Ananias

Ananias

Acts 9:10-20

Last week, we watched as Paul got stopped, dead in his tracks, on the way to Damascus.  He knew he was right.  He knew exactly what he was going to do.  The man practically marched down the road, surrounded by people who hurried to keep up.  All of this was true until the instant it wasn’t.  He was blinded by a bright light.  He crumpled to the ground.  By instinct, he “schmoozed” whoever this powerful force was as, “Lord,” if for no other reason than to save his own skin.  That’s when he learned he was wrong…about almost everything.  In the span of a few minutes, this powerful and feared pit bull of a man was reduced to a blind pile of needs.  He was still going to Damascus, the same place that he’d been going all along. However, now, he was being led by his lackeys, one hobbling step at a time.

This is one experience in life of God’s calling—the wake-up call.  If you’ve ever been convinced you were so right—about the job opportunity, or about your latest romance, or about your personal mission in life, maybe the wake up call came for you.  You know…the job fell apart or your friends leveled with you about that romantic partner or the mission became mission impossible.  Boom—everything changes.  Admittedly, these are not the kind of moments that are typically deemed “holy.”  They’re just the ones that matter so much to us…which is why, I suspect, the God who loves us can be found in the midst of them.  “Twas blind but now I see…”  It was written by a former slave owner but, if we’re honest, it could have been written by any of us, right?

Here’s another kind of calling in life.  Saul makes his way to Damascus—a huge city in what we know as Syria today.  Meanwhile, there’s a guy named Ananias.  He’s a follower of Christ and a faithful man.  He’s so faithful, in fact, that when God says to him in a vision, “Ananias,” it’s as if he’s been just waiting to hear his name the whole time:  “Here I am, Lord.”  He doesn’t mistake the voice for someone else.  He doesn’t rub his eyes and say, “Wow… I must have been dreaming.”  Nope…Ananias is ready for duty.  (I so want to be the person, like him, for whom the ready response is, “Here I am!”) Think about how personal that calling is.  God calls Ananias by his name:  “Here I am.”

Ananias doesn’t argue with the voice or question whether he misheard.  He just keeps listening which is sometimes an incredibly difficult thing to do.  This message isn’t for everyone or anyone who happens to hear.  This message is for one specific person.  The message is equally specific.  God tells Ananias to get up and go to the street called Straight.  (Straight Street, the main thoroughfare through old Damascus, still exists today!)  On that street is a specific house, owned by a man named Judas (no, not that Judas.)  Once he gets there, he will find a man whose name is Saul.

Now, one whole layer of reaction to this moment should be about how detailed the instructions are.  Do you remember in the Old Testament when God tells Noah to build an ark?  There are incredibly detailed instructions about what kind of wood he should use and how many cubits by how many cubits the ark should be.  Have you ever read about the Ark of the Covenant? Again, super detailed instructions about how to build it and how it should be treated.  Do you remember the instructions that the disciples received before Palm Sunday:  look for this animal, tied in this way, and say these words if anyone questions you.  Nothing is left to chance:  “I need you and here’s exactly what I need you to do.”

So far, we’ve covered two of the main ways that people talk each other out of a calling.  First, they question whether the calling is there.  We shake our heads and wonder out loud, “Are you talking to me?”  Second, we question the details:  what if this happens; what if I can’t find the place I’m supposed to go; what if I do something wrong?  Sometimes, God makes it perfectly clear that God is, in fact, talking to us.  Sometimes, God anticipates our questions and gives us the details up front.  It’s not that we still can’t dismiss the calling as a “wrong number.”  It’s not that we can’t still mess things up.  Heck, I can forget why I came into a room when I’ve barely entered the room at all.

That’s not the problem though.  The real sticking point of a calling, the one that can stop us dead in our tracks, is that God has a long history of calling us to go where we don’t want to go and to do what we really don’t want to do.  Ananias is faithful enough to report for duty, to recognize God’s voice speaking his name.  Ananias was also certainly familiar enough with the city to get the logistics, too.  Everyone knew where Straight Street was.  When he got there, he’d just ask until someone recognized Judas’ name and showed him the way.  The problem isn’t any of that.  The problem is that the whole point of this journey is to go find Saul. 

Although Ananias had never met Saul of Tarsus, (“Thank God!” he would have said!), he knew him by reputation, “How much evil he has done to the saints in Jerusalem,” how he had been given license to come and do the same in Damascus, now.  Ananias doesn’t argue about whether God is talking to him.  Ananias doesn’t argue with the directions.  No…Ananias digs his heels in deep and has no problem raising the question with God, “Why would you want me to do that? I don’t want to go find Saul, I want to run the other direction.”

