We have seen this week the heartbreak and confusion the violent act of one disturbed man can cause. So it is one of those ironies of the lectionary that we come to conversion of Saul who is, when we encounter him a man of anger and violence.

Saul is first introduced to us in the seventh chapter of Acts where he is an eyewitness and supporter of an act of violence. We meet him at the execution by stoning of the Christian martyr Stephen. It is Saul, the young, smart, devout Pharisee who watches the coats of those who are throwing stones and approves of their action. Why? Because Saul is no different than the radical religionists we see today. For him the best way to protect his Jewish faith was for him to do all that he could to destroy the people who in his mind are guilty of the heresy of following the Way of Jesus. For Saul the only good followers of Jesus is a dead or imprisoned follower of Jesus. Then Saul met Jesus for himself and everything changed.

Two things are going on in this story of the conversion of Saul. The first is the story of a man whose life was transformed, radically changed inside and outside. While his personality remained the same, our personalities seldom change, Saul’s motivation for living was reversed. No longer did he live to shut the church of Jesus Christ down, he now lives to spread its good news message everywhere he goes.

It all sounds pretty cut and dried, "just the facts ma’am" until you realize that Theophilus means "friend of God", that this is a word to the church, and that Luke is writing to whoever is open to learning more about what it means to follow Jesus.

After the stoning of Stephen, Luke tells us in the eighth chapter of Acts about Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch who was reading one of prophesies that the church believes Jesus fulfills. When he asked Philip who the scriptures were about, Philip told him all about Jesus and as they passed a pond, the man says to Philip, "here is water, what is to prevent me from being baptized?" (Acts 8.37). The answer of course was no thing, nothing prevented Philip from baptizing the eunuch, and so he did. Lives were changed and it was all good.

Then there is Saul who is that person that cannot stand to see lives changed, who loves the status quo, who does not react well when a life is turned around. He and people like him like the box they are in and want everybody else in there with them. They are so committed to orthodoxy, to a straight and narrow view of the way things should be, that they cannot acknowledge that life has few twists and turns and some of them are life changing.

As the good news of Jesus Christ is spread, Saul acts like every person who believes that it is just to destroy those who believe differently than they do. No ecumenical witness, no interfaith activity, it’s my way or the highway, and be quick about getting out of my way. Saul wants these followers of Jesus stopped now. He gets a bounty hunting license in the form of a letter allowing him to travel between Jerusalem and Damascus rounding up Christians as he finds them.

The Saul meets Jesus and everything changes. Not all stories about how we come to know Jesus as Lord are as dramatic as this one, but the truth is sometimes we come to know Jesus in ways that surprise us so much that we didn’t even see it coming. Saul who was so hostile to those transformed by the good news is himself about to be changed in a miraculous way.

We know the story, though we tend to add our own embellishments. William Willimon gives us an example: "Flannery O’Connor 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’ (p.355). No passage in Acts is more familiar than the account of the conversion of Saul, yet few passages are more subject to misinterpretation - for one thing, the New Testament never says that Paul was on a horse!" (Interpretation. Acts. William Willimon. Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1998, p.73), it is just the way the story has been passed on to us.

The important thing is this, Saul has a life-changing vision. He hears his name called twice which tells us that what follows is important. Jesus speaks to him, "Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?"

"Why am I persecuting you? Who are you, what makes you special? I do not know who you are."

"I am the one you discriminate against and put down, even now. It is me that you are persecuting every time you tie up believers in me so that they can be thrown in to prison or killed. It is me that you persecute with all of this racism, and warfare, this violence on college campuses and in workplaces, and this hatred and intolerance in my name. I am the one to whom you do violence, the one whom you disrespect. That is who I am."

"And, Saul, I am also the one who loves you and will redeem you and turn your life around. Go on to Damascus, Saul, and wait there." And so Saul goes, the one who lead people bound up has to be lead into the city, so overwhelmed that he cannot see, or eat.

But someone is sent to help Saul. He gives Ananias a vision and a word of instruction to care for Saul. He is a reluctant caretaker. We would be too if we were Christians who knew what Saul had been up to. So we understand when he says, "Look Jesus, I know Saul, I know his reputation, he is not our kind, in fact he hates us, can’t we just leave him where he is?"

Our transformation happens when we see each other, even our adversaries as human beings loved by God. We never know, we may, as we care for those to whom God has sent us, be God’s instrument in someone else’s redemption and thereby find our own. That random act of kindness, paying a good deed forward, loving our enemies in Jesus’ name helps us to be better people. That is how it was for Ananias and it’s how it is for us. Besides, Jesus has work for Saul, the guardian of Jewish law to do.

"Ananias, Saul will no longer bring people to stand trial for their faith, instead he will spread the faith beyond Jerusalem to where Gentiles live. He will take my name," Jesus says, "and my message far and wide to the Gentiles.

Isn’t it amazing what happens when we listen to Jesus? When we do what he says, love as he loves, go where he sends us? By the time Ananias gets to where Saul is, he knows that Saul is not longer an enemy but he is "Brother Saul". He is now the one whose sight is restored, who receives some food, perhaps it was communion; and after he eats, he is the one who gets up and offers himself for baptism and whose life is changed. I imagine that on the way up out of the water, this new follower of Jesus Christ remembered the Psalm that says: "You have turned my mourning into dancing; you have taken off my sackcloth and clothed me with joy" (Psalm 30.11).

His strength restored, his life transformed, Saul goes back to the synagogues not to seek permission to arrest people who follow Jesus, but so that he himself can declare that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God.

Saul’s transformation reminds us of three things we seek our own transformation. One, the kind of transformation Saul experienced is indeed the work of Christ working through him. It was not Saul’s doing, he simply received it as a gift of grace. May we be open to such grace at work in us.

Two, Saul was changed from a man confident in his own history and ability to one who came to see his dependence on God and others. He had no lack of confidence in himself, but he now knows how to give God all the glory for all that he is and all that he has. By the time he writes to the church in Galatia, Paul will say, "it is not I who lives, but Christ who lives in me" (Galatians 2.20). May we give God glory for all that we have and all that we are.

And third, Saul came to symbolize the power of God to transform an enemy into a brother. He gets a new name. His Hebrew name Saul, becomes the Latin, Paul (Willimon, p.78-79). We will read the rest of his story through the book of Acts and we will see how he shaped the life of the early church in his letters to those churches, we will see this man who breathed murder and violence become a transformed leader in the church’s mission and a declarer of victory in Jesus Christ (I Corinthians 15.57), and we will see in his life how God through Jesus Christ will transform our own when we are open to what God is doing in us.

One writer says, "we will not all be stopped in the road by a brilliant light. We will not all hear a voice calling us by name out of that light, nor have a vision in which the Lord instructs us to go to a specific person and perform a specific ritual. But we can be transformed in the ways Saul was transformed. Relinquishing the violence in ourselves and in our culture, trusting the Christian community to help us do that, is not easy. But it is what Jesus, calling to us from his solidarity with the oppressed and persecuted, is asking. Answering that call will transform us" (May Schertz "Turn In The Road" www.christiancentury.org/article.lasso?id+3138).

May God continue the work of transformation in us. Thanks be to God. Amen.