The Conversion of Paul and the Feeding of Sheep
Third Sunday after Easter
May 5, 2019
Preaching Text: Acts 9:1-20, John 21.1-19
I hope you have had a good week. I have had a great week. A week filled with new learnings, understandings and questions. As some of you know I was at the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts Clergy Conference earlier this week. The conference started off with two hours with the Presiding Bishop, the Most Reverend Michael Curry – who is truly inspirational, personable, funny, brilliant, and self-effacing. We are a lucky church to have such a wise and wonderful person leading our church.
The rest of the conference was led by The Reverend Doctor Kelly Brown Douglas, the Dean of the Episcopal Divinity School at Union Seminary and on the staff of the National Cathedral. The topic she spoke on was racism in America. And while she discussed the roots of racism here in the United States, I was reminded that there are discussions that are happening all around the world about racism. My clergy colleague and friend, The Reverend Dr. James Kodera, who is Japanese by birth, who is both a professor at Wellesley College and a rector of a church in Hudson, Massachusetts, spent an hour with me last Spring telling me about the racism of the Japanese toward the Koreans. A world I knew nothing about.[1]
But back to Kelly Brown Douglas. She spoke with passion and openness about the task of confronting racism– and what touched me most is that she spoke from a place of hope in the Gospel of Christ and in the power of the Gospel through Christianity, and Christians, to help end structures of hatred, oppression, and cruelty.
Toward the end of the conference she turned the attention of her talk from the history of racism and its presence in modern society, to what we can do. She urged us to do two things when we are wondering what we are being called to do. She said “listen to the whispering of your soul”. Said another way, listen to what the Holy Spirit is trying to tell you. The second thing she recommended was to focus on those places that we are closest to. She assured us that our callings are most often found in the garden in which we stand. So it’s two-fold: 1. Listen to the whispering in your soul. 2. Tend the garden where you stand.
And this was true for Peter and Paul this morning, albeit in more dramatic fashion than a whispering in their souls. They got a much more dramatic nudging by God. To Saul – through voices, blinding and healing, Saul was told by Jesus in no uncertain terms to stop persecuting the followers of Christ and to preach the Good News of Christ as the Son of God. And to Peter, he called him to feed the sheep of the flock.
But what about us? As I sat and listened to Kelley Brown Douglas, I started to think of people I know who have listened to the whispering in their souls. But the person I thought about the most was my father, which I will get to in a minute. My father is not often a subject of my sermons, but I did talk about him in my Maundy Thursday sermon this past Holy Week. So this is maybe part II of that sermon? And what I want to share with you this morning is what I know about his call – the call born from the whisperings in his soul. He was born in 1913 and he died when I was a young teenager so I don’t have all the details, but this is what I know or have been able to piece together from the members of my family. My father graduated from Harvard College in 1936. He had wanted to be a doctor like his father, so he entered college to study pre-med but soon found out that his natural intellect and abilities did not lie in the sciences but in music, languages and literature. So he majored in music. Also, in college, he went through a “conversion experience” at Church of the Advent in Boston. He converted from the Unitarianism of his family, and became an Episcopalian. After he graduated, he went to seminary at Virginia Theological Seminary, and shortly after his ordination, he served at Christ Church in Cambridge and in the Harvard University Chaplaincy. After a few short years, he was called off to serve as a chaplain in the infantry in World War II in war-torn France, in General Patton’s army. After the war he came home to Boston, shattered as many soldiers were after the war. He decided to live with my Aunt Celina in Vermont where she was waiting for her husband to return home from England where he was serving in Intelligence. During the time my father took off after the war he came to realize that he could not stay in Boston. It was too small, and too confining for him. That is what the whispering of his soul was telling him. So he went to the Midwest – to the homelands of the soldiers he had met during the war – and whom he admired for their goodness and wholesomeness. And he served a small farming community in South West Iowa for 25 years – and had a very successful ministry growing a little community church, St. John’s Episcopal Church, Shenandoah, Iowa, from about 25 souls to over 300.
But at some point his sense of call changed. This was in the late 1960s. And this is where an interesting thing happened. He was nominated to run to be the Bishop of Iowa, and he did run, but in the end, he was not made bishop, someone else was. Although I am sure this was a disappointment to my father, something very interesting happened. I truly believe that this was one of those moments that many of us have in our lives of “Man’s Rejection is God’s Protection”. This is one of my favorite spiritual slogans: Man’s Rejection is God’s Protection. So at this point, my father started to hear the whispering of his soul more clearly –with the distraction of running for bishop over. He felt a new conviction in his bones growing around issues of racial inequality. He knew that God was calling him to be part of this civil rights movement which led his to become a priest serving a struggling communities in the midst of urban blight and civil unrest. That is how this Iowa born girl, me, ended out in Providence, RI. God stirred something in my father’s heart that made him leave the comfort of the Midwest to move to South Providence to serve not as a rector, but as an assistant to the rector. This is a position that is usually for someone straight out of seminary, not for someone with 30 years’ experience. My father was 57 when he took what seemed backseat to his career – so that he could obey the whisperings of his soul. Sometimes God calls us to new gardens to tend.
And I share my father’s story with you, because it is in many ways it is a not all that different from Peter and Paul’s. And more importantly it is a familiar story in all our lives – of thinking you know where you are going, and finding yourself someplace else; a story of surprising success and a story of terrible disappointments and so-called failures. It is a story of trial and error, of redirection, until we find ourselves in the place we are meant to be.
God calls each of us to work in the gardens of this world – we may do that in our work, in our volunteer life, in our parenting, coaching, neighborhoods, and service organizations. In the terms of the Way of Love of which the Presiding Bishop commends to Episcopalians– this is what it means to bless – to go out into the world and bless the people we meet – practicing generosity and compassion, and proclaiming the Good News of God in Christ with hopeful words and selfless actions.
When the Risen Jesus says to
Peter, “feed my sheep” – Jesus says that to us as well. And I think what is important to remember is
that Jesus did not say “Feed all my sheep in the whole wide world”, or “make
sure those sheep are fed in New Zealand”.
Rather what we are called to do is to keep our ears, eyes, and hearts
open so that we know which particular sheep the Lord has in mind for us. Those sheep may be a local food pantry, or a literacy
program, to be an English as a Second Language instructor, or academic tutor, or
a preparer or server of foods for Serenity or Shadows, the two women’s shelters
that we serve. It might be families in
Appalachia where our youth and adult volunteers go every other summer. Or
Holliston Habitat for Humanity. It might
be caring for a maiden aunt, or a neighborhood child. There is no shortage of
sheep. And as the Reverend Doctor Kelly Brown Douglas assured us – it is not an
impossible task. But it is this: it is a precious opportunity to serve the
beloved children of God and God’s creation.
Let it be so. What are the whisperings of your soul? What is the garden
in which you stand that you are called to tend?
God invites you daily to look at the present state of the world around
you, and to spend some time listening for that whisper.
[1] If you are interested in learning more, I recommend the book Pachinko which I read a couple of months ago – it is brilliant and eye opening.
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