Without a doubt, this is the most important conversion in the New Testament. We don’t really think about the disciples converting, do we? There are other dramatic conversions like Cornelius and his family, the Philippian jailer and his family as well as Lydia, a magician and others. However, this conversion is so central to the history of the church that it is told 4 times – 3 in Acts and once in Galatians. In a sense, it has become the model that is first in our minds when we talk about conversion. It is a radical reversal of a life.

But, it is only one story and should not be the standard for conversions. There are other “on the road” conversions in this early part of Acts and another in the last part of the book of Luke that are just as real.

First, the road of reason and the conversion of the Ethiopian official. There is no sense of great sin. No fight or conflict. No drama at all. It is simply, “Is there any reason I should not be baptized?” It is an illustration of God using someone to come alongside a person and explain the Gospel in a way that makes sense and the response is one of reason. We call that apologetics. The official believes and goes on his way.

Second, is what I would call the road of recognition. Look at the disciples who are leaving Jerusalem after the crucifixion. They are discouraged but not disobedient. They have lost confidence and feel abandoned. They once believed and are now disappointed. They meet a stranger on the road who walks with them in the wrong direction. It is only when they break bread together that they recognize him for who he is and, like John Wesley’s conversion, their hearts were burning and they are turned around from disappointment to their eyes being opened. Jesus walked with them while they were going in the wrong direction but they return.

Finally, there is road to Damascus or the road of revolution. It comes not from disappointment or explanation but an intense conflict and enormous pain. It is a spiritual earthquake that tears and shatters an individual to the core.

Earthquakes happen when two tectonic plates that have been pushing against each other deep within the earth suddenly snap and create a violent reaction on the surface. 

There were two opposing plates deep within the personality of Paul, I think. The plate of grace pushing up against the plate of proving himself worthy of God’s acceptance. The earthquake of grace is best experienced by those who have such a fear of God. Most of us don’t to the degree that Paul did. In fact, not many people have such a fault line running through their lives. Fewer and fewer people have the deep sense of sin that makes them feel separated from God. Yes, there is the discomfort of having a crack on the surface, a ripped seam, an inconsistency or a nagging doubt but not two tectonic plates deep beneath the surface pushing against each other.

Paul’s character was one that had been shaped by a life growing up in a religious system that produces rigid beliefs and sometimes violent reactions against those who threaten those beliefs. The world is black and white – good and evil. The categories are defined and accepted. God measures performance and adherence to the rules and punishes those who break them. It is a dangerous mixture of idealism, single minded devotion and anger. Someone once told me this religion is little more than organized hostility. Paul was the perfect religious attack dog working his way up through the system.

In fact, he was just the opposite of how we often describe others who have “seen the light.” Hank Williams wrote that song after a long night of drinking on his way from a concert to Montgomery, Alabama. His mother was driving and she saw the lights of the city and said, “I saw the lights.” That was the inspiration for the lyrics:

I wandered so aimless life filled with sin
I wouldn’t let my dear saviour in
Then Jesus came like a stranger in the night
Praise the Lord I saw the light.

Nothing could have been further from the truth in Paul’s life. He was not wandering, blind or astray. He was a guided missile bent on destroying the church. He was the perfect tool for the high priest and officials – a young, ambitious, focused and lethal weapon. But, I suspect, in the back of his mind were the words of his teacher, Gamaliel. “Be careful. You could find yourselves fighting against God.” He did, didn’t he? But these are not the words a true believer wants to hear. Instead, you double down.

Let’s read the account in Acts 26:9-18 where Paul is standing before Agrippa on trial.

I too was convinced that I ought to do all that was possible to oppose the name of Jesus of Nazareth. And that is just what I did in Jerusalem. On the authority of the chief priests I put many of the Lord’s people in prison, and when they were put to death, I cast my vote against them. Many a time I went from one synagogue to another to have them punished, and I tried to force them to blaspheme. I was so obsessed with persecuting them that I even hunted them down in foreign cities. “On one of these journeys I was going to Damascus with the authority and commission of the chief priests.  About noon, King Agrippa, as I was on the road, I saw a light from heaven, brighter than the sun, blazing around me and my companions.  We all fell to the ground, and I heard a voice saying to me in Aramaic, ‘Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? It is hard for you to kick against the goads.’  “Then I asked, ‘Who are you, Lord?’ “ ‘I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting,’ the Lord replied.  ‘Now get up and stand on your feet. I have appeared to you to appoint you as a servant and as a witness of what you have seen and will see of me.  I will rescue you from your own people and from the Gentiles. I am sending you to them  to open their eyes and turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan to God, so that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me.’

