Amanda McMillen, “A Revelation of Sin & Mercy”
The other day I was stuck in that special springtime school-year traffic that we will hopefully get a few months of relief from very soon - I was heading home from work, hungry for dinner, with a baby in the backseat who was getting increasingly irritated and with cars on every side of me, at a full stop, and no side streets to turn off of and I thought to myself - I’m literally stuck here for God knows how long. And then, in some way that I can only describe as miraculous, I heard a voice that seemed to come from outside of myself and it said - You aren’t stuck in traffic, Amanda, you are the traffic. These people aren’t just in your way, you are actually very much in theirs!
Sometimes we have moments of revelation that take us out of our present reality that we are blind to and give us a glimpse of something from another perspective. It’s like David Foster Wallace’s 2005 commencement address to Kenyon College graduates, which begins with the story of two fish swimming along, and one passes by and says “Morning, boys, how’s the water?” and the two fish keep swimming for a minute and then one says to the other - “what is water?” Sometimes we are just too close to something to really see it for what it is. We become blind to our circumstances from any perspective other than our own.
In the last couple of weeks we’ve been reading stories in Scripture about what happened after Jesus’ resurrection - how different people responded when they heard the news, and what came of the disciples after the fact. In our story from Acts today, we meet Saul, a devout Pharisee, committed to the religious law, who has an unexpected encounter with God as he goes about his business of stamping out any sign of these followers of Jesus. Saul understood himself to be a champion of God, eliminating this sect of Judaism that seemed to believe that their Messiah had come, was crucified, and finally resurrected. Saul was concerned with wiping out followers of “the Way” to preserve the purity of God’s righteousness. But in reality, he was persecuting God himself, Jesus Christ, by seeking out his followers for death. He needed some sort of miraculous encounter to completely alter his perspective.
In the Bible, when God’s people are being persecuted, we sometimes read of that person being “struck down”, that’s the language used, a kind miraculous and sudden death comes about in order to save God’s people. It happened in Exodus when Pharoah’s people were struck down in the Red Sea as the Israelite slaves made their way across to freedom. But when Saul, Jesus’ enemy number one, is “struck down” to the ground, he is not dead, not physically, but rather is struck blind. For three days he was without sight, the passage reads, and did not eat or drink.
The parallels of this story to these similar stories of the enemies of God being struck down in death tells us that Saul is himself also dead, here. Not literally, but in some other spiritual, very real sense. For three days, not unlike Jesus’ three days in the tomb, for three days, Saul cannot see, or eat, or drink. He went from being up on his high horse, to down in the grave. His purpose, of ending the Christian movement, is over. As far as his self-righteous career of killing Christians goes, he is as good as dead. Saul, as we know him, is no more. His perspective has been flipped upside down.
God then tells Ananias, a follower of Jesus, to go to Saul and help him regain his sight. And after Ananias admits his fears, knowing Saul’s violent reputation, God says to Ananias, “Go, for he is an instrument whom I have chosen to bring my name before Gentiles and kings and before the people of Israel”. Saul, God says, is an instrument whom I have chosen - another translation of that word instrument means “vessel” - Saul is a vessel to be filled and used for the sake of the Gospel. But if Saul is going to be a vessel, if he’s going to carry this news of the Gospel, as enemy number one of Jesus, a lot of work needs to be done first - if Saul is going to be a vessel, he must first be hollowed out.
Saul, as he is known by many, has been struck down, dead. Not physically, no, and that is a mercy. But he has been stripped of his purpose, stripped of his anger towards followers of Christ, stripped of his commitment to his perspective of the matter, stripped of his self-righteousness, his assurance that he is God’s gift to the world, and in all of that his very identity has been struck down, dead. He was wrong. The Lord Jesus is the Messiah they had longed for, and he met him on the road to Damascus. Everything that Saul once saw as his reason for living, his persecution of Christians, has been taken away from him, leaving him hollowed inside, empty. For three days, Saul is blinded in a dark, hollow tomb.
Saul has been committed to his purity campaign of righteousness, fully focused on the error of all of those around him. Not unlike one Mrs. Turpin, the infamous character from a Flannery O’Connor short story. Let me tell you about Mrs. Turpin. Mrs. Ruby Turpin is a middle-aged, self-satisfied, southern woman, quite pleased with her social standing, her respectable wealth, and her religious proclivities, who finds herself at the beginning of the story in a waiting room of a doctor’s office, surrounded by people that she is so thankful she is NOT. She thinks to herself, “Thank you Jesus that you made me myself, and not like all these other people.”
