February 24, 2013 | 4:00 p.m. | Second Sunday in Lent

Insiders and Outsiders

The Second in a Series of Sermons on the Apostle Paul

Edwin Estevez
Pastoral Resident, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Acts 9:17–28

To be clear, this text isn’t about Jews versus Christians; there has been a terrible history of consequences when we make it about the Jewish and Christian relationship in the Newer Testament. No, this is, as this evening’s sermon title states, about insiders and outsiders.

So I want to tell you a story about that.

His name was Paul. He was the class clown, but the kind that made some people laugh hysterically but annoyed most others. He was in trouble often. Most people snickered at him because he wore what looked like the same clothes every week, the same looking jeans every day.

He couldn’t see very well and used glasses, but because he had lost them, his parents made him go without. He would stare up at the classroom projector or blackboard stretching his eyes to see well. This annoyed the teachers, who thought he was just being a class clown again, and everyone else thought him really weird for doing it. No one ever wanted to be in a group with him; barely anyone talked to him. His only other “friends” were two other kids who were always picked on.

Paul was my classmate in elementary school. I had always taken pride in the fact that I never picked on him. He thought I was nice enough, so he invited me to his birthday party. I went and entered what looked like a mansion; his well-to-do adoptive parents owned an impressive Victorian home in a working-class community. They had even purchased some arcades that were up in the playroom of the house for their children, and I guess Paul could use them too. I don’t know his parents’ stories: they may have been very loving with great intentions, but in my usual interactions with them, including at this birthday party, they were pretty mean to Paul.

Even though Paul might have thought me nice, looking back, I also realize I never stood up for him. I never challenged the bullying. He was bullied because he was an outsider.

In this story, maybe you identify with Paul—feeling isolated, picked on, bullied; everyone’s mean; maybe you came from a broken home. You wanted to fit in, so you took on a persona, as the class clown, tough guy, or rebel.

Maybe you have a persona now, where you don’t open up to people, because—and it’s understandable—you don’t trust people because they’ve hurt you. You wear a mask because you don’t want people to see the real you, perhaps because you think little of yourself and believe others will think little of you.

Or maybe you identify with some of the smart alecks in the classroom who picked on Paul. Maybe you remember, or not, and maybe you’re even ashamed now, but maybe you thought someone like Paul was weird. Maybe outsiders made you nervous; you didn’t trust them. Maybe it also made you feel powerful to put others down, to cause fear in them and not even get in trouble. You were a bully. You bullied boys that seemed too “girly”; you excluded girls from your clique because you didn’t think they were pretty or popular; maybe you excluded the kid who smelled funny, the other that looked funny. You were a bully.

Or maybe you identify with me and a few others in the class who didn’t have the heart to bully Paul, to exclude people from your group, but you also didn’t have the courage to stand up for someone like Paul. You stayed silent when you could have spoken up. You left someone hanging when you could have been by their side. You laughed, even on the inside, or were annoyed by someone like Paul and didn’t tell the teachers about his family situation or didn’t ask about her story. You weren’t a real friend but an onlooker; you weren’t a bully, but you also weren’t an advocate.

Whom do you identify with in the story? Who comes to mind as you hear this story? Can you take a moment to remember the moments when you felt bullied? Or when you bullied? Or when you were a bystander, a spectator, and let it all happen?

The scripture today also deals with insiders and outsiders.

Saul is an insider. He has authority to deal with the problem of the “followers of the Way,” which was the original name of Christians back then. In his defense, he thought these followers of Jesus were being disrespectful to Jewish tradition and beliefs, blasphemous even, and disruptive to community; at the very least, these followers of the way were weird—and they were weird to those around them.

In fact, we’ve found some documents written by Roman contemporaries accusing followers of the Way of practicing incest, because they all called each other brothers and sisters in Christ, even when they were married. And they were accused of cannibalism, because at the Lord’s Table they professed to eat bread as Christ’s body, and the fruit of the vine as Christ’s blood. They were accused of circumventing the norms of Roman customs and challenging the status quo, especially the status quo of sexuality—in which well-to-do women were expected to marry well-to-do men to produce the children that would serve as leaders in the senate, in the army, and in business, and the poor women were expected to produce the workers that built Rome and the soldiers to fill the army—when suddenly some women who became followers of Jesus chose not to marry but to instead devote themselves to the work of the church, offering their homes as meeting places, donating large sums of money to the poor, to pilgrimages to Jerusalem.