There is no condemnation or anger on the part of Jesus even though Saul has murdered Christians, including one of the pillars of the early church. There is only concern for him. Why are you creating such pain for yourself? Why are you doubling down and destroying yourself? Jesus is not a gentle therapist. He is asking the one question that cuts to the heart of Paul’s life and the tension of those plates. What are you kicking against that is causing such personal and public destruction?

We should ask the same of ourselves. When I do, I come up with four questions.

First, what am I protecting that does not work any longer but I cannot let go? Paul described himself in Galatians as one who had a “greater enthusiasm for the old traditions” and there are some of us in that camp. We know those traditions are no longer working but we hold on to them for dear life. Our black and white categories have become rigid. In an earthquake, it is the rigid structures built on loose soil that are destroyed. Rigid structures built on bedrock are safe. Flimsy structures built on bedrock are safe but those that cannot flex with the movement are brought down. And there are two kinds of movement happening at the same time – the horizontal shifting and the vertical shifting. That is what happens in a personal earthquake as well, isn’t it? Our horizontal stability – relationships – are upset as well as our vertical stability – our beliefs – are shaken.

The Church has a long history of defending itself against change. Just read the book, Wide As The Waters about the history of the making of the English Bible. Taking the Bible out of the hands of the priests and professionals and making it accessible to common people made martyrs out of William Tyndale and John Wycliffe. As one of the defenders of the Church said, “This book will destroy the building” and he was right. Wycliffe died of a heart attack and later his bones were dug up and burned. Tyndale was strangled in the public square and then his body burned at the stake. Like Paul, those who are intimidated find themselves breathing out threats and slaughter. They live in an atmosphere of violence and paranoia. The defenders of the faith will not be shaken.

I like the way Wendell Berry puts it in his book JayberCrow. “As I have read the Gospels over the years, the belief has grown in me that Christ did not come to found an organized religion but came instead to found an unorganized one. He seems to have come to carry religion out of the temples into the fields and sheep pastures, onto the roadsides and the banks of the rivers, into the houses of sinners and publicans, into the town and the wilderness, toward the membership of all that is here.”

Second, what idea of God am I kicking against most violently? What is it that God must do to be God? I think Inspector Javert in Le Miserable best illustrates that trait. He lives in a world of fixed categories. There is right and there is wrong but nothing in between. There is justice. There are good people and bad people. Bad people do not become good people. The world is simple. But maybe not.

“To come to the pass of returning good for good, although one has said to oneself up to that day that that good is evil! To be the watch-dog, and to lick the intruder’s hand! To be ice and melt! To be the pincers and to turn into a hand! To suddenly feel one’s fingers opening! To relax one’s grip,—what a terrible thing!”

Of course, we know how he resolves the tension between those two plates in his soul. He leaps from the bridge to his death. God has asked too much of him.

Third, am I wanting to persecute those who have found something I long for? As I read Romans 5 and Romans 8 it is clear that Paul’s great relief in life was to have found peace with God and a release from the sense of condemnation. Even though he, like us, struggles with this for the balance of his life the issue is settled. To this point he has lived with the overwhelming burden of being at war with a distant God. C.S. Lewis says there are people who are not searching for God. “To say I was searching for God would be like the mouse searching for the cat. I did not want to find him.”

“You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England. I did not then see what is now the most shining and obvious thing; the Divine humility which will accept a convert even on such terms. The Prodigal Son at least walked home on his own feet. But who can duly adore that Love which will open the high gates to a prodigal who is brought in kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape? The words compelleintrare, compel them to come in, have been so abused be wicked men that we shudder at them; but, properly understood, they plumb the depth of the Divine mercy. The hardness of God is kinder than the softness of men, and His compulsion is our liberation.”

For Paul, and others, God is a threat and an unyielding, cold and harsh judge or He is a God who is never satisfied with us. The result of this earthquake was his reconciliation with God and his release from wrath.