The real horror, though, is not that God wants Ananias to go find Saul.  If that was all there was to it, maybe God would let him just tee up the man like those old time prophets used to do.  Maybe God would let him “smite” him.  Saul seemed such a good candidate for that!  But no…that’s not God’s plan.  God wants Ananias to find Saul and care for him.  In fact, God says, as they are speaking, Saul is praying.  Right now, Saul is having a vision of a man named Ananias coming to him and laying his hands on him and restoring his sight.  I imagine at the mere thought of him being present in Saul’s mind, Ananias felt a shiver running down his spine. Beyond that, though, at the suggestion that he would care for Saul, that he would feel compassion for him, Ananias felt revulsion—just that core, deep-down, sickness in the pit of his stomach.

Here’s the thing…by all appearances, God has no problem listening to Ananias complaint.  On the day when God’s calling comes for us to go where we don’t want to go and do what we don’t want to do, we can trust that God will listen to us, too.  The problem, of course, is that God is God and we are not.  God can see things we can’t see.  So, maybe God ends up being like that loving parent or the caring friend or the really good therapist who is willing to let us “knock ourselves out” until they finally smile, kindly, and say, “Ya…but there’s still some things you need to do.”

God actually gives Ananias a two part answer.  “I need you to go. Here’s why…”  The first reason, to paraphrase things, is that God is going to play Saul like a fiddle.  God says that Saul will be an instrument.  Saul will bring God’s name to the Gentiles and to the kings and to the people of Israel.  In other words, Saul is someone who can speak to just about anyone and who will be taken seriously by most everyone who hears him.  The guy is sharp as a tack and can weave words like a tapestry.  Honestly, the implication seems to be, people like that aren’t all that easy to find.  God says, “I need him. I’ve got plans for this man.”

It’s worth pausing here.  We roll through life and think we’re pretty good at sizing people up, right?  This person has these gifts. This other person has those gifts.  But that person?  What a total waste of oxygen and space!  Okay, maybe you “gussy” things up more than that for others or maybe even for yourself.  However, at a human level, we have such a tendency to pass judgment on and dismiss others, especially people who are different.  Trust me, in the last 15 months of being on Facebook, I’ve seen your posts!  Don’t think I’m not watching…

All of that’s true and that’s just with people who are different or people with whom we disagree.  That’s not Ananias issue with Saul.  Saul isn’t just different or unpleasant.  Saul has done terrible things to people whom he knows and loves.  The normal, 100 percent human response to people like that is to at least wish them harm if not to hope that we get to harm them ourselves.  The problem is that vengeance happens to be fundamentally at odds with Christian faith.  Remember…Jesus was forgiving people from the cross.  That’s a high bar, friends…

We can cling to the wrongs someone has done in the past.  We can even build an image of God where God joins us in our grudges and encourages us to seek revenge.  However, sooner or later, we run headlong, like Ananias, into the God who believes in redemption, who believes in new beginnings, who believes in the possibility of all things being made new, including previously awful human beings.  God will look us in the eye and ask, “Are you with me?”

And like Ananias, we may ask God, “Do they just get away with that, with whatever wrongs they’ve done?”  That’s why answer number two from God matters so very much.  Basically, and I’m paraphrasing again here, God tells Ananias that no one really gets away with anything in this life.  Ananias, just like us, knew that God was telling the truth as soon as he heard those words.  God basically says that the life ahead of Saul will include plenty of opportunities to suffer for his faith.  Saul may have come to his new faith and ended up on Straight Street but there is a rough road ahead, full of ups and downs, but also full of the chance to serve God every step of the way.  If you know anything about Saul’s life as Paul, the man’s going to be jailed and shipwrecked and building tents to make enough money to get to the next town.  Maybe most difficult of all, he is going to come to love the people he once hunted.  That’s a hell of thing to learn to live with.

Ananias goes where he doesn’t want to go and does what he doesn’t want to do.  Maybe he was even thinking as he walked toward Straight Street, “If I were God….but I’m not.”  I’ve certainly been there and thought that.  Maybe you have, too.  Still…Ananias went.  He didn’t just go through the motions.  Maybe he trembled as he entered the room.  He put his hands on Saul.   He told him exactly who sent him…the same Jesus who knocked him silly on the road.  While God’s promise was that Saul’s sight would be restored,  Ananias’ promise to Saul goes one step further:  “He has sent me so that you can regain your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit.” Ananias just knew, probably from his own experience that this is how God works. You roll along through life full of…whatever…until one day, somehow, you find yourself full of the presence of God.

So, whether you meet the loving and living God in a stunning “wake up call,” or you just know that you are about to go where you don’t want to go and do what you don’t want to do, God calls us.  Will we listen?  Will we own the genuine disappointment of discovering that we are not God? Can we cope with a loving, living God who even loves…them… and not just us?  If we can, we, too, will be well on our way to becoming servants of God.