Text: Acts 9:1-19a

This week we watched, horrified, as yet another story about violence ran across our television screens, growing more disturbing and bizarre with each passing day. Monday we learned of the murders of 32 students and faculty at Virginia Tech by an assailant who then turned the gun on himself. Tuesday we learned his identity--a 23 year-old senior with a history of mental illness. Wednesday excerpts of his videotaped “manifesto” appeared on the evening news. From the lips of a person whom students had rarely heard speak spewed a stream of raging, obscenity-laced invective.

We cannot conceive of the inner darkness and profound alienation that drove this sociopath to commit premeditated mass murder. Seung-Hui Cho had so dehumanized his victims that he laughed even as he shot them repeatedly.

One of the terrible ironies of the massacre at Virginia Tech is that one of the victims, a 76 year-old lecturer in engineering and mathematics, was a Holocaust survivor in his native Romania. Adding to the irony, Professor Librescu was murdered during the annual week of remembrance for the 6 million people killed in the Holocaust.

If you have been to one of the Holocaust museums—Yad Vashem in Jerusalem or the museum in Washington—you will find yourself overwhelmed by the enormity of the atrocity that is remembered there. Last October, when someone asked me as we left Yad Vashem what I had learned there, I replied, “never dehumanize people.”

Almost lost in the media coverage of the Virginia Tech massacre is the continuing violence in Iraq, where on Wednesday five car bombs in Baghdad killed 187 people (127 of them in one place) and injured scores of others. This has become the stuff of everyday life.

Such violence thrives on the human tendency to dehumanize others, making them faceless and nameless objects on which to project one’s rage or sling one’s insults. Violence in this day and age is not just physical, but verbal. Media “shock jocks” target faceless multitudes and play upon people’s feelings about those who are different—whether those differences arise from race, gender, or sexual orientation.

People of goodwill can agree or disagree about whether Don Imus should have lost his job over his comments about the Rutgers women’s basketball team the day after they lost the national championship game. But commentators almost universally agree that this time Don Imus crossed the line by picking on a dozen women with very human and in some cases quite remarkable stories-- women with real names and real faces who refused to be dehumanized.

Violence thrives on dehumanizing and demonizing others, and it is one of the real cancers in our society. It may manifest itself in particular ways today—amplified in its power and notoriety by 21^st-century technology. But violence is not a new phenomenon.

Today’s reading from the Acts of the Apostles is the dramatic story of Paul’s experience of the risen Lord on the road to Damascus. We tend to think of it as a conversion story, but the issue here is violence.

Earlier in the book of Acts Luke introduces Paul—then called Saul—as a man of violence who was complicit in the murder of Stephen. Luke tells us that when Stephen spoke of Jesus as “the Righteous One” of whom his persecutors had become “his betrayers and murderers,” “they became enraged and ground their teeth at Stephen…Then they dragged him out of the city and began to stone him; and the witnesses laid their coats at the feet of a young man name Saul.” When Stephen died, “Saul approved of their killing him.” Luke goes on to tell of a severe persecution that began that day in Jerusalem. “Saul was ravaging the church by entering house after house; dragging off both men and women, he committed them to prison” (7:55,68; 8:1).

Later in Acts, Paul himself describes what he had done. “I persecuted (them) up to the point of death by binding both men and women and putting them in prison” (22:4). “I not only locked up many of the saints in prison, but I also cast my vote against them when they were being condemned to death. By punishing them often in all the synagogues I tried to force them to blaspheme; and since I was so furiously enraged at them, I pursued them even to foreign cities” (26:10-11).

We pick up Saul’s story again on the road to Damascus where, “still breathing threats and murder,” Saul is headed in order to round up the followers of Jesus “and bring them bound to Jerusalem.”

This is the man whom God chooses to be an instrument “to bring (God’s) name before Gentiles and kings and before the people of Israel.” God gets Saul’s attention by blinding him with a light from heaven that drives him to the ground. Then God indicts him not for persecuting the followers of Jesus but for persecuting Jesus himself. When Saul asks, “Who are you, Lord?” the reply comes, “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.” All of those nameless and faceless people that Saul has persecuted in Jerusalem and on the way to Damascus suddenly have a name and face on them: the name and face of Jesus Christ himself. Blinded and helpless, Saul is led by the hand to Damascus.

There he has another vision, that a man named Ananias will lay his hands on him and restore his sight. At the same time, God tells Ananias in a vision to do just that. But Ananias, well aware of “how much evil Saul has done,” balks at the suggestion. When God then reveals that Saul is God’s chosen instrument, Ananias obeys. Saul regains his sight, is baptized, regains his strength, and proclaims Jesus as the Son of God right there in Damascus.

Saul, it turns out, was not the only person whose life was transformed in Damascus. For Saul’s stunning transformation from persecution to proclamation would never have happened if Ananias hadn’t set aside his own skepticism to welcome Saul as “Brother.” Saul’s conversion was not a private matter between him and Jesus but a public act that required the transformation of a community of skeptical Christians in order to bring it about.

Today we are surrounded by violence, much of which goes largely unchallenged because it is done against nameless and faceless masses in distant lands and in the back alleys of our cities. But each of those individuals that have been dehumanized by people and circumstance has a name: “child of God.”

Christians are called to be active participants in transforming a world of violence into a world of peace. It may run against our every instinct, and it certainly takes us outside our comfort zones. We start by seeing the face of Jesus on those we might seek to dehumanize. And we continue by daring to be like Ananias—opening ourselves to be instruments of transformation in order to win a battle that really must be won: relinquishing the violence in ourselves and in our world.