Sunday, April 10, 2016 | 4:00 p.m.

Learning to See

Nanette Sawyer
Minister for Congregational Life

Psalm 30
Acts 9:1–21

Our scripture story today is about Saul on the road to Damascus. We first get introduced to Saul when he stands by while Stephen, a well-known deacon in the early church, is murdered by an angry mob.

Stephen is described as a man endowed by the Holy Spirit with exceptional faith. He stood out among the believers for the way God’s grace was at work in his life, scripture says, and for the wonders and signs he performed among the people (Acts 6:5, 8).

Opposition rose up against Stephen and he was unjustly accused of insulting Moses and God, and people said that he spoke against the holy place and the Law. For this he was thrown out of the city and killed by stoning.

The book of Acts says that witnesses of his stoning placed their coats in the care of a young man named Saul (Acts 7:58). Saul approved of Stephen’s murder. And he approved of the vicious harassment of the church that was happening in Jerusalem.

“Saul began to wreak havoc against the church. Entering one house after another, he would drag off both men and women and throw them into prison” (Acts 8:3, CEB).

Reading today’s text we are left with this question: Who is this Saul? Isn’t he the persecutor? Isn’t he the instrument of vicious harassment?

In the “Jazz at Four” email newsletter that went out from me on Friday, I said that this is the story in which Saul becomes Paul. But when I tried to find the verse that says Saul’s name was changed to Paul, I couldn’t find it. It doesn’t exist.

Some names are changed in the Bible. God changed Abram’s name to Abraham, and Sarai’s name to Sarah.

Jesus did change Simon’s name to Peter (Petros in Latin). It was Cephas in Aramaic, meaning “rock.” Peter was to be the rock on which the church would be founded.

But Saul’s name was not actually changed. He was always both Saul and Paul. He was a Hebrew, a Jew, born of Hebrew parents, and he had a Hebrew name, Saul (Philippians 3:5).

But he was also a Roman citizen, born as a Roman citizen, and because of this he also had his Latin name, Paulus, or Paul (Acts 16:37; 22:25–28).

Saul had multiple identities, multiple stories, multiple worlds he lived in.

But about the followers of the Way, Saul had one story. When opposition arose against Stephen, with the crowds saying he was against God and Moses and against the temple and the Law, this was the story that Saul seemed to accept. So when Stephen was stoned, Saul approved.

Saul saw all the followers of the Way only negatively, as dissenters and troublemakers. He didn’t see them as healers or helpers. He didn’t see their love or their generosity in sharing all they had with the poorest of the poor. They were just enemies. He saw them as criminals. He did his best to round them up, to drag them away, to lock them in prison.

Although his eyes were open, he did not see them. Not in the beginning of this story.

And the same can be said of Ananias. Ananias knew who Saul was because of the stories that he had heard. He said to God, I’ve heard the reports about this guy; he’s not a good guy.

But God had a different story about Saul, and Ananias had to learn to see something more than the one story he had heard.

I’m using this language of story because of a powerful TED talk that I watched recently. It’s a talk by Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Her talk is called “The Danger of a Single Story.”

Adichie grew up in a middle-class Nigerian family with a professor for a father and a mother who worked as an administrator. They had employees who lived in their home with them: domestic help. When she was eight years old they got a new house boy, whose name was Fide.

Her mother only told her one thing about Fide’s family: that they were very poor. They would send yams and rice and their old clothing to Fide’s family. And when Adichie didn’t clean her plate at dinner, her mother would remind her of how poor and hungry Fide’s family was.

Then one Saturday, Adichie describes, they went to visit Fide’s family in the village. One of Fide’s brothers had made a beautifully patterned basket out of dyed raffia, and she was surprised.

She said, “It had not occurred to me that anybody in his family could actually make something. All I had heard about them was how poor they were, so that it had become impossible for me to see them as anything else but poor. Their poverty was my single story of them” (3:42 of www.bit.ly/1SONcEP).

Sometimes stories can expand our minds and help us to learn new things and understand people better. But in this case, the opposite happened, because there was only one story, a limited story, a partial story.

What a single story does is creates a stereotype. And the problem with stereotypes, Adichie says, “is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story” (12:56 of www.bit.ly/1SONcEP).

This is what Adichie did with Fide’s family; it’s what Saul did with the Jesus followers; it’s what Ananias did with Saul; it’s what we do anytime we describe any group of people as one thing. When we have a single story that “those people” are lazy or dangerous or greedy, power-hungry, poor or rich and selfish—when we describe a whole group of people like this, we are diminishing them to a single story.

We can make one story—even if it’s a true story—we can make one story into a single story by repeating it many times. When we “show a people as one thing, as only one thing, over and over again, [and] that is what they become,” Adichie says (9:25 of www.bit.ly/1SONcEP). How do we reduce a whole life—filled with many stories, many people, many places, many experiences—how do we reduce that into a single story?

I was in a meeting this week with some members of the church talking about discipleship. One man shared with me the story of a mission trip he was part of that went to Ghana many years ago. The church had sent a contingent to help rebuild a building that had been destroyed in a hurricane there.

On the first day this person saw all the handmade bricks the Ghanaians had made in preparation for the rebuilding project. Looking at all the bricks he thought it would probably take about three days for the people on the mission trip to rebuild the building.

But to his surprise, the next day about a hundred people came from the village, and working together they finished the building in a day.

The group from Fourth Church was scheduled to be there for ten days, and the project was already done! He wondered what they would do for the remaining days.

He shared his surprise and his question with the Ghanaian pastor, and she said to him, “Did you think that we couldn’t do our own work?”

As he thought about it, he began to see the people there and himself differently. That pastor went on to tell him how amazed her community was that people in the U.S. cared enough about them and their situation that they came all that way to help them. That was the gift. That was the amazing thing to them. What was important was not that they build a building but that they come, that they be in relationship with them.

There was not one story there. There was a rich, rich history and many stories to be learned and even created over the next week.

I don’t want to say that the man telling me the story started out with only a single story; I don’t know if he did. But by the end of the week he had so many more.

In her TED talk, Adichie says, “I’ve always felt that it is impossible to engage properly with a place or a person without engaging with all of the stories of that place and that person. The consequence of the single story is this: It robs people of dignity. It makes our recognition of our equal humanity difficult. It emphasizes how we are different rather than how we are similar” (13:44 of www.bit.ly/1SONcEP).

We need to find our equal humanity. Saul needed to find it. Ananias needed to find it, too.

I think it’s important to recognize both how we are similar, in our shared humanity, and how we are different. If we pretend that we are all the same, then we’re not really seeing each other either.

But if we only see how we are different and not how we are the same, then we also miss seeing the whole truth. Some of our stories are about how we are human beings. And we can only find those stories, and those similarities, if we don’t limit people to a single story.

Saul had to get knocked to the ground by Jesus and blinded by the light before he would let the other stories in about who the Jesus followers were.

In fact, it was a Jesus follower who was able to heal Saul. I imagine that changed his perspective on who the followers of the Way were.

Learning to see, like Saul had to, means learning to look for the multiple stories about anyone we meet. It means asking questions and listening, watching, and taking the time to get to know people in all the richness of their experience.

“Stories matter,” Adichie says. “Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to empower and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people, but stories can also repair that broken dignity” ( 17:35 of www.bit.ly/1SONcEP).

So let’s learn the stories that will help us become repairers of dignity. When we hear a single story being told about a people, let’s question that.

Let’s find other stories and then tell them, too. Let’s repeat them, so that we too can see the light and we too can be healed as Saul was healed.

May God help us to do it. Amen.