ZIONSVILLE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH
March 8, 2009 Rev. Glenn McDonald
Acts 9:1-9; 26:12-14

Back to the Blueprints
(10) You Need A Do-Over

This message was preceded by a clip from "City Slickers," in which the character Phil, played by Daniel Stern, laments the fact that his life is so broken he can never have a do-over or believe that he has a clean slate.

Phil has been given a gift. His life has been so thoroughly jolted that he is now in a position to go a whole new way. But Phil has a hard time seeing this moment as a gift. To him it feels more like an ending than a beginning. And he wonders if this "do-over" that his friends are so excited about is even possible, considering the debris field that is trailing out behind his life.

Many of us live in fear that our lives might somehow come undone. Life-altering interruptions, however, are not the exception; they are the rule. We might even say that God is in the interruption business. On the road to the destination of our choice, suddenly we are stopped in our tracks - perhaps by a drunk driver, or a doctor's mistake, or a frivolous lawsuit that wipes out our savings, or an economic downtown that renders our entire industry irrelevant. Or, like Phil, we may blunder our way into a place that feels as if there are no exits.

But God is faithful in such unwelcome and uninvited moments. God speaks to us in the midst of life-changing interruptions. How we respond is primarily what determines our character and our future.

The church is the community of interrupted lives. This is the place where men and women are free to ask two important questions: "God, who are you? And what do you want me to do? How is it that you've been running the universe while this mess of a moment has happened to me? And now that I am at this point, what is my next step?"

In his book When God Interrupts, Craig Barnes points out that at life-altering moments people can go one of two ways. We can either turn our hearts toward what we have lost (or are still in the process of losing), or we can open our hearts wider to what has always been our one true hope, which is Jesus. Are you longing right now for some version of Plan A that you can never have again, or are you allowing the interruptions in your life to open your eyes to the do-over that Jesus is offering in Plan B?

Most of us wouldn't be nearly as open to trusting God or even remotely as certain that we needed a Savior, unless our own plans and security systems had been severely disrupted. And no one on the pages of the Bible illustrates that more dramatically than the man who turns out to be the central human character of the book of Acts.

His name is Paul. After Jesus, Paul is the key figure in the early Church. He wrote nearly half the books of the New Testament. His conversion to Christ is the most famous in history, and a number of people have called him the most thoroughly transformed human being who has ever lived. That transformation begins with a massive jolt that Paul does not expect, does not invite, and does not at first understand. Paul is a model of how God exercises divine freedom to interrupt our lives so that we might be given the chance to embrace a whole new path.

You might recall that Paul was introduced back in chapter seven, where as a young man he watched over the clothing of those who had taken off their outer garments to stone Stephen. His given name is Saul. Now it might seem confusing that Bible characters sometimes change their names, but we do after all live in a time in which rap artist Sean Combs, in the space of a decade, can become Puff Daddy, then P. Diddy, and as of the start of this service, simply Diddy.

Let's pick up the story of Saul-who-will-become-Paul, beginning in Acts chapter nine. In verse one we read: "Meanwhile, Saul was still breathing out murderous threats against the Lord's disciples. He went to the high priest and asked him for letters to the synagogues in Damascus, so that if he found any there who belonged to the Way, whether men or women, he might take them as prisoners to Jerusalem." Over the centuries, thousands of books and sermons have been written about Paul's inner motivations. Why is he consumed by this murderous frenzy? Maybe he is haunted by the death of Stephen. If Stephen had really been such a horrible person, as the Pharisees maintained, why had he died so graciously, and with forgiveness on his lips?

It may therefore be that Paul is silencing his own doubts by trying to wipe out the church through sheer force of will. He will personally crush this Christian cult. But just as Paul accelerates his efforts - making great progress, apparently, and all in the name of God - God himself dramatically interrupts.

Damascus, the capital of the nation of Syria, is one of the oldest continually occupied cities in the world. It's about 140 miles north-northeast from Jerusalem, and the connecting road features lengthy stretches of wilderness. This trip was almost certainly made on foot and would have taken about a week. We know that an armed guard provided by the Sanhedrin is accompanying Paul. But since he is a Pharisee it is likely that he is walking out front, all by himself, so as not to contaminate himself by the company of mere soldiers.

Then, like a bolt out of the blue, God alters his reality. Look at verse three: "As he neared Damascus on his journey, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice say to him, "Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?" In the book of Acts this story is reported three times. Luke provides a description of it here in chapter nine. In chapters 22 and 26 Paul tells his own story to different audiences, where he has the freedom to emphasize different details.

The first thing worth noting is that the voice from heaven calls his name twice. "Saul, Saul..." Every Pharisee knew his Bible - what we today call the Old Testament - forwards and backwards. Paul would have remembered the voice that said, "Abraham, Abraham, put down that flint knife and don't sacrifice your son Isaac. Moses, Moses, take off your sandals and approach this burning bush, for you are standing on holy ground. Samuel, Samuel, wake up, because I need to tell you who I am."

Now if we heard such a disembodied voice we might assume that we were hallucinating, or maybe suffering prescription drug interactions that the pharmacist forgot to warn us about. But if any Pharisee heard a voice from the sky, he would automatically assume it was God. What's confusing to Paul is this claim of persecution. So he asks a very important question: "Who are you, Lord?"

