Paul’s Conversion

Lord, open our hearts and minds by the power of your Holy Spirit, that as the scriptures are read and your Word is proclaimed, we may hear with joy what you have to say to us today. Amen.

Today’s first scripture reading is Matthew 7, verses 7 through 11, and can be found on page 7 of the New Testament portion of your pew Bible.

“Ask, and it will be given you; search, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened for you.

“For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who searches finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened.

“Is there anyone among you who, if your child asks for bread, will give a stone? Or if the child asks for a fish, will give a snake?

“If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in Heaven give good things to those who ask him?”

The Word of the Lord.

Thanks be to God.

Good morning.

As Seth indicated, my name is Fred Hartsook, for those of us who, well, we haven’t met each other yet. And I have the esteemed position of being Seth’s friend. And so, also in a position to be, I was, yeah, I was available this week. So here I am.

But that’s often how, hey! But that’s often how we get to see each other, isn’t it? And for those of us who do know each other, it is great to see you again. It is a gift always to be able to come and worship with you. I am an elder at First Presbyterian Church just up the street, and so we are all extended family, and it’s great to see you.

Here’s a fun coincidence for this morning. That song we just heard was by Lauren Daigle. I used to have a job with Logos Bible Software, and in May of 2018, I was speaking at a women’s conference in Dallas, Texas, and this person, this artist that was sort of on the come-up that nobody really knew yet, was set to lead worship.

And so she came out and blew the roof off of the place. And, like, everybody’s, what’s the term? Nobody was wearing socks because they all got knocked off, right? And she finished with an original song of her own that nobody knew, but was going to soon be released as a single a couple of months later. And that song was “You Say” by Lauren Daigle.

And so it was really, I always have a warm, soft spot in my heart for Lauren and for that song, because I go, “Ooh, I got to hang out with you in the green room back before anybody knew.” And then you gave us a lovely, lovely version today, so thank you so much.

Our scripture for the sermon today is from Acts chapter 9. And since Seth, you know, I’ve never done this with Seth actually in the room. Does anybody else feel weird?

Man, got to be on good behavior today. I didn’t bring my twirling ribbons and tambourines like I usually do, but didn’t want Seth to know that.

Anyway, so Acts chapter 9. For whatever reason, I like to do the sermon scripture reading up here. It just feels comfortable. And then I’ll come down there.

But we’re going to read verses 1 through the first half of verse 19. And, you know, the pericope, the heading at the top of this says, “The Conversion of Saul.” And I sometimes find the pericope, the heading, very, very helpful. I sometimes find it to be something that I want to argue with, and I want to unpack a little bit, and I want to play with. And that’s one that we find ourselves with today.

It says, “The Conversion of Saul.”

Who gets to decide when the conversion of Saul happened? The author? You? Me? Hmm. Well, let’s wonder about that as we hear the scripture read this morning.

And I’ll read it. Here’s what it says:

Meanwhile Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest and asked him for letters to the synagogues at Damascus, so that if he found any who belonged to the Way, men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem.

Now as he was going along and approaching Damascus, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?”

He asked, “Who are you, Lord?”

The reply came, “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. But get up and enter the city, and you will be told what you are to do.”

The men who were traveling with him stood speechless because they heard the voice but saw no one.

Saul got up from the ground, and though his eyes were open, he could see nothing. So they led him by the hand and brought him into Damascus. For three days he was without sight and neither ate nor drank.

Now there was a disciple in Damascus named Ananias. The Lord said to him in a vision, “Ananias.”

He answered, “Here I am, Lord.”

The Lord said to him, “Get up and go to the street called Straight, and at the house of Judas look for a man of Tarsus named Saul. At this moment he is praying, and he has seen in a vision a man named Ananias come in and lay his hands on him so that he might regain his sight.”

But Ananias answered, “Lord, I have heard from many about this man, how much evil he has done to your saints in Jerusalem. And here he has authority from the chief priests to bind all who invoke your name.”

