Domes - Our Monthly Newsletter
Dunbar UCC
April 29, 2007
Acts 9:1-6
Acts 9 7-25
Scales Fell
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Do people change? Do you? Other than getting older, physically, do you think that any of us change before we die? There’s a lot of evidence to suggest that we won’t.
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I was reading this month’s Rolling Stone magazine, and there were two interviews that were especially good: Paul McCartney and Bob Dylan.
McCartney was asked: “In the 60’s, Sgt. Pepper seemed very much a part of the feeling at that time that somehow everything was going to transform, that nothing was ever going to be the same.” And McCartney said: “I know a lot of people who felt a sense of disappointment that that never came to pass.” The sixties never delivered on their great promise.
And Bob Dylan was asked: “’Do you think America is a force for good in the world today?”
Dylan: Theoretically.
RS: But in practical fact?....
Dylan: The practical fact is always different than theory.
RS: What do you think the practical fact is right now?
Dylan: With what’s going on? Human nature hasn’t really changed in 3000 years. Maybe customs change....but human nature really hasn’t changed. It cannot change. It’s not made to change.
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Maybe we have great dreams, or good intentions. But in every generation, the same terrible stuff keeps happening over and over. Like the poet said, “The best lack all conviction, and the worst are filled with passionate intensity.” And so, people fight wars, rather than make peace --- because hatred is so strong, and war is so profitable. War is a big business now, and people in power become even wealthier -- so why stop? In the movie, “The Lord of War,” the arms dealer Uri Orlov says: “There are over 500 million guns in the world -- that’s one gun for ever 12 persons. My job is to find a way to arm those other eleven.” Violence is in our nature. Like Dylan said, “It cannot change. It’s not made to change.”
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Once the apostle Paul -- that man who wrote the beautiful love poem in his letter to the Corinthians that we read at weddings -- once he was a killer. Once he rounded up Christians to be tortured and executed. And there was no reason to expect that he’d ever stop what he was doing.
He was the worst, filled with passionate intensity.
And then a light from heaven blinded him, and he was changed.
Once a know-it-all, now he was confused.
Once powerful, now he was weak.
Once the authority arresting people, now the authorities would arrest him.
Once the executioner, now he would be executed.
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Three days after Paul was blinded by the light of heaven, the Bible says “something like scales fell from his eyes.” Through an act of God, our natures can change. The scales of ignorance could fall from our own eyes, and our own world could change, as Paul’s did. Today, the resurrected Christ could speak to us.