So I thought we would take a break from the lectionary to celebrate today the conversion of St Paul which feast day is on January 25th. It seems actually very fitting to celebrate Paul’s conversion during our season of the Epiphany, since even when we know very little about the man, most of us have heard about the story we read this morning about Paul’s conversion, his dramatic encounter with the Risen Christ on the way to Damascus. What an Epiphany indeed! It was for Paul a complete change of thinking, believing and living. As some theologians put it: “There was definitively a before and an after”, and “It was for Paul an 180 degrees change of direction”, or “Christ turned his life completely upside down”. In Paul’s own words: “I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish ” (Philippians 3:8). Indeed the man changed his whole existence, he even changed his name, from Saul he became Paul.
So who was Saul? Well, you may be surprised to realize that he was actually a Pharisee, that’s right, among those who have been in conflict with Jesus during all of Jesus’s ministry. In the New Testament, we don’t hear about Saul before the testimony and martyrdom of Stephen (Acts 7), which happened probably two years after Jesus’s death and Resurrection. Jesus’s death and Resurrection hadn’t stopped the Pharisees indeed. The on going conflict with Jesus was now taking place with the disciples, and the Pharisees became more and more enraged as more and more people started following Jesus’s teaching and believing he was the Messiah. And Saul was one of the enraged one, in his own words:
I not only locked up many of the saints in prison, but I also cast my vote against them when they were being condemned to death. By punishing them often in all the synagogues I tried to force them to blaspheme; and since I was so furiously enraged at them, I pursued them even to foreign cities.
Paul was born in the city of Tarsus, in Turkey, a few miles from the Mediterranean sea. It was a wealthy city known for the excellence of its schools. A very brilliant student, he was sent to Jerusalem at the age of 13 to learn from the most reputable Rabbi Gamaliel. We lose track of him after that, but he probably went back to Tarsus and became a prominent religious leader, called back to Jerusalem to fight againt the movement Jesus had started. That’s what he did, until he finally encountered Christ for himself on this famous trip to Damascus.
Knowing all of that, I think it’s interesting to realize that Paul’s “conversion” does not really fit the pattern of what we usually mean by conversion: Saul was a very strict and very religious person, he wasn’t an atheist who became a believer, he wasn’t living a life of immorality and then became a righteous person, Saul wasn’t even a Jew who became a Christian, since he is the one who will define what is actually Christian doctrine. So what happened? Saul met the Risen Christ and he turned from a life of anger, violence and destruction to a life of passion, reconciliation and building up the church. What happened? He realized he was wrong. One of the commentators I read said that not only Paul’s conversion was a major event in his life, and in the life of the church but that this conversion literally changed the whole world since Paul defined Christianity.
Now it really made me wonder, for all the people who want to change the world, that Paul started changing the world when he was stopped in his tracks and acknowledged that he was wrong. He didn’t start by defining a program, he didn’t start by handing our leaflets or joining a protest, he started by acknowledging that he was wrong, and that’s the first thing I would like for us to think about this morning.
1 – The best thing we may do is to admit that we are wrong
As I was reading about Paul’s conversion this week, I realized that we certainly also live in a time of anger and violence, and this also among religious people, among Christians where people cannot agree on what the Gospel asks of us. You may probably have have heard about Bishop’s Marian sermon at the President’s service of prayers, and people were arguing on social medias about what she should have said or not said, if she was being too political or if she was just preaching the Gospel. Well, I may have my opinions about that but what was really disheartening and even a bit scary was the way people talked to each other, because quite frankly they were enraged. There was almost no debate, no trying to listen to each other, to understand each other. Thankfully, most of the time we’re not hurting each other physically, but we’re quite figuratively at each other’s throat and using verbal violence, deciding who is Christian and who is not. What does the Gospel teach us? Well certainly first that anger and violence are not the way, and that the first person we need to take a good look at and to question is ourselves, our own person. Paul started changing the world when he realized he may have been wrong about everything, when he actually fell on the ground andlost his sight, when he was taken to Ananias, a man so little remember today, a local religious figure, and Paul let him teach him about what he would have never wanted to hear about, Jesus Christ, and finally received the baptism. The cover of our bulletin represents Saul falling off his horse, as many representations of his conversion do. The thing is, nowhere it says, in any of the three passages of the New Testament where the story is told, that Paul did have a horse, it’s actually quite unlikely, only the military had horses because it was so expensive. But I love the idea that Christ “knocked him down of his high horse” before he received him, changed him, used him. And it happened not only at Paul’s conversion, but we know it was an ongoing thing in Paul’s life: He confessed in the second letter to the Corinthians that: In order to keep me from becoming conceited, I was given a thorn in my flesh.
