William H. Willimon - "While Journeying, Suddenly a Light from Heaven" (April 29, 2001)

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-	This, the third Sunday after Easter	0:09
	we've got quite a good story,	0:11
	even if you don't know a lot about the Bible,	0:15
	there's a good chance that you do know this story.	0:18
	About Saul.	0:22
	Saul, Church enemy number one;	0:25
	Saul, the murderer on his way to Damascus	0:28
	to persecute Christians.	0:31
	Saul, struck down on the Damascus road,	0:34
	blinded by light, his life addressed,	0:38
	his name changed.	0:43
	It was such a dramatic experience,	0:48
	he had to get his named changed	0:49
	from Saul to Paul.	0:51
	Paul, the great missionary to the gentiles.	0:54
	It is a story that is always told by the church,	1:00
	at least here,	1:05
	in the afterglow of Easter.	1:07
	We're just three Sundays from Easter.	1:11
	That day when the stone was rolled away	1:14
	and dead Jesus was brought back to life	1:17
	and light shone from the empty tomb,	1:21
	and the risen Christ burst the bonds of death.	1:26
	Well, so what?	1:32
	So what if Jesus has been raised from the dead?	1:35
	So what if Jesus has been brought from death to life?	1:39
	What does that have to do with us?	1:42
	In answer: the church tells this story	1:48
	the story of a man named Saul	1:53
	and how he got born again.	1:56
	And we love stories like this one.	2:00
	Over the front door of this chapel there is a statue	2:03
	of John Wesley, the founder of Methodism,	2:08
	welcomes you to the chapel,	2:11
	and that is a story, almost as dear to Methodists	2:12
	as the story of the conversion of Saul to Paul.	2:16
	Wesley was a proper little Oxford Don	2:20
	a priest in the church of England,	2:25
	a devout Christian who had already devoted his life	2:28
	to Bible study, to preaching.	2:31
	But Wesley had no fire.	2:34
	After a disastrous stent as a missionary	2:38
	in Georgia, he went back to London,	2:41
	and in his words, one evening he went unwillingly	2:44
	to a meeting in Aldersgate Street	2:48
	where someone was reading Luther's rather dull commentary	2:51
	on the Epistle to the Romans	2:56
	and during that reading, Wesley said his heart	2:58
	was strangely warmed.	3:02
	His soul struck fire and the Wesleyan revival began.	3:06
	See it was for Wesley, a lot like Saul	3:14
	on the Damascus road.	3:17
	And I don't know, maybe I've reached that certain age	3:22
	in life but, it's occurred to me	3:26
	that maybe some of you enjoy hearing stories	3:29
	like this more than I.	3:32
	I confess that I am of that age	3:35
	where I have come to take inordinate joy	3:39
	in keeping things in their place.	3:43
	I am at that point in life,	3:47
	where I sort of like things to stay fixed.	3:50
	Bloom where you are planted, I say.	3:53
	Slippers under the bed,	3:56
	toothbrush always in the same place everyday,	3:57
	everything today, just in the same place	4:01
	that it was in yesterday and the day before.	4:04
	If something gets out of place in my morning	4:09
	rituals of awakening;	4:12
	say come down, no cornflakes in the box.	4:13
	I'm out of sync for the rest of the day.	4:17
	So maybe there is something about this story	4:21
	of Paul's Damascus road experience	4:24
	that is for me, here passed 50, less than appealing.	4:28
	And I confess, I'm a member of a church	4:36
	that's come to a certain age,	4:40
	that appears to love everything fixed in place	4:43
	just like it was yesterday and the day before.	4:47
	As a speaker I go to gatherings	4:52
	of mainline protestant churches	4:56
	and I look out and I behold a sea of hair	4:58
	the same color as mine.	5:03
	It's sad, Wesley's once bubbling church	5:06
	of revivals and great awakenings and new birth	5:09
	has become geriatric.	5:12
	The church of the over 50 crowd.	5:17
	Like cement.	5:21
	Of course people on top, people who are well-fixed,	5:24
	people who've got it made, content, self-satisfied,	5:26
	people for whom the world as it is has been fairly good	5:30
	well we don't want much change	5:35
	and we don't get much.	5:38
	We prefer to set out on a journey	5:41
	moving confidently and assuredly	5:44
	from point A to point B	5:45
	with no detours, interruptions, diversions.	5:46
	We are awfully well-accommodated.	5:52
	We are well-situated, we're just doing fine, thank you.	5:57
	Content with present arrangements.	6:02
	"O Lord," we pray on Sundays, "Preserve us from having	6:06
	"to make big moves."	6:10
	You can't teach an old dog new tricks.	6:14
	Sometimes even a young one is hard to budge.	6:17
	And yet, deep in our well-situated little hearts,	6:23
	there has been deposited this story;	6:29
	this story of Saul who was knocked down,	6:31
	heard a voice, blinded by a light,	6:35
	and whose name was changed to Paul.	6:39
	Here is a story which	6:43
	rebukes all of our characterizations	6:46
	of the Christian life as basically a neat,	6:48
	predictable, orderly, progression series	6:51
	of pleasantly continuous steps along the way	6:55
	from point A to Point B.	6:58
	With no jerks and jolts and lurches to the right	7:00
	or the left along the way.	7:04
	Sometimes,	7:08
	sometimes by the grace of a living	7:10
	and powerful God.	7:14
	Sometimes we're on these journeys	7:16
	and we get blinded by light.	7:19
	Sometimes God surprises.	7:24
	Sometimes it's as if God just reaches in and grabs us	7:27
	by the neck and jerks, jolts, blinds us.	7:31
