The
Park Road Pulpit
Sermons from Park Road Baptist Church
Russ and Amy Jacks Dean, Pastors
Converted Again – For the First Time!
Russ Dean, April 29, 2001
I said to you on
Easter Sunday that the facts of the Easter story no longer fascinate me
as the once did. The empty tomb, the angels, Mary, John and Peter, the Gardiner
who was the resurrected Jesus… these “facts” were once the essence of my faith.
But they are no longer. Now, let me make it clear to you that I understand
that for many people this statement alone is heresy. Because for many people,
the facts of the story, equals the fact of resurrection. And for many
Christian believers, the “fact” of the resurrection is Christian faith.
The argument that is
too often made for this claim, though, seems circular to me – “We believe in
the resurrection of Jesus... because the Bible says so. And we believe that the
Bible is accurate because… the Bible says so.” This argument to prove that the
event called “the resurrection” is a “fact” is based on a proposition of faith,
namely, accepting that the Bible is true. So it seems to me that trying to
argue the factuality of this event, is to essentially reduce Christianity
to a “fact,” and in so doing, to diminish the power of Christian faith
itself, as well as its central event. (I do believe that resurrection is the
central event of the Christian faith.) To argue the fact of the
resurrection is perhaps to practice Christian science, or Christian dogmatism,
maybe even Christian religion. But it is not to argue Christian
Faith.
Does this make sense to you? I don’t want to turn
“the resurrection” into a so-called “fact.” Because facts are, I believe,
explainable and understandable. And to a great degree, they are containable.
Controllable. Easter is not about an event that is any of those. Faith, I
believe, by its very nature is un-explainable. Never fully understandable. And
if we believe at all in the mystery of the Spirit of God, faith is neither
containable nor controllable. Jesus said, The wind blows where it wills… so
it is with the Spirit of God.
So I hope that on this Sunday of Eastertide, I can
make the suggestion to you, and avoid being burned at the stake for it,
that resurrection is not a fact to be argued. It is a faith to be
lived.
I don’t know exactly what happened to Mary Magdalene that morning at the tomb. But, clearly, whatever it was changed the world. I’m not sure what happened to John and Peter and Thomas, and those friends of Jesus who sat in that locked room, when suddenly they experienced his presence in their midst. But, clearly, whatever it was changed the world. I’m not sure what happened to Cleopas and his companion, walking side by side on a quiet road to Emmaus, when suddenly a stranger walked between them. I’m not sure what happened when they shared dinner with this stranger and then he mysteriously disappeared, vanishing before their eyes. I’m not sure what happened at that moment that caused them to know that the stranger in their midst had been the risen Christ. But, clearly, whatever it was changed the world.
Do you understand the point I’m trying to make here? I do not know what happened inside a Jerusalem tomb one cool, spring Easter morning. This is a story that no one can tell.
What I do know this morning is what happened to Mary. What happened to John and Peter. To Thomas. To Cleopas and his traveling companion. What I do know this morning is what happened to those who say they experienced the risen Christ. . . because they have told their stories. And their stories have become my story.
This story is called conversion.
In the winter of 1985 I sat on an airplane bound for New York City, with a woman whose name I never knew. I was an eager and excited Furman University religion major returning from five weeks in the Holy Land. She was a skeptic. An unbeliever. As we talked about my encounters in the Holy Land, about walking today where Jesus walked, I was unable to convincer her of my claims to Truth. This troubled and saddened me.
And, yet, as I listened to her, I detected a depth, something real about her that I could not name. She told me that she had been raised in a nominally “Christian,” yet non-practicing home. That she had struggled with the claims of Christianity. That she had wandered away. Later though, still wrestling, she had invested a period of her life, studying about the life and death of Jesus. I recognized that she was intellectual and highly committed, and I was embarrassed that as an unbeliever, in that period of her life she had studied more diligently, had read more widely, had invested herself more thoroughly in knowing Jesus’ life, than I could have claimed, even as a Southern Baptist preacher’s kid who was studying for “the ministry.”
