Tag: jesus

I Demand to See the Body: Sermon for Easter 2

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When I first looked at this week’s scripture readings, I struggled to understand exactly how they fit together.  

At first glance, our Acts reading and our John reading don’t draw out one particular theme.  

How does “Doubting Thomas” fit together with…starting a commune? Like most things, it turns out that these scriptures don’t benefit from oversimplification!

So I kept thinking… 

It’s the Easter season, so it’s customary to continue in our story with the now resurrected Jesus visiting his disciples and friends. 

And on this day, we hear the story of Thomas, who, apparently, lost his invitation to the dinner party.  And thought he had missed his chance to see Jesus, in all his resurrected glory.  

Ok, so, that story’s squared away for now. 

But the tricky part of the way we read scriptures in the Episcopal Church is that, even though Thomas is always right here, waiting for us, on the Second Sunday in Easter, the other passages move around in a three-year cycle.  

That means that this is the only time in three years that today’s Acts passage is paired with the story of Thomas. Though a bit complicated, the lectionary cycle gives us several ways to encounter the unfolding story of Christ and his church. And to make connections we may not have noticed before. 

All that to say: when I dug deeper into today’s readings, the thing that stuck out to me was the fixation on bodies. 

Not dead bodies, but living ones. And, not just any body, but the Body of Christ. 

— 

With that in mind, let’s get back to Thomas… 

Thomas is an important part of the resurrection narrative, because he’s just like us. 

He says what everyone is thinking, even if they won’t admit it:  “I’m not gonna believe that Jesus rose from the dead, until I see it for myself! Show me the evidence!” 

And Jesus readily complies. A week later, Jesus returns and immediately tells Thomas: “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.” 

Thomas doesn’t need to touch Jesus after all.  

In the presence of Jesus’ living, breathing, resurrected body, this body that still holds the battle wounds of death, in that moment, Thomas believes. 

And Jesus is more than willing to help him believe. 

Jesus goes on to say: “Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.” 

Because of that statement, Thomas has been forced to bear the nickname, Doubting Thomas, for the last 2,000 years.  

But it seems clear that Jesus isn’t condemning him for wanting to see the body. 

Rather, Jesus is graciously acknowledging that it is hard to believe in him without any evidence. 

Jesus gets it.  

If the Gospel of John were turned into a play, this would be the moment where Jesus breaks the fourth wall.  It’s almost as if he’s looking out into the future and speaking directly to us. 

We are the ones who “have not seen and yet have come to believe.”  

But can’t there more than that? Like Thomas, I want evidence: 

  • I want proof that Jesus is who he says he is.  
  • I want examples of how God is acting in the world, now.  
  • I want Jesus to show up and start pointing to all the things he’s up to,  
  • So that I can believe that he really is paying attention. 

And I wouldn’t say I want any of these things because I don’t have faith. 

It’s just that the world is a tragic place.  

It is full of horrific violence that never seems to end.  Of illness, grief, fear, and so much anxiety.  There are too many people struggling to survive.  And too many people making their survival impossible. 

Sometimes it seems like nothing will get better. 

But, Thomas demanded to see the body of Christ and Jesus consented. In doing so, they both taught us that it is ok to make that demand. 

Well then, I demand to see the body.  

— 

Where is Christ’s body for us, today?  

Our Collect, which paraphrases the Scriptures, says that we have “been reborn into the fellowship of Christ’s Body.”  

If we are part of Christ’s body, that means that we encounter Jesus, quite literally, in one another. 

In other words, WE are the living, breathing, resurrected body of Christ, for one another.  We bear the battle wounds of our own difficult lives,  and we allow one another to witness those vulnerabilities.  

— 

At first glance, this strange proposition doesn’t feel the same as Jesus showing up for Thomas. 

But, when I think about it, I can honestly say that the reason I’m still a Christian is because people in the church kept showing up and loving me. 

When I felt abandoned, they stepped forward and said, “here I am.” 

And every time I have demanded to see evidence of God working in the world,  I have only needed to turn to my right or to my left,  and observe my siblings in Christ doing that work. 

The church at its best makes believing in Jesus not only easier, but compelling.  Because we actually do catch glimpses of Christ when we reach out our hands in care for one another. 

— 

And that’s why the Acts passage has something to say about our Gospel. 

