RECEIVING SPIRITUAL SIGHT

The events of that Damascus road experience are described in Acts 26:9 - 23.   Then, in Galatians 1:11 - 24, we read Paul’s own words describing his amazing experience and transformation from being a persecutor of Christians to an apostle, an apostle not appointed by people, but appointed by God. In Mark 10:46 - 52, we hear about the healing of Bartimaeus’ physical sight and the refusal of the religious leaders to receive God’s gift of healing of their spiritual blindness, which contrasts so profoundly with Paul’s receiving of God’s gift of healing of both his physical and spiritual blindness…

The consequences of Paul allowing God to heal his spiritual sight is truly world changing: Paul is undoubtedly the greatest evangelist of all time. Not only is a large proportion of the New Testament either penned by him (or in some cases possibly by one of his follower), not only has he shared God’s touch with and thus inspired millions over two thousand years, but his thinking as handed to us through his writings have had an incredibly profound influence on Christian theology and thus the entire fabric of both Western and near Eastern thinking and culture…

For example, despite some people’s misguided thoughts to the contrary, he advocated individual freedom in a culture where the poor, sick, slaves, women and children were mere property and where the tribe’s good meant everything and individual rights were of little to no consequence. Paul’s God inspired insights influenced the human rights movement over two millennia through his amazingly visionary-for-his-time teaching that we are all equal in Christ, male and female, Gentile and Jew, slave or free and by extension black, yellow, white, gay, straight, rich, poor, so called abled or so called disabled, whatever….

What a wonderful man to celebrate….

But what Paul's conversion is really about is not Paul, but God….

God’s invitation is offered to all of us so we too may see, where we are blind, be it physically or so much more importantly, spiritually…

I know I seem to have a naïve view of God being in control, believing that God is truly working to the good in all things, even though we face natural disasters, political problems, personal crises that give many the impression that a good, omnipotent God could not be so seemingly mute to our cries, so that God must then not exist….

I truly have faith, with every fibre of my being I can muster, that God is real, good, alive and working in our times as profoundly as what we read about in scripture…

And I too have had an experience of God that has been life changing – I’ve mentioned this to some, but I’ve never publically told the story, but as I’ve told God for years if I were preaching when this feast occurred, if God so moved me, I would… So that you too might be encourages to see better, spiritually….

At 07h35 on Sunday 24 September 2006, while I was welcoming people to the service at St Martin's, I felt an excruciating, burning light that made me feel my mind was being burned up the way film used to get burned up in old projectors, and I was terrified… But almost instantaneously, I felt God’s calming, reassuring love, a love I had believed in, a love I had preached about, but a love I then realised was simply beyond words….

Like Paul, I was blind for three days, in those three days I experienced amazing visions, like flying with Jesus backed by angel chorus’ along cliffs, through hell, but even hell was not frightening, God’s love simply overwhelmed everything…

But also three days of anguish… I had a family to support, and I prayed to see again, and I started to see, a real miracle, but not an instantaneous miracle…

And I was also still so afraid – my mind (which had been my pride and joy) was shattered, I was so out of it, I could not function – doctors diagnosed a stroke, and I was so confused, I couldn’t even find my way from the bed to the bathroom and back… I knew I could not support my family in this state, and I had just cancelled the policies that would have provided for my family in such an event to join the church…  

Talk about a thorn in my side I begged God to remove! Many people prayed for healing, and unlike the instantaneous healing of the blind man in our gospel reading today, my healing took much longer, in the beginning, after 3 days I could see, but everything was dull, lifeless. As my brain healed, I became more and more functional, but it depended on constant faith…

But God was and still is truly remodelling me, I have accepted what I can bear of God’s love, of this new spiritual sight… I wish I could portray it as powerfully as Paul and others, but all I can do believe and struggle on and encourage those around to do so too…

My experiential lesson, is, I believe an important lesson our readings teach us - spiritual sight is so much more important than physical sight, and that choosing to accept, in faith, that God can and does save us, if we allow God to be in control, and that God always has and always will be working to the good in all things, and like Bartimaeus, like Paul, like millions through the years, we too can rely on God, in faith and not on our mind or our own abilities is truly the point.

Amen!

Rev Gavin Smith  January 2016