Conversion

Easter 3                                                                                                   18 April 2010

Acts 9:1-20                                                                                             John 21:1-19

e are presented today with two different resurrection appearances of our Lord.  The Gospel story about Jesus at the Lake eating fish with his disciples is a beloved story and fits in with the other resurrection appearances that the Gospels relate.  Here Jesus is seen as the same, yet very different.  His disciples recognize him, and yet there is something strange about him.  He can eat with them—fish and bread, just as in the feeding of the 5000—but he doesn’t need to eat. 

hen we come to the story of the resurrected Jesus in the lesson from the Acts of the Apostles, however, we have a different kind of appearance.  It is the last time Jesus manifested himself in his resurrected humanity in this world—and it was to a man who had not known him during his ministry on earth and who was an active opponent of his followers.  It was a strange appearance, but, at least to Paul, it was unmistakable.  The appearance of our Lord to Paul, or rather, Saul, was a turning point in his life and led to his conversion.  Jesus’ appearance by the lake, and the subsequent conversation he had with Peter, was also the occasion of a conversion in his life.  Neither man was the same after his encounter with the risen Lord.  And that is what I would like to explore with you for a while this morning—the nature of conversion.

ow is a person converted?  What does it mean to be converted?  Some people associate conversion with a dramatic emotional experience and it might well take place in that way.  But the experience is not the conversion.  Paul’s encounter with the risen Lord was enough to knock him from his horse and blind him.  But that was not his conversion.  His conversion was what happened in the aftermath of the encounter and went far deeper than physical blindness.  Paul had to process the information he had been given and take account of the reality of Jesus’ resurrection in a way he had not done before.  His conversion began to be seen when he started to preach the very Jesus he had been persecuting before, in Jesus’ disciples and friends.  Peter’s conversion was seen, not in his rather emotional confrontation with the Lord about his denial, but as he took his place in the leadership position in the early church and faithfully bore witness to Christ in Jerusalem, Judea, and to the far reaches of the Roman Empire. 

o what is this conversion we are talking about?  How does it happen?  I think what precipitates conversion is what you might call a cognitive dissonance—which is to say, we come to be aware of a reality which we cannot account for in the ways of life and modes of thinking to which we have become accustomed.  The experience that can lead to conversion is what we might call a kind of reality therapy.  I am not expert in counseling, but there is a form of therapy, about which I have read, which is meant to confront a person with realities he or she has been trying to avoid.  Sometimes we have grown up in situations in which we have learned ways of coping that in later life do not serve us very well anymore.  Sometimes we have faced pain or received emotional wounds that have led to defensiveness on our part that in later life keep us from experiencing life in its richness.  Sometimes we have developed ways of thinking and relating to people that were based on misunderstandings, or less than adequate understandings, of people and circumstances.  If we are to grow, to develop as human beings, to be true friends, to be good neighbors, we have to lay aside defensive and narrow ways of thinking about life and the world.  This laying aside can lead to a different outlook and different relationships with people.  We can be converted to a better way of living with people and in the world. 

hat we are trying to say about religious conversion is very similar to this.  When people live their lives without a close relationship with God—especially a close relationship of the kind that can be had with God in Christ by the power of the Spirit—they live lives that are curtailed and narrowed and diminished in many important ways.  They do not know the meaning of their lives in the world, they do not live into the fullness of the purpose that God has for them, they do not understand rightly their connection with all their neighbors in the loving intention of God, and they misunderstand their relationship to the natural world.  Sometimes the manner of life such people pursue is not too terribly destructive, but sometimes it is.  Whether it is horrible or not, it is finally frustrating to their full human potential, since human beings were created for life in fellowship with God. 

