A New Kind of Belonging

This weekend we welcome pastor Zach to join our summer walk through Acts. Our Scripture this Sunday brings us to one of the most dramatic reversals in scripture: Saul's conversion in Acts 9. Saul is introduced to us as a man breathing threats, a persecutor whose power comes from violence and control. He is the picture of dominance wielded against the vulnerable.
And then the Spirit meets him on the road, and everything about how he understands power gets undone.

What strikes me about this story isn't just Saul's blindness and sight restored, though that matters. It's what he's converted into, not simply as a changed individual, but into a new form of community altogether. The Spirit doesn't just soften Saul's heart, She dismantles the logic of subjugation that he'd built his whole identity around and places him inside a community built on mutuality, where Ananias, someone Saul had every institutional reason to despise or dismiss, becomes the one who extends a healing hand to, and in laying hands on him, names Saul as sibling. This is a creative act of redefining a relation from enemy to companion, from one over another to one alongside.

Words matter, and so also does embodied embrace of those who are enemies. The relation between Saul and Ananias is, in fact, a conversion of both of them, from their respective places, from prisoner and enemy to new forms of human dignity and recognition as siblings.
His baptism isn't a private transaction. It's an immersive embrace into a body where former persecutors and persecuted find their place in God, side by side. That's what the Spirit keeps doing throughout Acts, disorienting and reorienting. The Spirit rejects and dismantles every hierarchy of patriarchal dominance determined by insiders and outsiders and builds instead a community held together by grace come to life in unexpected joining across the gaps of inhumane separation.

In this way, both parties are being transformed and brought into a new kind of community in the Spirit through the joining. So whatever side we happen to be on, whether you are a Saul or an Ananias, divides are being dissolved. And that’s life in this world when the Spirit is leading.

See you on Sunday!
Pastor David