But the Lord said to him, “Go, for he is an instrument whom I have chosen to bring my name before Gentiles and kings and before the people of Israel. I myself will show him how much he must suffer for the sake of my name.”

So Ananias went and entered the house. He laid his hands on Saul and said, “Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus who appeared to you on your way here has sent me so that you may regain your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit.”

And immediately something like scales fell from his eyes, and his sight was restored. Then he got up and was baptized. And after taking some food, he regained his strength.

This is the Word of the Lord.

Wow.

So reading this, Acts 9, it made me think of something this week. Kind of a universal question of life that all of us have wondered at one point or another, that plagues many of us, our days, sometimes our nights. And that is: when you put a piece of bread in the toaster, at what point has it magically transformed into toast?

This keeps you up at night, doesn’t it?

I toss and turn regularly, wishing that one of those clear toasters would have ever made it to market so I could watch and see, maybe, and get a little better impression of how the heck does bread, boring old bread, become life-changing toast.

I’ve always wondered about that. And you think about it, you think, well, buy a loaf of bread, you can do some things with it. You can make a sandwich. What else can you do with it?

You still, what’s the second word of that? Toast. What can you do with toast? Infinite number of things that are better than what you can do with just plain old bread.

But how does it happen? It’s magic. It’s the magic of the toaster. Only God really knows what happens in those little things when you put the lever down and the little squiggly things turn red. And then a couple of minutes later, toast. God only knows what happens in there.

Well, I read the story of Saul’s conversion, and I think there’s a lot going on in this story. You read the top of it and it says, “The Conversion of Saul,” or some Bibles might say, “The Conversion of Paul.” And then you read the story and you think, okay, here’s this guy, and we know a little bit about him.

We know that he’s religiously educated. We know that he was brought up in and among the faith. We know that he has some level of power, institutional and cultural, and he uses it for what God would say is evil.

And so God meets him. He meets him through a series of moments that are accounted for in Acts 9 in our reading today. First he’s on the road, and then he gets blinded by a light, and then he gets knocked down, and then he can’t see. And then he has to be led to Damascus, and then he’s there for three days, not seeing, not eating, not drinking.

Doing what?

And then this guy, who has heard of him but he doesn’t know, comes and lays hands and prays for him. And then these things fall off his eyes that are kind of mysterious. And then he has sight.

So at what point in that story was Saul’s conversion? At what point in Acts 1 through 19 did Saul convert?

Well, it depends on what you mean when you say convert, Fred. It depends on what we mean when we think about what is a conversion. Is it a moment? Is it a process? Is it a series of events that God orchestrates to bring our heart to the place that he would say is fully converted?

Some of us like our toast a little darker. Some of us like our toast a little lighter. You people are nuts.

But each of us, I think God looks at in a similar way. Sorry to trivialize conversion for a moment with a toast illustration that I’m going to belabor for the next few minutes.

But God, I think, sees each of us and recognizes. He looked at Saul and he recognized, here are the things that must happen for me to convert this bread into toast. And so I will go ahead and I will do them.

And he has looked upon each of us and does look upon each of us and says, I know that person. I was there when they were made, and I know what it will look like for that person to convert from bread to toast.

And so just like when you put a piece of bread in a toaster and push down on the button, and then it pops back up and it’s magically toast, and God only knows at what point it crossed over from being bread to toast, I think the important thing to remember when we look at Saul’s conversion, and we think about anybody’s conversion, and we wonder, what is the moment? What is the event? What is the sequence of things that it takes to move a person from there to crossing over into there?

Same thing to remember when we think about making toast in a toaster: only God knows.

And you know what? On some level, who cares? Who cares?

Because here’s the good news. Here’s the thing that matters the most. The world is better when more bread becomes toast. And God recognizes as well that converted people will make the world better. That’s his hope. That’s his vision. That’s his dream.

