In June of 1997 all of the staff of my church in Vermont attended the Annual UCC Conference.  We all split up to take in as many workshops as possible. I can't for the life of me remember what workshops I attended, but I soon found out where our CE director and Administrator went to.  At the next staff meeting they proclaimed: we are going to start a food pantry at the church! Oh boy, I thought, what have they gotten into now? These two went to a workshop on "How to start a food pantry in you church! And guess what? We did start a food pantry that following fall.

People in need of food would either go to Burlington to get help, or call the church and we would write a check.  It was very clean for us to do so. But having a food pantry would truly get us in touch with the need out there. 

We had no trouble getting volunteers. Over the course of the summer months, we would encourage parishioners to bring in non-perishable food items to get us started.  The day of the food pantry's opening, early in the morning we all drove to the Food Bank and picked up all kinds to fresh and canned goods. When the pantry opened that day, about 30 families came to get food.  We were floored.  The next month, there were about 50 families that came.  Over the course of a few months, people donated cabinets, and freezers, and fridges, and food.  The staff in Essex Junction never looked back.  The Food Pantry is still going strong. And together, with a small Thrift Shop called "Heavenly Cents" next door, also run by the church, countless people have been reached out too to cover basic needs.         

Since we are still talking about surprise, the most surprising thing about Jesus for me is that he still speaks to people and inspires them to take risks and to try something new - like the food pantry in Essex Junction. 

And then there are times when Jesus does even more: when he turns lives around, knocks people out of their well-established lives with their lovely prejudices and assumptions, and turns them into social prophets, movement initiators, healers, teachers, people who are willing to loose their lives to have life.

The technical/theological/religious term of that kind of experience would be conversion.

In the Bible, the Hebrew word for conversion is shub, which means "to turn" or "to return," and the Greek word is metanoia, which means "to turn around."

As defined by The Dictionary of Bible and Religion, "To be converted means to have the direction of one's life shifted, so that it no longer points toward self, but points toward God."

The conversions we usually hear about, whether of a religious nature or of some other type, are often accompanied, at least initially, by excitement, zest, intensity, an eagerness to tell others about it and efforts to make significant changes in one's life. And often, the converted person looks back at the time of the conversion as a significant turning point.

Some of us may have had an experience like that were we committed ourselves to Jesus Christ with all our heart, mind, body and soul. There might have been a real milestone experience that we can look back on and say, "Right there. That's when I really became a Christian. And my life has been different because of the turn I made at that point."

But others of us, maybe the majority of Christians, and I am part of that group, cannot point to a moment of conversion. We have attended church since childhood and never questioned the faith as it was presented to us. We have accepted Jesus along the way as our guide and friend. We have had moving and spiritual moments when we felt closer to Jesus Christ, but we probably never had this moment with Jesus that rocked our world.

It is not essential to have had a conversion experience to be a Christian.  But I have come to the conclusion after working on this theme, that we, who are not conscious converts to Christianity, might have missed out on some of the passion and intensity that often marks converts.

When we don't have a faith-conversion story to tell, sometimes we tell nothing at all about our faith. Not only don't we "proclaim it freely" and "spread the word," we sometimes act as if our spiritual stance is strictly a private matter. Yet the fact is, whether we've had a turning-point experience or not, we do have a story about the content of faith that we can and must share.

What words would describe a conversion experience? Unexpected, unintentional, unpredictable, inconvenient, life-changing, and on-going.  An experience like this will run our life in ways we have never known before, and there is no way in going back to the old ways.

Our New Testament is full of people's stories whose have had a conversion experience that made them believe in Jesus Christ and acted accordingly.

The first converts, of course, were the disciples and their entourage. But I think they truly experienced a conversion after Christ's resurrection.  Before that they were still in learning mode, still apprentices of faith when Christ was with them. 

But after his death when Christ appeared to them - on the road to Emmaus, behind closed doors in the upper room, by the sea side, when he broke bread with them so they would know that he was not dead but alive, it all began to make sense to them, and they believed.  Everything they had experienced until that point was like "testing the waters." But now, after Jesus showed himself to them after they witnessed him being killed on the cross, now it all changed.  Now they believed; they truly believed.

And it gave them the courage and dedication to carry that belief into the world.  Knowing that their Lord was not dead, but continued to be right with them, they continued his work of teaching, healing, and feeding, of training new leaders for the ministry before them.

This new faith reached people far beyond imagined barriers.  A faith that was thought to convert only Jew, touched Gentiles as well - Greeks, Romans, rich people, poor people, men, women, slaves and free, all kinds of strangers from all over the known corners of their world.

The most famous of these conversion stories is that of St. Paul who turned from Christ-hater to the one who took the good news out into the world. He got literally knocked off his chariot, was struck blind, and nursed back into health and faith in Jesus Christ.

