Acts 9: 1-22; Matt: 19:  27-30

Today we celebrate one of the most significant moments in the history of God’s church as we remember with thanks the conversion of Paul.

Before his conversion Saul was well known. He was known as someone who was well versed in the scriptures and the traditions of God’s people. He was regarded as a righteous man who himself observed that law fastidiously. And he was a man with a mission. That mission was to preserve that true and orthodox faith as it had been received and handed down to him. So he was intent on stamping out this new interpretation of that faith by the people who belonged to a group known as “the Way”. And he felt fully justified in that mission. After all this new-fangled interpretation of their historic faith was clearly fake news. How could he be sure of that? Well, Jesus had been publicly crucified by Roman soldiers, his body has been laid in a tomb, and his followers had scattered. But not long afterwards those followers began to assert that Jesus was alive. That was clearly a lie as everyone knows dead men don’t rise.

So Saul had in his hand, written authority from no less a person than the High Priest himself to go, on this occasion to Damascus, and there to seek out members of that group of troublemakers. When he found them, he was to arrest them and take them to Jerusalem, where they would be examined and punished if they would not recant this heretical development of the true faith.

But as he journeyed a remarkable thing happened. There was a brilliant flash of light that blinded him and caused him to fall to the ground. He and his entourage heard a voice. The voice addressed him by name and asked him “Saul why are you persecuting me?”

At that moment he recognised that this could only be God speaking and so in line with a long standing Jewish tradition he asked God to reveal who he was. Moses, Jacob, Gideon had all met God in dramatic circumstances and as part of their encounters had asked God who he was? The reply Saul received could not have been more unexpected or dramatic. The voice revealed himself as Jesus and said that it was he Jesus whom Saul was persecuting – not this group, not the individuals whom he was to arrest, but it was Jesus himself whom Saul was attacking.

The one whom he believed was dead, discredited and dangerous was very much alive and confronting him and calling on him now to turn round.

So it came about that Saul who believed that he had a very clear vision of the faith was now blind – unable to see at all. He had to be led by the hand. Vulnerable and dependent. He was taken to the house of man called Judas. We have no reason to think Judas was a follower of Jesus, indeed from what happens next he would certainly appear not to have been.

For three days and nights Saul remains completely in the dark. He didn’t eat or drink. We can only begin to imagine what must have been going through his mind as everything he had been so sure about was turned upside down.

We read that he was praying, and my guess is that that prayer was him just holding his life before God as he recognised that he had got so much wrong. And all those certainties, all that he had been so sure about, was steadily dismantled as he prayed.

Now Saul’s experience was very dramatic, and although there are still some people who today have dramatic conversion experiences, I guess that if we think about our own experiences of turning round, for most of us it will have been a more gradual process. That may be so in relation to an initial decision to follow Jesus or in the development of our faith as we have followed Him. And many of us find that the longer we follow him the more we need to be open to change and to dismantling our previous certainties. Certainly in recent years I have had to let go of a number of my previous certainties.

It is also a common experience that spiritual change and development can take us into and through dark places where we can’t always see as clearly as we would like. The dismantling of old ways of thinking and acting can take time. And the more certain we have been about something the deeper the dismantling needs to go.

And certainty can be very dangerous. Dangerous in that it leads to blindness as to what is really true. And dangerous in that it can be very damaging to others.

In our own times there is a great deal of certainty being expressed by powerful people in our world and in our church. And let’s be clear many people like their leaders to be certain. We live in a world where everything is being reduced to binary choices, which you are for or against. But that kind of certainty so often leads to blindness and to damage.

But then comes Ananias. God spoke to Ananias in a vision and told him to go to the house where Saul was. There he was to lay his hands on Saul and enable him to recover his sight. Ananias’s reaction is so understandable – Lord I know who this is, and I know why he has come here; he’s come to arrest us and cart us off to Jerusalem. “Ananias”, says God, “just go”. And so Ananias went and did as God told him. He laid his hands on him and addressed him as “Brother Saul”.

I find that quite remarkable. I ask myself how I would have approached this situation. I think I might have wanted to ask some questions. Saul is it true you have had a change of mind and heart? Can you tell me what has happened? And so what do you believe now? But none of that – his first words are simply “Brother Saul!” or “Welcome to the family!”

And so we see that conversion to following Jesus leads immediately to belonging rather than to theological understanding. We join a family of people not a sect with a code.

Now human nature and the stuff of religion does not change.

On Wednesday of this coming week the Bishop of London will cross the road from where she currently lives to St Pauls Cathedral and there her election as the Archbishop of Canterbury will be confirmed and she will become the Archbishop from that point on. It was 500 years ago this year, 1526, when another Bishop of London made another trip to St Pauls. He was Cuthbert Tunstall, and he came from this part of the world, North Yorkshire. He took with him on his journey to St Pauls as many Bibles as he had been able to find or buy. There outside St Pauls, in order to maintain the orthodoxy of his day, he burned those bibles. Those bibles were William Tyndale’s translation, and the words used by Tyndale in his translation challenged much of the way the church was then being run. One simple example: he used the word repentance rather than penance, and thereby he challenged the orthodox faith of his day with its whole system of penances and indulgences.

Have things changed? Confidence and certainty in what we were brought up to believe is very much alive and well in our time. We hear a lot of talk within our own Church of England about revealed truth and about orthodoxy. And when it comes to issues about race and gender and money, those who are on the wrong side of such orthodoxy can suffer great pain. And Jesus has always said to those who cause pain to his followers: “why are you persecuting me?” Because as always he identifies with the little, the least and the lost.

And of course we still see the importance of the welcoming Christian family. A family that accepts all who have met with Jesus Christ and which knows that together we are undergoing change and transformation. No conditions, just a welcome.

There can be no doubt that our church needs to hear the call to be that kind of church. And by church I mean both our Church of England and also we here as a cathedral community. And to get there we are likely to need our own Damascus Road dismantling experiences whether they be dramatic or steady and continuing.

Amen.