And so whatever the toasting and converting process looks like, let it be a mystery. Let it be something that God only knows, remembering that what God is hoping for is not that we would be able to dissect the process, but that we would become fully converted and that we would become fully toast.

From that point, or excuse me, from the point of Saul’s conversion that we just read, Saul’s life looked a lot different than it did before. For those of us who know Saul or Paul’s story, we know that he stayed in some of the same circles, and maybe he went through some of the same locations, but everything else inside and outside of him changed.

We know that his vocation changed. He went from being persecutor of those who follow Christ to multiplier of those who follow Christ. He went from one who would slaughter and bind those who knew God to one who was fully devoted with his entire life to helping people know and follow God.

These are the external things of what happened to him internally that only God knows how that happened. But we know that those things internally did have to happen too, right? In order for Paul to have the life that he did, you can’t do that if your heart is not in it.

And so there was a series of moments, whether it was the ones contained in Acts 1 through 19, or the many that came in the later chapters where we get to account for his life, and all the things that were unwritten about, that God was continually changing, transforming, further perfectly toasting Saul or Paul.

Wow, we about to lift off? Okay.

But we read Saul, we read Paul, we read this conversion moment, we read this conversion story, and we recognize that this isn’t the sum of Saul and Paul’s story. We recognize that this is only a commencement because of what we know has happened later.

This conversion story would not have made it into our scriptures if not for the life that was lived after. It would have no weight. It would have no bearing. It would have no relevance for any of us following Jesus today if the life that Saul or Paul lived after had never occurred.

And so I think as we read this this morning, I would like us to have our own reminder. I would like us to remember, as we remember Saul and Paul’s conversion, I would invite us to remember our own conversion, our own three to five minutes in the toaster, where God was beginning to do the things that he needed to do to convert us to converted people, to convert us, our hearts internally and our life externally, into the one that he would use to make the world better.

Some of us have a moment where it was like the lights came on, a little like Saul did when he was walking on the road. Some of us have those stories, and they’re really inspiring and encouraging.

Some of us have long, drawn-out, small moments of being raised by a praying grandma. Never go against the will of a praying grandma. Maybe you had parents who dragged you to church against your will every single Sunday, and you fought kicking and screaming, and yet 50 years later, here you are. Got one?

Maybe there’s all these unexplainable moments that have occurred through your life, and the first name that you learned to call God was something.

“Well, I was going to go and make that decision, but something told me that I shouldn’t.”

Or, “I was here, I was in this situation, I was in rock bottom. I wanted to end it all, I saw no hope, I saw no way out, and yet something got me to get out of bed that day.”

For some of us, the first name we call God is something. And this is the beginning of our conversion moment. Our conversion story.

For some of us, there’s people like me who, I feel like, so I eat gluten-free bread exclusively. And if anybody else eats gluten-free bread, you know about this, that if you don’t toast the bread, it’s inedible. And oftentimes, it’s like multiple ka-chunk. It pops up, squeeze, squeeze, not there. Ka-chunk, pops up, squeeze, squeeze, dang it. Ka-chunk, pops up, squeeze, squeeze, okay, it’s fine. Now it’s a crostini, essentially. But I ate that this morning on the way here with peanut butter.

For some of us, like me, with my gluten-free bread, I feel like that’s my story of conversion. God is continually having to toast and re-toast and re-toast. Because something happens, you leave it out untended to, and it loses its luster, and you’ve got to go back for a little bit more.

I feel like this is God in my life. Throughout, I was raised in church. I was somewhat dragged kicking and screaming to my parents’ church, and then I figured out some other churches that I liked better, and so there was less kicking and screaming. That was my rebellion was, “I’m going to go to the Methodist church.”

But through that, God was continually finding ways to say, okay, I understand Fred. I get him. I know what it’s going to take to convert Fred. And so I’m going to keep putting all these things into Fred’s life to make sure that the result that I want is the one that I get.

