April 19, 2026

Indianola Presbyterian Church

"He Called him 'Brother"

Sermon by Rev. Trip Porch

April 19, 2026                                                                                                                     Based on  Acts 9:1-19a

There is a man in South Africa named Pieter Willem Botha. PW Botha.
He was the Prime Minister during the time of Apartheid who enforced the system with an iron fist. He is the man who uses the law, the police, the military, to keep Black South Africans from voting, from living where they choose, from being fully human in the eyes of the state. He is not peripheral in this story. He is the very figurehead of the suffering.
And Desmond Tutu, Anglican Archbishop, Nobel Peace Prize winner, one of the most important voices in the struggle against apartheid, insisted on always referring to Prime minister Botha as "my brother-in-Christ."
I don’t t think that’s a word that came easily to tutu. 
I do not think he woke up one morning and it just rolled off his tongue. I think he had to find it. I think he had to practice it. I think there were mornings when he said it and meant it, and mornings when he said it and had to trust that the meaning would follow.
And the people fighting apartheid alongside him thought he had lost his mind. It enraged them that he would show compassion to their oppressor.
You are calling this man your brother? The man who is working to dismantle our families, imprison our leaders, authorizing violence against our communities? 
But Tutu insisted. Prime Minister Botha… My Brother in Christ.
Not because it was an easy thing to say but because he believed that it was true. He believed that God’s love extended to all people, that even his oppressor was a member of the body of Christ.
And he knew that if he stopped believing it, if he let Botha's cruelty decide what words he was allowed to use, something in him would harden into something he did not want to become.
Only later do many of those around him understand what Tutu already knows: that to deny the humanity of your oppressor is to let your oppressor decide what kind of person you become. It’s to become the oppressor yourself.
Saul is not complicated to understand at the beginning of Acts 9. He is terrifying. The author of Acts, Luke, describes him almost like a dragon, breathing fire and unstoppable in his oppression. 
When our story comes He has already stood by while Stephen is stoned to death. He approved of the murder. And by verse one of this chapter, he is not merely approving anymore. He is the one driving the violence himself, breathing, the text says, threats and murder against the followers of Jesus. That’s not metaphorical. Luke is painting a picture of someone who has become consumed by his beliefs. It is the air he breathes. This new community of Jesus’ followers “The way” is against all he holds dear, and he must do everything in his power to stop them.
He heads to Damascus with papers authorizing him to arrest anyone he finds living in what the early community calls "the Way." Men and women both. He intends to bring them back to Jerusalem in chains.
And then a light shines.
He falls to the ground. A voice speaks his name. "Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?" And Saul, who thought he knew exactly whose side he was on, asks a question that changes things: 
"Who are you, Lord?"
The answer is not what he expects. It is not God affirming his mission. It is Jesus, telling him that every person he has dragged from their home, every follower he has handed over to be punished, he has been doing that to Jesus himself. The church and Jesus are not separate things. To persecute one is to persecute the other.
Saul is leveled. The most powerful man on that road is suddenly the most helpless. He gets up from the ground blinded by this revelation, unable to see, and his companions have to lead him by the hand into Damascus.
The man who came to put people in chains cannot find his way across the street without help.

For three days he sits in the dark, eating nothing, drinking nothing. Three days, which in the gospel imagination is never just three days but something more. Something is dying. Something else is being born.

Now we get to Ananias. He is a disciple of Jesus’s living in Damascus. He is not famous. He is not one of the first twelve. He is just a person trying to live faithfully following Christ in a city that now has Saul of Tarsus in it.
God speaks to him in a vision. "Ananias."
And Ananias says, "Here I am, Lord." 
Just like the Hebrew bible: Just like Isaiah. Just like Samuel. “Here I am, Lord… Is it I, Lord?"
Ananias is being called by God towards something new….
And then God says: go to this specific house and ask for a man from Tarsus named Saul.
And Ananias, who moments ago sounded like Isaiah, now sounds like every one of us when God's call gets specific. He says, Lord, I have heard about this man. I have heard what he has done to persecute your people in Jerusalem. And he is here right now with authorization from the chief priests to arrest everyone who calls on your name.
In other words: you do know who you are sending me to, right?
Ananias knows exactly who Saul is. There is new confusion about it. The people Saul has hurt are his people. They are his community. Some of them may be his friends.
And God confirms everything Ananias already knows, and sends him anyway.

