Saul and Ananias: The Hurt We Give: Acts 9:1-19

 Ordinary Time; Pride Sunday

Meanwhile Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest and asked him for letters to the synagogues at Damascus, so that if he found any who belonged to the Way, men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem. Now as he was going along and approaching Damascus, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” He asked, “Who are you, Lord?” The reply came, “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. But get up and enter the city, and you will be told what you are to do.” The men who were traveling with him stood speechless because they heard the voice but saw no one. Saul got up from the ground, and though his eyes were open, he could see nothing; so they led him by the hand and brought him into Damascus. For three days he was without sight and neither ate nor drank.

10 Now there was a disciple in Damascus named Ananias. The Lord said to him in a vision, “Ananias.” He answered, “Here I am, Lord.” 11 The Lord said to him, “Get up and go to the street called Straight, and at the house of Judas look for a man of Tarsus named Saul. At this moment he is praying, 12 and he has seen in a vision a man named Ananias come in and lay his hands on him so that he might regain his sight.” 13 But Ananias answered, “Lord, I have heard from many about this man, how much evil he has done to your saints in Jerusalem, 14 and here he has authority from the chief priests to bind all who invoke your name.” 15 But the Lord said to him, “Go, for he is an instrument whom I have chosen to bring my name before gentiles and kings and before the people of Israel; 16 I myself will show him how much he must suffer for the sake of my name.” 17 So Ananias went and entered the house. He laid his hands on Saul and said, “Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus, who appeared to you on your way here, has sent me so that you may regain your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit.” 18 And immediately something like scales fell from his eyes, and his sight was restored. Then he got up and was baptized, 19 and after taking some food, he regained his strength. (NRSVue)

 

          Everybody take a deep breath in, then a deep breath out.  We’re going to talk about Paul, and there are few characters in the Christian story who have quite as much ability to pull strong emotions from people as Paul.  People who have spent really any amount of time in the New Testament beyond the gospels quickly develop feelings about him, one way or another.     

“Paul’s mads were madder and his blues bluer, his pride prouder and his humbleness humbler, his strengths stronger and his weaknesses weaker than almost anybody else’s you’d be apt to think of; and the splash he made when he fell for Christ is audible still.  It is little wonder that from the start he was a genius at making enemies.

          “As his own letter indicate, his contemporaries accused him of being insincere, crooked, yellow, physically repulsive, unclean, bumbling, and off his rocker.  Since then the charges against him have tended to narrow down to one, i.e., that he took the simple and beautiful Gospel of Jesus and loused it up with obscure, divisive, and unnecessary theological subtleties.

          “Anybody who thinks the Gospel of Jesus is simple should go back and take a look at it.”[1]

          American theologian Frederick Buechner had a great deal of admiration for Paul, divisive figure that he is.  Credited with nearly half of what became the New Testament and likely the true author of at least a quarter of it, Paul’s voice shaped Christianity irrevocably.[2]  His call story, alongside the others we’ve been examining in this summer series on those called whose answer cost them every ounce of what they thought they knew, is one that many Christians have heard over and over.  It’s dramatic, high theatre—a voice from the heavens, sudden blindness, a proud man struck down, a miraculous healing, a changed heart.  The changing of Paul is God still at work on a deeply personal level.

          Except this story isn’t about Paul—not really.  It’s about Saul.  Luke, credited author of today’s Scripture reading in the Acts of the Apostles, doesn’t use the name Paul until chapter 13—four chapters from now.  There are plenty of memes around about those who can call Saul Paul can surely adapt to a chosen name someone uses for themselves, particularly gender-expansive people.  But it’s not as much of a fluidity as those might mean because we almost always talk about Paul; Paul the letter-writer, Paul the traveler, Paul the converted.  We so rarely talk about Saul, who breathed “threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord” because he felt he was absolutely correct to do so.