So sure, Fred will go to Methodist Church on Sunday, and he’ll go to UCC youth group on Wednesday, and whatever it’s going to take. And then in his junior year of high school, he’s going to go to Malibu with Young Life, and it’s going to be a kind of experience with God he’s never had before, and that’s going to propel some things.

And then I’m going to move him to Bellingham, and I’m going to introduce him to a ministry called The Inn, where he gets to experience community and learning and following and wondering about God in a way that he’s never gotten to before. And that’s going to be another sort of re-toasting moment of God reintroducing himself to me in a certain kind of way.

And then as a young adult, as I’m fully disillusioned with the church and Christianity and saying, I don’t want to be affiliated with these people, and so I’m going to step away. And yet God is going to put people into my life, into the regular parts of my life that I can’t escape from, who continually are putting God in front of me.

Ka-chunk, another time down in the toaster.

And then as an adult, over and over and over, every five years, 10 years, whatever it is, as I need it, God continually puts his conversion, his reconversion and conversion and reconversion rhythms back into my life to go, right, toast. Toast is better.

Some of us have stories like that. A lot of us have, or any and all of us have, our own story with God about how he has brought us along, or how he has transformed us in a moment, or maybe like Saul, in like a flurry of moments, to say, I want this person to become that person because the world will be better if I send that person into it.

Can you remember for a moment what some of those first instances were like for you? Can you remember, think back to however many years ago it was, maybe months ago it was, days, and remember what it felt like, and remember what God’s character seemed like to be to you.

What did God give you in those first moments with him? What had been missing in your life that God pushed in, in those first few parts of your story where you were being converted?

Let’s just take a second and be grateful for that. Just take a moment and say, God, you are so kind. You are so gracious to me. A pretty unruly piece of bread. And nevertheless, you still came.

Thank you, God.

Well, you don’t make toast and then throw it away, do you? No, you make toast with a purpose: to enjoy, to make the world better, to make your own life better, to make your family’s life better, whoever is around.

And God gave that to us. He gave that sensibility to us.

I don’t believe that God converts Saul or Paul simply for the sake of converting Saul or Paul. No, because of the life that Saul lived after his conversion.

In the same way, I don’t believe that God would convert us simply for the sake of just converting us. I think God would bring us along because there is a world that needs changing. There’s a world that needs bettering. There’s a world that needs feeding, healing, justice. And he, in his design, converted people can do that.

When Saul reaches the end of his ministry life, which was fraught, as successful as it was by sort of our own industrial metrics, it was fraught. It was perilous. He was on the run for most of it under threat of death.

And when he’s finally facing the music, so to speak, the two different instances in Acts 22 and Acts 26, he’s put to the defense for his ministry and for his life, for questions of what we might call heresy or treason.

And what does Paul do at this point when they’re taking an account of his life that he’s lived post-conversion? What does Paul do in these moments? Does he give some sort of academic, historical, theological explanation? Does he give an argument for why the people who are persecuting him are wrong? Does he disassociate and deflect?

What does he do? Do you remember?

In Acts 22 and Acts 26, especially when he’s standing before Agrippa, he tells the story of Acts 9. When they say, “Defend your actions. Defend your life. Here’s the accounting of it. What do you have to say for yourself?” he says, “You know, I was walking along the road, and all of a sudden I was blinded by a light, and I heard a voice, and it was Jesus. And then he brought Ananias, and he prayed for me, and the scales fell from my eyes, and I could see. And I was sent out into Jerusalem and everywhere to go spread the good news of Jesus to the Gentiles.”

And when they looked back on his life, whatever preconceived ideas they had about why he was doing what he was doing, they became clear with Paul’s explanation. He said, from the moment of my conversion, God set me on a path, and I’ve been on that path. Here I am now.

As we remember our conversion, so to speak, or those first moments with God, do you remember what kinds of stirrings that God gave you? Do you remember what kinds of idealistic hopes and dreams that God gave you about what the world could be like now that you could see it clearly with his eyes?