The followers of the Way were eventually called Christians, but this was a derogatory name; it was a mockery to name them after someone who had been crucified as a criminal, who was supposed to be the son of God.

They were outsiders, and as outsiders, they were persecuted by insiders, bullied by them; again, this isn’t about Jews and Christians. It’s about insiders and outsiders. That is why this isn’t about what groups are doing it, but why. And the reason is because of this evil inclination we have to exclude some and include others, to have power over others, to humiliate and hurt and create power structures that deem some worthy and some not.

Saul has this encounter on Damascus Road. “Why do you persecute me?” he is asked. The bully, the one doing the persecution, who seems filled with righteous indignation and hate for those whom he thinks should be excluded, encounters the risen Christ on that road, falls off his “high horse,” is blinded by the light, and is asked, “Why do you persecute me?” Or put another way, “Why do you bully me and those that follow me?”

Before that, Saul thought he knew exactly who was blind—in other words, who cannot see—but it takes blindness to be led about, to be powerless, and to experience the dependency on another for Saul to truly see.

And, of course, Saul is taken to the followers of the Way, but the scripture tells us that they were afraid—understandably so. They had been persecuted by the likes of Saul, and now they were being asked to welcome him? They were right to distrust. They were right to be afraid. I even imagine some of them were angry.

Ananias even raises this concern before God, who offers a word of comfort to him, and then it is Ananias who receives Saul and calls him brother.

That’s powerful, isn’t it? Saul, who used to persecute the followers of Jesus, like Ananias, is then welcomed by him as “brother.” This, my friends, is the essence of Christianity. We might not all get the different doctrines, traditions, and structures; we might not understand the scripture or we might find some of its stories disturbing or very foreign. We might forget to pray, not do anything for Lent, and struggle to come to church. We might feel under-churched or over-churched, but for all this, this story and so many others illustrate the essence of Christianity: forgivenesss.

That encounter when you who did so much evil, you who bullied, you who oppressed, you who wronged, you who messed up, you are received by God—and not just by God, but by God’s community, by the very people you bullied, by the oppressed, by those you wronged.

And you who had been so wronged, bullied, can look at someone like Saul and say, “Brother.” This is radical stuff. It is challenging. And let me be clear: it isn’t easy. No, I’m not asking you to press a magical button and forgive or to press another magical button and receive your forgiveness. It’s deeper than that; there is more to the process. We are responsible for our actions and their consequences. If we bullied, there’s real pain we caused and real people we affected. If we were bullied, although survivors, we need time to heal and recover. In some ways, the Christian journey is the long, challenging, but grace-filled journey of learning to accept your forgiveness and learning to forgive others.

Therein lies our identity. Our identity is that we are not the excluded ones the world tried to make us; our identity is not that we are so cool as to belong to the VIP group that excludes others; our identity lies in that we are a forgiven people of God; our identity lies in Christ, who is the bridge between the insiders and outsiders, who calls the insiders to repentance and the outsiders to their healing.

To you who have bullied in the past or bully now, Christ calls you to repent, to change your ways. To you who have stood silent in the midst of bullying or exclusion, in the ways we make each other outsiders, you are called to speak up, to speak out, to advocate and to stand in solidarity with the bullied, the oppressed, the wounded, the excluded, and the outsiders. And you who have been excluded and wronged and made an outsider—you are called to your healing in Christ.

Like Saul the oppressor or Ananias the oppressed, we are called to this encounter in Christ. And this evening, as we come to the table, the Lord’s Table, we are all welcome. We are all invited. Here at this table, there are no outsiders or insiders, but only the forgiven people of God, who are loved and valued, whose true identity is in the grace of God, in the love of Christ, in the communion of the Spirit that calls us to share that forgiveness with ourselves and with others.

And this evening, as you take the bread and the cup, open yourself up to forgiveness—to your own forgiveness and the forgiveness of others—because often we are both oppressor and oppressed, the bully and the bullied, but in Christ we are the beloved. Amen.