You know, the only thing worse than being wrong is finding out that you're wrong; even still worse is having to change. You heard the Scripture of Saul: how terrible of a guy he was, and what he was doing.

I'm going to assume that most folks listening to this are not that terrible. I'm just going to make that assumption because I'm a hopeful person.

But that doesn't mean that we don't participate in things that do persecute others. Whether it is directly—you know, you intend to do it, and you are just trying to return evil with evil—or it's indirect, and you're doing things that you may don’t even know that impact other people. There are conscious things you're doing, and there are subconscious things you're doing. I mean, we all do them.

I still remember my first call when I discovered how much I could do that. I was back in my office on Monday and just decompressing from the Sunday. There was this knock on the door, and you hear this booming voice from the entryway say, "Is Bruce in there!?"

I immediately knew who it was. It was this elder named Lucille Tobiasen, and Lucille was one of those OG church ladies that, when she came out, she was always dressed to the nines. I swear she always had a church lady hat on, and she was not playing around when she came out. So for her to knock on the door on a Monday and use "Bruce" and no honorific, no "pastor," nothing like that—I knew I was in trouble. So she comes, knocks on the door, she comes in. And Inga—we called them “secretaries” at that time, 30 years ago— my secretary at that time, Inga. For most of you, if you know church secretaries and administrators, their primary role and responsibility is to protect the pastor. So Lucille comes in, "Boom, boom, boom, is Bruce in there?" and immediately Inga says, "Yeah, he's in the back." And I'm like, "Inga, what's going on?" Lucille comes stomping down the hallway. It's a very long hallway, and you have to remember I am brand new in my ministry. This is my first call.

I'm already scared to death of this woman. And so she comes in, she knocks on the door, and I legit thought about just pretending I wasn't in the office and just remaining quiet. But I didn't, because I'm brave. I'm so brave that I said, "Sure, Lucille, come on in." Before I said that though, I got behind my desk so I could put this big old piece of furniture in between the two of us, so she would know who's in charge.

So she comes in, and she says to me right off the bat—no pleasantries—she says, "Bruce, do you know what happened on Sunday?" and I'm like, "I have no idea what happened on Sunday, Lucille."

It's not that I hadn't done things on a Sunday that deserved some kind of rebuke. I swore from the pulpit within my first month. One Sunday, I came into the sanctuary and I had a cup of coffee, and I was going to put it down. The only flat surface that I could see was our piano (a Steinway), and I went to put my coffee on the top of this piano, and the choir almost had a collective coronary. I've done things like that. But she says, "Bruce, you have no idea what happened on Sunday." I'm like, "Lucille, I have no idea what happened on Sunday. What happened on Sunday?" She says, "Bruce, the flowers were in the wrong place." And I was in my head just like, "Well, my flower arranging class in seminary... I don't know if I really covered that, but ok." But no, you know, new, very full of myself, the first thing I could think of to say to this elder woman who holds this church up was, "Lucille, I don't care." Now, if you've ever tried to put toothpaste back in the tube, it just gets messier if you try to do that. And she and I just went at it. It was like she was a cartoon character, and steam coming out of her ears and her head, her hat starts to rise, her face is red, and we just go at it.

Now, she eventually became one of my champions, but not on that day. But after this, I went to the sanctuary because I needed to cool off. And Inga was like, looking down at her desk, pretending that there was just not a cage match in my office as I walked by. And she goes—I go and sit in the sanctuary, and I look at the flowers. And they were off, like a little bit. But then I realized to myself, "Oh man, Bruce, you are such a jerk." (I might have used different language than that, but I've learned not to swear for recorded things!) "You are such an..." And I just had this realization that Lucille Tobiasen—Lucille Tobiasen had been a member of this church for 50 years. And in that time, she had her children baptized there, her friends' children baptized there, she had a grandchild baptized there. She had seen the marriages of her friends. She had seen the death of friends, and she had said goodbye to them. She had seen people in great trauma and tragedy and experienced great celebration. And every Sunday, she would in the morning get there before church, before any of us. She would go into the office and get the flowers that were delivered that day, and she would go and she would put them in the sanctuary. She would line them up on the carpet there, where there was a ring that had been lined up so many times. And she would back all the way to the back of the sanctuary, just to make sure they were still centered. And then she would come back and she put a little water in—not too much water—and then she would sit to the right side, four pews back. And for 50 years, she had experienced the divine in this community through the lens of those flowers.

