Recycled
Acts 9:1-6
I was surfing the Internet recently and came across the website of the Philadelphia Recycling Office. Their description of why they exist caught my eye. “Recycling is collecting, processing, and reusing materials that would otherwise be thrown away.” That makes sense. We understand that it is good for our planet to reuse materials rather than to simply discarding useful material in a landfill. What we don’t always think about is the process something has to go through to become that new thing. Consider this: When you recycle an aluminum can, it does not simply magically become a new roll of aluminum foil or a new auto part. First it must be melted down, impurities leached away through heat or chemical processes. Then the newly refined material must be molded, shaped, pressed and basically transformed into something new. It would be hard to look at some recycled aluminum product and see an old Pepsi can in there, but its there in a new form.
One of the first things I noticed about Minnesota when I moved here six years ago was how many people here recycle. It is so amazing to drive down the alley behind Bill and my house and see the recycling bins filled with newspapers, bottles, plastic and glass. I had never lived in a place where people were so conscientious about recycling. I love living in a community where we get the idea that re-using something that would otherwise be wasted is a civic responsibility. Why don’t we come to the same conclusion when it comes to people?
To be able to see potential in otherwise “disposable” people, we have to first be able to see them the way God sees them – as valuable. We may look at someone and simply see an addict, a homeless person, someone who hurt your feelings, someone mentally ill, or an adversary. Like turning old aluminum cans into brand new aluminum foil, it takes a great deal of effort, energy, time and investment of ourselves to risk going through the process of helping another human being reach their potential. Is life just too hectic to invest ourselves into this kind of project, or is that simply a convenient excuse?
In our scripture for today Paul is on his famous mission of persecution. He is on a journey to punish people whose lives and faith are challenging to his own. In the process of this journey, Paul has an encounter with Jesus who sends him to a group of Christians and tells them to welcome this man (a man all of them would have labeled an enemy) into their faith community. They weren’t keen on accepting a recycled person like Paul just like most people today. They wanted evidence that this personal experience with the divine had indeed transformed Paul. His previous passion for violence is recycled by God into a passion for finding hope. As we see from our text, Paul’s recycling process was not an easy one. He finds himself blind, helpless and he will be led to people who just a few days ago were his quarry. His transformation process may have felt like a meltdown as he is re-constituted into someone new.
For Paul to be “reconstructed” into the person who would be the pivotal person in Christian history for helping his generation understand the story of Jesus, he first had to be “deconstructed.” The recycling process of the Spirit is not always a pretty or pleasant thing to watch. Like aluminum being refined by a furnace, it can seem to dissolve us into nothingness. That to which Paul held so tenaciously had to be let go. Some of the things of his former life would serve him well. Others had to be dismissed as no longer relevant to his understanding of God. Now, it is easy from our 21st century perspective to look back and see clearly the things Paul needed to let go – his hatred, his fear, his prejudice, his angst. It is not nearly as easy to assess what things from our own lives need to melt away.
I was listening to NPR this week as they were doing a piece on stem cells. It was mentioned that the stem cell lines researchers created can basically go on producing new cells indefinitely. It made me marvel at the wonders of the human body. How can these basic building blocks of our bodies continue to reproduce themselves indefinitely into whatever cells are needed at that particular time? Imagine if all of our cells could do that. We would never age. All of our organs that are ravaged by disease or abuse could be re-constituted. But that’s not how it works for us, is it? Our only hope of reconstruction – of being recycled – is through the grace of God – who takes the often meager gifts of our lives and transforms them into something beautiful. That is how we can produce new life indefinitely. That is how the gift of our lives can live on, even long after we are gone.
This is really a fascinating scripture text to me. I find it interesting that Paul’s mission to “carry the name of Jesus” uses a verb reminiscent of a woman carrying a child to birth. That really resonates with me. You see, being a Christian is not about telling other people what to believe, how to act or who is the acceptable group before God. Being a Christian – carrying the name of Jesus – is about birthing new life in our world, allowing the broken and damaged parts of ourselves to be recycled by God’s grace, and becoming agents who actively help others find a way out of the mires and messes they have created for themselves.
Now that we have begun the “Would Jesus Discriminate?” campaign in earnest, there are going to be lots of opportunities for many us to have conversations with people who we might have missed otherwise – people who read your tee shirt and ask what it means, people who see your yard sign and want to know why you have that in your yard. Our first reaction might be to get defensive or prickly and get ready for a verbal feud, or we could allow God’s grace to take all that old information people have about our community or our church and recycle it into an opportunity for connection, healing, understanding and hopefully community.
Every life is precious to God because every life is a manifestation of God’s love to the world. I bet they didn’t know it, but Philadelphia Recycling could have been describing in their slogan what it means to be Christian – collecting, processing, and reusing that which would otherwise be thrown away. If we can do it with our bottles and cans, then we can also do it in assisting others in discovering that they are blessed and valuable to God – and that we value and bless them as well.
Sources:
www.homileticsonline.com Plattenbau Paul, April 2007.
http://www.phila.gov/streets/recycling.html
http://cmbi.bjmu.edu.cn/cmbidata/stem/progress/NIH%20News%20Stem%20Cell%20Stem%20Cells;%20Scientific%20Progress%20and%20Future%20Research%20Directions.files/stemcellcover.jpg stem cell image