That’s the message of us as well. We talked at Bible study about how doubts aren’t necessarily a bad things, especially doubting ourselves. Saul the Pharisee had no doubts, he was certain he was doing the right thing, he was certain he was pleasing God. Now it does not mean we shouldn’t have convictions, it does not mean we should agree with everybody, it certainly does men we should accept what we believe is evil. But I think it’s a good thing to often remember that the best thing we can do to change the world is by not assuming we are righteous people. In fact, one of Paul’s major teachings is that we are all convicted of sin until we receive Christ’s grace and Christ’s mercy.And that’s a second point.
2 – The best thing that we can do is to submit to Christ
Jesus said to Paul that he was “kicking against the goads (=spikes)” by fighting him. Paul was clinging so much to his certitudes, instead of opening his heart and his mind, he was just hurting himself. I think it’s something that happens often in our spiritual lives as well. We get all wrapped up in our anger, our resentment, sometimes our sorrow that we are mainly the one hurting ourselves. Some wise person said that it’s not so much the things that happen in our lives that hurt us, rather the way we think about them. Jesus came to change our perspective on things, to let us see the world, people and ourselves the way God sees us. Instead of keeping on hurting ourselves with our own sins, we are called again and again (and that’s the baptismal covenant) to turn to Christ. We are not called to acknowledge that we are wrong and sinful because God wants to humiliate us, we have to acknowledge it so we can receive “grace and truth” (John 1:16). It is interesting isn’t it that after Jesus “knocks Paul off his high horse”, Jesus tells him: “Get up and stand on your feet”. Jesus is going to completely change Paul, emptying him of his anger, violence and rage to fill him with love and compassion. He does not put him down to put him down, but to “raise him up”, Paul became “a new creation“. In the meantime Paul is still Paul: Passionate, energetic, fearless, and even stubborn and self confident. But all he is and all he has, he uses it now for Christ’s purposes. Because we are Christians, that’s what we have to do to: we have to choose Christ’s way, Christ’s will, and it certainly not for us to become persecutors, this kind of zeal does not please God and it’s very clear from our passage in the Gospel. Now we may not always know Christ’s will, but do we look for it, or do we just assume we know? I am amazed at what Adam Hamilton say (our author in our current Bible study). He says that the first thing he does every morning is to fall on his knees and ask Christ to use him for his purposes. I wonder how it would look like if every Christian did the same thing…Which takes us to our first and last point.
3 – The best thing that we can do is to pray [for others] (Stephen)
The last thing I want to underscore today in Paul’s conversion that could be useful for us as well is to see the role of prayer and meditation. When Paul finds out about Christ, the story tells us, he spends three years in Arabia and then Damascus before he started preaching. No doubt that he spent his time in prayer, meditating everything he used to know and what happened to him, letting Christ instruct him. This is an example for all of us. Yes Christ can transform us, but it takes time for our heart and mind to be molded after him. If we don’t give him time with us, if we’re not available in our hearts, nothing is going to change. That’s the role of prayer.
And if we dig a little more, there is even something else beyond Paul’s conversion. As you may remember, we noticed that the first time we hear about Paul is when Stephen preaches to the Jews and is put to death for confessing Christ. Saul not only was present at the execution, but he may have had been responsible for it as it is said that “(…) the witnesses laid down their clothes at the feet of a young man named Saul” (Acts 7: 58) and then Stephen says that he can see the Son of Man coming in the clouds and he tells Christ: “Lord, do not charge them with this sin.” And so it’s amazing to see that in Paul’s conversion it is where the story resumes: The heavens are open and Paul receives mercy, and his conversion will indeed change everything. The power of Stephen’s prayer and act of forgiveness was remembered by Christ and how much will he honor this prayer. I know this is quite an example, but do we pray also for those we think are hopeless and tormentors and even persecutors? Do we believe that Christ can still use them, not as is, but that he can also bring them to “grace and truth”? And what are we ready to sacrifice for that?