Seminarian Meagan Kim April 19, 2026
“This Resurrection Life” Third Sunday of Easter (Acts 9:1-19a)
Well friends, here we are on April 16th, still living within the season of Easter, and I have to say—I love going out into the world this time of year and saying, “Happy Easter,” because it disrupts the way we’ve been taught to think about Easter, the way we’ve been conditioned to compress something as vast and mysterious as resurrection into a single day.
Easter has become one bright and beautiful Sunday that we celebrate and then, almost without even thinking about it, we move on.
But Easter is not just a day.
It is a season.
Fifty days long.
Easter stretches from the moment that Jesus Christ walks out of the tomb all the way to Pentecost, when the Spirit is poured out in a new way.
That space - that fifty days, it’s not accidental—I believe that those days are God’s way, through the institution of the Church, of telling the truth about how transformation actually happens, Because resurrection is not something that we grasp all at once, not something we fully understand in a single moment of clarity, but is something that unfolds over time, something that takes root in us gradually.
And it is precisely this kind of unfolding, this kind of uneven, Spirit-shaped transformation, that we begin to see when we turn to the stories in Acts.
In Acts, the Spirit of God begins to move in ways that stretch people beyond their boundaries, beyond their expectations, and it begins to do things, to bear fruit, in ways that they could never even imagine. The Spirit calls people to release their hold on control, and to lean into the resurrection life - where God is putting something to rest - so that something new can be birthed so that the Kingdom of God can grow into a greater fullness.
And that movement is not always comfortable.
And that is where we encounter Paul the Apostle—or Saul, as he is known at this point in his life - in our story today. When we first meet Saul, he is a man at the top of his game. He is walking with clarity, He’s moving with certainty, and has a very deep sense of purpose, holy purpose.
God’s law, as he understands it, shows him who’s in and who’s out, who is faithful and who is not—and there is something in all of us that longs for that kind of clarity, that kind of assurance that we are standing on solid ground, especially when it comes to matters of eternity and salvation.
And Saul is sincere. He is deeply committed, deeply devout. He is absolutely convinced that he is serving God.
And it is precisely there—in that place of certainty—that Jesus interrupts him.
On the road to Damascus, on his way to persecute these new followers of The Way, everything shifts—very suddenly—a light flashes, a voice calls his name, and Saul, stunned and disoriented, asks the only question that a devout person like him would ask in that moment:
“Who are you, Lord?”
And the answer comes:
“I am Jesus…who you are persecuting.”
And with those words, everything that Saul thought he understood begins to unravel.
The very God he believed he was defending turns out to be the God he has been opposing—not in theory, but in people, in real lives, in those he has persecuted. Jesus says that he is the people that Paul had set his mind and his heart against.
This revelation of God in this moment shows us that it is entirely possible to be sincere, committed, and even faithful in intention—and still find ourselves resisting the movement of God.
You know, there was a time when early fossil discoveries—what we now call dinosaurs—were first being uncovered, and people did not yet have the categories to make sense of what they were seeing, and so they interpreted those bones through the stories and frameworks they already knew; some imagined they were the remains of giants spoken of in ancient tales, others thought they were remnants of a world that no longer existed, and it took time—years, even generations—for our understanding to stretch
wide enough to say, no… this is something far larger and different than what we first believed.
And I’m probably not telling you anything you don’t already know when I say that there are still those who continue to read Scripture—and therefore the world—in ways that diminish the fullness of human experience, or reduce the vast mystery of the universe into something more manageable, and ultimately less true than what we encounter every day—rather than listening for how God is breathing new life into what we thought was already settled.
This is a temptation for all of us—something we all need to guard against.
And this is part of what God is doing in our story with Saul.
Because Saul believed he could see. He believed he understood where God was and where God was not. He believed he knew who was faithful, who belonged and who did not.
And sometimes the only way God can open our eyes is by first undoing the way we see - not as punishment but so that God can reveal to us a new vision.
And so Saul is led—blind—into what looks like, from what we can tell by the reading, a solitary space—where it’s just Saul and God, no outside noise, Saul doesn’t even eat or drink in those three days the Scriptures tell us.
And what I see in this is Saul being drawn into spiritual discernment. He is seeking answers from God, wrestling with God—like his Jewish ancestor Jacob—coming face to face with everything he thought he knew, and everything that is now beginning to unravel.
And it’s in that space, in the dark, that something begins to happen, God begins the slow and sacred work of undoing and remaking.
Saul is brought to a kind of death—not to destroy him, but to bring an end to the parts of him that were bringing death to others, things that were stopping the flow of God’s love.
And in place of this old way of being, God begins to birth something new in Saul—something more open, more alive, more aligned with the boundless love of God.
Now while this is happening with Saul, we see God also speaking to Ananias.
Because Ananias, too, has a way of seeing.
And when God calls him by name and tells him to go to Saul, his response is immediately—“Lord… I have heard about this man.” I know who he is. I know what he’s done.
Ananias is rightly afraid.
And yet—God is asking him to see differently.
To go to the very one he has learned to fear.
And in that moment, Ananias is drawn into the same movement as Saul - this way of resurrection life - this letting go, releasing of
certainty, this willingness to be part of something he cannot fully control or predict.
And in Ananias’s going his fear gives way to trust.
And when that happens, when we let go of our fear and our “othering” of each other, God gives a new vision - and we see that when Ananias calls Saul brother.
The first words out of his mouth are, Brother Saul.
God is doing something new in the lives of these two people from Acts. And it’s the same kind of new thing that God is doing in us and in the church today.
And this is what the entire book of Acts is about.
It’s not just the Acts of the Apostles as it’s sometimes called, but as Willie James Jennings tells readers in The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race it would be better called the Acts of Holy Spirit. Because the real actor in the story is not human control or human clarity, but it’s the Spirit of God moving through and beyond what anyone expected.
The Spirit that falls at Pentecost and refuses to be contained. The Spirit that sends people across boundaries they never would have crossed on their own. The Spirit that meets an Ethiopian official on a desert road, that opens the hearts of unexpected people, that again and again stretches the early church beyond what it thought was possible.
The Spirit that meets Saul in his blindness. The Spirit that speaks to Ananias in his fear.
Always moving. Always unsettling. Always bringing life where there once was division, fear, or certainty that is just too small for God’s love.
The Spirit that Saul encounters in our story today from Acts carries him forward in his life and reveals to him one day as he’s writing to the churches of Galatia - that in Christ, there is no longer Jew or Gentile, there’s no longer social or economic castes, there’s no longer priority or preference given because of your gender or orientation - Christ is creating in us a new humanity, where the divisions that still try to define us have been put to death.
In Christ’s resurrection, we have inherited lives built around the unending grace of God.
And the God who met Saul on the road, and spoke to Ananias in the night, is the same God who is moving even now—bringing life out of death, opening our eyes in ways we could not have imagined, and drawing us, together, into a life that is wider, and freer, and more alive than we have yet known.
Thanks be to God.