In Acts, we see how the early church showed up as Christ’s body for one another. They participated in a radical experiment to give up their personal property and share “everything in common.” In doing so, they ensured that no one in their community struggled to survive.  

As theologian Will Willimon puts it, this community showed the surrounding culture that: “The church takes care of its own, thus creating in its life together a kind of vignette, a paradigm of the sort of world God intends for all” (Interpretation Commentary on Acts, 53). 

While the church has never managed to broadly sustain this kind of communal living situation, this passage reminds us that being Christ’s body in the world is a serious undertaking. Just as we have received love from others, we must make it our job to share that love with others. 

It’s not always easy.  

In fact, this job of caring for one another as Christ’s Body is both the heart of our faith, and the hardest thing to do. It requires us to see ourselves as one part of the bigger whole.  It forces us to always imagine what is possible, instead of giving up when things feel too hard. It puts us in situations of risk and discomfort, because to be like Jesus in this world means showing up, even if the doors are locked. 

Caring for one another as Christ cares for us means we can’t give up on each other. And we can’t give up on building a better world. 

— 

The good news is, we’re not giving up. 

Just this week, I have spent hours learning about the history and hopes of this place. And I have been energized by your faithful labor and persistent care for one another.  

Limb by limb, the Body of Christ is being made visible. And the Holy Spirit is urging us to continue the work. 

Of course, the church has never been perfect. The Body of Christ has, perhaps, never been as visible to us as it was to Thomas. Because of this, there will be struggles and disagreements and roadblocks. We will have our doubts.  

But we can demand to see the Body. We can ask for Jesus to reveal himself, and expect to see him, quite literally, in one another. 

So, look for Jesus and expect him to show up. He’s already here. 

Amen. 

At the Fault Line of the Resurrection

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A Sermon for Easter

I shall not die, but live,
and declare the works of the Lord…

shot of hill country in texas with bird flying over
Photo by J. Amill Santiago on Unsplash

This morning, we join Mary and the disciples at the threshold of the tomb.

As we poke our heads into that dark cave in the hill country outside Jerusalem, we brace ourselves for the stench of death, and find it empty.

In the long hours after Jesus died, we were trying to be strong. But the absence of a body finally breaks us. Our worst fear already came true, when the man who promised he would save us, died on the cross. But now, Jesus is really gone, and it feels like a second death.

Now, hope is dead. And there is no possibility of closure, only the bodily ache of despair.

But, just as we are hit with a fresh wave of grief, we turn our faces toward the blinding light of the morning as a mysterious messenger beckons us:

“Do not be alarmed! Do not weep! The longing you have held in your body, the fear and the hope, the promises you were foolish enough to believe – all of it has been redeemed! All of it has been transformed!”

Against all odds, Jesus Christ was dead, and now he is alive.

Here we are again, this Easter morning, standing at the threshold of the tomb, gazing into an empty burial chamber in amazement. Daring to believe in resurrection.

We stand at the doorway between darkness and light, fear and hope, death and life. Here, at the threshold, our perspective is broadened. We finally have the vantage point to understand the truth of all things: Here, in this space between all we thought we knew, and all that Christ is making new, the way we order the world breaks down. The dichotomies no longer make sense. In view of the risen Christ, “even the darkness is as light.”

At the empty tomb, we see everything with new eyes. NOW, we live in the ambient light of the Savior, the living Word, who created all things and redeems all things.

There is no need to fear the future. Because Jesus Christ is risen, and all things grow toward his light. In fact, there is no need, even, to hope. Because what our ancestors have hoped for since Eden has already come true.

We’re not yearning for the old days, or waiting for better ones. Heaven has come to earth, and paradise is here!

New life bursts forth at the threshold of a tomb in Judean hill country.

Here in Austin, we are intimately familiar with thresholds, in the geological sense. That’s because we quite literally live on a fault line. The city is built on a geological landmark called the Balcones Escarpment.

map of fault lines and zones in Texas
Balcones, and the Mexia-Talco-Luling Fault Trends, where black lines are faults, the blue shaded area is the Claiborne Group, yellow is the Jackson Group, and tan is the Wilcox Group (Image: Public Domain)

As Austin resident Stephen Harrigan put it in a 1987 article for Texas Monthly,

“The Balcones Escarpment…is geology’s most fateful mark upon the surface of Texas, a bulwark of cracked and weathered rock that extends in a pronounced arc from Waco to Del Rio. It is the Balcones that creates the Hill Country, that sets the stage for the Edwards Plateau and the High Plains beyond. The cotton economy, for our schematic purposes, ends at the base of the escarpment, where the rich blackland prairie…runs literally into a wall. Above that mass of limestone there is only a veneer of soil, and the country is hard, craggy, and scenic—cowboy country. The distinction is that sharp: farmers to the east, ranchers to the west.”

