Sermon by Rev. Russell Daye
St. Andrew's United Church, Halifax

Seeing the People We have Made Invisible

Acts 9:1-6

In the 1970s, along with such programmes as The Six Million Dollar Man and the Bionic Woman, there was a short-lived television series called The Invisible Man. For Daniel Westin, the protagonist, being invisible was both a blessing and a curse. I can remember, in a vague way, the conversations my friends and I had about this in the corridors of our junior high school. For us, the benefits of being invisible were most obvious, leading to many discussions about sneaking into the girls' locker room or slipping out of English class or making off with goodies at the local corner store. Would we really be able to get behind the counter and grab a fistful of hockey cards without bumping into the cashier in the narrow confines back there?

Years later, I became aware of the disadvantages of being invisible. This was when I moved to Montreal and discovered that the city was full of invisible people and that I had a special power to see them. This power came not from any particular gift or talent, but simply from the fact that I was a hick. I had not learned that navigating a big, fast moving, complex city required focusing on certain things to the exclusion of other things. Focus on the flow of pedestrian traffic you're following on the sidewalk; don't look at the man in a wheelchair holding out a coffee cup. Look for the signs telling you how to take the subway going west; don't look at the woman speaking loudly into the toy telephone. Slowly I learned that city dwellers developed edit systems that allowed them to concentrate on a small percentage of the information pouring into their senses. These systems kept them out of harms way and allowed them to stay attentive to the goals to which they were moving - physical destinations, social destinations, professional destinations. Reaching these goals required ignoring a great deal.

This kind of sifting is necessary in the city. The essential must be lifted from the irrelevant. Unfortunately, people fall into these categories too, and some people fall into the later category for just about everyone they encounter. They become detritus. We don't see them. Riding Montreal's Metro (subway) I learned to pick out the people who had become irrelevant. They were accustomed to being unseen. They shared an expression; it conveyed the surrender of any expectations for human contact. Unfortunately, as I became at home in the city, as I articulated and started to move toward social and professional destinations, these folks faded from my view as well. They became invisible.

I want to contrast this phenomenon with an experience Leni and Bob Anderson and Martha and Kevin and I shared last week at the Tatamagouche Centre. We attended an event an event called You Can Talk about the Tough Stuff, which introduced a number of methods for transforming congregational conflict with dialogue. All of these methods have one thing in common. They are designed to foster deep listening among the participants. We practiced some of the simpler ones, beginning with a listening circle. Four to six people sit in a circle and attend to a single question. My first listening circle had the following question: What is a dilemma in your life that you are having difficulty resolving? Each person in the circle was given a chance to speak without interruption: no questions from the others, no comments like 'yes, I've experienced that too,' no 'ping pong' discussion with interventions going back and fort and cutting off of the other person.

It was a very powerful experience. Being forced to sit and listen carefully with no chance of responding allows you to surrender the need to formulate what you will say in response. You stop half-listening, and when you are drawn into full attention to the other person you start to notice subtle and powerful cues: undercurrents of emotion or tension that are easily missed, delicate self-revelations by the face or the hands or the breath. The power of another's story begins to settle into you. In a real way, the person to whom you are listening becomes more visible to you. She becomes more real to you and you find yourself creating a unique space for her in your mind instead of keeping her in some prefabricated category into which you placed her based on first impressions.

It is not an overstatement to say that such listening can provide a conversion experience. Jesus said, 'Where two or three are gathered in my name, there I am in the midst of them.' In a circle of people who are holding each other in deep care, in non-judgemental listening a new space opens up. As your breath deepens and your eyes soften you can feel a transcendent dimension emerging. It feels like the space through which the Holy Spirit moves. As the people to whom you are listening become more profoundly visible to you, you start to sense the presence of God in them. Perhaps that's not quite right. You start to sense the presence of God in the connections between you. The conversion I speak of is toward a deeper trust in the immanent, active presence of the Spirit.