t is possible for people to drift along through this world without ever really seriously taking God into account.  They may try to enlist him on their side in a pet project, they may have a superstitious attachment to God as if he were an idol they could control or a deity they could bargain with on occasion.  In our media-saturated world, it is possible for people to go a long time and never be confronted with God’s reality and the need they have for him, since they live in the midst of manifold distractions, under the influence of models of life which are focused on fulfillment as a matter of consumer satisfaction.  But in most lives, at some time, an awareness of a larger reality, of a need for God, threatens to break in.  Sometimes it is because of a word spoken by a friend, sometimes through a life crisis.  Always, however, the Holy Spirit plays the role of the master therapist.  No one has the power really to break through the defenses of a person nor the right to manipulate another.   True conversion is not a kind of brow-beating.  But, if this new information is not resisted, this new awareness of God’s reality can revolutionize a person’s inner life.  He can become aware of how he has misconstrued his life in his false thinking, how he has lived for himself and how that has resulted in his being far less than God intends him to be.  She can see how she has wasted so much of her time, worrying about little things that don’t matter, pursuing trivial interests that are a distraction from the main things in life—all of which have to do with love and faith. 

ll of this reality can lead to serious conversion of heart and life.  It begins as the mind processes the new information and it takes form in life as the heart accepts obediently the importance of the new information, and cooperates with the Holy Spirit of God who works at the depths of our personalities.  The radical character of the conversion will be in proportion to the falsity of the previous life.  Paul’s conversion was more radical than Peter’s since his former way of life was so much more misdirected. 

ut we ought not to think that conversion, once experienced, is over, never to be repeated.  Many of us require several if not many conversions.  Perhaps none will be as radical as the one that got us on to the right track initially, but many of us learn to walk in the right way only over a long time and with many falls and failings.  That is, life is often a matter of learning how to be open regularly to new information and so to repeated conversions.  We don’t get it all at once.  This was true of Peter, too, as you recall.  After the early mission of the Church got going well, the issue of the relationship of Christians to the old Jewish law became a problem.  It took a while for all the apostolic leaders to sort it out.  Once Paul had to rebuke Peter publicly because his way of treating Greek Christians and Jewish Christians was hypocritical—he proclaimed liberty to Greeks and then fell back under the law when the Jewish Christians were around.  Peter recognized that Paul spoke the truth and he changed—that is, he experienced a conversion. 

e even have a model for how this process works, one which you have heard of before: The Benedictine Promise.  As in most of these models, we start with a triangle.  Imagine at the top of the triangle the idea of Stability.  This refers to the intention to stay with the Christian community and all its people, in a place, believing that God has for you there all that you need to grow up to maturity in Christ.  The second angle of the triangle is Obedience.  As we stick with each other and faithfully read scripture and pray and love each other, God will speak to us, the Spirit will touch our hearts.  Reality will be made available to us.  We shall be confronted with our inner attitudes and ways of coping with life and people and we shall have them all held up to the light of the Word of God.  There are not any of us for whom this light will not from time to time shine on areas that are not what they should be.  This angle is called Obedience, because in order that this truth might actually do us some good, we have to listen to it and for it; we have to be open to what the Bible, the preacher, our brothers and sisters in the congregation, have to tell us.  If we take it in and let the Spirit apply it to our hearts and lives, then we shall experience that last angle of the triangle, Conversion.  That is, we shall be transformed, changed, more and more, into the image of Christ that God intends for us. 

ometimes people who are not in the Church have this attitude towards Church people that we are a narrow bunch, with rules and regulations that keep us confined within cramped spaces and hide-bound ideas.  It is certainly the case that Christians have been this way in the past, and that some are still—living in denial of reality, with narrow understandings of God and the world and life and death.  But I would say of these Christians that they are not yet fully or adequately converted.  Christians are meant to embrace reality in its fullness because the One with Whom we have to do is the Creator and Redeemer of all—of the whole world.  He is Reality itself, the fount of all that is, evil excepted.   Our argument with the world around us has to do with what is real, what we need to take account of, what belongs to our full humanity.  If someone can show us that our ways of coping with the world have led to a diminished appreciation for something that is real and true, then we are duty bound to accommodate ourselves to it and let it convert us to a deeper way of living.  We are also meant to show to the world outside of the Church a way of living that is deep and rich and fully human, with the power of breaking down and breaking through the denial of the reality of God that cripples human life in so many places.  And the fullest reality to which we can point people is the reality of the Resurrected Christ.  When we begin to take into account the full meaning of Jesus’ Rising from the Dead, then we are plunged into reality in its fullest sense, and nothing can be the same as before, as both Peter and Paul discovered.