Loving God, as you opened the tomb and raised Jesus to new life, so open our hearts and minds by the power of your Holy Spirit that as your Word is proclaimed, we may hear with joy what you say to us today, and in confidence go forth to live what you show us. We ask it in Jesus' name. Amen.
As a teenager I engaged in what most teenagers engage in. I tried to figure out whether or not what I was thinking and feeling was normal or if in fact I was as different from everybody else as I suspected I might be.
You ever done that?
And again, when I became a Christian - I tried to figure out what was a normal way to experience the faith. I only did that however - after I noticed that my pattern of belief - my pattern of conversion - was not shared as widely as I had first thought.
What I went through was nothing quite as dramatic as what Paul experienced; but it did share some elements of what countless numbers of people have undergone.
I began with nothing but a wish - a dream - a hope - that maybe there was something more to life than what I could see, touch, and taste. Something more than "might makes right". Something more than "survival of the fittest".
I grew up in a home where God was almost never talked about, and where the holy things of our faith were unknown.
So for me there was a time of longing - of seeking - of struggling - for what I did not know;a time which finally cumulated in encountering a group of Christians who engaged me in a conversation: a conversation over several months, about God and about Jesus, and about how in Jesus God shows his unconditional love and his redeeming purpose for all people - even for one such as I.
And the love that this group of Christians showed me, and the willingness they had to examine their own faith and their own assumptions about what it taught, touched me - and permitted me as I was reading the Gospel According to Luke one night in my little room, to move from unbelief to faith; from a life where the Tarot Cards and Astrology were being used to give direction, to a life where the law and the prophets provided guidance and the inner voice of the Spirit was at last heard.
In short there was a day and a time when I gave my life over to God - a day and a time when I prayed what is known in some places as the sinner's prayer, the prayer that goes something like this:
Lord Jesus Christ, I repent of my sins. I believe in you. I want you to be Lord of my life, to cleanse my soul and open the gates of heaven to me. Come into my heart. Help me to follow you each day. Rule in my life. Amen
And so it was. And so it continues - day by day.
But - in my innocence - in my lack of knowledge - and in face of the number of people throughout history who have gone through something like what I went through - I made an assumption back then, a common assumption: the assumption that all "true believers" (you notice how I said that don't you?) that all "true believers" must go through a time when they repent of their past and consciously invite Jesus to be Lord of their lives.
And indeed there are many who tell us that this pattern of experience is the normal pattern, indeed the only pattern, that ensures one's salvation; that the pattern seen in St. Paul - who - though a believer in God - persecuted the church - and then - hrough an encounter with the Risen Christ and through the testimony of others - turns his life around and is made into a disciple and apostle of the good news. Is the pattern that should be seen in us all.
John Newton - the composer of the hymn "Amazing Grace" which is so well loved by the church around the world had the same kind of saving experience as Paul.
Brought up in a rough circumstances, Newton became the captain of slave trading ship. He drank hard, he worked hard, and he hated with a passion all things Christian, all things he saw as weak, all things that would bridle his behaviour...and then - after years of self-loathing and of hating others, he heard the gospel with fresh ears - the Spirit worked in his heart - and he gave control of his life over to Christ Jesus, ending his days as a beloved Pastor in a church in London, ending his days as the author of the words we love so well:
Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found, was blind, but now I see.
Such profound and beautiful words.
But what about those who have never been lost?
What about those who have never been blind?
What about those who have believed from their mothers knee and heard the gospel from the lips of their fathers or their grandfathers?
What about those who have ever worshipped God as revealed through Christ Jesus those baptised as a child and confirmed as a young teen?
What about their experience?
What about their faith?
You know - we can so easily - even with the best and most loving motives - make other people feel unimportant, unvalued, somehow second class.
We - with our seeking to define for ourselves what is normal so that we can assure ourselves that we are normal end up imposing upon others our definitions; we end up judging others by the "one right way" we ourselves have subscribed to.
And yet there are many ways that lead us into a whole relationship with God and many people who have a whole relationship with God from their infancy: a relationship that may have it moments of confession and profession - it's times of wandering and returning - but whose essential strands are never broken and whose certainties are never in doubt.
After all my years as a follower of Christ, I remain convinced of the truth of what Kathryn Kulman, a great evangelists said when she wrote these words:
"God has no grandchildren"
I understood some years ago that to mean that no one can inherit their faith, that each person must confess and profess for themselves.
That is most surely true.
But that does not mean that those whose confession and profession has happened countless times since they were but babes coming to worship and repeating the creeds as we repeat them during this Easter Season are not as equally loved by God and saved by God as those who have at one great moment of their lives done it for the very first time in their basement bedroom - or on a highway - or beside the seashore.
Nor does it mean that those who have said the Lord's Prayer and who have called upon God over their meals and gone to Sunday School with their parents or grandparents are any less devoted followers of Christ than those who like Paul did not turn to Christ until later in their lives.
What it does mean is that everyone is called to have a personal relationship with God through Christ Jesus - and that relationship is one in which God accepts us as one of his much loved children - and we accept God as a much loved - and supremely good - parent: a parent who calls us to a holy obedience and an everlasting joy, an obedience and a joy that are based not on compulsion, but upon love.
What it also means is that each of us, from the youngest to the oldest, is loved intensely and personally - as only a mother or father can love their first born child.
What's normal?
In today's world as in the world of the past there are many people - perhaps more than anytime since the Emperor Constantine made the faith legal who will go through the pattern of call and conversion that Paul went through, that John Newton went through: - an experience that leads them from being lost to being found, and from being blind to seeing - from believing in nothing to believing in the God who does everything good.
And there are many who have always had the freedom, the sense of belonging, the vision, that people like these have only come to latter in life, people like many of you here have had since your grandmothers sang hymns over your cradle or your father took you to be baptised and your brothers and sisters accompanied you to Sunday School.
What unites us is not how we arrive at faith, nor is it even how we worship or where we worship or when we worship.
What unites us is the God who calls us all together, and who names us as Christ's brother and sister and who calls us to continue in faith - to love one another - to watch over one another to know Christ as both crucified and risen and to trust in him.
There is one right way - but there are many roads that lead us to it, there is one God - one Christ - one Spirit - but many believers, many experiences of coming to faith and staying in faith.
St. Paul - whose conversion - or call - name it what you will - is featured in today's readings once said this:
If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead you will be saved. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified and with your mouth that you confess and are saved.
As the scripture says, 'anyone who trusts in him will never be put to shame', for there is no difference between Jew and Gentile, the same Lord is Lord of all and richly blesses all who call on him."
I no longer know what is normal.
And I no longer care.
It is enough for me that God has called me to give my life over to him, and that God will never let me be put to shame as long as I trust in him and follow him.
And it is great joy when others - the cradle born believers or the newly re-born - sing God's praise and give testimony to God's goodness and strive to do what Peter - the rock upon which our church is built - was called to do: when they feed Christ's sheep and tend to the Lord's lambs.
I love the Lord and I love how in the way that is appropriate to each of us individually he calls us, how he knows our names and remembers who we are and makes us his own.
Peter or Paul, Mary or Martha, Richard or Robert, Denise or Shelley each of us are called in a different way.
We are called and equipped by God, we are named and blessed by Christ - so that we might not only be blessed, but bless others.
Let no-one, not even your own selves, say your faith is less important or meaningful than someone else's, rather give thanks and glory to God for the faith you have received and love Christ and feed his sheep, his lambs, even as he has called you to do through Peter the Rock upon which the church of God is built in this world. Amen
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