Thomas J Parlette
“Approaching Damascus”
Acts 9: 1-20
5/4/25
In the summer of 2021, as the world was slowly emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic, an interesting commercial emerged that featured these encouraging words – “We need to come back to feeling our best selves again. Back to inviting. Back to caring. Back to life.”
Was that commercial produced by a church? Was it a public service announcement promoting good mental health? No, believe it or not, it was a commercial produced by the Jamaican Tourist Board to promote vacations to Jamaica.
“While everyone has been impacted by the pandemic,” explained the country’s minister of tourism as he introduced the campaign, “we want to let everyone know that Jamaica is good for the spirit. Therefore, it is the ideal destination to help people rediscover their sense of adventure, natural curiosity, human connection, and ultimately realize their most valuable human potential.” (1)
You’ve got to hand it to the Jamaicans – it was a shrewd and winsome message – co-opting vaguely spiritual language for the sake of selling vacations on the beach. This was not simply a quick getaway sitting on the beach under palm trees with a tropical drink in your hand – this was an invitation back to life.
That’s what’s happening in this passage from Acts this morning. As Saul was approaching Damascus, he has an encounter with God, through the person of the Risen Jesus, that literally knocks him to his knees. And Jesus invites him back to life – life as one of his followers, instead of his chief persecutor.
For many Christians, this is a familiar story – one that is often referred to as “the Conversion of Saul.” In his book “Why Preach? Why Listen?”, William Muehl suggests that on any given Sunday when you look out at a congregation, you can imagine that many of those sitting in the pews almost didn’t come that day. They considered staying home because in their minds, their faith does not measure up to the faith of others in the congregation. For Muehl, such a dramatic story of conversion contributes to what he calls a “faith inferiority complex.” (2)
When people talk about their faith journeys, most share a narrative that begins something like this: “I was raised in the church and never knew a time when I was not a Christian.” There is something comforting about having such an early faith identity. There is nothing with such a faith statement unless you compare it with a story like this one, and ten it seems woefully inadequate.
I remember when I started Seminary, it was quite common to share conversion stories around the dinner table. I never really had a good story to tell. I was raised in Presbyterian Churches across the country – with the one exception being when we attended a Congregational church in Topsfield, Massachusetts, when we lived there. I had always been active in church and didn’t really have a conversion story or a “born again” story to share.
I remember one classmate in particular who had an interesting story to tell. She was a second, or maybe third career seminarian, from Georgia, new to the Christian faith. After she converted to Presbyterianism from Catholicism, she was debating about going to Seminary, in particular Princeton Seminary in New Jersey. But then, on her birthday, the man she was dating at the time, gave her a fur coat, and she said, “It was right then I knew I had my answer, it was my Damascus Road moment. God was telling me to go to Princeton Seminary and study to become a pastor – why else would I receive such a warm fur coat unless God meant me to go north and go to Seminary.”
I’m not sure that was God’s intended message. Anyway, she did not return for the second semester.
If the truth be known, we have some discomfort with the story of the conversion of Saul. It’s such a dramatic story. It’s easy to get a bit defensive and say, “Even though I’ve never had a Damascus Road experience, I still believe God has been at work in my life.”
It’s important to remember that what happened on the road to Damascus was noteworthy precisely because it was not typical of the way most people became converts. Luke goes out of his way to let us know the significance of this conversion by giving us three accounts of it – here in Acts 9, again in Acts 22, and another in Acts 26. Since Luke was a very concise and purposeful writer, this repetition stands out.
In his commentary on Acts, William Willimon encourages us to pay careful attention to this story so that we can gain insight for our own lives. He suggests that the story is so familiar that its meaning may be taken for granted and therefore misunderstood. He cites an interesting quote by Flannery O’Connor, who once said of Paul, “I reckon the Lord knew that the only way to make a Christian out of that one was to knock him off his horse.” (3) Never mind that the passage never mentions that Paul was on a horse. O’Connor was probably referring to the well-known Caravaggio painting of this scene that depicts Paul lying flat on his back with a powerful –looking horse towering over him.
Despite the reference to a horse for Paul, Flannery O’Connor does guide our attention in the right direction. The main character in this and every conversion story is ultimately God. It is God who changes lives. The one thing clear about Saul’s Damascus Road experience is the power of God that turned him from someone “breathing threats and murder against the disciples of Jesus”, to someone who “proclaimed Jesus so that all who heard him were amazed.” Saul’s conversion was not something he decided to do – he did not sit down and make a pros and cons list. No, it was God’s doing, through the person of Jesus Christ.
There is nothing more difficult to preach to 21st century listeners than the “unbelievable” stories in the Bible, and this one surely pushes the limits. It is far easier to leave this story in the past and deem it “ancient and irrelevant” to us modern, sophisticated people. We wonder – “Did this really happen? It’s never happened to me. It’s never happened to anyone I know. Why doesn’t this happen more often? It sure would be easier to take God and Jesus more seriously if this kind of thing happened a little more often.”
Not many of us are “breathing threats and murder against our opponents.” However, we have all been on wrong paths that have been injurious to ourselves and others, just like Saul. We’ve all been headstrong, we’ve all been stubborn, we’ve all been blinded by our own ambition, and caught in addictive behaviors and oblivious to the true cost to others and ourselves. On this level, we’ve all been on the wrong path, just like Saul.
But the good news of Eastertide is that even in our failure – God comes to us. In the person of Jesus Christ, God comes to us and redeems us. God redeemed Saul, gave him a new name, and placed him on a new path. This same mercy and grace and forgiveness is available to each of us, and to our faith communities. The Easter miracle proves that God loves and forgives friends, betrayers, doubters, skeptics – even God’s own persecutors and enemies, even those who breath threats and murder.
The God Who Is Love has no need of being defended by violent means. In fact, Love grabs Saul’s fist in mid-punch and unbalances him, knocking him to the ground and saving him from a life of hatred and violence. (4)
As Carl Jung once said – “Where you stumble and fall, there you find pure gold.” (5)
The gold Saul found was a new name – Paul.
A new call – to be an Apostle of Jesus.
And an invitation back to life.
That same invitation is extended to us in this Easter season. Come back to life – life in the Risen Lord Jesus. Amen.
1. Homileticsonline, retrieved 4/5/25.
2. William Muehl, Why Preach? Why Listen? (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1986), 11.
3. William H. Willimon, Acts, Interpretation series (Louisville, KY: John Knox Press, 1988) 73.
4. Cathy Caldwell Hoop, Connections, (Westminster John Knox Press, 2018), 220.
5. Homileticsonline, retrieved 4/5/25.
