"the Voices of Change" Acts 9: 1-19

I stayed up late last night to do the blog, but somehow lost the data in transmission.  Here I go again.

The conversion of Saul to Paul may be the best known story in Acts, with the exception of the Pentecost story.  I initially thought about leaving it out of the sermon series and spending the week on a lesser known story, but ultimately decided this story reveals such a powerful story of conversion and change in life that it should be told again.  As many members of the congregation I serve can attest, I allude to this story often.

In the original planning for the sermon series, the sermon for this text was going to be a dramatic interpretation with Saul talking to Paul.  When I studied the text further, however, I ended up reflecting on more than two voices -- the voice that Saul heard; the voice that Paul heard; the voice that Ananias heard; and the voice that we hear as we make decisions in our lives.  That led to a little bit different sermon than a  dialogue between Saul and Paul.

One of my favorite quotes about this story comes from Flannery O'Connor's work The Habit of Being (355) as quoted in Interpretation: a  Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching Acts (William Willimon, 73).  O'Connor noted about Paul:  "I reckon the Lord knew that the only way to make a Christian out of that one was to knock him off his horse."  I wonder how many of us might need that as well.

Both Willimon and Ben Witherington (The Acts of the Apostles:  a Socio-Rhetorical Commentary, 303) argue that Saul's conversion is closely connected to the story of Cornelius' conversion in Chapter 10.  Although they follow each other chronologically, I have never thought about those two stories in tandem.