Finally, what is it that is making life so loveless and empty. Why are you so angry? Why has trying to please God made us so unhappy and violent? Why do other people have to suffer for you? Why are you kicking against the goads? That phrase “kicking against the goads” is so interesting to me. It can be translated, struggling compulsively or trampling on spear points, wounding or even spurring yourself on to self-destructive madness. And that is what Paul’s life was. It was not just violence against others but it was his sense that he had to crawl across broken glass to satisfy God. He was going mad.

And Jesus does not ask these questions in anger or condemnation but out of incredible love. He doesn’t bring up the death of Stephen or the imprisonment and death of others. He doesn’t indict Paul. He simply asks the question for which there is no answer other than love.

It was not the conviction of sin that threw Paul to the ground…but the shock of being loved. The encounter with grace.

David Brooks in his book, The Road To Character quotes Paul Tillich:

“Grace strikes us when we are in great pain and restlessness. It strikes us when we walk through the dark valley of a meaningless and empty life. It strikes us when we feel that our separation is deeper than usual, because we have violated another life, a life which we loved, or from which we were estranged. It strikes us when our disgust for our own being, our indifference, our weakness, our hostility, and our lack of direction and composure have become intolerable to us. It strikes us when, year after year, the longed-for perfection of life does not appear, when the old compulsions reign within us as they have for decades, when despair destroys all joy and courage. Sometimes at that moment a wave of light breaks into our darkness, and it is as though a voice were saying: “You are accepted. You are accepted, accepted by that which is greater than you, and the name of which you do not know. Do not ask for the name now; perhaps you will find it later. Do not try to do anything now; perhaps later you will do much. Do not seek for anything; do not perform anything; do not intend anything. Simply accept the fact that you are accepted!” If that happens to us, we experience grace.  After such an experience we may not be better than before, and we may not believe more than before. But everything is transformed. In that moment, grace conquers sin, and reconciliation bridges the gulf of estrangement. And nothing is demanded of this experience, no religious or moral or intellectual presupposition, nothing but acceptance.”

But the outcome is not just a warm heart, or release from condemnation, peace with God and a resolution of internal conflicts. It is a purpose for life – and suffering. It is an assignment.

“I have appeared to you to appoint you.” Paul later describes it not as his vocation or even his calling but God’s apprehending him – God’s taking him into custody and, literally, arresting him. He was not recruited. He was arrested. He was not a volunteer but a conscript whose life was no longer his own. He says it 164 times in the New Testament. Our lives are now “in Christ Jesus” and everything I tried to do on my own to please God was worthless. All that crawling across broken glass to please Him. All that protecting of what was no longer working. All that anger and life of threats and violence. All that sense of keeping two subterranean plates deep below the surface from snapping and destroying me. All that is past.

These are questions for each of us this morning:

What am I protecting that does not work any longer?

What idea of God am I kicking against most violently?

Am I most angry at those who have found what I long for?

What is it that is making life so loveless and empty?

Some of us remember Lee Atwater, the ruthless attack dog of the Reagan and elder Bush campaigns. We drive by his burial spot every year on the way to and from the beach in South Carolina. He died of a brain tumor when he was 40 but shortly before he died he wrote an apology that was published in Life magazine. This is part of what he said:

“My illness helped me to see that what was missing in society is what was missing in me: a little heart, a lot of brotherhood. The ’80s were about acquiring — acquiring wealth, power, prestige. I know. I acquired more wealth, power, and prestige than most. But you can acquire all you want and still feel empty. What power wouldn’t I trade for a little more time with my family? What price wouldn’t I pay for an evening with friends? It took a deadly illness to put me eye to eye with that truth, but it is a truth that the country, caught up in its ruthless ambitions and moral decay, can learn on my dime. I don’t know who will lead us through the ’90s, but they must be made to speak to this spiritual vacuum at the heart of American society, this tumor of the soul….I was wrong to follow the meanness of Conservatism. I should have been trying to help people instead of taking advantage of them. I don’t hate anyone anymore. For the first time in my life I don’t hate somebody. I have nothing but good feelings toward people. I’ve found Jesus Christ – It’s that simple. He’s made a difference.”

We should not wait until the end of our life or be knocked to the ground blind before accepting the grace God holds out to us.