He then went out himself to bring the good news to whoever wanted to hear it, changing lives and changing the church. 

The passage I chose for today is the story of Lydia - a prayerful businesswoman. Lydia lived in Thyatira, a city in Asia Minor that was a few hundred miles from Philippi. She was wealthy, successful, and an already faithful person, since we meet her attending the Sabbath prayer with other women. It's unlikely that these women knew much, if anything, about Jesus. More likely, they were Jews or Gentile proselytes who knew about the God of the Old Testament but not about Jesus, his death, his resurrection, and salvation through him. In a way, what need did she have for conversion? It seems that her life was filled with good things, and she was already a faithful woman.

And yet, when Paul met this group of women, and shared the good news of Jesus Christ with them, the words sank into Lydia's mind and heart. The Holy Spirit came upon this Sabbath meeting and opened Lydia's heart, as well as the hearts of the other women who were present. This was the beginning of the Philippian church-the first church, in fact, on the continent of Europe.

Lydia's conversion to the Christian faith is just one examples of many - then and now, for Jesus is not done changing hearts and lives.

In my research for this sermon I came across Sara Miles who wrote the book "Take this Bread" in which she tells of her conversion story. It is her "Spiritual memoir of a 21^st century Christian."

She writes in the prologue: "...Mine is a personal story of an unexpected and terribly inconvenient Christian conversion, told by a very unlikely convert: a blue-state, secular intellectual; a lesbian, a left-wing journalist with a habit of skepticism. I'm not the person my reporter colleagues ever expected to see exchanging blessings with street-corner evangelists. I'm hardly the person George Bush had in mind to be running a "faith-based charity." My own family never imagined that I'd wind up preaching the Word of God and serving communion to a hymn-singing flock.

But as well as an intimate memoir of personal conversion, mine is a political story. At a moment when right-wing American Christianity is ascendant, when religion worldwide is rife with fundamentalism and exclusionary ideological crusades, I stumbled into a radically inclusive faith centered on sacraments and action. What I found wasn't about angels, or going to church, or trying to be "good" in a pious, idealized way. It wasn't about arguing a doctrine--the Virgin birth, predestination, the sinfulness of homosexuality and divorce--or pledging blind allegiance to a denomination. I was, as the prophet said, hungering and thirsting for righteousness... I discovered a religion rooted in the most ordinary yet subversive practice: a dinner table where everyone is welcome, where the poor, the despised and the outcasts are honored."

So Sara became a Christian.  After many years as a cook, then a journalist covering wars and revolutions on Central America, she found herself in San Francisco, living with her daughter in a Latino neighborhood.

Early one winter morning, she walked into St. Gregory of Nyssa's Episcopal Church. She had no earthly reason to be there. In fact she had never been to church, having grown up as a dedicated atheist, never heard a Gospel reading, never said the Lord's Prayer, and certainly was not interested in becoming a Christian, or as she puts it, "a religious nut.".  She walked into the church on an impulse with the habitual curiosity of a reporter.  

She sat down and followed the service. And then, she writes, "... we gathered around that table. And there was more singing and standing, and someone was putting a piece of fresh, crumbly bread in my hands, saying, "the body of Christ," and handing me the goblet of sweet wine saying "the blood of Christ," and then something outrageous and terrifying happened. Jesus happened to me.  (Take This Bread, pp. 57-58)

If you read the beginning of Sara's story, this "Aha!" moment can almost be anticipated. It may seem unusual for the act of receiving communion to initiate a conversion of heart, but, if you think about it, isn't that exactly what the Eucharist is intended to do?

She describes her conversion to the Christian faith as on-going, at times difficult, jagged journey, marked by cycles of acceptance and resistance, epiphany and doubt. It was not a one-time deal.

And then, after a year of exploring what this new faith was all about, she realized that it would be have to be all about action.  This realization propelled her into a line of work she never imagined.

She started a food pantry at her church, and gave away tons of fruit and vegetables and cereal from the same altar that feed her on a grey winter morning.  She organized food pantries all over San Francisco to provide hundred and hundred of families with fresh groceries each week.  Without an office and an official telephone number, she recruited scores of volunteers and raised hundred of thousands of dollars. 

It is an inspiring story. If you feel that you could use a little faith-refresher, a little boost, I encourage you to read this book.  If nothing else it will reiterate what we already know through our faith:

- that at the heart of Christianity is a power that continues to speak to us and transforms us;

- that our faith is a faith of action more than anything else;

- that our faith proclaims that the hungry will be fed;

- that those cast down will be raised up, and that all things are being made new; that our faith in Jesus Christ offers food, without exception, to all. That should not surprise us. Amen.

Sources:

"Take this Bread" by Sara Miles, Ballantine Books