She told me that her study had convinced her, by the biblical and non-biblical evidence, that there had in fact lived a man named Jesus. That he had lived in first-century Palestine. That he had taught and healed and claimed a small band of disciples. That he had, in fact, been killed by the Romans. She even believed that something mysterious seemed to have happened following his death, but what it was, she could not know for certain. And because there was no “fact” there. She could not believe.
I could not convince her of a risen Christ. I should have introduced her to Mary, the woman of questionable reputation. To impulsive Peter. To Thomas, the “doubter”. Most importantly, what I should have done was to introduce her to myself. And I should have had the maturity, the confidence, and the honesty to say, “I don’t know what happened either. But here’s my story…”
You see. What happened in the tomb did not matter. What mattered is what happened to Mary. What happened to John and Peter. To Thomas and Cleopas.
And what happened in the tomb still does not matter. If it does not happen to me.
This “happening” is called conversion.
In the epilogue to his work entitled The Book of God, Walt Wangerin tells briefly of Saul’s conversion. He tells it this way:
This, then, is the story that was told through the years and the centuries and the millennia to come. The disciples preached it in Jerusalem, adding more and more people to their company until the number of those baptized swelled into the thousands. . . After twelve years of increasing conflict, King Herod Agrippa took bloody measures against this growing Church. He ordered [executions]. . . Nevertheless, the story still was told.
Among those who persecuted the followers of Jesus was a Pharisee born in Tarsus at the northeastern sweep of the seas, A Jew of wild intelligence and passionate legalism. He hated those who scorned the laws of God. He saw the Church as subversive and dangerous. But then the story that he strove to abolish rose up and overwhelmed him, becoming his only reality.
Wangerin, pp. 631-632 (emphasis added)
The amazing thing about Easter, which is the miraculous thing about resurrection is that the story became reality. For Mary. For Peter. For Cleopas. For Saul of Tarsus. The amazing thing about Easter, which is the miraculous thing about resurrection is that the story still has the power to become reality. For Russ and Carrie and Frank and Gwen… For those, including us, who encounter the risen Christ, it can become our only reality.
This is the meaning of conversion.
For the next six weeks, Amy and I want to trace some of the steps in the development of the early Church through the book of Acts. How did it begin? Why did it begin? What were its main impulses? How did the wind of God blow through that time and those people? This is the interesting story to me. This is the fascination of Easter to me. Not the tomb, but their testimony. Not some fact, but their faith. Not the resurrection, but its reality in their lives.
We want to look at the development of this story, this story which became the only reality for those first believers, in part, because we believe that those who claim we live in a “post-Christian” era are correct.
If the Church is “dead” in a matter of speaking, then… how will God breathe life into it, again? If Park Road Baptist is in a period of revitalization, a “rebirth” of sorts, where will the wind of God will blow? If you are, individually, at the end of your rope, spiritually dry, emotionally exhausted, physically alone, what life will come?
Barbara Brown Taylor is an Episcopal priest and an acclaimed writer and speaker. In a sermon entitled “A Church in Ruins,” she says it this way:
As best I can figure, the Christian era ended during my lifetime. When I was eight years old in small-town Alabama, there was nothing to do on Sundays but to go to church. Everything else was closed, because decent people both observed the Sabbath and removed temptation from those who did not… In school we prayed to God as routinely as we pledge allegiance to the flag, and we memorized the Ten Commandments alongside our multiplication tables.
By the time I reached high school, God was dead. Pictures of Kent State and the My Lai massacre were tattooed on people’s minds, and they turned their outrage on what they had been taught about God. God was not good. God did not answer prayer. God, for all practical purposes, was dead. All bets were off. Human beings were free to construct their own realities from any materials at hand and to express themselves any way they pleased. When lightning did not strike, their confidence grew along with their fear: that perhaps they really were alone in the universe after all. (Taylor, The Preaching Life, p.5, emphasis added).