Returning from Tatamagouche, I was happy to find this week's lectionary reading from Acts because it describes a double conversion experience. The more dramatic conversion is of Saul to Paul, of the man murdering the first Christians to the man who would lead them. The other conversion is of Ananias, the man sent by God to minister to Saul, and who does so reluctantly, knowing of his past.

Two things stand out about these personal transformations. First, they are not conversions to a set of beliefs, but rather to a new way of seeing other people. Saul, through an encounter with Jesus, moves from seeing Jesus' followers as criminals to seeing them as the heroic bearers of truth at great cost. This is important! The archetypical New Testament conversion is not to a set of beliefs but to relationship based on a new way of seeing the other. Ananias' conversion is similar. God sends him to look at the murderer with fresh eyes.

The second thing that stands out is that Saul and Ananias are converted together. Each requires the other for transformation. When do the scales fall from Saul's eyes? When Ananias utters these words: 'Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus … has sent me so that you may regain your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit.' Saul sees only when he is addressed as 'brother.' He sees in a new way when he is seen in a new way. Growth in faith and love happens in relationship, particularly in a relationship that neither party could have believed was possible only days before.

Friends, this is both the Gospel and the future of St. Andrew's, if we are to have a future. Allow me to speak to two challenges we face.

Those of you who were here last Sunday will be aware of one of those challenges. Four of the people who belong to this congregation spoke to the ways it does and does not provide a welcome to those who enter our doors. We received a mixed score. Perhaps the most dramatic line came from a woman new to this church who says her heart starts to race whenever she comes to worship because she's afraid that no one will speak to her. Others say that they found St. Andrew's extremely welcoming and were immediately made to feel at home. These accounts match my observations since coming here. A lot of new people have tested our waters in the last two years. Some of them have been drawn in with open arms. Others say they felt invisible. No one noticed them, week after week. I have had at least a dozen people say to me that they liked the music and my sermons and tried to make St. Andrew's their home but they just didn't feel welcome and moved on. My feeling is that we see some of the people who come through our door and others we just do not see. They get filtered out by our edit systems.

The other challenge we face is navigating disagreement. Among us there is disagreement about the removal of pews, about same sex marriage, about the kinds of music we want during worship, and about the changes that will have to be made to our building. This disagreement is natural, perhaps even good; all churches have such differences of opinion. The difficulty is St. Andrew's history of managing - or not managing - disagreement through debate instead of dialogue, through falling into clusters of like opinion, through personalising conflict, and through schism.

The helpful response, the Gospel response to each of these challenges is the same: a conversion to a more profound seeing of the other, a conversion to a more profound hearing of the other. Who is the other? The other is the person who comes through our doors looking and sounding like he belongs to a different cultural group or a different social class. The other is the person to whom we do not know how to relate, so we filter him out of our awareness. We all do this; I do it. But the Gospel and the good of this church compel us to be converted toward seeing and hearing these folks.

Who is the other? The other is the member of St. Andrew's with whom we disagree on same gender marriage, or the removal or pews or some other issue to which we are attached. The other is the person whom we place in the other camp, the person whom we do not hear because we are too busy developing counter arguments, the person whose views we dismiss before we learn the underlying values that inform those views.

How does the Gospel compel us to respond to the other? As Saul responded to Annanias and Annanias to Saul. With careful attention, with judgement suspended, with deep seeing and listening that opens a new space through which the Spirit can move. Ultimately, is this not the most important thing for a community of faith, the moving presence of the Spirit? When we meet the other and are uncomfortable because we don't know how to talk to her, let us turn to listening and invite the Spirit into the encounter. When we meet the other and are uncomfortable because we do not like her opinions, let us turn to deep listening and invite the Spirit into the encounter. Once the Spirit is in the room nothing will keep us from fellowship, not pews, not different backgrounds, not different musical tastes. Once the Spirit joins us we will find new ways to resolve disagreements, ways better than either party could have imagined before the encounter. There is suffering in this opening, but there is also much delight. There we will find the Gospel and there we will find our future.