How many of you are eager and ready to begin a brand new year? How many of you wish that there were more time left from last year so you could catch up? How many of you are looking at the 360 days still left of this year and wondering how you’ll get through them? How many of you are thrilled that 2008 has an extra day in it? How many of you could care less about any of the questions I’ve just asked? None of us knows what the coming year will bring, not entirely. We can see some things on the horizon and surely there will be some surprises. Whether we are thinking about our personal lives, our professional lives, or our life as followers of Jesus Christ, we know that there will be ups and downs and we’ll just hope and pray that when the end of this year comes the ups will have been more up than the downs have been down. With all of that said, it seems to me that it’s always helpful to begin a new year by going back to the basics and reestablishing the baseline truths and realities from which all the rest of our lives are built. From the perspective of our faith, there is no better place to do that than in the most famous conversion story of the Bible, the story of Paul’s encounter with Christ on the road to Damascus.

We are looking at this episode in Paul’s life within the larger context of our study of the lives of several important people of the New Testament, including John the Baptist, Joseph, Mary, Peter, and the Apostle John. We have been learning how these people’s lives show us the actual shape and impact of the twin commandments that Jesus said were the most important word from God: to love God with all of our heart, soul, mind and strength and to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. All of these people were real and normal people of flesh and blood who, were we to meet them, would seem totally unremarkable to us. And so it’s both important and instructive for us to get to know them. Their stories can become our stories.

Just as Peter’s original name was Simon, Paul’s original name was Saul. Saul was an up and coming hotshot in the Jewish religious world. He was from the elite class called the Pharisees. He had studied under one of the great rabbis of his day. He was so sincere and energetic in his faith that he had enlisted in the cause of protecting the faith from dangerous heresy, especially that heresy being promoted by the followers of Jesus of Nazareth. He was a sworn enemy of Jesus’ disciples who were known as followers of “The Way.” And so he became their persecutor, their oppressor, even their executioner, in a way. His vocation was to seek out these Jesus People and have them imprisoned, tried, and perhaps martyred for their faith. But on the way to Damascus, Jesus intervened. In a blinding flash, Jesus spoke to Paul and changed the course of Paul’s life completely. Public Enemy Number One, at least as far as the Christians were concerned, converted to the side of those whom he had formerly tried to kill.

Jesus and Paul usually get the lion’s share of attention from people like me when we retell this story, but there is a third person who is extremely important in the whole episode. His name was Ananias. Ananias was one of the people whom Paul might have found and persecuted and perhaps even had executed. But the Lord also spoke to Ananias, to tell him that his job was to welcome Saul into the Christian family. Ananias is not thrilled with this news. We need to understand the level of personal danger to which this exposed him and perhaps his family. But Ananias is a faithful servant of Christ, and so he goes to where he is told Saul will be, and he welcomes the former enemy of Christ and of all Christians with these words: “Brother Saul.” Without Ananias’ courageous and faithful response, who knows what might have happened to Saul?

Saul becomes a totally new person, so new, that he eventually takes a new name: Paul. He now loves Christ and he has to learn The Way of Christ. Though he is an expert in all things religious from the Jewish perspective, he must become a student again and relearn a totally new way of understanding God. The man who is the highly educated, highly respected, highly influential member of the elite goes back to square one and starts all over again. The man who has aided and abetted the oppression and execution of some of the very first followers of Jesus now becomes one of them. The man who has opposed Jesus himself will become Jesus’ greatest champion.

Think of the dynamics here. Jesus is so intent on bringing everyone into a saving relationship with God that he will even intervene personally in the life of his greatest enemy in order to win that person over to himself. Jesus is so filled with forgiving love that he will welcome even someone who has used every available means to oppose him. Jesus cannot act alone here: he must have another willing disciple to accomplish his purpose. Jesus cannot effectively reach out to Saul without the help of Ananias. It takes the risky courage of Ananias to put flesh and blood behind the spiritual experience Saul had with the Risen Christ. And think about Saul. Yes, he had an unmistakable experience, but he could have chosen to ignore it, or to explain it away, just like all of us can excuse ourselves from actually hearing what God is trying to say to us. Saul gives away life as he knows it, even his name, in order to follow Christ.

One way to summarize this story is to steal a phrase coined a few years ago in the public sphere to talk about education reform: no child left behind. If you can leave behind any baggage associated with the political and public use of that phrase, think about what it means in terms of our faith. God is unwilling for any of his children to be left behind. God will even come after one of his worst enemies in order to welcome him back to the family. In order for that to happen, though, two parties have to agree with what God is doing: God’s enemy and God’s friends. Those who have opposed God, who have excluded and ignored and ridiculed God, have to overcome their hatred of God, or their guilt, or their disbelief, and simply receive the grace that God offers them. And those who have been loving God all along, and perhaps who have suffered because of it, have to overcome their hatred or fear or distrust of God’s former enemies in order to welcome them into the family. God welcomes everyone into his family, no matter who they are, no matter what they’ve done. Nothing excludes any person from God’s love and from the fellowship of God’s people, not even their former status as God’s sworn enemy. Slave or free, Jew or Greek, male or female, black or white, old or young, short or tall, smart or stupid, ugly or pretty…the list goes on and on…there is no barrier that God will not cross in order to bring his children back to him. He will leave no child behind.

There is no way to overestimate the importance of this truth in your personal life or in the life of the human community. God’s offer of grace to anyone and everyone is why we believe that all people are equal in his eyes. It is why we believe that no person has a privileged status before God and no person should have a privileged status in society. It is why we believe that there should be things like equal rights before the law, equal opportunity for education, and one vote for one person in a democratic society. It is why we work against any tendency in ourselves to exclude or deny or discriminate against anyone. It is why we believe that people can make mistakes that do not forever exclude them from heaven. It is why we believe that people can waver from the straight and narrow path but can then come back and start over again, to create a new self, or a new society, or even a new country. It is why we believe that when you start a new day or a new year you can actually look forward to something better than what was in the past. It is why we believe that one of the chief goals of the Church of Jesus Christ is to go into every last corner of the world to find every last child of God and to tell them that God loves and welcomes them into his family.

Some people believe that the flash from heaven Saul saw was just lightening. To the world’s way of thinking, God uses lightening to zap anyone he doesn’t like. Certainly, had God ever wanted to fry an enemy, it would have been Saul. But that’s not what happened. God can take anyone, even people like you and me, and give them a new start and a new mission. God will take anyone, even people like you and me, and welcome them home into his heart. He won’t leave anyone behind. No matter what else happens in your life this year, be sure that you open your eyes and accept God’s love in your life, and then start loving him back.

Amen.