My favorite story of conversion comes from Sara Miles in her memoir Take this Bread.  This is what she writes: 

“Early one morning, when I was 46, I walked in to a church, ate a piece of bread, and took a sip of wine.  A routine Sunday activity for tens of millions of Americans—except that up until that moment, I’d led a thoroughly secular life.  This was my first communion.  It changed everything.  Eating Jesus, as I did that day to my great astonishment, led me against all my expectations to a faith I’d scorned and work I’d never imagined.” 

Sara went on to organize food pantries all over her city of San Franscico, recruiting thousands of volunteers to help her. 

She said of her new call, “(it) didn’t turn out to be as simple as going to church on Sundays, folding my hands in the pews and declaring myself ‘saved.’  Nor did my volunteer church word mean talking kindly to poor folks and handing them a sandwich from a sanctified distance…I had to struggle with my atheist family, my doubting friends, and the prejudices and traditions of my newfound church…I met thieves, child abusers, millionaires, day laborers, politicians, schzophrenics, gangsters and bishops—all blown into my life through the restless power of a call to feed people, widening what I though of as my ‘community’ in ways that were exhilarating, confusing, often scary.”

“This is my belief: that at the heart of Christianity is a power that continues to speak to and transform us.  As I found to my surprise and alarm, it could speak even to me:  not in the sappy, Jesus-and-cookies tone of mild-mannered liberal Christianity, or the blustering hellfire of the religious right.  What I heard, and continue to hear, is a voice that can crack religious and political convictions open, that advocates for the least qualified, least official, least likely; that upsets the established order and makes a joke of certainty.  It proclaims against reason that the hungry will be fed, that those cast down will be raised up, that all things, including my own faulures, are being made new….It doesn’t promise to solve or erase suffering, but to transform it, pledging that by loving one another, even through pain, we will find new life.  And it insists that by opening ourselves to strangers…we will see more and more of the holy, since, without exception, all people are one body:  Gods.”

Sara Miles’ story is compelling, partly because she breaks all the rules, partly because she can name what happened to her. But, most profoundly she can name the salvation, the liberation that is brought about by following in the way of Jesus.   

  When we believe this message of liberation, it is taking the place of fear, of that unclean spirit that is part of all of us.  With God’s reign fully present, we don’t need to hold on to the fear any more.  Something better and more sustaining is exorcising that spirit. 

And when we believe, we know that letting go of that fear is a journey we take, on a path which we do not see clearly.  It leads us to the waters of baptism, and from there—who knows. Perhaps the desert, perhaps the church.  Maybe to the food pantry, or to the street, or to our neighbors.  There is no certainty, but there is the holy presence of God, leading and sustaining us.

When we lay down the fear, those demons—unclean spirits—whatever you want to call them—can be exorcised, and we experience the terrifying liberation of Christ. 

I understand what scared that unclean spirit that day in the temple.  This journey of discipleship is not safe or clear nor does it make a lot of sense.  Holding on to the fear can feel safe than jumping into the unknown.  But we hold onto the promises today that love is stronger than fear, and that discipleship is freedom.  

AMEN.