	And we do change.	7:36
	Historian Gary Wills says:	7:40
	"If you are white, if you are male, if you are a southerner,	7:44
	over 50," guilty on all accounts.	7:47
	"there is no way to convince you that people can't change.	7:52
	"because you have experienced," Wills says,	7:57
	"radical transformation of heart and mind	8:01
	"on matters of race	8:04
	"in your own family, deep within the recesses	8:07
	"of your own soul, that you are completely convinced	8:10
	"of the possibility of radical human alteration."	8:15
	When Paul looked back later and wrote about what	8:21
	happened to him on the Damascus road that day,	8:26
	he seems not to know whether to call it birth	8:28
	or death.	8:33
	'Cause in a way it felt like both at the same time,	8:35
	it was like an old him was dying	8:38
	and a new self was being born.	8:42
	Writer Anne Braden grew up in the south in the 1930s.	8:47
	The old south.	8:51
	And yet as a college student, Braden had dinner one night	8:55
	with an African American women.	8:59
	And there at table, sharing a meal together,	9:03
	Anne Braden said that though she was an Episcopalian	9:08
	she got born again.	9:14
	There at the table, a very Episcopalian	9:17
	kind of thing to do.	9:19
	In words worthy of Paul, Anne Braden later wrote:	9:21
	"It was a tremendous revelation.	9:26
	"It was the turning point in my life.	9:28
	"All the cramping, confining walls of a lifetime	9:30
	"seemed to come tumbling down in that moment.	9:34
	"Heavy shackles seemed to fall from my feet.	9:38
	"For the first time in my 19 years on this earth	9:42
	"I felt I had room to stretch my arms and legs	9:46
	"and lift my head towards the sky.	9:52
	"Here for a moment I glimpsed a vision of the world	9:55
	"as it should be.	9:58
	"Where people are people and spirits have got room to grow.	10:00
	"I never got over it."	10:06
	And I can tell you that one of the great things	10:11
	about being a pastor is that occasionally,	10:13
	not everyday, but at least occasionally,	10:16
	you have these people stagger in	10:19
	and they tell a story	10:21
	about how they've just been	10:25
	plodding through life, minding their own business,	10:27
	keeping their heads down, obeying the rules,	10:30
	plowing the same furrow, day after day,	10:33
	not expecting, not even wanting conversion.	10:36
	And somehow God reaches in, grabs them by the neck,	10:41
	shakes them up and down, and they despite themselves,	10:46
	are different.	10:51
	And their stories are a great challenge	10:55
	to the conventional, socially approved atheism	10:58
	of the modern university.	11:02
	And I sit there, and though I try,	11:05
	I can find no sociological, economic,	11:08
	psychological, gender-determined explanation	11:10
	for why they are where now they are.	11:14
	I asked them the typical, conventional questions:	11:19
	now let's see; you say you've made this big change.	11:25
	Now, as a young child, did your mother ever beat you?	11:28
	No?	11:33
	Well okay, have you recently been dumped by your girlfriend?	11:34
	No?	11:39
	Well, is there some unresolved grief in your life?	11:40
	No?	11:45
	Well, have you recently had a dinner of Mexican food?	11:45
	What?	11:50
	And at the end of the conversation,	11:54
	I'm just stuck with saying, "Well, I guess	11:55
	"there really is a living God." You know?	12:00
	I guess Jesus Christ maybe really has been raised	12:04
	from the dead.	12:06
	Because how else to explain such a lurch in your life?	12:09
	Any God who would raise somebody from the dead,	12:16
	and after three days in the tomb,	12:20
	is just the sort of God would think it was cute	12:23
	to jerk somebody around at 50.	12:26
	And So C.S. Lewis spoke of his conversion as:	12:31
	that time before God closed in on me.	12:36
	And later he wrote a book about his conversion	12:41
	and he entitled it: "Surprised by Joy".	12:44
	Just this morning, I get up at seven o'clock,	12:51
	old people can't sleep late	12:55
	and I go down to the email	12:56
	and I get this email from a student	13:00
	an email written at 2:30 in the morning saying:	13:01
	"I'm getting ready to get out of here for the summer	13:05
	"and I've got to talk with you this week	13:07
	"without fail, I've made some amazing moves	13:08
	"in my life, some huge changes, stuff has happened,	13:11
	"I've got to start processing this."	13:15
	And I say to myself, that's amazing.	13:20
	I can't even get in the dorms	13:25
	without a magnetic, properly coded card.	13:27
	And yet, Jesus has gotten in there	13:32
	and jerked somebody around, gotten another one.	13:34
	I will make time to talk to you this week.	13:36
	Oh most of the time I want to portray	13:43
	the Christian life as this orderly progression,	13:45
	you've got to practice these spiritual disciplines,	13:48
	faith development, you need to get up and do this,	13:51
	read this from seven to eight,	13:54
	and you've gotta be here on Sundays from 11-12	13:56
	and plod your way through the bulletin	13:59
	and now everything is just by slow progression	14:02
	and gradually it'll come to you, you'll get it.	14:05
	But sometimes, but the sheer surprising grace	14:07
	of a living God, sometimes	14:11
	somebody gets grabbed.	14:15
	God jumped somebody unawares	14:18
	while they're on their way to somewhere else.	14:20
	God closes in, God claims, God converts, calls.	14:22
	Just like Saul	14:26
	on the Damascus road.	14:28
