“CONFRONTED BY THE RISEN LORD”

Rev. James Singleton

4/18/10
ACTS 9:1-20

A number of years ago a woman here in Ohio had the unusual experience of having her husband show up several years after he had been declared dead. The husband’s car had been found on the shore of Lake Erie with a suicide note taped to the steering wheel. He was presumed drowned, although his body was not found.

After a year, he was declared dead. The woman remarried and had begun putting her life back together when, one day, the first husband showed up on her doorstep. It turns out that he had only faked the suicide and had run off to another state. The woman, confronted with someone she thought was dead was very distraught and was recorded to have commented: “I wish he hadn’t shown up.”

That’s probably very similar to the way both Saul and Ananias felt at first when they were going about their lives as usual, traveling down the same old road they had always traveled, when suddenly they were confronted by a man who was supposed to be dead but who has just unexpectedly returned and is now confronting them.

Today’s passage reminds us that Easter is the celebration of the Risen Lord who is now loose in the world and who confronts us with the way we are living because there are things that must change.

For Saul, who would become known as the Apostle Paul, Jesus was supposed to have been dead. He had been crucified and buried and Saul had taken it upon himself to round-up and punish those poor misguided and heretical souls who still claimed that this dead man was God.

Earlier in the Book of Acts we read about how happy he was that a Christian named Stephen was stoned to death. Saul had a reputation for dragging Christian men and women out of their homes and throwing them in prison. He was nothing short of a bully.

It was while he was traveling this road of persecution, breathing threats and murder against the disciples of Jesus, that Saul found himself knocked off his horse, blinded by light, and interrogated by a voice that asked him, “Why are you persecuting me?”

Not knowing exactly who “me” was he was supposedly persecuting, Saul asks. It was then that he learned that the person whom he had just crashed into, or rather, who had just crashed into him, was none other than the person who was suppose to be dead—Jesus. And from that moment of confrontation with this living Lord Jesus, Saul’s entire life would no longer be the same.

The first thing I want you to notice is that Jesus confronts Saul’s bullying and the abusive ways he has been treating people. The risen Lord goes so far as to identify himself with the persecuted and tells Saul that as he does it to the least of these, he does it to Jesus. That is a lesson we can never forget.

It seems like every couple of years there is some horrible school tragedy that gets the nation’s attention. The latest tragedy happened this past January in South Hadley, Massachusetts to a fifteen year old Irish immigrant girl named Phoebe Prince. Phoebe was the victim of bullying.

This high school freshman was a target of an orchestrated series of vicious attacks that included verbal assaults, physical confrontations, cyber attacks on Facebook, and constant text threats sent to her phone. She could not escape the persecution. So on January 14 she went home and hung herself.

What happened in South Hadley is not an anomaly. It is happening in schools all over the country. And it’s not just the fault of kids gone wild. It is a pattern of the bully mindset that seems to be taking over in this country.

We watch U.S. Senators call each other names and we listen to talk show radio pundits actually call for threats and hint at violence against members of the government who disagree with them. We watch the real lives of housewives in New York or California on television where perverse, mean spirited, cruel actions simply result in higher ratings.

Today we are told that we are confronted with the living Lord Jesus whenever we threaten people in an abusive manner. What we do to another, we do to Jesus. What we say to another we say to Jesus. Whenever men try to bully their wives, Jesus is crying out, “Why do you persecute me?” Whenever parents intimidate and belittle their children, Jesus cries out, “Why do you persecute me?” Whenever we send a rude and hurtful email to another, Jesus cries out, “Why do you persecute me?”

Sooner or later the Risen Lord will confront our bullying ways and open our eyes to the horror of what we are doing and we will be forced to make a painful decision to either continue along our bullying way, which is to fight against God, or see the light and change our ways.

There are other ways the living Lord confronts us. We are confronted when we come to see that our lying, cheating, and deception are destroying the ones who love us and unless we change we will lose everything.

We are confronted with the living Lord Jesus when we come to realize that our values have been all out of whack and what we have been living for and knocking ourselves out for is no longer good enough. There must be more to life than just the things and accolades and pleasures we have been chasing.

The Lord is risen and he comes to confront that within us that acts as though he is still dead. He comes to confront us and remind us that we belong to him and our life and lifestyle must reflect that truth. 

To receive the new life of Easter promise, we have to let go of the old life. Conversion happens only when we recognize it is the risen Lord Jesus who confronts our misguided and abusive ways and we allow ourselves to be transformed by his Holy Spirit. If Saul could become Paul, what can we yet become?

Then, there’s Ananias. Ananias believed that he could live with an unforgiving heart. Ananias did not see a connection between the Resurrection of Jesus and the need to reach out to those who had hurt him.

Ananias did not like Saul. Because Saul had hurt his friends in the past, Ananias wanted nothing to do with Saul. If only Jesus had remained in the tomb, Ananias could wash his hands of Saul forever.

But Ananias was told by the risen Lord to go where he did not want to go and do what he did not want to do and bless someone he did not want to bless. On his way to Saul’s room on Straight Street, Ananias probably was muttering under his breath that he wished Jesus had never come back to life to stand on his doorstep.

And yet, when he encountered Saul, reconciliation took place he never imagined possible. These one time enemies became brothers and life would never be the same for either of them again.

It is a given in this world that there are people we do not like because their actions have caused us pain in one form or another. And it is a given in this life that there will be those whom we love and who will do things which we will not approve and their actions will strain and stretch our love to the breaking point.

If Jesus was not raised from the dead, we would have an easy choice. In fact, there would be no choice. We need not bother with those who hurt us. We can live with broken relationships. We can be through with them forever. But Jesus is raised from the dead and that changes everything.

Eugene Peterson, the author of the contemporary paraphrase of the Bible entitled The Message, wrote that he never got emotionally involved in the story of Paul’s conversion. But that attitude gradually changed for Peterson when he realized that for the first century Christians like Ananias, “Paul was the man from whom you expected the worst—and experienced it.”

But here is the catch, “This man from whom Christians expected the worst, for good reason, was the man of whom God said: ‘He is a chosen instrument of mine.’”

Peterson goes on: “It is precisely at this point that I have become personally involved in this story. It is no longer, for me, a story about a conversion that happened to someone else a long time ago, or a model of how good conversions take place.

“It is, rather, a revelation of what God does to the man that I think is beyond his reach. It is the word of God that raises my expectations about the person from whom I expect nothing but the worst.”

If God did not give up on Saul, then who are we to give up on another? If the one who forgave his crucifiers is alive; if the one who taught us to forgive as we are forgiven is alive; if the one who called Saul his “brother” is alive—then we, like Ananias, are confronted with the hard decision of either reaching out to someone we don’t want to reach out to or living as though Jesus is dead.

 We are not always such a good judge of who God has given up on or who is a hopeless case. Neither are we such a good judge of what relationships are worth throwing away. The Risen Lord confronts our judgmental attitudes and demands from us humility and courage. And if we follow him, we just might find the miracle of reconciliation.

The Easter Season reminds us that the Lord is risen and comes to stand in our way when we are headed in wrong directions to remind us that we are his and that we need to change the way we act and treat other people.

There may be times when we wish Jesus hadn’t shown up on our doorstep because what he asks is hard. And yet, ask Saul and Ananias if the pain of change was worth the joy of new life.

Ananias found a brother he never knew he had; Saul found a way of life he never believed he could have. And it was all because they were confronted by the risen Lord, accepted that confrontation and changed as a result.

The question that remains is this:

Where is the risen Lord confronting you?

AMEN.