Picture it: Saul, trained and educated Pharisee who held Roman citizenship, making him not only powerful in his community but recognized by the empire that held his people under its boot.  He leverages his connections and gets formal authority to bind and bring in anyone who is following this new religious offshoot, the Way.

Think of the furtive conversations that must have been happening among the people; “make sure your documentation is correct,” they’d tell each other, “so there’s no doubt about who you really are, especially if you have right standing with the government.”  “Consider relocation now, if your safety and security is a concern,” if you could afford to leave, if there was somewhere else to go.  “Find a safety plan” for if and when you come under attack.  “Remember that we are in a marathon, not a sprint,” and that the threats of Saul and Rome are not forever.

Ah, sorry; not Saul and Rome.  All those things are from an article published in November 2024 titled “How LGBTQ+ People Can Protect Themselves Legally, Financially, and Medically in the Coming Months” and published by the Modern Military Association of America.[3]

Let’s try again; picture it.  God comes to Ananias and says, “Get up and go looking for a man of Tarsus named Saul.”  “But Ananias answered, ‘Lord, I have heard from many about this man, how much evil he has done to your saints in Jerusalem’”.

Go anyway, he was told; go because God called you, others around him said, and what is your faith if you don’t follow God’s call.  It doesn’t matter if you’re comfortable; Christianity isn’t about being comfortable, anyway.  Of course it will be difficult—being called to ministry is difficult, that’s how it is, if you can’t handle that then you maybe shouldn’t be doing this.  Of course it may cost you everything; Jesus said to take up His cross, after all, we all have one, and if you turn away it’s your job to make sure healing happens no matter how much it harms you or how the vitriol against who you are could still roll casually off the tongue of the one who had so recently thought of you as less than a person.  You shouldn’t make him uncomfortable, he’s trying, you might be scared but just think of how much he’s going through, you aren’t faithful if you say no, Ananias. 

Ah, apologies; not Ananias.  That was some of the types of things people have said to me as a queer person and an ordained elder in the ministries where I’ve served, including this one.

Do you hear, Body of Christ?  Do you hear how this story that we have told each other a thousand times about how glorious it is to have Paul transformed must also deal with how much damage Saul had done?  Up to the very moment Saul was somewhat literally knocked off his high horse, he was breathing threats and murder.  He held cloaks while men were stoned to death, dragged women to judgment with a clear and ferocious heart.  “It’s important to remember that Saul sees himself as the good guy trying to protect the faith,” writes Professor Amy G. Oden.  “Saul loves God and wants to stamp out anything that, in his view, dishonors God…His one-track focus on righteousness narrows rather than expands his vision of what God is up to. He is so convinced of the error of others that he cannot see the new thing God is doing in Jesus Christ and mis-reads it completely”.[4]

Last weekend was Pride here in Ann Arbor, and a colorful and wild and massive Pride it was.  Two hundred vendors lined the streets for the 30th year of celebrating queer identities and an estimated 15,000 people came to dance, talk, see and be seen.  For the first time, there was “a group wedding ceremony, allowing multiple couples to tie the knot as the festivities began. The celebration also introduced its first-ever drag king show, expanding the festival's already diverse entertainment lineup.”[5]  At least 11 of the vendors were faith-based, including Jews, Buddhists, and a whole variety of Christians. 

And yet the Church—yes, even this church—is still such a dangerous place for queer folk.  There are plenty of people who are breathing threats and murder, but there are also those who are simply, quietly expecting queer folk to go into spaces that are unsafe with people who have never taken the time to listen to or care for them.  There are people who have said they don’t have to do the work of reparation and healing because they’re not “those people,” because they don’t breathe threats and murder, because people shouldn’t be afraid of them.

