The following is a manuscript form of a message I delivered on May 4, 2025, for Common Table Charlotte, a joint ecumenical outreach ministry of my work church St. Stephen United Methodist and home church St. John’s Baptist. This manuscript form differs from the way we usually deliver messages at Common Table, with two built-in breaks for guided conversation. This was also written out a few weeks after this message was delivered in person, so I’ve had the benefit of additional thought; the general message is the same, even if I’ve elaborated on or added points that weren’t originally shared with our friends at the May dinner.
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.
— Acts 9:1-9 (NRSVUE)
Saul, who many of us know better as Paul, was a man with a zealous religious conviction. An educated Jew and a Roman citizen, Paul was not stupid. He knew the Law, and he knew his religious tradition. He was utterly convinced of the rightness of his own beliefs. So passionate was Paul of this singular conviction that he volunteered to lead the persecution of others who weren’t doing things “the right way,” Paul’s way. The very first Christian martyr, St. Stephen, fell at the hands of a mob led by none other than Paul. So, Paul had certainly made a name for himself as he traveled the land hunting down, arresting, and overseeing the execution of those who followed “The Way,” instead of Paul’s way.
But then, on the road to Paul’s next stone-throwing escapade, Paul experienced something miraculous. Completely out of nowhere, completely unexplained, he experienced the ultimate divine encounter.
Acts doesn’t tell us exactly how Paul responded or detail for us exactly what he was thinking, but we know he was blinded. I’m sure he was beyond shock. You would have been, right? I would have been! It only makes sense. Utterly at a loss for words, attempting to make sense out of something you’ve never experienced before, we might have found ourselves at a complete loss for words, mouths gaping in astonishment. That’s what usually happens when any of our carefully constructed frameworks of the world — our self-crafted, self-assured ideas about who God is, who we are in relation to God, or how God’s world is supposed to work — come crashing down around us. Everything we thought we knew becomes shattered in the face of a divine encounter that forever changes the trajectory of our lives.
So, we can imagine Paul feeling about the same way after that miraculous encounter on the road to Damascus. And, it was in that moment, almost instantly, that something in Paul changed. What was it that caused it? What had he learned? What new fact had changed his mind?
I don’t think it was new knowledge or any collection of facts that caused Paul’s changing. It’s not as if Paul got any real, new information here. He was already fully aware of the facts of Jesus’ life and of the Christian story. He would have known full well what the Followers of The Way were saying about this Christ figure raised from the dead. He was, after all, a powerful, well-educated man. And, I imagine he would have been not unlike any of the powerful, well-educated men who persecute others today. They are not without facts; they’ve studied the lives and stories and writings of their supposed foes, if only to use some twisted sense of that knowledge against them.
No, it was not new information that changed Paul, but rather a new experience that defied any logic or material sense — his direct, miraculous encounter with the risen Christ.
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about “sense” and “logic” and “reason.” I’ve been wrestling with the meaning of my own recent, and not-so-recent, experiences that defy logical sense, aided by this spring’s seminary course exploring spiritual formation and, in it, our discussions of mysticism.
As the semester ended, seemingly by coincidence — but more on that later — I ran across two quotes that provided the spark for this message tonight:
“The devout Christian of the future will either be a ‘mystic,’ one who has experienced ‘something,’ or he will cease to be anything at all.”
— Karl Rahner, Jesuit priest and theologian
“If our faith is merely intellectual assent (to a set of doctrines, a social ethic, a cultural way of life, a political philosophy), but it leaves untouched man’s inner experience, it won’t long survive — at least not as anything identifiable with the kingdom of heaven Jesus preached.”
— Luke Stamps, Professor of Christian Theology at Anderson University and the Clamp Divinity School, Co-Director of the Center for Baptist Renewal
Broadly defined, mysticism is any number of spiritual practices which focus our energy or help us prepare to open our hearts toward achieving a direct and transformative experience with God, often described as a “union with the divine” or an “experiential faith.”
The history of the Church is full of those we would call mystics. In many ways, this kind of experiential faith may have been a more widely expressed form of the Christian life prior to the advent of the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, and modernity — back when the lines between fact and fable and truth and myth were a little more blurry.
Today, we value a world defined by strict binaries between true and false. We privilege rationality and reason, with firm lines separating fact from fiction. We have trouble understanding that something can be true, without necessarily being a verifiable, quantifiable fact. It’s the reason why so many people still hold to a belief in a literal seven-day creation story of an earth only 6,000 years old. They’re unable to see that a story mustn’t necessarily be a historical fact for it to contain abundant, eternal, and universal truths.
In contrast, an experiential — a mystical — faith challenges our rationalistic understanding of the world. It tugs and pulls at what we think about God, about ourselves, and other people. It is the difference between knowing about God and knowing God — truly having a relationship with God that opens your heart up to the movement of the Spirit and changes your life, in much the say way Paul’s newfound relationship with Jesus changed his, and revealed for him a truth unbounded by logic or reason.
