life’s destination. “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.  But get up and enter the city and you will be told what to do.”  Saul is led away by Ananias, unable to eat or drink for three days.  Brash, forceful and utterly convinced about his holy crusade of squashing Christians, Saul become Paul is led away like some hapless, whimpering puppy.

Saul, who was so certain about all things religious; Saul, who was so well-connected with Jerusalem’s shakers and movers, rendered childlike by a blinding light on the road to hammer holiness into lesser, deluded souls.  He has become as a small child into the hands of the ones he had come to arrest and eliminate. Big bad Saul now to be instructed by the ones he had perceived as badly misled! 

The story reminds me of another writer, novelist Anne Tyler, and conversations within her wonderful book, Saint Maybe.  It has since been made into a movie.  Ian Bedloe is the hero of this novel.  At one point feeling a little lost, he wanders into a storefront church, upon whose plate glass front door was emblazoned, “The Church of the Second Chance.”  He went in because he was attracted to the hymns sung by the 15 or so people in attendance.  He sat down, not meaning to say anything.  But when he laughed out loud, upon hearing a woman tell about her son, who died when he jumped from a Vietnam warplane having forgotten his parachute, he tried to explain.  Ian felt like he had done shameful things before, but nothing so shocking as to laugh out loud at hearing a mother’s bereavement.
Anne Tyler plays out the scene, “He wished he could disappear.  He wanted to perform some violent and decisive act, like leaping into space himself.  ‘No prayer is unworthy in the eyes of our Creator,’ someone told him.  Heads swiveled once again.  ‘I used to be…,’ Ian said.  Frog in his throat.  He gave a fake, dry sounding cough. ‘I used to be good,’ he said, ‘Or at least I used to be not bad, at least.  Not evil.  I just assumed I wasn’t evil, but lately I don’t know what has happened.  Everything I touch goes wrong.  I didn’t mean to laugh just now.  I’m sorry, I laughed, Mrs….’ He looked over at the woman. Her face was lowered and she seemed unaware of him.  But the others were watching closely.  He had the sense they were weighing his words; they were taking him seriously.”

Ian felt the need to confess, because of his brother’s death, a possible suicide.  In truth, we cannot mediate mercy unto ourselves. Mercy and grace both require a community.  Ian’s brother had married a young woman with two children from a previous marriage.  Ian often baby-sat for her and had come to suspect that she was being unfaithful to his brother.  And he told his brother as much, even though he wasn’t absolutely certain of it.  His brother drove into a wall.  Not long after, the mother of the two children, grief-stricken, died of a sleeping pill overdose.

After worship at the Church of the Second Chance, Ian lingered to be with the awkward but intense Rev. Emmett.  He asked if God had forgiven him the wrong he had done.  “Goodness, no,” Rev. Emmett responded.  Ian couldn’t believe his ears. To hear that he was not forgiven seemed to contradict everything he understood about Christianity.  “I thought God forgives everything,” he protested.  Rev. Emmett agreed with him.  But he pointed out that God wants more than just saying, “I’m sorry.”  The pastor was striking a note not unlike the questioner Madeleine L’Engle had heard about the need for justice within forgiveness. Had Ian offered concrete reparation for the wrong he had caused?  Ian pondered that.  ‘But what if there isn’t any reparation? What if it’s something nothing will fix?’

Rev. Emmett answered Ian’s dilemma invoking that itchy name Jesus.  “Jesus helps what you can’t undo,” he said, “but only after you have tried to undo it.” When Ian told him he didn’t understand, Rev. Emmett asked about the children left behind.  Who is seeing to them? He asked Ian.  “Seeing to them in exactly what way?” Ian asked. “Why, raising them, I suppose,” he answered.  “Huh?” Ian said.  “But I’m only a freshman!”  Rev. Emmett turned to face him, hugging the stack of hymnals against his concave shirt front.  “I’m away in Pennsylvania most of the time!” Ian protested. “Then maybe you should drop out,” said the reverend.

“Drop out?”

“Right.”

“Drop out of college?”

“Right.”

