Flat On Your Back
Flat On Your Back
Acts 9:1-21
I’ve been thinking about my dog, Karma, lately. Whenever we grieve, we sort through memories, let go of some, hold on tightly to others. We glean among them for the meaning that we’ll carry forward. What did I learn? How was I changed?
Karma was one of Jeff and Joan Lynch’s second litter of Labradors. Sarah had been lobbying hard for one of the puppies. I was the holdout. While the puppies were being born, Jeff called our house. I answered. He asked for Sarah, who was maybe 12 at the time. I handed her the phone. He told her that the cutest little black lab has just been born. My holdout days were history.
We actually put the Lynch kids to work for us, describing the personality we were looking for and asking them to tell us which puppy fit the bill. At seven weeks, I held Karma in my hands like a little potato and looked straight into her eyes. She was with us for the next 12 years, to the day.
The moment that I’ve been sorting out happened around six months. We started walking in Open Lands at three months. She picked up walking together really fast. In between sniffing here and there, she would always make eye contact, to the point where she didn’t like it if I wore sunglasses. If she was on leash, the leash would be slack as she walked beside me. When I took her off leash, she still walked beside me. Every other dog that I had ever owned would have run for the hills. I was thrilled!
Then, at 6 months, one day, she just wandered off. I called her. Apparently, she had suddenly gone deaf. I trotted after her. She sprinted away from me. I pulled out my “ace card”—I walked the other direction. She would always come if I did that. She could not have cared less. What in the world happened to my good dog?
When I finally caught her, I did something that I would only do once in her life. I very calmly picked her up and laid her down on her back. I held her in place with my hand and looked straight into her eyes. Then, in a really calm voice, I said, “Listen…” I repeated that word a few times: “Listen….listen…listen.” For a moment, we just made eye contact. Finally, I lifted my hand. She rolled over and got back on her feet. She gave me a look that seemed to say, “Sorry, I don’t know what got into me. Can we just walk now?”
For the rest of her life, on leash or off, Karma was always making eye contact, always checking in. She loved to chase a deer, especially early in her life. She even taught me to smell them long before I saw them. However, what mattered to her more than any smell or any other creature was staying connected to me: “Listen!”
A long time ago, I saw a little sign that said, “I aspire to the be the person whom my dog thinks I am.” That made me laugh and stuck with me. This morning, what I want to say to you is that I aspire, in my relationship to God, to be a good dog. Let me explain.
Let’s take Saul’s relationship to God as an example. There were two really crucial leaders in the earliest days of the church: Peter and Saul, who came to be known as Paul. If you grew up Catholic, you focused on Peter, the one who is considered the foundation of the church. If you grew up Protestant, you heard a lot about Paul, the one who spread the church through the known world and established at least a starting point for Christian theology.
The really interesting thing about these men is that they were both entirely human. Peter is perhaps Jesus’ best friend. And yet, passionate as he was, he keeps overstepping things. He gets rebuked by Jesus. When Jesus is arrested, Peter utterly abandons him and denies ever even knowing him. The first time we see Saul, he’s holding the coats of the people who are stoning a brilliant young Christian—Stephen—to death. Then, he’s hunting down people’s brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers and arresting them for being Christian. In our world, if those who oppose you can find one time when you made a mistake, then they can “cancel” you. Peter and Saul would never have survived such scrutiny. They were each in their own way, a total piece of work. They were both totally capable of being “bad dogs.”
Saul’s situation was especially challenging. For basically two thousand years now, if you are going to follow Christ, you have to choose to do so without ever having met the man. Peter knew him well. Lots of people heard Jesus or saw him with their own eyes. Saul never actually saw Jesus…which makes him one of us, right? He didn’t see the man and when he heard about him, he immediately opposed him because Jesus was perceived to be a threat to his faith. In fact, if he’d had the chance to meet Jesus it would probably have been in order to hunt Jesus down.
The point here is that at the heart of the lives of the two greatest leaders in early Christianity was a giant need for…forgiveness and redemption. If they were going to learn to walk with God through this life and stay connected to God through all of life’s distractions and defeats and setbacks, they were going to have to learn to forgive others and actually accept their own need to be forgiven. Smart as they were, strong willed as they were, they were going to have to learn how to get over things, to not get stuck in remorse or regret. “Learn from it. Then let it go. Keep walking.”
In particular, Saul was smart and ruthless and relentless. He didn’t just believe he was right. He knew that he was right. He would bulldoze anyone or anything out of his way to make his point and preserve the faith. Whenever faith (any faith) and nationalism mix, you get “true believers,” fanatics who will do anything to preserve the present order.