So Ananias goes. He walks to the house God tells him to go to… He goes inside. He finds Saul, sitting in the dark, three days blind.
And now imagine the walk across that room. Imagine what is moving through Ananias in that moment. The fear. The anger, maybe. The grief for his community. Everything he knows about this man. And he has to find a word. He has to open his mouth and choose the first thing he is going to say to Saul of Tarsus.
Maybe he practiced it on the way over. Maybe he said it quietly to himself, walking through the streets of Damascus, trying to feel whether it was something he could actually mean. Maybe the first time he says it out loud it comes through gritted teeth.
But he says it.
"Brother Saul."
He’s not remembering his past… its Not "Saul the persecutor." Not "Saul who did those things to our people." Its this person who is sitting in front of him… its this person who has been humbled by God. 
The first word out of his mouth is brother.
And I think that word, said by this follower of Jesus to this powerful persecutor, is one of the most extraordinary moments in the entire New Testament. Because Ananias does not yet know what Saul will become. He only knows what God told him: that something has already cracked open in this man. That the same Jesus Saul was persecuting has met Saul on the road and called him by name. And that is enough for Ananias to walk through the door and find a word he may have had to drag up from somewhere deep.
Brother Saul, the sight you lost is coming back. Brother Saul, you are going to be filled with the Holy Spirit. Brother Saul, you are going to be baptized.
And the scales fall from Saul's eyes. And Ananias  helps him to eat. He helps him to get up. He helps him to be strong again.

Here is what the text does not want us to miss about what happens next. The man who is knocked flat on the road to Damascus, humbled, blinded, led by the hand into the city, shown mercy by the very people he came to destroy, that man gets up and becomes the most influential figure in the history of the Christian movement.
There is no church without Paul. Not the church of the first century, not the church of the twenty-first. His letters are in our Bible. His theology is in our hymns. His vision of a community where there is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, neither male nor female, is still the vision we are trying to catch up to two thousand years later.
And here is the thing about Paul that does not get said enough: he does not become a different person on that road.
The same fire, the same intensity, the same absolute furious commitment that drove him to persecute the church, he now turns in the other direction.

He takes everything he was and points it somewhere new. The most dangerous enemy of the early church becomes its most tireless advocate. Because one man walked across a room and called him brother.
The mercy Ananias extends does not just change Saul. It changes everything for the world.

I think this is a story that asks us whether we can look into the face of someone who has caused real harm and still find a sibling. 
Still find someone in whom God might be at work.
That is the hard version. That is the Ananias version.
Now, I don’t think this text is asking victims to pretend harm did not happen. It is not asking anyone to walk back into danger without any sign of change. Saul is already on the ground. Something has already broken open in him. Ananias is not being sent to someone still breathing threats. He is being sent to someone sitting in the dark who has been there for three days.
But even knowing that, Ananias still has to choose to go. He still has to find the word. Nobody finds it for him.
This is not a one-time heroic act. It is a practice. Some days you mean it fully and some days you say it anyway and trust that the meaning will follow. Tutu called Botha brother for years before those around him understood why. Ananias may have rehearsed it all the way as he walked across town. The point is not that it was easy. The point is that he did not let his fear or his anger or his very legitimate grief get in the way of his belief in a God who’s love and resurrection includes everyone, even those who seek to do us harm, even our enemy.

A week ago, The astronauts of the Artemis II mission splashed down in the Pacific Ocean after ten days in space, humanity's first crewed journey into lunar orbit in over fifty years. After they were was back on the recovery ship, someone asked one of the astronauts, Christina Koch what the mission had taught her.
She described the moment it hit her. Looking out the window of the Orion spacecraft, watching Earth grow small, a tiny fragile sphere suspended in an expanse of blackness that seemed to go on forever. Every border invisible. Every division erased by distance. Just this one small orb, this luminous thing that all of us share.
And out of that moment she said this: “For awhile people have been asking me what it means to be a part of a crew… A crew is a group that is in it all the time, no matter what, that is stroking together every minute with the same purpose, that is willing to sacrifice silently for each other, that gives grace, that holds accountable. A crew has the same cares and the same needs, and a crew is inescapably, beautifully, dutifully linked."
And then she said: "Planet Earth, you are a crew."
From that distance, the lines we draw between ourselves disappear. What remains is just this fragile thing we all belong to, whether we have chosen each other or not.
Ananias does not get to see it from that distance. He has to find it from three feet away, in a dark room, with a man who frightened him. He has to find it in the act of putting his hands on someone and choosing, maybe through gritted teeth, to say brother.
That is the harder miracle. And it is the one God keeps asking of us.

May we have the courage of Ananias. May we have the conviction of Tutu. And may we find, even in the faces that frighten us, the image of the God who made us all. Alleluia, amen.