On the east side of town where we are right now, you can still see traces of fertile farmland. Each day when I come home, I have to be extra careful not to track fine, black dirt into my living room.

But just a few miles west, the landscape suddenly transforms into hill country. The ground rises up in stops and starts to reveal red clay and rocky passes.

The first time you drive west toward Lake Travis, you might find, like I did, that “amazement seizes you” at the sudden shift in perspective.

Like the Psalmist, maybe you’ll exclaim:

“This is the Lord’s doing,
and it is marvelous in our eyes.”

The landscape here, not unlike the culture, is a juxtaposition of abundance and want, softness and hard living, simultaneously quaint and exhilarating.

But you should know that the Balcones Escarpment isn’t the only interesting thing about the fault line. The result of a violent collision of earth that occurred 20 million years ago, the Balcones Fault Zone also produced the Edwards Aquifer.

Basically, when the ground was pushed up into hill country, it was also pushed down into deep ravines and caves. Rainwater flooded these hidden caverns, forming underground springs that provide water to local waterholes, the Colorado River, and the households of most of Central Texas.

These aquifers are literally what make life possible here.

So, if you’re having trouble finding the fault line, just look to where green things grow and people gather. Amid the tumult, and against the odds, life is nurtured and sustained, right here, at the threshold.

Like so many who settled here before us, the perspective of this place might grip you.

Living here, at the site of a geological wonder, you are living proof of a bigger truth: that the ways we sort the world, into good and bad, salvageable and broken, safe and dangerous, habitat and wasteland, no longer make sense in view of the fault line.

From this vantage point, we see things differently: All of it is redeemable. All of it holds hidden possibility. All of it can be made new.

At the fault line, you realize you no longer need to let yourself down easy. You no longer need the old stories or the doubted promises. Things can be bigger, and better, and more beautiful than you imagined.

Here at the threshold, life is bursting forth.

Today we worship in a church, formed at a geological threshold. And we stand with the disciples, at the fault line of the resurrection.

We have held the black earth of the east while gazing up at the red hills to the west. We have drunk the pure water from aquifers borne of violent shifts below the surface.

We dare to proclaim that the old things can be made new. We insist that life is persistent, growing in crevices and dusty hills, against all odds.

We have seen with our own eyes how the death of an old world can create the conditions for abundant life.

And if all this is true, just about the ground we stand on, how much more is in store for us, who proclaim the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the redeemer of the whole world!?

On Easter, we declare that, even in darkness, life is bursting forth!

And so, we proclaim: Alleluia!

“O death, where is thy sting?
O grave, where is thy victory?”

Christ swallowed up death and shifted the tectonic plates. Resurrection is here.

Two thousand years after the disciples peered into the empty tomb, we still bear witness to the Risen Savior.

We still dare to be faithful, in a fickle and distracted world. We still dare to believe in the reconciliation of all things, and all people. We still dare to see the bigger picture.

A dead man crossed the threshold of a tomb. Now, we know that life is always possible. Even death carries the seed of resurrection.

I shall not die, but live,
and declare the works of the Lord.

Amen.

The Pinnacle Epiphany: A Sermon on Transfiguration

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Readings here

Early last week, I wrote an entire 1,200 word sermon.  

But this weekend was Diocesan Council. And it wasn’t just any Council Meeting. This year, the Episcopal Diocese of Texas is celebrating 175 years. 

Over 600 of us – lay and clergy – listened to story after story of lives being changed, and people doing incredible things in the name of the Gospel, over the Diocese’s 175-year history.  

  • Three religious leaders who blocked the bridge to Galveston to keep the KKK from rallying there.  
  • A white Episcopal priest who risked being lynched to stop the lynching of a Black man.  
  • The first woman priest ordained in Texas, at nearby Epiphany, in spite of a protest in the middle of the service.  
  • And then, the recent news, of millions of dollars being distributed to support scholarships, health access, and community programs.  