Jesus’ own ministry modeled for us the best of a relational, experiential faith, as he encouraged his own disciples and any who would listen to go beyond facts and seek a true relationship with him. I’m reminded of Nicodemus. Like Paul, Nicodemus was a well-educated and powerful man. As a rabbi and member of the Sanhedrin, Nicodemus knew all about the Law, the Prophets, the history of his people. Nicodemus thought he had all the facts and was brought to complete confusion by this poor, wandering, nobody preacher from backwater Nazareth. Nicodemus had a faith that was dependent upon what was in his head, but not in his heart. With Jesus, Nicodemus began opening his heart, being “born again” to a truer, more genuine way of understanding and experiencing God. When we see Nicodemus again, he’s slowly making his way toward being a disciple… defending Jesus in the Sanhedrin, then helping to prepare Jesus for burial. I wonder, how much sooner would Nicodemus have gotten there if he’d first gotten out of his head?
Our heads are often the safest places for us to be. The heart? Our feelings? That’s scary. Who wants to deal with feelings? That forces us to face our own fears, our own shortcomings, all the questions we don’t have answers to. I wonder how many of us have ever found ourselves retreating into the safety and surety of an intellectualized faith of the head? I once did, and if I’m being honest, I still struggle against it. After growing up in a conservative, independent, fundamentalist Baptist church, an intellectualized faith was the safest and easiest way to deal with my own fears, church hurt, trauma, and rejection. I could safely stuff God into a tidy, little academic box. God was a subject to be studied, not experienced. Distancing my heart from God, from feeling, I removed any danger of being hurt again.
It took me a long time and a series of seemingly unconnected coincidences to start opening my heart again to an experiential relationship with God:
- Moving to Charlotte, finding a church, increasing levels of lay involvement, a tugging at my heart to get baptized. I chalked all these up to coincidences, or maybe just the natural way of things, but the door to my heart cracked open just a little.
- And then I met my now fiancé. I met his parents. I learned that his father had grown up in and been baptized at the same church I thought I’d found by random chance. Another, but awesome, coincidence, I told myself. The door to my heart opened a little wider again.
- I began finding less and less genuine fulfillment at work. I called it burnout, and it was. But it sure did seem to coincide with an ever-increasing and flourishing involvement at church. I didn’t connect these dots at the time, but something — or someone — was truly working.
- I left that job and spent months looking for another, passing over an opening at St. Stephen when I first saw it. After weeks of dead-end interviews, I hesitantly applied to St. Stephen — coincidentally the job was still open. You already know I got the job, because, well, here I am. But did I mention? St. Stephen is located literally right next door to my fiancé’s parents’ home. Coincidence, right?
There have been more of these little coincidences over the past two years. Early on, it was easy for my mind to explain and rationalize them away. Just coincidences and nothing more, my very smart, very reasonable brain told me. But the door to my heart is open much wider now. Looking back, I wasn’t actually being very smart. I certainly wasn’t seeing clearly. Like Paul, my eyes were open, but I could not see. Today, I more clearly see in these seeming coincidences, both recently and throughout my life, the real, true work of the Holy Spirit, not some unseen hand of luck or chance — even if there’s no solidly verifiable way to test this truth.
Most of us may never experience a sudden, miraculous encounter with God the way Paul did. Most of us — in this life, at least — will not be granted the same opportunity Nicodemus had, as he sat down and talked to Jesus face to face, in the flesh. But we can open ourselves up to God. We can move from intellectual safety to spiritual vulnerability. In this vulnerability, the Holy Spirit will work to draw many of us into a deeper, closer, more intimate, and experiential relationship with God. If we allow the doors to our hearts to open, even if just a little crack, God will take over and help us open that door ever more widely to the way the Spirit moves in and through our lives.
Many Christians in antiquity and in the Middle Ages long before our Age of Reason, knew this model of faith. We call many of them mystics. They had a way of living into faith that engaged both their intellect and sought after an experiential relationship with God. Like them, we can begin to tune our hearts toward God through any number of spiritual practices. Developing a disciplined, intentional life of prayer, study, and reflection creates in us space for a divine encounter. It’s allowed me, for instance, to more clearly see how all those little coincidences were never really coincidences at all.
What does your current prayer life look like? What spiritual practices do you engage in now? What would you be willing to try? How can you move from knowing about God to truly knowing God? In what ways can you begin to cultivate a more experiential faith and relationship with God?
Jesus has called us into a relationship with God. Jesus is the teacher, yes, but more than that he is our friend. And our friends aren’t mere subjects designed to be studied. We love our friends. We live with them. We flourish with them. We serve with them. We sacrifice for them. And they sacrifice for us. Jesus has done all these things with us and for us already. God promises to keep doing so, if only we return that freely outstretched hand of relationship and welcome God’s Spirit into our hearts.
At the conclusion of the May 4, 2025, Common Table dinner, we distributed this handout with examples of a variety of spiritual practices. Take a look and try one out for a week, two weeks, a month. See in what ways you can open your heart to the ways God is moving in your life.
