The Beginning of Christian Community
A sermon by Pastor Darrell Reeck, Ph.D.
Third Sunday of Easter, April 25, 2004
"Who are you, Lord?" -- Saul [Paul] in Acts 9: 5
Prayer for Enlightenment
Who was this Saul or Paul? What does his conversion mean for us today, in our current Christian community, and in the future?
Paul saw a blinding light and heard a voice from heaven. He heard the voice say, "Why do you persecute me?"
I've long and seriously wondered about visions and sounds, and how they communicate religious meaning.
My earliest memories of visions and voices go back to native American vision quests, as I've read about them.
To make the transition from child to full adult, physical maturity is insufficient. Young Native Americans fasted, prayed in the wilderness, all alone except for plants and animals and, and quested for a vision. And apparently, the vision came-individual after individual, generation upon generation. It was predictable and routine. Yet that never happened in my culture-we went to the driver's license bureau at 16, got our license, and that was it!
As a young person out of college, I became aware of African traditional thought and psychology. In West Africa, a vision or a dream can change one's life-for better or for worse. I've seen both better and worse. Late in 1961, I visited a village elder. He was incoherent and babbling. Tied to a log in a hut, he couldn't wander.
The village had given this fellow the role of serving at the shrine of the ancestors, about a mile out in the forest. He had neglected his responsibility for months. When he finally had set out with appropriate offerings, and before he had reached the shrine, he had seen an elder up in a palm tree. Think "vision." He had a vision and heard a voice!
The ancestor looks down and accuses the village priest of neglect. This episode sent the poor man into a state of mindlessness, incoherence, and incomprehension. Did he recover? I was unable to follow the case and I don't know.
It's amazing that many ancient religious events have been accompanied by visions and sounds.
Moses on Mt. Sinai: thunder and lightning.
Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration. Great light and a voice from heaven.
Mohammed in the mountainside cave, experiencing divine recitations from the heavenly Qur'an.
And I could mention sightings of Mary on the feast of the Virgin.
If someone in Washington State had such a vision, the neurologist would probably put her on Dilantin.
Are all of these voices and visions just seizures, at root? If people could hear voices and see visions today, are these legitimate visions and voices suppressed by medication? Is that why there are so few vision episodes and quests in our era of technological medication?
How might we rate and evaluate such episodes? By these questions I just want you to know that I'm not uncritical when I say that Paul's episode on the Damascus road was not just life-transforming, but that it launched a whole new meaning of community.
I think one must rate such episodes by the moral and spiritual qualities they convey. The moral and spiritual qualities of their visions separate a Jesus, a Paul, an Ezekiel or a Moses from lesser figures.
Paul had two mindsets about community: pre-conversion and post-conversion.
Paul's first version of community was legal and exclusionary. A Pharisee, he was a member of the Jewish version of the religious gendarmerie. In his group of believers, the mindset was: know the religious law, keep the religious law, detect a religious lawbreaker, and use force to assure conformity.
This first version of community erected high barriers. If you didn't follow the regulations, you weren't in the group. It wasn't like exclusion from a high school clique. Depending on the rule you broke, you could be regarded as ritually unclean, untouchable, polluted, taboo.
That's why Paul was known as a persecutor of Christians, and thus of Christ. He was on his way to Damascus to find the Christian lawbreakers and put them straight, using arrest warrants he'd picked up in Jerusalem.
Then Paul "saw the light." The conversion was stunning, immediate, and total, and he came to his second mindset about community. He literally started Christian community as we know it today. Without Paul's insight, you and I would not be Christian. That's how enormously Paul changed.
From persecutor to protector, from religious policeman to inclusionist. That's how Paul changed.
And what did it mean for Christianity community? Paul kicked off the concept of community as a diverse, inclusive, barrier-breaking divine-human association.
Paul came to realize that you didn't have to be a Jew first before you became a Christian. This was a mind-blowing breakthrough in defining Christian community.
Africans and Asian Indians could become Christians directly without becoming Jews first. Greeks, Romans, barbarians ... you name it. To the furthest extent of the Roman empire, Paul reached out to every race and clan.
Now, you'd think that disciples and apostles would die to get on board with this new vision. Hardly.
It wasn't easy to convince his fellow apostles. In a strategic council in Jerusalem, Paul advocated his position. Many resisted. So the Christian leaders divided up the world. The resisters took Jerusalem and Palestine. Paul reached out as a missionary to places you recognize: Philippi, Rome, Ephesus, and Galatia.
Paul's vision of the open Christian community is the only thing that makes it possible for you, your children and me and my children to be Christian.
The community has grown to 1.6 billion, the largest single religious community on earth. It includes virtually every language and every race. It began with Paul.
Open community is not easy. Paul had his struggles. In Acts, we read he ran into "no small dissension and debate." He had his struggles, we have ours.
What's Paul's secret? How does open community start? How do we maintain and expand open Christian community? The beginning of Christian community is to ask with Paul: "Who are you, Lord?" Every person, every generation needs to ask that question anew.
Once we get clarity about the values and claims of Jesus Christ, it's easy to identify barriers to be broken as we answer the call to community.
My prayer for Ellensburg and Topeka, for Pittsburg, Seattle and Jackson, for Lagos and Canterbury is this: as we reach out to Jesus Christ, may we find our neighbor. As we find our neighbor, may we find ourself. May God help us to grow and build our Christian community in the inclusive way Paul pioneered.
Amen.
Copyright by Darrell Reeck, 2004. All rights reserved.
Feedback invited at dreeck@msn.com
Previous Sermons
- Sermon from April 18, 2004: Human Law and Divine Law
- Sermon from Easter Sunday, April 11, 2004: The Goal of the Pilgrim
- Sermon from Palm Sunday, April 4, 2004: The Universe Proclaims
- Sermon from March 28, 2004: Extravagant Love