It some­times strikes me that the Lord some­times picks some might­ily unlikely mes­sen­gers. We are all flawed in our ways, true, but it’s easy to think there are those flawed more than our­selves. In part this is the whole beam in the eye prob­lem of per­spec­tive we find in Matthew 7. But the para­ble of the Lost Sheep recorded in Luke 15 sug­gests that some are more lost than others:

What man of you, hav­ing an hun­dred sheep, if he lose one of them, doth not leave the ninety and nine in the wilder­ness, and go after that which is lost, until he find it? And when he hath found it, he layeth it on his shoul­ders, rejoicing. And when he cometh home, he cal­leth together his friends and neigh­bours, say­ing unto them, Rejoice with me; for I have found my sheep which was lost. I say unto you, that like­wise joy shall be in heaven over one sin­ner that repen­teth, more than over ninety and nine just per­sons, which need no repentance.

One of the best-known exam­ples of the formerly-lost sheep is the apos­tle Paul of Tar­sus. We first learn about him as Saul, a Phar­isee who actively per­se­cuted the early church. The story of the the light of heaven inter­rupt­ing his jour­ney to Dam­as­cus is really key to under­stand­ing Friends under­stand­ing of the Light as judge and instruc­tor (it’s also the source of one of my favorite line in the Johnny Cash oevre “it’s hard for thee to kick against the pricks”!).

But I always won­der what the other Chris­tians made of the post-conversion Paul. We get a lit­tle of their reac­tion from Ana­nias but I imag­ine there was lots of talk and anger, jeal­ousy and con­fu­sion all swirling with what­ever joy they could muster that another soul was saved. A man who had “slaugh­tered” them was soon to present him­self as a major leader, tak­ing sides in the great debates over how Jew­ish the Chris­t­ian com­mu­nity needed to be.

How do we react when God uses an unlikely mes­sen­ger to spread the good news? None of my blog read­ers are likely to have seen their brethren slaugh­tered but it’s safe to say we’ve all been wronged and mis­treated from time to time. One of the great mys­ter­ies I’ve expe­ri­enced is how God has seem­ingly used other’s dis­obe­di­ence to do His work. Know­ing this requires a scale of love that’s hard to imag­ine. Peo­ple do wrong can still be some­how act­ing of God. Peo­ple who have done wrong are some­times espe­cially cho­sen of God. Heaven rejoices more for that one saved sin­ner than all the rest of us try­ing to mud­dle along in faith. Even secret anger is akin to mur­der.

We Friends are rightly inspired of 17th Cen­tury New Jer­sey Friend John Woolman’s excep­tional com­pas­sion and abil­ity to see out­side the prej­u­dices of his day, but even this “Quaker saint” con­sid­ered him­self the unlikely mes­sen­ger, the lost sheep of  the Luke story. He wrote of a dream:“Then the mys­tery was opened, and I per­ceived there was joy in heaven over a sin­ner who had repented [Luk 15:7] and that that lan­guage John Wool­man is dead meant no more than the death of my own will.”

How do we hold tight to love, even for those we don’t like? When we greet even those who have dis­ap­pointed us, we need to bear in mind that they might have trav­eled their own road to Dam­as­cus since last we met. They might be one of those God chooses to teach.

(Thanks to Esther Green­leaf Mürer’s Quaker Bible Index for the Wool­man connection.)

In the New York Times, a “glimpse behind the scenes of the Bush Administration’s sup­port for war in Lebanon”:www.nytimes.com/2006/08/10/washington/10rice.html:
bq.. Washington’s resis­tance to an imme­di­ate cease-fire and its staunch sup­port of Israel have made it more dif­fi­cult for [US “Sec­re­tary of State”:www.nonviolence.org/tag/secretary%20of%20state] Rice to work with other nations, includ­ing some Amer­i­can allies, as they search for a for­mula that will end the vio­lence and pro­duce a durable cease-fire.…
Sev­eral State Depart­ment offi­cials have pri­vately objected to the administration’s empha­sis on Israel and have said that Wash­ing­ton is not talk­ing to Syria to try to resolve the cri­sis. Dam­as­cus has long been a sup­porter of “Hezbollah”:www.nonviolence.org/tag/hezbollah, and pre­vi­ous con­flicts between the group and Israel have been resolved through shut­tle diplo­macy with Syria.
p. The wars in “Lebanon”:www.nonviolence.org/tag/lebanon and “Iraq”:www.nonviolence.org/tag/iraq are caus­ing irrepara­ble harm to the U.S. image in the Mid­dle East. High-sounding words about democ­racy ring hol­low when we for­sake diplomacy.