These were stories of people putting their bodies on the line, and their money where their mouth is. 

— 

I don’t know how y’all have been feeling lately, but I really needed to hear stories of hope. 

I had a breakdown on Thursday night, thinking about the death toll in Gaza, and the drowned mom and kids at the border, and all the other scary, terrible, evil things humans do to one another.  

I kept asking:  

  • What should I do?  
  • How should I act?  
  • How will I know when God is calling me to risk everything for the sake of what’s right?  

I was thinking of all those heroes and martyrs who came before me.  

The Christians who hid Jewish families during the Holocaust, the Civil Rights leaders who persisted through death threats.  My neighbors in Charlottesville who held the line in the face of white supremacists.  And even the Hebrew prophets, who yelled and yelled the words of God, even when everyone called them crazy.  

Sometimes I worry that my practice of religion is too sanitized.  

That I’m too comfortable.  

I can talk the talk, but what good is that, if I’m not living like a person who believes in resurrection?  What good is sound theology if I’m more worried about my reputation than the new creation?  

I don’t think I have a martyr complex, but I do revere the martyrs.  I do think there are things worth risking everything for.  

But what does that matter if I’m not the one willing to put my own body on the line? 

I say all this to give you some taste of the real agony I was feeling.  The guilt, the inadequacy, that sense that I want to do the right thing. But I’m not sure how to even know what the right thing is.  

When are we called to be prophets? When are we called to be pastors? When are we called to be…people? 

— 

With all this in my head, I listened to these diocesan stories, of lives being changed and people doing incredible things in the name of the Gospel. 

And during Hour 5 of yesterday’s 6-hour meeting, I realized I would need to re-write my sermon.  You could say I had an Epiphany about an Epiphany. 

— 

The Transfiguration reading we just heard is the bookend to the Season of Epiphany, that begins with the Wise Men finding the human God in the form of a toddler in a working class family. 

This first Epiphany is that God came down from glory and became human. Not a king, but a carpenter. 

Then, in the Transfiguration, we follow this human God up a mountain for another surprise.  This time, the man Jesus is revealed as the glorified Christ. The eternal Son of God, shining with an other-worldly glow. 

The Transfiguration is generally thought of as a pre-cursor to Christ’s final appearance after the resurrection. Here, in the middle of his earthly ministry, Jesus has invited three of his most trusted disciples to witness the full truth of his nature. 

Some scholars suggest that the optics of the Transfiguration are so similar to Jesus’ appearance after the resurrection, that this event was actually written back into the story after the fact.  

— 

But there’s a more interesting story to tell about the similarity between the Transfiguration and the Resurrection. 

While the Gospels don’t name the mountain Jesus and his friends climb, we often assume it’s Mount Horeb, which is the same as Mount Sinai.  

Christians associate the Transfiguration story with Mount Horeb, because of the text’s mention of Moses and Elijah:  

  • Moses encountered God and received the Ten Commandments on Mount Horeb. 
  • And Elijah flees to Mount Horeb to escape his call, when God shows up and speaks to him in a whisper. 

My friend Ora explained to me that, in Jewish theology, these encounters with God on the mountain are thought to exist outside of time, in God’s eternal timelessness. 

This means that you could think of every divine encounter on Mount Horeb as simultaneous events. God is always present there and always speaking – and the message is always the same. 

So, in this passage, when we are invited to encounter Jesus on the mountaintop, what we are witnessing is neither a story about a past event nor a pre-cursor to a future one.  

In a reality beyond our understanding, the Transfiguration is, and has always been, happening, now. 

When we bear witness to the Transfiguration, we are having an epiphany in the truest meaning of the word. 

  • We are “perceiving the essential nature of a thing.”  
  • The thing, in this case, being God.  

We are seeing the full glory of the eternal and always resurrected Christ, who was and is and is to come.  

Our eyes are fixed on hope incarnate, in the flesh. On the living sacrifice.  On the Word who spoke Creation into being, and still whispers new creation all around us. 

“Suddenly when they looked around, they saw no one with them any more, but only Jesus.” 

This is the Epiphany to end all Epiphanies. The pinnacle epiphany.  

Not only that God was a baby in a manger, or a man on the move.  But that God, in Christ, is bigger than the whole human story. And yet, he is an eternal and ever-present part of the human story. 