Do you remember some of those things? Do you remember some of the hope that you had that maybe now, as years have gone by and you haven’t seen that hope realized, do you feel like, well, either I’m jaded or maybe that wasn’t realistic or I just sort of forgot?

Do you remember what some of those things were? Do you remember some of the things that you were burdened by? Because as God pulled you in and changed your heart, he made your heart more like his. And all of a sudden you took on the burdens of his heart.

Things that were wrong in the world. Injustices that were perpetrated in our world, maybe just in your close-knit community and in your family. You don’t have to go very far to find injustice.

Do you remember some of those things from those days, whether you were 15 years old, 28 years old, 56 years old, two years old, however you were?

Do you remember some of those things?

Here’s what might be a challenging invitation for some of us this morning. As you remember those, and as you sit now, if you were called to look back on what God was placing on you and covering you with and filling you with in that moment, has the life you’ve lived since then been the story of that conversion played out?

Those hopes, those dreams that God gave you early in those days and in those moments, have they been realized? Have they been pursued? Have they been forgotten?

Those injustices, those burdens, those heartaches that God gave you as he brought you into his heart, have they been worked against? Have they been subverted? Have they been forgotten?

If you today were to defend your life and you told your conversion story, would it match the life that you have lived since those days?

This is a tough invitation for some of us because Seth called me earlier this week and said, “Hey, here’s the scripture for Sunday.” And I went into reading it, and as I sat with it, and I sat with the Lord about it, this question got brought to me, and I went, “Oh dear.”

Because, as I said, I’m going to belabor the illustration. Have you ever tried to untoast bread? Really, have you? Why would you?

But think about the ways that you would try. You’re really just trying to rehydrate it, right? So would you spritz it? Would you steam it? Would you, I don’t know, what are the other options? Submerge it? Take it in the shower? Yeah, scrape it? Scrape up the toasted edges and maybe find some soft stuff on the inside?

Whatever you do, it’s going to be gross. It’s not going to be what you intended when you set out to make toast that day. It’s not going to delight you in the way that toast ought to. It’s not going to make life and your meal better.

And the reason the invitation that I share with you can be challenging for some of us today is because some of us might see that there are ways in which maybe we have become untoasted toast, and God has been on a mission to convert us for some amount of time, and we might need one more ka-chunk.

So I want you to hear this, if that’s you this morning, as it was for me this week, which made me really bummed at first to have to come and say in front of you. But then I realized, and God gave me this good news to remember that I’ll share with you, that made me excited to come and share these words with you this week.

Here’s some great news. God makes toast.

God can take even the most unruly, stale, unappealing bread and make something delightful out of it. Something that you would never eat, never serve your kids, never put on your table when your guests come. God has made a way for it to become delightful and pleasant and make your meal better.

And in the same way, God has shown us with Saul, he has shown us, probably if we examined each of our own hearts and each of our own lives, that he can take even the most unruly, unappealing, undesirable, furthest away from him and convert them just perfectly in the way that he designs, in a way that makes our world and our families and our communities better, to delight them, to serve them, to change them.

This is tremendous news. This is the news of Saul from Acts chapter 9, and this is the good news for us this morning.

So let us give thanks, and we’ll continue in worship.

Let me pray.

Dear Lord, I do thank you for the gift of the witness of your scripture. God, that as we open it, as we read it, as we hear it, as we meditate on it, God, that you share yourself with us. That through it we get to explore and to be near to you.

So God, as you have given us the ability to sit with Acts chapter 9 today and your story with Saul, God, I pray that however you are inviting us, however you are reminding us of who you are, of what you say about us, God, I pray that you make our hearts, our minds, our spirits wide, wide open.

Fully open not only to receive the challenge of your invitation, but the abundance of your grace. God, I pray for anyone here who feels hesitant or questions if your arms will be open, God, that you would break through all of that and you would embrace them now in this moment.

Lord, we thank you and we ask you all these things in Jesus’ name. Amen.