Professor Oden continues, “At both ends of the ideological spectrum, Christian progressives as well as Christian conservatives look to purge their ranks of any who step even slightly out of line. The story each side tells about themselves is that they are holding firm to sacred values. No one thinks of themselves as a persecutor in the stories we tell ourselves about our own commitments. We would be shocked to hear Jesus say to us, ‘Why do you persecute me?’”[6]  It may not be threats and murder but it is the history of our institution, our denomination that colors every interaction we have no matter how many flags we fly or statement we write; it’s the grapevine of “I have heard from many” about this man, this congregation, these expectations, these baits-and-switches.  When Saul was awaiting Ananias, he was already being changed but our intentions never override our impact.  Ananias had heard things, things that had been true, and he was afraid, and he had every right to be fearful because he had not yet seen Saul do anything other than breathe threats and murder, than seek the authority to squash Ananias’ friends, than silence the voice Saul deemed wrong.

Dr. Raj Nadella writes, “[W]hen Saul asked to know who confronted and addressed him by name, the voice responded saying, ‘I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.’ In locating itself in and with the victims of Saul’s violence, the voice was not just expressing solidarity with them, but was also asking Saul to see the divine in those he was targeting. In identifying with the people, the voice was suggesting to Saul that inasmuch as he was targeting them, he was targeting Jesus himself. For Saul, the site of encounter with the divine transforms into a site of encounter with the humans he was persecuting.

“…Saul eventually joins the Jesus movement, but what stands out in this story is not theological or doctrinal, but the profound ways in which people can be transformed when they acknowledge the pain and damage of forcing others to see the world as they do.”[7]

Everything that Saul has done gives Ananias the right to run from this call—but he doesn’t.  “So Ananias went and entered the house. He laid his hands on Saul and said, ‘Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus, who appeared to you on your way here, has sent me so that you may regain your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit.’”

This is a call story of two men.  It’s a call story of an entire mindset.  It’s a call story about recognizing that becoming the hero doesn’t mean there isn’t work left over from when you were the villain.  It’s a call story about trusting that God doesn’t call people to suffering for its own sake, that God didn’t ignore Ananias’ fear because God was already changing what made him afraid.

The gospel, the Good News, may well be that Saul becomes Paul.  But it’s also that Ananias trusted, and it’s that God is meddlesome, and it’s that Saul was forced to see—or unsee—the world differently, and it’s that pain was met with reparation instead of recrimination.  Saul spends the rest of his life, even unto martyrdom, building a different path than the one he’d so painstakingly laid.  We don’t get Ananias’ story beyond this, but he is forever in our holy text as the courageous one who said “this hurts and I trust.

This is a call story for us, that we look with scale-less eyes at the places where we are Saul who frightens the Ananiases around us even though we meant well, even though we’re trying not to take up all the space, to breathe threats; that we discover in ourselves an Ananias who steps forward in courage because God said so and God’s is the voice to which we listen.  It’s a call story to do our own work of repentance for the ways we have casually overlooked others’ pain; it’s a call story to realize that none of us fully knows the impact we have on those we meet, no matter how we perceive what we’ve done.

And it’s a story where God works with it.  God works through it, God shakes it up, God invites, God demands, God changes, God protects, God reveals, God remains.  How, then, are you a Paul who has a Saul past?  How are you an Ananias fighting to be heard?  How are you allowing God to work in you, through you, to be Good News in every heartbeat pulsing through you?

May we do the hard, hard work of listening; may we do the hard, hard work of changing; may we open ourselves to the beautiful, beautiful work of being God’s people.  Amen.



[1] Frederick Buechner, “Paul,” in Wishful Thinking: A Seeker’s ABC (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), 82.

[2] Of the 27 Protestant canonical NT books, Paul is credited with 13 or 14; he likely wrote at least 7.

[3] Rachel Branaman and Adele Scheiber, “How LGBTQ+ People Can Protect Themselves Legally, Financially, and Medically in the Coming Months,” Nov. 19, 2024, accessed August 9, 2025.  How LGBTQ+ People Can Protect Themselves Legally, Financially, and Medically in the Coming Months – Modern Military Association of America

[5] https://pridesource.com/article/ann-arbor-pride-2025-photos

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