— 

The Epiphany I had during Diocesan Council was that you and I ask a lot of very good questions about the world’s suffering, and our responsibility to alleviate it. 

But the answer doesn’t arrive in words. It arrives in an Epiphany.  

It arrives in God made flesh, and flesh transfigured as God. It arrives as the person of Jesus Christ. 

— 

If we want to do brave and risky things for God, we already have the action plan we need.  

“Suddenly when they looked around, they saw no one with them any more, but only Jesus.” 

If we don’t know what to say or how to act or when to do risky things for the Gospel, we look to Jesus.  We might be asked to follow stars or hike up mountains – to take beatings, leave our nice things behind, and journey to places far beyond our comfort zone.  

But we’ll know when it’s right, because we’re looking to Jesus.  We have witnessed him there, in the timeless place of God, in his full resurrected glory.  We are assured that he is with us, has always been with us, is present in primordial winds that still blow through the streets. 

Evil creeps in, but it can’t win. Because we have seen Christ’s glory face to face.  

We know what hope looks like and no one can convince us otherwise. 

When we get back down the mountain, we’ll know what to do.  Because the Transfiguration is the pinnacle epiphany, eternally revealing the truth of things.  

And maybe the world will kill us for it. It killed Jesus, after all. 

But God whispers an epiphany on that mountaintop that echoes through eternity: 

Have you not seen? Have you not heard?  

We’re a resurrection people. 

Amen. 

Divine Reassurances and Difficult Questions: A Sermon on Mary

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Advent 4, Year B – Readings here

For the past couple of months, I’ve have been slowly making my way through a book series about Jesuit priests who travel through space to meet singing aliens.

While these books, The Sparrow and Children of God, sound pretty lighthearted in their premise, they are actually extremely intense. They follow a Jesuit and linguist named Emilio Sandoz through the thrill of discovering alien life, the tedium of the long journey to another planet, the awe of taking that first step into completely foreign territory, and the surprising joy of engaging meaningfully with another sentient species.

Throughout the books, Sandoz is depicted as a person of wavering faith. Though he has devoted his life to God, he still grapples with life’s most difficult existential questions.

Questions like: Am I really doing what God wants me to do? Where is God in all this suffering? How can beauty and pain exist simultaneously?

But here’s the question the story seems to ask more than any other: If I had known what I know now, would I have followed God’s call on my life?

Early on in the first book, Sandoz has an experience of God so profound that those witnessing it say his face was shining like a saint. But that moment of spiritual certainty is overshadowed by years of tragedy, loss, and physical disability. Sandoz spends the rest of his life wondering what it could mean to have received divine reassurance that God has a plan for him, but to still be grappling with the confusion, doubt, and discomfort of not really knowing what will happen next.

Because I have been living in this alien world with Emilio Sandoz for so long, I can’t help but imagine Mary grappling with the same divine reassurances, and the same difficult questions.

But before I get into that, let me give you a bit of background on what we might call the “Mary Discourse.”

For the past few years, it has been trendy for preachers to riff on the popular Christmas song: “Mary, did you know?”

The song, which we’ll actually hear during the Offertory, goes like this:

Mary did you know
That your baby boy
Would one day walk on water?
Mary did you know
That your baby boy
Would save our sons and daughters?

Did you know
That your baby boy
Has come to make you new?
This child that you’ve delivered
Will soon deliver you.

Though the song was released in 1991, a parody called “Yes, I freaking knew” was shared online in 2019. That song uses all the same words from the original, except each repetition of “Mary did you know?” turns into an exasperated declaration: “Yes, I freaking knew.”

The parody song set off an ongoing conversation about what, exactly, Mary knew when she consented to God’s call on her life. We know that almost immediately after Gabriel’s visit, Mary sings a song about empires falling, and God keeping God’s promises. We call it the Magnificat.

But even though her words are forceful and prophetic, we often talk about Mary as meek, mild, and mostly silent. In other words, there is a disparity between her own words and the church’s historical characterization of Mary.

I mean, look at the hymn we just sang (“The angel Gabriel from heaven came”):

Out of 4 verses, Mary only gets one verse with a speaking part. This, despite being the one who bore Jesus Christ, the Savior of the World, in her own body! The fourth verse has the nerve to give us a speaking part, which doesn’t really seem fair to Mary, since we weren’t there for any of it.

