Jesus Happened to Them
Posted by stpauls on January 30, 2011 under Sermons | 
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In her 2007 autobiographical book Take This Bread – A Radical Conversion, Sara Miles tells the story of her story of life and her story of faith. It is an amazing book with deep insights into the life-giving mystery of our Christian faith, the profound mystery and divine beauty of the sacraments, the rewarding mystery of our response to God’s call in mission and ministry, and the messy mystery of our Anglican Communion, and I can only recommend this book.
Sara Miles was raised as an Atheist. The opening lines of her book are “My mother nursed a grudge against Christianity for more than fifty years.”1 However, that doesn’t mean she grew up without faith. Hers was a faith that was grounded in a strong secular orientation that acknowledged and affirmed the goodness of the human race, and that found its expression in the fight for equal rights and social justice around the globe, and it was celebrated by breaking bread at the family dinner table and by sharing a meal with friends and strangers alike.
And it was not something that Sara stumbled upon by herself. One of her grandmothers marched with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the largest civil rights organization in the U.S., while the other grandmother was arrested protesting at a military base. Yes, activism was in Sara’s blood. This was the faith of her ancestors, or at least an aspect of it.
After leaving her home, she quickly became part of progressive causes and she embraced that other family tradition of sharing meals, when she became a chef.
But after a rather serious kitchen accident, Sara set out to become a writer, a journalist, reporting about the rights of oppressed people in Latin America. She did research work in Nicaragua, in El Salvador, and other places and she got involved in her work as much as in the fight. Yes, she had embraced the secular cause, even become a zealot for it. And, not unlike her mother, she scorned Christianity.
Which is what she shares with Saul.
On the surface, Saul, the first century Jewish male, who was firmly embedded into the traditional religious structures, has nothing in common with Sara, this emancipated, contemporary Western woman, who had never even been really in contact with any traditional religion.
Yet, there are similarities. Even striking similarities:
Both were citizens of the dominant power. Saul was a citizen of Rome. Sara is a U.S. citizen. Both were involved in the fight for freedom against the Empire: Saul fought for religious freedom for the Jewish people. And Sara fought for personal freedom for the peoples of Central and South America. And both were zealots. Both were deeply enmeshed and had enthusiastically embraced what they had believed to be their cause.
Yet, both used the intensity of their involvement to cover a nagging pain, a dark emptiness in their souls. When Paul stood before King Agrippa he acknowledged: “I was so furiously enraged”2 and later he realizes that his zeal “hurt him”3 and probably hurt him deeply.
Sara’s zeal equally was not fulfilling. And after getting married and pregnant, her life took an unexpected turn when she flew back to the United States with her husband Bob, fully expecting to return to Latin America after the baby’s birth. Just like Saul, who wanted to return to Jerusalem after his trip to Damascus. And we all just heard how that trip ended.
Let me share you in Sara’s own words, though, in a bit of a longer reading from her book, what happened to her:
We settled in San Francisco … and Katie was born. …
The next few years would unfold in a dizzying blend of joy and anguish, as Katie grew, the Central American wars lurched to their desperate ends, communism itself cracked and dissolved around the world, my relationship with Bob ended, and I stayed in America.
My entire personal and political landscape was breaking apart. … Years of living among continents had left me feeling like a stranger everywhere. … Around the world all revolutionary fervor of the last decade was dissipating. … There was no more communist utopia on the horizon, and certainly no capitalist utopia: just the inevitable wreckage of war and the scrambling for postwar power.
Even as the wars ended, death was coming closer to me. My best friend, Douglas, called to ask if I would come to New York and help him end his life: In the last excruciating stages of AISA, his lungs were filling up with Kaposi’s sarcoma, and he couldn’t breathe. He died in my arms, as I whispered to him. …
Then my father, who had never spent a day of his life in a hospital, was diagnosed with lymphoma and died, out of the blue, four days later. …
It was once the acute grief abated that I could start to see new things. We’d bought a big, cheap wooden house in the Mission District. … Bob, who had come out as a gay man, had moved just blocks away, and Katie – a luminously happy, talkative child – tromped back and forth between us, wearing pink sneakers. There was an apricot tree in my backyard, and lilies, and wisteria and jasmine twining over the deck. … And at a party in the rainy season, I met Martha, an editor, and we fell in love.
Over the next five years, I cooked dinner every night for Martha and Katie at home. And every day, Katie kept talking and laughing and reaching for more. As my life got happier, ease and love began to enter me, side by side with the memories I carried. While the classic conversion story involves desperation, hitting bottom, and a plea for help, I think now that it was gratitude, as well as the suffering I’d seen, that made room for me to open my heart to something new.