Now, one could argue, "Are the flowers really that important?" And for church folks, you know there are lots of things that we put our energy into that probably aren't, in the eyes of God, very important. But that morning, I realized that it didn't really matter, because she had just been told by this pastor—she was on the committee that called me to this church—the person that she had entrusted the spiritual care and leadership and nourishment of this community and of her, that he didn't care. And not only that, that what she thought was important wasn't important. I'll never forget that, because I think sometimes we allow ourselves to fall into these places where we persecute people—that we do things that tear people down, that we do things that tell another human being that what they are feeling, believing, what's important to them, we diminish who they are. Now again, this is not an intentional, violent act of persecution, but it was some kind of a persecution on somebody's spirit and soul. And I'll never forget that. That's changed me forever. So I think it's important for us to remember that we even have the possibility to do these things, and that when we are actually in those places, that sometimes we have to be able to allow ourselves to actually be told that we can change.

In that moment, all I needed was a moment to sit in the sanctuary by myself and to listen for the Spirit, to listen for that thing that was in my gut that was saying, "This is not quite right." I knew that I maybe didn't make the best choices and that this elder had left the church hurt and angry. And I needed to figure out a way to reflect on that. I think that all of us have to surround ourselves with people who will step into our lives and our world to remind us of those times when we possibly are doing the persecuting. Now, Ananias was not necessarily a friend of Paul's, but was sent to him to be able to say, "Hey, this is what Jesus has said to me, you need to kind of, you know, and I'm going to remind you about who you are and who you are to be."

Recently, in my role on the board of an organization here in the Bay Area, and I was helping to interview a person for a new position. I was very excited about this person. We were going through the process, and about an hour later, the executive director— a very good friend of mine—we got off the call, and they said to me, "Bruce, you interrupted them a lot. What's up?" And I was like, "I had no idea." Now, I sat in that moment thinking I could take this a couple of ways, right? "What? I am 55, and I've been doing this forever. And who are you to tell me how I'm acting?" Or I could be like, "Huh, all right. I trust this person to help me see how, even now, I am doing things that step all over someone else."

And so for us to be open to people and those around us, our communities, to remind us when we be stepping into those spaces, I think is really important to do. It is not easy, especially as we get older, as we're more experienced and we are told maybe we're good at things. There's always room for us to grow. And we have to surround ourselves with the people who remind us that possibly we are not always at our best selves, and we need to be reminded. I was told this part really dramatically in my call about five years ago.

I was an interim at a church, and I was called into this meeting with a gentleman named Bill. Now, Bill was a person that had let me know that he did not agree with me about many things—politics, ideology, church, all those things. Bill, though, was dying. He was in the latter stages of his cancer; he had just moved to hospice at his apartment where he and his wife lived. I get an email from his wife that says, "Bill would like you to come meet with him." Now, I'm a pastor. For those of you that have ever served churches, sometimes you are thrilled when you get an invitation to somebody's house, and other times you have to gird yourselves up because you know that something's coming. But it is our role to go and hear whatever people want to say. So I went, and I walked into Bill's apartment.

We sat down; his wife got us tea and cookies on little old-fashioned-looking plates and cups, and it was lovely. Then she left us and said, "Well, I think you and Bill need to talk." I thought, "Oh God, what's going to happen?"

Bill begins by talking about the church that he had been a member of for so long and how he loved the church. Nothing negative about me at all. I was bracing for it. Then he said he was really grateful for my time with them. I'd only been there about six months at that point. He said he was really thankful for my time. Then he said, "But I have one question for you." I thought, "Here it comes, here it comes," and he says to me, "I'm dying. What does God still want me to do?"

I’m getting a little teary just telling the story again. I mean, this is not the thing that you expect when somebody is dying. You don't expect them to be like, "What does God still want me to do?"

I think there's a lesson in this Saul story: no matter where we are, no matter how much authority we have, no matter where we are in our professional life, our emotional life, or our relationships, we all have the room and the calling to grow. Bill's story will always stay with me, that no matter how terrible I am feeling physically, emotionally, professionally, God is always reaching out to us. As Jesus did, reached out to Saul, to Paul, and said, "You have a better thing in you than what you were doing. You've been harassing me, persecuting me. And yet I believe, hope, and intend for you to be more." So as you move through your life, as you move through all the daily things, as you discover those places that you might be wrong and then have to admit you're wrong, and then, worse yet, have to change your ways—know that there are many that have gone before you and that you will be okay. Part of that calling is to know that God is never done with you. Amen.