	And we realized that what we thought	14:31
	was just a matter of bourgeois respectability	14:33
	has become high adventure.	14:35
	From this pulpit, some of you were probably here,	14:39
	back in January, from this pulpit,	14:42
	preacher Barbara Brown Taylor told of a time	14:45
	when she had to sit on a seminary admissions committee.	14:49
	And they turned this student down,	14:53
	a student who was obviously unqualified	14:56
	for the academic rigors of theological study.	14:58
	But then this student, this person wrote them again	15:03
	pleading with them to accept him	15:07
	because he said, "I am in the Georgia State Prison,	15:09
	"and my parole board has said, if you will let me in,	15:12
	"they will let me out."	15:16
	(congregation laughing)	15:17
	Well, they invited him to come plead his case before them.	15:21
	And this big guy, she said, came in	15:27
	all the seminary people around	15:30
	this big old table,	15:32
	he comes in, and he tells them he said,	15:33
	"I was a confused teenager, I hit on hard times	15:35
	"I got a gun, it wasn't loaded,	15:39
	"but I went in this convenience store,	15:41
	"and thought about not doing it last minute	15:43
	"I pull that gun out.	15:44
	"Unknown to me there was an off-duty policeman	15:47
	"in the convenience store, shots rang out	15:49
	"and my life was changed forever."	15:55
	And she said with that, he lifts up his T-shirt	15:58
	exposing his large stomach, and he said:	16:00
	"That bullet went in right here,	16:02
	"came out over here, and that was my burning bush.	16:04
	"That was my Damascus road."	16:07
	And Barbara said the bad thing	16:12
	about being on the seminary admissions committee,	16:13
	of course we didn't want to admit him	16:15
	but we had read Acts nine;	16:17
	how did we know God wouldn't do something like that?	16:21
	If God could change this murderer named Saul,	16:25
	God could also probably change some nervous kid	16:30
	with an unloaded gun.	16:34
	It was just the sort of thing that God,	16:38
	a God who had raised Jesus from the dead	16:41
	might do.	16:45
	And later, in Lent, from this pulpit, Peter Gomes	16:47
	reading the story of Jesus.	16:51
	Jesus just before his death	16:53
	he goes to the house of Mary and Martha for a dinner party.	16:55
	And he said Mary was there, and Martha was there	16:58
	and Jesus was there, and old Lazarus	17:01
	whom Jesus had just raised from the dead,	17:03
	he was also there	17:05
	and well in that moment, listening to that scripture	17:06
	I thought, "Wait a minute. What kind of world is this	17:10
	"where you can go to a dinner party	17:13
	"and they seat you and say 'by the way you may remember	17:15
	"'Lazarus, he's been raised from the dead	17:18
	"'just a short time ago, hello' have a conversation."	17:21
	I tell you, you can mess up people with stories like that.	17:28
	They walk out of here, they say,	17:35
	"You know, something may be afoot."	17:37
	And it's a great joy because even folk	17:43
	who are passed 50,	17:46
	there's still some part of us that thrills to the notion	17:49
	that God	17:54
	is strong enough to change us.	17:56
	It's a joy.	18:01
	Because if we don't know a story like Saul	18:03
	on the Damascus road;	18:07
	if we've never heard about somebody getting	18:10
	radically detoured; or minding her own business on Elm St.	18:11
	Well, how could Easter be true?	18:18
	Some of you have lived in North Caroline long enough	18:26
	to remember the case of Velma Barfield.	18:28
	Velma Barfield, she poisoned her husband,	18:33
	I think he was a pastor	18:36
	and they found out that she'd possibly poisoned	18:39
	her previous husband.	18:42
	She was of course, convicted to die in our electric chair.	18:45
	And while she was on deathrow, Velma Barfield	18:51
	began a correspondence with Ruth Graham.	18:54
	Ruth Graham, wife of Dr. Billy Graham.	18:57
	And Ruth Graham wrote some moving letters	19:03
	to the governor and to anybody else who would listen	19:07
	pleading with them for the life of Velma Barfield	19:10
	because she said Velma has gone through this	19:13
	traumatic conversion,	19:16
	Jesus has gotten in there and touched her life	19:19
	she is a different person, she had repented	19:22
	she has felt remorse for her sins,	19:25
	her story has got to be told to others.	19:27
	Don't execute her.	19:30
	Well, we said, you know isn't it in the Bible	19:35
	an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth?	19:38
	We followed proper procedure, we've done everything,	19:41
	we've followed the law and if you do this,	19:44
	then you deserve that.	19:46
	But I thought the saddest thing	19:54
	when it came time for us to be conservative,	19:57
	bible-believing, evangelical Christians,	19:59
	when it came time for us truly to believe	20:04
	in the possibility of the resurrection of the dead;	20:08
	we couldn't do it.	20:12
	We just didn't believe there was a possibility	20:15
	in that much God loose.	20:17
	And we executed Velma Barfield,	20:23
	and we felt good about it.	20:27
	Well, I thought it not a matter of believing	20:30
	or not believing in capital punishment,	20:36
	but a failure to believe	20:37
	that Easter keeps on happening.	20:41
	Well you've heard the story of Saul.	20:45
	If I had to take all this	20:46
	and sum it up in just one sentence.	20:49
	It is this: the same powerful God who raised Jesus	20:54
	from the dead,	21:00
	just won't stop.	21:03