The answer comes in the rest of verse five: "'I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting,' he replied. ‘Now get up and go into the city, and you will be told what you must do.' The men traveling with Saul stood there speechless; they heard the sound but did not see anyone. Saul got up from the ground, but when he opened his eyes he could see nothing. So they led him by the hand into Damascus. For three days he was blind, and did not eat or drink anything."

Paul is stunned. Wasn't this Jesus dead? How could Jesus still be communicating? And what does it mean that in the process of rounding up Christians Paul is persecuting Jesus? For the first time it dawns on him that by going after Jesus' people, he is actually going after him. The church is the body of Christ on earth.

Let's turn our Bibles over to chapter 26. When Paul tells this same story to a non-Jewish audience, he adds an interesting detail. Look at verse 14: "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.'" What does that mean? This happens to be a proverb from the Greek-speaking world. When a young ox was fitted with a yoke and made to a pull a cart for the first time, it sometimes rebelled and began thrashing wildly. Farmers would attach sharpened stakes called goads to the front of their carts. After a kicking ox skewered himself a few times, he would learn to accept the yoke.

Jesus is saying, "Paul, I know this interruption isn't what you pictured for your life. But by resisting it you're only hurting yourself." God will break into our lives as well, through circumstances that may even bring us pain, or force us off the path we have been on, or dramatically knock us flat. At such moments we will be tempted to picture ourselves as victims. But becoming victims is a choice - a choice to waste our suffering and the opportunity to start life over.

It's far better to ask the two questions that Paul poses while lying in the dust of the road to Damascus: "Lord, who are you? And what shall I do? What kind of God are you to allow such an interruption to enter my life? And what do you want me to do about it right now?

In recent weeks, as our national leaders have launched their economic stimulus plan, we've all had the opportunity to wrestle with the size of a very big number. How much is a trillion? A trillion is the number one followed by twelve zeroes. If you stack a trillion one-dollar bills on top of each other, the stack would be 68,000 miles high - that's one third of the way to the moon. If you count off a trillion seconds, one at a time, starting right now, it would take you 32,000 years to finish. If on the day Jesus was born you paid a million dollars, and then paid another million the next day, and a million more every day since, you still would not have paid out a trillion dollars. A trillion is a very big number.

And there are at least a trillion lesser things in this life that are worth leaving behind so we can take hold of Jesus. God's purposes in our lives are not accomplished by one shattering Damascus-road experience. Again and again and again, we will need a do-over. We will need to turn from the paths we have been on to the new path that God is showing us. Almost every time it will feel like dying. But such interruptions are the means by which God heals us and rescues us.

That means that our "failures" may be his successes. Our "setbacks" may prove to be his turning points. Our "disasters" may turn out to be God's greatest triumphs. God is even able to turn our worst mistakes into his victories - if we will turn our hearts not toward what we have lost, but toward the new life in Jesus that God is always offering us.

So many times, when somebody else's life has been disrupted, our first instinct is to rush in and help them fix it. We want to be great friends and great counselors, so we attempt to help them get things back the way they were. But more often than we might imagine, that isn't the most helpful thing to do. It may be that our friends' well-ordered lives are the very things that they most need to be saved from. Our ongoing call is to gently point each other to the only thing that really matters, and the only One we really need - Jesus.

So what are the action points that we can take away with us today from the story of Paul's conversion? Let me suggest three things that you can ask for. The first requires great bravery: Ask God to blind you with his light - just as he blinded Paul and set him on a new path. Boldly ask God to deconstruct the life you currently have so you can start pursuing the life that God wants you to have. It's safe to say that rather often we don't even recognize when that is happening.

Yesterday our presbytery met at Camp Pyoca in southern Indiana. Camp Pyoca is the place, 39 years ago, where God wrecked my life. As a senior in high school I had decided that I had had enough of church. But first I would attend one last retreat at Pyoca. That's where I became friends with Rich Retallic, the man whom God would use to bring me to Christ over the next few months. Rich would also lead to Christ the girl whom I would one day marry. God wrecked my life - the life I had dreamed up for myself, that is. I don't know what direction I would have gone or how my life would have turned out if I had stayed home that weekend. But God set into motion the right circumstances to demolish my own plans, and to bring me to him.

Most of us at ZPC can't point to 180-degree turns on our own roads to Damascus. But God will faithfully provide a series of 1.8-degree turns that will cumulatively transform our lives. Ask him to do so.

Second, ask God to transform your mind concerning whatever interruptions are currently jolting your life. Are you facing a serious illness or disability? We can be bitter and despairing, or a model of hope to those around us. The cancer or the surgery or the pain isn't what makes the difference. It's whether or not we allow the Spirit of Jesus to rule our minds.

The same thing is true when it comes to money, and relationships, and success, and disappointment. It's incredible how two people can have almost identical circumstances, yet come to entirely different conclusions as to what those things might mean. Refuse to be a victim. If life as you had planned it has come to a screeching halt, lift up your head and say, like Paul, "Lord, what are you calling me to do?" Ask the Spirit to fix your eyes on Jesus.

Third, and finally, ask to receive God's gift of a clean slate. Decades ago, students were expected to bring their own slates to class - so-called because they were actually pieces of slate on which you could use a piece of chalk to practice working on problems. At the beginning of every new day, you could wipe that slate clean and start over.

In the movie, Phil has lost hope that his slate can ever be clean. Is God big enough to provide do-overs, no matter what we have done, and no matter what events have overwhelmed us? Yes, he is. And yes, he can. And yes, he will - as we open our hearts to the God of new beginnings.