Early one winter morning, when Katie was sleeping at her father’s house, I walked into St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church in San Francisco. I had no earthly reason to be there. I’d never heard a Gospel reading, never said the Lord’s Prayer. I was certainly not interested in becoming a Christian – or, as I thought of it rather less politely, a religious nut. But on other long walks, I’d passed the beautiful wooden building, with its shingled steeples and plain windows, and this time I went in, on an impulse, with no more than a reporter’s habitual curiosity. …
I walked in, took a chair, and tried not to catch anyone’s eye. There were windows looking out on the hillside covered in geraniums, and I could hear birds squabbling outside. Then a man and a woman in long tie-dyed robes stood and began chanting in harmony. There was no organ, no choir, no pulpit: just the unadorned voices of the people, and long silences framed by the ringing of Tibetan bowls. I sang, too. It crossed my mind that this was ridiculous.
We sat down and stood up, sang and sat down, waited and listened and stood up and sang, and it was all pretty peaceful and sort of interesting. “Jesus invites everyone to his table,” the woman announced, and we started moving up in a stately dance to the table in the rotunda. It had some dishes on it, and a pottery goblet.
And then we gathered around that table. And there was more singing and standing, and someone was putting a piece of fresh, crumbly bread in my hands, saying “the body of Christ,” and handing me the goblet of sweet wine, saying “the blood of Christ,” and then something outrageous and terrifying happened. Jesus happened to me.4
Jesus happened to me.
And Jesus also happened to Saul, who was transformed into Paul. We might have long academic debates if what turned Saul’s heart was a light and a voice from heaven or a realization that in the faces of the ones he persecuted he finally recognized the face of the crucified Jesus. But the fact remains: Jesus happened to Saul. And it changed his life. As darkness clouded his eyes, he discovered the awesomeness of the divine light that restored him to the beauty that God intended for him and that allowed him to claim the love of the Risen One. He was gifted life, life eternal, and life abundant.
And it was beautiful and wonderful and awesome. It is what we celebrate today. And this might be enough for you, enough to digest, and enough to celebrate.
But the story doesn’t end here. It is only the beginning. Jesus says: “[G]et up and stand on your feet; for I have appeared to you for this purpose, to appoint you to serve and testify.”3
What Paul encountered on the road to Damascus is not a personal story, not something that seeks to remain hidden. But it wants to be shared. The love that engulfed Paul spurned him on to share it with all those searching for meaning and with all those yearning for healing in body, mind, and soul – around the globe. And in claiming his call to bring the light of Christ into the darkness of the world, Paul pushed open the gates of the church that had been firmly locked to keep out those who did not fit the traditional scheme. The love that engulfed Paul not only brought light to his darkness, but it made him act, it turned him into the one that pushed the church beyond her docility, beyond her comfort zone, and beyond her self-imposed limits. The love of Christ made Paul act.
As fire commands to burn and the wind commands to blow, so God’s love commands to act.
And this is true for Sara too.
When Jesus happened to her, her life was reoriented. The Eternal Love she encountered at the sacred meal of Communion opened her eyes to the suffering Christ she had seen in Latin America and it restored her, like Paul, to the beauty that God intended for her. Yet, again, the story did not end here either. In no time, the meal of the altar had multiplied.
The first food pantry Sara founded provided food for hundreds of poor and needy. From the very table she received the Body and Blood of Jesus the Christ on Sundays, she distributed food for the hungry during the week. And she too pushed the church, her church beyond her limits.
“Jesus happened to me,” she wrote. Yes, indeed, Jesus happened to her.
And because Jesus happened to these two zealots, who scorned or even oppressed Jesus, I am not giving up hope that Jesus might happen to others who scorn and persecute Jesus today. I am not giving up hope for people like fellow Anglican priest Fr. Thomas Musoke, whose zeal made him preach hate at the funeral of David Kato, a gay rights’ activist, who was murdered for his sexuality in Uganda on 26 January of this year.
And Jesus can happen to us. In fact, Jesus has happened to us already. Just look around and consider our ministries, the things we already do.
And I wonder how Jesus will continue to happen to us in the future, here at St. Paul’s Anglican Church.
1. Miles, Sara: Take This Bread – A Radical Conversion, 2007, p. 3
2. Acts 26:11
3. Acts 26:14
4. Miles, Sara, ibid pp.54-58
5. Acts 26:16
[The Reverend Markus Duenzkofer delivered this sermon on January 30, 2011.]