WE GATHER IN AWE AND PRAISE

PRELUDE                                        "You Can Make the Pathway Bright"                          arr. Amy Webb

INTROIT                        "Christ Has Arisen, Alleluia!"                               Tanzanian Melody

WELCOME                                                                 Rev. Trip Porch

One: This is the day that the Lord has made

All: Let us rejoice and be glad in it.

*CALL TO WORSHIP

One: We gather as people who have been found by a God who finds everyone.

All: Even those we have written off. Even those who have hurt us.

One: God calls us by name and sends us to call others by name.

All: To see in every face the image of the one who made us.

         Let us worship the God who makes brothers and sisters of us all.

*HYMN 301                                “Let Us Build a House”                                                   TWO OAKS

*PRAYER OF CONFESSION                                                          Jeremy Carroll

God of open hands, we confess that we are better at naming our enemies than we are at naming our siblings. We have sorted people into those worthy of our compassion and those we have decided are beyond it. We have called our fear discernment, and kept our distance from the doors you were asking us to walk through. Forgive us, and remake us in your image that holds the whole of the world in love . Amen.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

*ASSURANCE OF PARDON

*RESPONSE OF PARDON 240       “Alleluia! Alleluia! Give Thanks”                     ALLELUIA NO. 1

*PASSING OF THE PEACE                                                                  

One:   The peace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all,

All:      And also with you.

WE LISTEN FOR GOD’S WORD

ANTHEM                          "From the End of the Earth”                               Alan Hovhaness

CHILDREN’S MESSAGE                                                                    Dorothy Kyle

PRAYER FOR ILLUMINATION                                                                 

SCRIPTURE        Acts 9:1-19a   NRVSUE

Meanwhile Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest  and asked him for letters to the synagogues at Damascus, so that if he found any who belonged to the Way, men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem.  

Now as he was going along and approaching Damascus, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him.  He fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?”  

He asked, “Who are you, Lord?”

The reply came, “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. But get up and enter the city, and you will be told what you are to do.”  

The men who were traveling with him stood speechless because they heard the voice but saw no one.  

Saul got up from the ground, and though his eyes were open, he could see nothing; so they led him by the hand and brought him into Damascus.  For three days he was without sight and neither ate nor drank.

 Now there was a disciple in Damascus named Ananias. The Lord said to him in a vision,

“Ananias.” He answered,

“Here I am, Lord.”  

The Lord said to him, “Get up and go to the street called Straight, and at the house of Judas look for a man of Tarsus named Saul. At this moment he is praying,  and he has seen in a vision a man named Ananias come in and lay his hands on him so that he might regain his sight.”  

But Ananias answered, “Lord, I have heard from many about this man, how much evil he has done to your saints in Jerusalem,  and here he has authority from the chief priests to bind all who invoke your name.”  But the Lord said to him, “Go, for he is an instrument whom I have chosen to bring my name before gentiles and kings and before the people of Israel;  I myself will show him how much he must suffer for the sake of my name.”  

So Ananias went and entered the house. He laid his hands on Saul and said, “Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus, who appeared to you on your way here, has sent me so that you may regain your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit.”   And immediately something like scales fell from his eyes, and his sight was restored. Then he got up and was baptized,   and after taking some food, he regained his strength.

SERMON                                                                                Rev. Trip Porch

WE RESPOND TO GOD’S WORD

*HYMN  662                                    “Christ Whose Glory Fills the Skies”                                                  RATISBON

PRAYERS OF THE PEOPLE  followed by the Lord’s Prayer using debts and debtors.

TIME OF OFFERING   online giving is available at  www. indianolapres.org/give

OFFERTORY                                             “A Pleasant Thought”                                                         Florence Price 

*OFFERTORY RESPONSE  609        “Praise God From Whom All Blessings Flow”

*PRAYER OF DEDICATION 

Generous God, we return to you what was always yours. Take these gifts and take us with them. Send us out to the houses on streets we would rather avoid, to the people we have been too afraid to call brother, too guarded to call sister. Use what we offer here to build the community you imagined when you looked at this world and called it good. Amen.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

*HYMN 761                      “Called As Partners in Christ’s Service”                                BEECHER

TIME OF COMMUNITY SHARING

CHARGE & BENEDICTION

CHORAL RESPONSE                       "Amen"                                                                 K. Lee Scott

POSTLUDE                              "Called as Partners in Christ’s Service"                                 arr. Lloyd Larson

  Acknowledgments: Unless otherwise indicated, all texts and music are printed and broadcast under OneLicense.net license #A-702452