Sermonette: Conversion of St. Paul the Apostle
Wednesday, 26 January 2022 06:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cjbanningAs preached at the midweek Eucharist at St. Thomas' Episcopal Church in Glassboro, NJ on the evening of Wednesday, January 26, 2022.
Acts 26:9-21
Psalm 67
Galatians 1:11-24
Mathew 10:16-22
I suppose it is something I have in common with St. Paul that we are both converts. Although it is not quite so easy to say what precisely it was I converted from. Nor was my conversion much like St. Paul's. His conversion was sudden, dramatic, and unexpected. Mine . . . was not.
Still, the idea of a conversion experience as a stunning, life-changing moment of clarity looms large within the Protestant imagination. There are Christian traditions which strongly emphasize this idea of conversion, to the point of considering it normative, a prerequisite for truly being a Christian.
Indeed, it is from this tradition that we get the beloved hymn Amazing Grace, which speaks of a discrete “hour I first believed” which separates a past of blindness from a present of sightedness, a past of “lostness” from a present of “foundness.”
But for many Christians, even for converts like me, these binaries simply do not adequately represent our Christian experience. It is not so much that we were lost and are found as that we are continually in the process of becoming found, of coming to see. If I were to speak of a “before” and an “after,” the turning point would not be my conversion but my baptism, when I was made regenerate through sacramental grace. Now I am still becoming found and coming to see, but I do so as a member of a community of faith, of Christ’s mystical Body, indelibly marked as his own.
To put aside the notion that some distinct conversion experience ought to be normative to Christian experience, we need only look to St. Paul’s own ministry.
St. Paul ministered to converts whose conversion experience mirrored his own, flashy and dramatic. I’m thinking of the Phillippian jailer who, when Paul and his companions were set free from prison by an earthquake, fell down before them, trembling with fear, asking them what he must do to be saved, and then was baptized with his entire household before the night was over.
But St. Paul also ministered to converts whose conversions were less dramatic, who were converted not by showy miracles but by reason and persuasion. The Acts of the Apostles tell us of a sermon he gave at the Areopagus in Athens, in which he quotes Greek philosophers and poets in order to explain and defend the teachings of Christianity to an interested but skeptical crowd. And St. Luke tells us that “some of them joined him and became believers, including Dionysius the Areopagite and a woman named Damaris, and others with them.”
St. Paul was wise enough to recognize that the path by which he came to Christ might not be the path everyone was called to follow. He reached out to the people he encountered where they were, and showed them the love of Christ in the ways he thought would make the most sense to them.
The importance of the Conversion of St. Paul lay not in a flashy miracle on the road to Damascus, but in the further conversions that his conversion enabled, and in those who were converted by those converts, and so on, stretching across the globe and across millennia. What is important is not how we were brought to Christ, but that we have been called to him and claimed as his own, and St. Paul was an important early part of the process of that happening.
Amen.
Acts 26:9-21
Psalm 67
Galatians 1:11-24
Mathew 10:16-22
I suppose it is something I have in common with St. Paul that we are both converts. Although it is not quite so easy to say what precisely it was I converted from. Nor was my conversion much like St. Paul's. His conversion was sudden, dramatic, and unexpected. Mine . . . was not.
Still, the idea of a conversion experience as a stunning, life-changing moment of clarity looms large within the Protestant imagination. There are Christian traditions which strongly emphasize this idea of conversion, to the point of considering it normative, a prerequisite for truly being a Christian.
Indeed, it is from this tradition that we get the beloved hymn Amazing Grace, which speaks of a discrete “hour I first believed” which separates a past of blindness from a present of sightedness, a past of “lostness” from a present of “foundness.”
But for many Christians, even for converts like me, these binaries simply do not adequately represent our Christian experience. It is not so much that we were lost and are found as that we are continually in the process of becoming found, of coming to see. If I were to speak of a “before” and an “after,” the turning point would not be my conversion but my baptism, when I was made regenerate through sacramental grace. Now I am still becoming found and coming to see, but I do so as a member of a community of faith, of Christ’s mystical Body, indelibly marked as his own.
To put aside the notion that some distinct conversion experience ought to be normative to Christian experience, we need only look to St. Paul’s own ministry.
St. Paul ministered to converts whose conversion experience mirrored his own, flashy and dramatic. I’m thinking of the Phillippian jailer who, when Paul and his companions were set free from prison by an earthquake, fell down before them, trembling with fear, asking them what he must do to be saved, and then was baptized with his entire household before the night was over.
But St. Paul also ministered to converts whose conversions were less dramatic, who were converted not by showy miracles but by reason and persuasion. The Acts of the Apostles tell us of a sermon he gave at the Areopagus in Athens, in which he quotes Greek philosophers and poets in order to explain and defend the teachings of Christianity to an interested but skeptical crowd. And St. Luke tells us that “some of them joined him and became believers, including Dionysius the Areopagite and a woman named Damaris, and others with them.”
St. Paul was wise enough to recognize that the path by which he came to Christ might not be the path everyone was called to follow. He reached out to the people he encountered where they were, and showed them the love of Christ in the ways he thought would make the most sense to them.
The importance of the Conversion of St. Paul lay not in a flashy miracle on the road to Damascus, but in the further conversions that his conversion enabled, and in those who were converted by those converts, and so on, stretching across the globe and across millennia. What is important is not how we were brought to Christ, but that we have been called to him and claimed as his own, and St. Paul was an important early part of the process of that happening.
Amen.