Poolesville Presbyterian Church
04.14.13; Rev David Williams
Scripture Lesson: Acts 9:1-20
When I was a lad, I was a small lad. In eighth grade, I was spindly and asthmatic and pale, and got most of my exercise from reading and daydreaming. Hey, turning pages burns calories. Three calories an hour, sure, but you’ve got to start somewhere.
Going into eighth grade, I was just about five foot one, and weighed 95 pounds if I was carrying a 20 pound bag of potatoes in my backpack. That meant, unsurprisingly enough, that I was potential bully-fodder. Mostly, I got around this by being almost entirely invisible. When you were as skinny as I was, that was easy...just stand sideways, and the light just flows around you. I had so little mass, I was like an anti-black-hole. When other boys can...and do...pick you up with one hand, it’s a little hard to impress the ladies.
I do not miss middle school.
Bullying has been around forever, but there’s always this hope we might one day figure out that it’s not something worth doing.
That had been the hope back at the dawn of the internet era. Remember that? It was going to make us considerably more connected. It would transform us, this sudden and explosive ability to know whatever we wanted to know, whenever we wanted to know it. There were no limits, and we’d electronically teach the world to sing in perfect harmony, as we all got to really know one another as fellow human beings.
Back in 1996, at the dawn of the ‘net era, there was an article in Wired Magazine by M.I.T. sociologist Sherry Turkle. Turkle was studying the remarkable new word of internet interaction. It was going to set us free, she argued, to express ourselves in new and exciting ways. We could be any person we wanted. We could cycle through all of the aspects of ourselves, freed from the limitations of our social world, able to fully be ourselves no matter what. It would be social network heaven, as we all sat with our laptops pointed to MySpace and learned to truly appreciate one another and our differences, singing cybernetic kumbaya to one another through the ether.
Where it ended up was rather different. Late last year, a decade and a half after her initial research, Turkle published a book. It was called: “Alone Together.” For all of her hopefulness at the dawn of the internet age, Turkle has now experienced the reality of our ‘net life together. What she argues is that in our connection we’ve become not more but less self-aware. Instead of facilitating real communication, it makes it easier for us to lose ourselves in communications that are more frequent but less substantial. And instead of finding our way to a more gracious self, we’ve become something rather different. Not more human, but somehow less.
What have we become?
In one difficult example from this last week, there came the news of the death of the son of megachurch pastor Rick Warren, Warren of Purpose Filled Life fame. He’d struggled his whole life long with depression and mental illness, and having purchased a handgun from an unlicensed online seller, he took his life.
What was more challenging, following this death, was the outpouring of online vitriol against Warren and his family. There are few things more terrible than the loss of a child, and you would think the one basic and fundamentally human response would be sympathy. And yet, with the polarization that tends to be the defining characteristic of net culture, online forums soon filled with insults from both left and right. Warren was criticized for his stance on gays and lesbians. He was told that his son was in hell because Warren was insufficiently rigorous in his theology. From that peculiar certainty that arises from being anonymous and able to mask your identity behind a veil, there are human beings who feel empowered to lay into someone they disagree with, particularly as that person struggles to cope with a tremendous personal tragedy.
It’s part of that strange compulsion human beings often feel, a desire to destroy another, particularly a vulnerable other who has opposed us, when we encounter them in a time of weakness.
That tendency was being actively defied today in the portions read from the Acts of the Apostles. We have today a tale from the heart of a faith that tells us not to destroy our enemies, or to crush them when they are vulnerable.
Here we are, just a couple weeks out from Easter, and the story we’re hearing is from the second part of Luke’s Gospel. We’re past the point of the life of Jesus, and now deep into the narrative of the early church. One of the main protagonists of that story is just about to step into the limelight: Saul of Tarsus.
Saul, or Paul, as he would soon be called, is perhaps the single most influential figure in Christian history after Jesus. Without his passion, gifts, and remarkable skill in teaching and translating the message of the Gospel to the Greco-Roman world, Christianity would very likely have never moved beyond being just another sputtering offshoot of a bizarre monotheistic tradition in the Ancient Near East.
In fact, when Saul enters the story, Christianity isn’t even called Christianity most of the time. In the Book of Acts, which recounts the early expansion of Jesus-folk in exhaustive detail, they don’t tend to be called “Christian.” That term is used only twice, in Acts 11:26 and Acts 26:28. Luke’s preferred term, which likely reflects a preference in the early church, is “The Way,” which we find a half-dozen times.
Primal Christianity was not an institution, or an organization. It was a movement, and the term that was used to describe it reflected that. The Way. It’s about a path you follow, and actions you take.
Saul’s relationship with the Way was a difficult one. In the early chapters of the Acts of the Apostles, we have heard that Saul numbered himself as an opponent of the church. He viewed himself as a zealous defender of his faith, and from the heart of that zeal, he felt that it was in his interests to drive out a heretical movement from Judaism.
That wasn’t just Saul. That attitude was considered to be a virtue among first century Jews, as deeply as it is considered a virtue among political “true believers” today. In the Catholic Apocrypha, which is just a sequence of Jewish religious books from the first century before Christ, the book of 2 Maccabees 6:13 says that “...it is a mark of great kindness with the impious are not let alone for a long time, but punished at once.” There’s a collection of sayings included in the Dead Sea Scrolls, written by the Essenes, a group of deeply religious Jews at around the time of Christ, we hear that a mark of the righteous man is that he “...bears unremitting hatred toward all men of ill repute.” Sounds a bit like talk radio to me.
And Paul certainly did that, right up until the moment that, while on the road to Damascus, we hear that he had an encounter with Jesus that changed him. He could no longer see.
He found himself in a strange city, helpless and vulnerable and lost.
And there, a follower of the Way named Ananias lived. We know absolutely nothing about this person. We just know that he followed Jesus, and that’s all. Ananias received a vision, and that vision called him to go to a fellow follower’s house, where Saul of Tarsus would be waiting for him.
Ananias is a little bit reluctant. Jesus followers were running scared at the time, being persecuted and attacked for their faith. He knew Saul, knew Saul had power, knew that he...despite the oppression known by the Jewish people...had made it his business to harm and oppress those who saw deep hope in Jesus.
And he was particularly reluctant because of what he was asked to do. In the vision, he is not told that now is his chance to sneak up on the blinded and helpless Paul, give him an epic wedgie, and then leave him with a “Kick Me I’m Stupid” sign taped to his back.
Instead, he is told that he is to go, and lay hands on him, and pray over him for his healing.
He struggles a bit with this vision. “Really? You want me to help that guy?” But he does just that, and Saul was made whole. Here’s a complete nobody, approaching a vulnerable enemy. In his act of mercy and forgiveness, the course of history is changed.
It is our tendency, as human beings, to strike out when we feel weak. We find the weaker person, the vulnerable person, and pour out our frustrations on them as a way of trying to affirm our own power. We mock them, or criticize them, or exclude them, or make a point of ignoring them.
That’s the way we’ve lived, for thousands upon thousands of years. But what it is not is the Way that Jesus taught and walked and lived.
And if we have the audacity to call ourselves disciples, in both the real and the virtual world, then it is also our Way.
Let it be so, for you and for me, AMEN.
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