As she looks around at a poor, snotty, rude young boy who lacks the wherewithal to offer her his seat in the waiting room, and his poor mother with dirty feet and old clothes, Mrs Turpin thinks, thank you God that you made me where I am in life. Mrs. Turpin recalls how she falls asleep every night, thinking through all the people in the world, sorting them into categories of social standing, based on their wealth, their hygiene, their education, and their skin color, before falling asleep and thanking God that she and her husband Claud are as close to the top of that list as they could be. “Thank you Jesus that you made me myself!” she says.
But at the end of the story, after a prophetic young girl in the doctor’s office overhears her conversation about her self-satisfied place in society, and attacks Mrs Turpin, calling her a warthog from hell, Mrs Turpin finds herself back at home on her farm when she experiences a revelation. She looks at the hogs on her farm and asks God, “How can I be a hog and me both?” She looks at the sky in that moment, and her vision is suddenly made crystal clear, as she sees a bridge of bright light, like a pathway to heaven, and all the people she saw at that doctor’s office are on their way to glory, starting with the poor mother and son who she looked at earlier with such disgust, although now they aren’t dirty at all but rather clean and at peace, and the people of color in her town who she’s looked down on all her life at the front of the line in white robes, dignified and free, and all the people she’s always thanked God that she is NOT like, walked right into heaven in front of everyone else. And behind them were she and Claud and all others like them who she always thought were the right kind of people to be, and, O’Connor writes, “Mrs Turpin could see by their shocked and altered faces that even their virtues were being burned away”.
Mrs. Turpin, blind to her own sin, was given a revelation, a new vision, of the way God sees things, with no respect at all for her sense of status and identity. Her virtues were burned away, just as Saul’s supposed virtues were burned away. Both Saul and Mrs. Turpin, by a revelation from God taking the form of a bright blinding light, were hollowed out of their self-righteousness, hollowed out of their very identities, and filled instead with the Holy Spirit, which made them no better and no worse than anyone else.
These stories of Saul’s conversion, and of Mrs. Turpin’s revelation describes what the Gospel does to us. Jesus’ death sheds light on our sin, and in the brightness of God’s goodness we see that we are full of self-righteousness, self-satisfaction, and judgment of others, consumed with the error of those around us and completely blind to our own. One appropriate question after reading this passage might be, “Lord, where are you showing me error in my own ways? Where am I not just stuck in traffic, but actually the traffic myself?”
This encounter with one’s sin, for Saul, for Mrs Turpin, and for us all, is the turning point of the stories. This is their revelation. They were blind, dead in their sin, which is the only way that God can raise them to new life. It is in our lack of vision, in our blindness, that we become fully dependent on God’s hope of resurrection. Saul goes from independence to dependence on God, from ignorance to wisdom, and from blindness to sight. It is his blindness, ironically, his dependence on God, that allows him to finally see the errors of his ways.
Saul becomes Paul, the missionary of the church, spreading the Gospel through the Greco-Roman world, but by the grace of God, he doesn’t seem to mistake this for his own opportunity for glory. “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the worst” is how he put it to his friend Timothy. Paul’s identity, after being raised to new life on that road to Damascus, is nothing that he could have ever created for himself.
Perhaps you have questions about your identity too. You’re a mother or a father, a husband or a wife, a friend or a neighbor, a doctor or a therapist, a volunteer, a retiree, an Episcopalian, a Republican or a Democrat, a Millennial or a Boomer.
What am I if not these words I use to describe myself? Well before any of the status that you may hold, or that you don’t hold but you long to, before any of that, you are a sinner, at the mercy of a God who created you and who loves you, and that is where you find your truest self, your source of identity. Like Saul, whose commitment to his purpose in life fueled his self-righteousness, or like Mrs. Turpin whose sense of her own goodness isolated her from all others, God is on a mission to hollow out our self-identification that we hold so dear so that we might see instead how God identifies us, as a beloved broken vessel, blindly dependent on God, and filled with the mercy of Jesus.
Amen.