We can weep and wail and bemoan the loss of a “Christian era” if we choose, and preachers can pound their pulpits weekly, crying out for a return of “old fashioned values.” But unless we can convince each other that our own story is what keeps Jesus alive in the world today, there will be no change. Without conversion, there will be no change. To the culture at large. To the Church as an institution. To the congregation of individual believers.
I do struggle with the cultural changes that are sweeping across 21st century America, and sometimes I fear. For myself. More often, I fear for my children. But fear aside, I know in my heart that the answer will not be found in restoring the “Christian Church” to any “rightful role” in American civic life. No, the answer is much more difficult than that, because the Church, too, needs conversion.
Bill O’Brien served as a Southern Baptist Missionary for many years in Indonesia. Later he was an administrator at the SBC’s Foreign Mission Board. For the last decade he directed the Global Center for Missions at Samford University. If any knows and believes in Christian Missions, it is Bill O’Brien. But Bill said to me a few years ago, “I don’t want to be called a ‘Christian’ any more. Because around the world, the word ‘Christian’ has become synonymous with a particular brand of American politics. I want to be called a ‘Christ-follower’ and not a ‘Christian’.” If Bill O’Brien no longer wants to be called “Christian.” The Church needs conversion.
Conversion is not equal to “salvation” as it is routinely preached. “Salvation” is a one-moment, eternity-altering event which makes us “safe” for God – safe from God. Conversion, on the other hand, is a life-long process of “working out our salvation in fear and trembling.” It may begin with drama, with some “Damascus Road” experience, but this event is not salvation – only its beginning. Conversion is a process which begins and continues to evolve in us, each time we encounter Truth and, like Saul, are willing to be changed by it. Truth is a becoming…
And conversion does not make us safe. What do we do when we are safe? We sit back and relax. We make ourselves comfortable. Enjoy what is ours, and enjoy our safety. Saul of Tarsus was as “safe” as anyone could possibly be – and then he met Jesus. And his world became dangerously unsafe, but, oh, so much more real.
The Church was born, not because Easter changed Jesus, but because those who said they had experienced the risen Christ changed the world in his name. The story became their only reality, and that reality made all the difference.
These lines from the pen of T.S. Elliot are often quoted:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
If we do live in a “post-Christian” era with a Church which is no longer the center of society, we are faced with the frightening but opportune challenge, to experience the risen Christ, again, and to make that experience our reality – for the first time. This opportunity changed the world 2000 years ago. Nothing short of the experience of Saul can change the world today.
For the Church, and for many individuals in the church, the time is right for us to be Converted Again -- For the first time!
Amen.
Prayer
O God of Great Possibility
Convict us this day
Of our need for Conversion.
Blind us, like Saul of Tarsus,
To the un-reality which can be our only vision
When we see only with our eyes,
And awaken in us, even today,
A world of the possible
(A world of the impossible made possible)
When we are made to see with the eyes of faith
Give us your vision.
Easter in us today
To make resurrection our only reality.
O God of Great Possibility
In us even today
Do the impossible:
Give us your eyes
And Christ’s compassion;
Give us your heart
And Christ’s hands;
Give us your Spirit
And the mind of Christ
That we might be born again
To the reality
That you believe in us,
That you have chosen us,
That you need us
To continue to converting the world
From chaos to beauty
From darkness to light
From death to life, eternal.
O God of Great Possibility
Convert us again – for the first time,
That in your world we might be
Instruments of Your Peace.
As we pray this day for Gavin Carr and Richard Cole,
For Jerry and Hilda Moulton and the family of Robbie Shaw
As we pray for these and for other great needs
In our small world
Convince our skeptical minds
Our unfaithful hearts
That prayer, like resurrection
Can change the world
When it comes to us.
So pray in us this day:
Speak to us
Speak through us
Speak for us when we cannot
And let your silence take pity
On our words.
O God of Great Possibility:
Hear our prayer.
Change our reality.
Amen.