Item Info

Title:

William H. Willimon - "While Journeying, Suddenly a Light from Heaven" (April 29, 2001)

Description:

Sermon start time: 00:09. Sermon end time: 21:06.
It’s hard for people to change. Yet the same power that raised Jesus from the dead can make radical changes to people’s lives and bring conversions. (Abstract created by Duke Divinity School staff.)
Key quotation: “The same powerful God who raised Jesus from the dead just won’t stop.”

Permalink:

https://idn.duke.edu/ark:/87924/r44j0bc59

Date:

April 29, 2001

Speaker:

Willimon, William H.

Liturgical Calendar:

Easter

Biblical Book:

Acts

Chapter and Verse:

Acts 9:1-6, (7-20)

Subject:

Contributor:

Duke University. Chapel

Identifier:

UA.17.01.0003 CS-1065
ref10287_vcs
uachapelsermaud
duke:320501
dcrau001709
ark:/87924/r44j0bc59
eeb4a936-80e3-4704-aaee-3a2ca401ab7e

Digital Collection:

Duke Chapel Recordings

Source Collection:

Duke University Chapel recordings

Language:

English

Location:

United States
North Carolina
Durham (N.C.)

Format:

Provenance:

The Duke University Chapel Recordings were transferred to the Duke University Archives beginning in 1970.

Rights:

Limited Re-Use

CC BY-NC 4.0

Rights Note:

This recording may contain 3rd party materials, such as music or readings that are therefore not covered by the Creative Commons license indicated here. For more information see https://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/research/citations-and-permissions.

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