Conversion Happens in the Life of Each of Us

Posted by stpauls on January 31, 2010 under Sermons |

One of the groups charged with leadership here at St. Paul’s is our Church Committee. It is the board of our parish, elected by the membership once a year at our annual general meeting. The Church Committee assists the priest, the wardens, and the community as a whole in mapping out our future together. Its job is to remind all of us that mission and ministry stay at the core of what it means to be a Christian community.

We start our monthly meetings with Bible Study. It is not a scientific, academic Bible Study, but the method we use is a more direct interaction with the actual text. We try to listen intently and intentionally to the words of the Bible. In the words of The Revelation to John, this Bible study is about listening “to what the Spirit is saying to God’s people.” And if you want to experience this particular method you are invited to attend our Church Committee meetings, which are always public.

Usually we study an appointed text for the following Sunday. It is a sneaky way by the priest to get ideas for his next sermon …

One of the fascinating things that happens during these Bible studies is this: Even though we might know the texts intimately, by studying it in community, by listening to the Spirit speaking to us both through the words on the page and also through the experiences of those around us. New, meaningful, profound, and life-giving insights emerge. Very often, Scripture opens to us in ways that we might not have experienced before. For me, this is a sign and a witness that God’s healing and prophetic Sprit is among us during these studies. And it is a reminder that spirituality cannot be practised in a vacuum, as a one-man or one-woman show. In order to stay alive and sane, in order to stay connected to the path of truth, spirituality must regularly intersect and interact with the community of the faithful.

Having said this, these Bible studies are equally a reminder that it doesn’t solely need theological experts to interpret the Bible. Every single one of us regardless of age, colour, gender, socio-economic background, education, sexual orientation, or heritage is capable of discerning in community “what the Spirit of God is saying.” Every single one of us is worthy of engaging the Word of God. God has something life-giving to offer each and every one of us. God wants to reveal words of wisdom to each and every one of us. God seeks to open a path of life and truth for each and every one of us. God has a plan: for each and every one of us.

And, of course this is what conversion is all about. It is about discovering the path that God has laid in front of us – and then walking it. And Conversion does not just happen in the life of Paul, but it also happens in the life of each and every one of us.

Some of you more seasoned spiritual sojourners will have noticed that despite today’s celebration of the feast of Paul’s conversion, we didn’t encounter the traditional text. None of the readings described Paul’s journey to Damascus, on which in a rather miraculous way he encountered the might of the living God when he was thrown off his high horse and heard the risen Christ speak to him. And I hope you remember from sermons past, that this experience doesn’t speak so much of conversion as a sudden intervention, but it speaks to the radical changes that occur in our lives when we are confronted and disarmed by the Good News of God in Christ.

But today we didn’t hear the story of Paul’s conversion. There was a choice today and I picked the reading from Galatians to mix things up a bit and to find another theological perspective for this special day.

And the Holy Spirit, I believe, did indeed tug at my heart in a different way. When we were reading the passage at the last Church Committee meeting, the Spirit opened my heart to these words from today’s passage: Paul writes: “God … set me apart before I was born and called me through his grace.”¹

In these few words, which are central to Pauline theology, Paul makes a point that we sometimes – in our struggle with other Pauline texts – overlook. And the point is this: Despite the fact that Paul is one of those Christian saints who is larger than life, for Paul himself, it really is all about God. God is the subject, not Paul. God does the converting, not Paul. God is the one who calls Paul on to the way of righteousness. It is not Paul doing it by himself. Paul is nothing more and nothing less than our brother. He is human – just like you and me. The reason we celebrate Paul’s conversion is not because Paul needs to be celebrated; we celebrate because in today’s feast God is glorified and something unique about God is revealed.

Far too often we look at Paul as the “theologian” only, as the one who doesn’t seem to know how to escape his particular theological, cultural, and sociological framework when he speaks of God. And this gets Paul into trouble in our day and age. And I think rightly so. We, thank God, are moving past sexism and homophobia – even in the church.

But today too often we forget that there is another side to Paul. There is “Paul, the mystic.” There is Paul, who comes to recognize that it is not our doings, not our achievements (or the lack thereof) that define us in the eyes of God. But our very being, our identity is defined by God’s reaching out to us in love. In his conversion, Paul is given an insight on how God looks at us: God is no persecutor. But God seeks to embrace and penetrate every fibre of who and what we are. God yearns to heal and restore us in body, mind, and soul. Paul understands that it is all about God’s love for us, for you, for me, and for each and every one of our sisters and brothers, whoever they are and wherever they find themselves on the journey. It is the discovery of God’s abundant love that turns Paul around and that allows him to become a lover of God, and, like God, also a lover of humanity.

God had to blow apart Paul’s original image of God, because, in his zealous strife to do things right, Paul had replaced the love of God with a desire to maintain supposed and assumed theological purity. In his spiritual journey, Paul had forgotten about love and about the mysterious connection between love of God and love of neighbour. Paul’s eyes finally were opened and he was able to see that one cannot love God without extending this love to fellow members of the human race.²

In one of his letters, Paul later writes: But “[i]f I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, and do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.”³

When God revealed in Paul’s life the love of God made manifest in Jesus, Paul not only recognized God’s healing power for his soul, but those he persecuted were turned from enemies to sisters and brothers. The nameless and faceless masses he had hunted down became friends with faces and names: Cephas, James, and many, many others. God broke through the wall of Paul’s self-righteous, arrogant and egocentric spirituality, which made him believe that he is right, but no other. Paul was finally able to listen to others. His sisters and brothers became important for him because they helped him figure out who he was and who God wanted him to be.

And this is true for us too. The great theologian and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer once observed: “We all become disciples on our own, but none of us stays alone.”⁴ God converts our hearts so we may experience God’s love working in us and so that our eyes are opened to see God’s love for our neighbours, too.

When Kerlande Kaye last week spoke so passionately about losing nine cousins in the earthquake in Haiti, it made the horrors of Haiti real. Those far away, those without names and faces, became our sisters and brothers. And just like listening to James and Cephas changed Paul’s heart, so do Kerlande’s words call for our hearts to be changed. The horror in Haiti has a name and a face and God has called us before we were born, not only to become lovers of God, but to become lovers of those faces and names, too.

In the end, conversion is meaningless if it remains just a personal reorientation of our journey. Godly conversion, in contrast, leads us to both discover a path that leads us deeper into the mystery of God and equally to open our eyes and hearts and minds to the needs of those around us. And this is what we celebrate today.

1 Galatians 1:15
2 cf. 1 John 4
3 Corinthians 13:1f
4 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich: “Nachfolge”

[The Reverend Markus Duenzkofer delivered this sermon on January 31, 2010.]