I think the “Yes, I freaking knew” parody is right to point out that Mary wasn’t just a passive part of the story. At some level, of course she knew that saying yes was a big responsibility, with world-changing repercussions.

For us today, Mary is not a “most highly favored lady” because God sent the angel Gabriel to have a little chat with her. We remember her today because she boldy said YES to God’s call on her life.

Today’s passage is all about what it looks, sounds, and feels like for God to call us to something, and for us to respond.

The narrative follows the structure of a classic call narrative. Like the Old Testament prophets and patriarchs, Mary is brought into the terrifying presence of God’s messenger, who shares a bewildering and improbable message:

You will bear the son of God. You, little old Mary, from a region about the size of Houston, Texas, are being asked to consent to something that will risk your future, for the sake of the whole world.

This experience must have been unlike anything Mary could have imagined for herself, a young, poor woman from a marginalized religious group. Like Emilio Sandoz encountering an alien world for the first time, I imagine that Mary felt equal parts joy and wonder as Gabriel told her that the story of salvation was, at last, coming to pass.

She knew, in that moment, that God was at work in the world. And everything would be different.

In the near presence of God, of course she said yes: “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.”

So, it seems clear that Mary freaking knew, at the moment of her call, that she would play a part in God’s plan. Jesus was coming and nothing would ever be the same.

But could Mary have possibly known…everything?

Could she have known the jumbled beauty and pain of childbirth? Could she have known that Jesus, once he was grown, would put her own people at odds with one another, almost immediately? Could she have known the intricacies of his ministry, and the difficulty of navigating the needy crowds? Could she have known the intense horror and grief she would feel when her son was murdered by the empire?

As Mary sat at the foot of the cross, her son gasping his presumed last breath, do you think she really knew what saying yes to God would mean? Do you think she wondered if she had lost the plot somewhere along the way?

Indeed, even after Jesus’ resurrection, the fledgling church looked nothing like the empire-destroying world Mary sang about in her Magnificat.

Are you there, God? It’s me, Mary.

At the end of Christ’s earthly ministry, I wonder if Mary secretly pondered a question she dared not say out loud: If I had known what I know now, would I have followed God’s call on my life?

I don’t mean to be bleak, but in this last reflective moment of Advent, I do mean to be honest.

When we, like Mary, say yes to where God is leading us, we can never really know what that means for our future. In following Jesus, we are not promised a roadmap. We are not guaranteed glory or safety or a simple life. We are not even promised rational answers to our existential questions.

But, what we are promised is that everything will change, for the better.

As we look forward to celebrating God coming near to us, in the form of a human named Jesus, what we can know is this: It wasn’t enough for God to be at work in the world, in a vague and distant way. It wasn’t enough for God to be just out of arm’s length.

No! For our sake, God wanted to be a baby we could hold, a person we could embrace, a fellow citizen in an unjust empire, a cousin who cries with you at your kitchen table, a friend who tells jokes and calls you on your crap, a son who loves his mom.

We worship an incarnate, em-bodied Savior who calls us, like Mary, to use our own body, mind, and spirit for the sake of the transformation of the world.

He reminds us that, even in our human frailty, we are stronger than we know. Empires will be toppled, and the lowly will be lifted up. And God is, truly, with us.

When we answer the call of the Gospel, we can never really know where Christ will lead us.

But I hope, when Jesus’ tiny hands reach out to you from the manger this Christmas, you can hold him close to your heart, and say: YES.

Amen.

Like Paul, Like Kelly

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Like Saul, Kelly Gissendaner plotted to kill the innocent. Like Saul, she was an enemy of the righteous.

Like Paul, Christ spoke life into her and, because of her, many were saved. Like Paul, she was killed by the state.

May we be like Paul, and like Kelly, and remember where we came from and where Christ brought us. May we sing Amazing Grace in our final moments. May we foster mercy in our hearts against reason and wage love against the pain.

“…and immediately he began to proclaim Jesus in the synagogues, saying, ‘He is the Son of God.’ All who heard him were amazed and said, ‘Is not this the man who made havoc in Jerusalem among those who invoked this name? And has he not come here for the purpose of bringing them bound before the chief priests?’ Saul became increasingly more powerful and confounded the Jews who lived in Damascus by proving that Jesus was the Messiah.” (Acts 9:20-22)