Ian stared at him.  “This is some kind of test, isn’t it?” he said finally.  Rev. Emmett nodded, smiling.  Ian sagged with relief.  “It’s God’s test,” Rev. Emmet told him. “So…”  “God wants to know how far you will go to undo the harm you’ve done.”  “But he wouldn’t really make me go through with it,” Ian said.  “How else would He know, then?” the reverend countered. “Wait,” Ian said.  “You’re saying God would want me to give up my education.  Change all my parents’ plans for me and give up my education?”  “Yes, if that’s what’s required, “ Rev. Emmett said.  “But that’s crazy. I’d have to be crazy!”  “’Let us love not in word, neither in tongue,’” Rev. Emmett answered, “’but in deed and truth.’  First John 3.18.”  “I can’t take on a bunch of kids! Who do you think I am? I’m 19 years old,” Ian said. What kind of cockeyed religion is this?”  “It’s the religion of atonement and complete forgiveness,” Rev. Emmett said. “It’s the religion of the second chance.” Then he set the hymnals on the counter and turned to offer Ian a beatific smile. Ian thought he’d never seen before anyone so completely at peace with himself.

I won’t spoil the ending.  But I will tell you, to his friends’ dismay and to his fellow students’ incomprehension, and to his parents’ shock, Ian raises the two children.

Thanks for your willingness to stick with me through such a lengthy reading. I appreciate it and it says a lot about you. It’s important because theology alone lacks the power to take us apart and break us down and reveal who we finally are.  Especially theology in the form of 20 minute sermons.  You need story for that, narrative. That’s why Jesus’ spoke in parables like Van Gogh worked in oils.

Until we are taken apart as human beings, our motives revealed and our foibles exposed, there’s pitifully little chance of God putting us properly back together. We are too hunkered down, too resistant and God will not force Godself upon us.

Good writers help us with that, whether its Madaleine L’Engle’s many different genres of writing, Luke writing Acts chapter 9, Anne Tyler writing Saint Maybe, or Moliere writing insightful plays into human nature, like Eventide Arts, The Miser. All of them excel at taking competent, self-sufficient, intelligent, respected people and breaking us down bit-by-bit, until we are revealed as needful children of God.

That is what Jesus was doing for Saul-become-Paul on the road to Damascus.
To become what God intended by making us human as opposed to settling with our stunted ideas of what it means to be human we must let go of old securities and allow the upheaval and chaos of transformation have its way with us. But you already know about that, don’t you? Otherwise, you never would have agreed to the massive dislocation you’ve so good-naturedly endured in this re-building the last 13 months.  It has pulled us together in way I hope we don’t lose track of. Just as this works for a community, so it works individually. God rewards those who let him to take us apart so he can reassemble us. It’s a paradoxical message, this gospel, to move forward, we must first move back.  It’s never easy, pleasant or agreeable.  But it’s the truth.  And that’s why we keep returning to it.

Still, we have to trust God before we will hear such a thing from God or God’s agents—like Reverend Emmett.  And maybe trust begins as we realize that the God who demands absolute justice is also the God of absolute mercy and grace. God cares so much about us, God interrupts us when we do the worst things in the name of holiness, as Saul did.  God interrupts us when we imagine a blithe “I’m sorry” and going our merry old way is all that Jesus was up to on the cross.

We are people of the second chance. We believe in the God of the second chance. Even third and fourth chances.  But we also know if these chances come freely from above, we can’t trade in them cheaply here below. Let us not hold too tightly to who we already are as God transfigures us into who we might become.  Amen.

O God, you bless us with life.  We thank you for the presence of the risen Christ in these Sundays of Eastertide.  No barrier that we erect can withstand Christ’s power to open us and turn us in the right direction.  No doubts that we harbor can change Christ’s willingness to bless and call us.  The Christ who judges us has also opened the door of mercy into our hearts and comes to us in the moment we least expect it and in a voice that speaks ineffably to us.  God, we thank you for how you have changed all of the earth and us with it in Easter that through Jesus’ risen presence, we might have joy.  We recognize there is nothing cheap or easy about this joy, as we remember Jesus’ persecutions and hurts we’ve advanced. 

We pray, O God, that you not leave us to our own devices, content with a stunted idea of what it means to live, what it means to be human, what it means to love. Expand our horizons, despite how sure we are that we’re right already, despite how we resist when you try to take us and shake us loose in our everyday lives. Help us to find blessings in our shakings, even if they leave us dazed and confused.