Think of it this way if you want. If Saul was a dog he’d be one of those Australian sheep dogs who are always nipping at livestock or children or whatever else they can herd. They’re smart and cagey and cunning. (Confessional statement: Karma’s only known enemy was an Australian sheep dog named “Kip.” So, I’m a little prejudiced here.) It takes a special owner to shepherd the sheep dog.
One day, God put Saul on his back just like I did with Karma. Saul’s on the road to Damascus in order to arrest more Christians. While on the ground, Saul hears a voice: “Saul, Saul…why are you out to get me?” Mind you…this had to come as a real shock to someone who was 100 percent sure that he’s already doing God’s work. The man who is convinced that he not only knows God’s will but is sure that he is doing God’s will doesn’t even know that it is God who is talking to him: “Who are you, Master?” Really…that’s pretty funny: “Um…Can I ask who’s calling?” The voice answers, “I am Jesus, the one you’re hunting down.” Oops!
Of course, the rest of this story is familiar. Saul, now blind, ends up in the care of a faithful guy named, Ananias who, at first, wants nothing to do with Saul. The two of them work things out. Saul is filled with the Holy Spirit. His sight is restored. And almost immediately, he goes from being a Christian hunter to a Christian preacher and leader. “Bad dog” to “good dog” in a few short days!
The problem is that it is too easy to skip over the first part of the story. There’s something essential about Saul lying on his back on the ground. There’s something essential about Karma, lying on her back on the ground. There’s been something essential about all the moments when I have found myself, once again, lying on my back on the ground, sometimes literally, sometimes figuratively. If we don’t listen carefully, if we don’t keep checking in, if we don’t keep our egos in check, there will be a wake up call. One way or another, the message will be, “Listen!”
I remember when I was in eighth grade. I lived for one thing and one thing only: basketball. I was almost 6’4’ tall and not all that comfortable in my own skin. In leu of any actual sense of who I was, I was that guy who played basketball. That year, I actually received a recruiting letter from Al Maguire at Marquette saying that he had his eye on me. That was fuel for the fire! (Of course, I stopped growing and never heard from Al again!). Then, I hurt my knee and was left writhing on the ground: “Who am I now?” To top things off, when I was biding my time watching practices and games, I thought I’d offer helpful “tips and suggestions” to my teammates. My coach basically put me on my back again and told me that no one really wanted to hear my suggestions. Those hard moments were invitations to change, to grow up, to become a more well-rounded person, to learn how to be the kind of friend that someone would actually want to have be their friend. There was a lot to learn but first the message was, “Oh my God, stop already! Listen!”
Thankfully, that time in eighth grade was the only time that I was ever oblivious and lost in my own stuff and needed a wake up call. (If you believe that, you really need to take another look at the total piece of work that I am!). Let’s see, when all my friends in college were sure that the woman I was dating was trouble, I was sure that I just had bad friends. Then, I found out she had another boyfriend in another city and they’d been dating for a year before we met. Or, when Tracy and I were very seriously dating and someone asked about my post-seminary plans, I described all the places I might go without ever really mentioning Tracy in those plans…and Tracy was part of the conversation. Tracy might have had a hand in putting me on my back. She might have uttered the word… “Listen!” The list of such moments could go on…
You get my point. We’re human. We think we’re seeing things clearly but we’re blind. We think we’ve got a handle on things but, really, our stuff—the same old, crusty stuff—kind of has us by the throat. We’re sure that we’re right and everyone else is wrong. And if the notion creeps into our minds that we might be wrong, we just dig in deeper. We care deeply. We’re being sincere. It’s just that we are sincerely and completely wrong.
Of course, those moments feel terrible. However, here’s the redemptive, essential truth. The time spent on our backs is worth it if we learn something. Part of what we may learn is a little humility. Part of what we learn may be specific to what we are going through. However, the most important things we learn may rest in what happens next. We fail spectacularly but the people who love us still love us. We get so full of ourselves that we’ve entirely forgotten about God but God is still there. And usually, if we watch carefully, some God-sent person will come to us in that God-forsaken moment to make the point, to dust us off, to heal us a bit, and remind us that life goes on, that love goes on, that the walk goes on.
Even good dogs make mistakes. Good dogs are capable of a moment of shame and remorse but then they move on. They get up off the ground and shake themselves off. They look around and sniff the air. Then, they make eye contact and silently ask, “Can we keep on walking?” With their connection restored to the one who matters most to them, they bound off, tail wagging, eager to find out what’s around that next corner.