Sermon preached at the Church of Christ the Cornerstone
Sunday 18th April 2010 (Easter 3)
What happened to Saul of Tarsus as recorded in the Acts of the Apostles was the classic ‘Damascus Road Experience’; it has put that expression into our vocabulary. Today such a radical change is treated with suspicion. No politician likes to be accused of ‘doing a U-turn.’ Before another election, Mrs Thatcher famously declared ‘the lady’s not for turning!’ But Saul did change direction, specifically with regard to Jesus of Nazareth and the Christian faith. He had tried to stamp it out but now he became one of its great ambassadors. The change was unexpected and unsought but utterly life-changing. What kind of change was it?
Conversion doesn’t just mean changing religion or denomination. This September when the Pope comes to Coventry, he will declare Cardinal John Henry Newman to be a saint. When Cardinal Newman described himself as ‘the only convert’ at the 1st Vatican Council, he meant that he had been an Anglican and had become a Roman Catholic. What happened to Saul of Tarsus was not that he changed from one religion to another. Many years later, when the Roman commandant in Jerusalem asks him who he is, he still says “I am a Jew…” (Acts 21.39; 22.3), not “I was a Jew but now I have become a Christian.”
So what is conversion? Conversion is the work of God. Ever since the time of Paul, some people have thought us preachers are proper fools. Some might say to me “you’ve been preaching for over forty years; how many people have you converted?” The answer is none, but whenever by God’s grace someone has heard what I have said and believed it and been converted, the work of conversion is entirely God’s. It seems ridiculous to imagine that people can actually be radically changed for the better by listening to someone preaching. But we keep on preaching and God keeps on converting people. When Paul wrote to the Corinthians about his preaching he said that ‘the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to those who are being saved it is the power of God.’ (1 Cor 1:18) Notice that these are not fixed categories of ‘the lost’ and ‘the saved’; they are ‘journeying’ words. God’s work of conversion is changing ‘being lost’ people into ‘being saved’ people.
So what happens when God converts someone? There are many famous accounts where people have described their conversion. As well as Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan wrote an account of his conversion which he entitled Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners. The classic sequence is conviction of sin – realising the gulf between the person you are and the person you should be, repentance – a change of heart, mind and direction, receiving forgiveness and assurance. It is still valid, but there are other roads. As well as The Damascus Road, there is The Jericho Road – being cared for when at rock bottom and brought to safety and health. And there is The Emmaus Road – from confusion and despair to a realisation of the transforming presence of the risen Christ.
Conversion is more than repentance. Repentance is something that God enables us to do but we have to do it. Every time we gather for worship, our prayers include an element of repentance. It is a reality check because we live in a culture where we are constantly expected to present a positive image – hordes of candidates are scouring the country doing it right now! – but when we come before God who sees us as we really are, such veneers are pointless. Some repentance can be frequent but short-lived; like the man who said “it’s easy to give up smoking – I’ve done it dozens of times!” It is after we have had a change of heart, mind and direction that God changes the actual person you are, and that is conversion.
What about those people who have never known a time when they didn’t believe? Do they still need to be converted? Most people brought up in a Christian home experience a time of drifting, or rebellion, or reassessment. We began with our parents’ faith and assumed it was true but eventually came to the point of asking “what do I believe for myself?” God’s work can be quiet, almost imperceptible. You could catch the Eurostar from St Pancras to Paris and fall asleep on the train. When you reach Paris, you know you have arrived, even though you have no idea when you crossed the border.
Conversion is not only for individuals; there is a need for both personal and social conversion. Social conversion is more than the benefit to society when more individuals are converted. It is the transformation of society itself by the power of the Gospel. Engaging in social conversion inevitably brings us into the realm of politics, whichever party you support. When we pray that God’s kingdom may come and God’s will be done on earth as it is in heaven, we are asking for a changed society and offering ourselves as agents of that change. It is a good thing to aim in life to leave the earth a little more like heaven than you found it. Social conversion addresses the national disgrace of 85,000 people in prison, the widening gap between rich and poor, the causes and consequences of marriage breakdown and broken families. It does so not by condemning those who have failed but by reaching out in costly compassion as Jesus did in Galilee, leaving us an example to follow in his steps.
Our Gospel reading this morning is one of my favourite parts of the Easter story. Peter was still under the cloud of having denied knowing Christ. He only knew how to do two things: following Jesus and fishing! How could he follow Jesus now? Better go fishing… Then comes another turning point – an unexpected appearance of Jesus, a life-transforming encounter. Peter can’t wait for the boat to land; his enthusiasm reminds me of Forrest Gump jumping out of his shrimp boat when he sees Lt Dan! Peter learns that Jesus still loves him and recommissions him to love others. 153 fish represent 153 Gentile nations; Peter is still to be a fisher of men.
Cynics will always scorn the possibility of conversion, just waiting for the reformed criminal to reoffend or the recovering addict to relapse. But the power to change the heart of a person, a change as radical as that from death to life, flows from the resurrection of Christ. It is because of Easter that we can be changed, not just when the last trumpet sounds, but now!
In some ways conversion is unrepeatable, like baptism, but at the same time, it is not just a once-for-all crisis. It is a stage in the process of becoming a disciple of Jesus Christ. In fact, the renewal of your conversion can be a reaffirmation of the faith in which you were baptised. The hymn writer Philip Doddridge wrote ‘High heaven, that heard the solemn vow, that vow renewed shall daily hear.’ Whether or not there has been such a life-changing moment in your life, each one of us can know that we have been and are being changed from ‘being lost’ people into ‘being saved’ people. When you think what God has done in your own life, you are better equipped to tell your story of growing faith to others. That is the best way to pass the faith on. Paul was ‘not disobedient to the heavenly vision’ he received on the Damascus Road and Peter never denied again the Master’s commission to feed his flock. Through their faithfulness, the faith reached us. Through our faithfulness, this same life-transforming message will reach others as yet unborn when they, too, need God’s gracious work of conversion.
