+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
We celebrate today the feast of the Conversion of St. Paul, one of those great stories from the Bible which is so familiar that we’ve made some pretty serious errors in how we’ve received it. This is pretty common. The Christmas story is so familiar that we assume there were three wise men, while the bible never gives us the number—there were three gifts but an indeterminate number of magi. The story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden is so familiar that we just know that the forbidden fruit was an apple, though this assumptions is not borne out in the text.
So it is with the story of St. Paul’s conversion, so I want to point out a couple of assumptions that we habitually get wrong about it. First, the Conversion does not come with an attendant name change. Common knowledge holds that Saul became Paul on the rode to Damascus, and that this name change indicates Paul’s change in character, much like Abram becoming Abraham in Genesis. This is not the case. Paul is still referred to as Saul for several chapters after the conversion story. The difference in how scripture names him has to do with his audience rather than the change on the road to Damascus. When he’s preaching to Jews, the Hebrew name Saul is used. When he’s preaching to Gentiles, the Greek name Paul is used.
Now that’s more a bit of trivia than something of theological significance, but the second mistake, I think, is more important for us to clear up, and it’s related. We have this vision of Paul changing his identity entirely at the moment of conversion- like Clark Kent turning into Superman in a phone booth, though in Paul’s case we imagine the change being from a purely evil character to a purely good character. Perhaps this is why we like the false name-change narrative.
I think this is the wrong way to view Paul’s Conversion. Those who have read much of St. Paul’s writing know that the characteristics which defined him during his life in Judaism—his pugnacious nature in particular—are still with him post-conversion. Paul doesn’t become a perfect person because he experienced Jesus on the road to Damascus. Rather, he becomes a person with a new mission, new goals, a new direction. Surely this new mission makes him a better person over time, but it’s a life’s work God sets him at. The transformative power of the moment of conversion is critical, but it’s a beginning whose implications will be borne out through a life of faithfulness.
So, Paul’s story does not mean that a personal conversion experience, a transformative moment, is the only thing that matters. Nor does it mean, and this is where I part ways with evangelicalism, that such an experience is necessarily normative. It is wonderful when it happens, but the Good News is more than “feel your heart strangely warmed once.”
The assumption that a once-for-all, affective experience of conversion is the “end-all-be-all” of Christian life stems, I believe, from both a misunderstanding of Paul’s teaching and of his experience on the road to Damascus. Paul’s response to seeing and hearing Jesus was not to say “thank God I’m saved, now my response to it for the rest of my life is neither here nor there.” Rather, he begins preaching the power of God to save all humanity, and indeed to redeem all Creation. Paul never says “accept Jesus Christ as your personal savior, and every thing else just automatically falls into place” but he does write “run the race with endurance” and “[fight] the good fight… [keep] the faith.”
So, Paul’s Conversion and what it teaches us about conversion in general might be counter-intuitive for many of us. It seems that conversion isn’t only a one-time deal- God can continue to conform us more and more to the likeness of Christ as we strive with faith and obedience to do his will. Granted, I am perhaps more suspicious of religious enthusiasm than most, but for me I’ve found that the quotidian, rather “boring” approach of saying one’s prayers and trying to be loving offers a more stable foundation than the waves of emotion that may have as much to do with how much coffee I’ve had or how loud the Berlioz is on my boom box than anything pertaining to God’s movement in my life. One has to discern the spirits, and I find this to be a tricky business if I’m not rather calmly circumspect about it.
I don’t know about you, but I find this composed vision of Christian conversion a lot more comforting than being obsessed with whether or not I’m supposed to have a particular, ecstatic experience once-and-for-all, at least when it comes to obtaining spiritual provision for the “long-haul”. It seems not only a lot more comforting but a lot more in keeping with what the majority of Christians throughout the centuries have experienced.
Again, there’s nothing particularly wrong with a dramatic conversion experience; sometimes that’s what it takes and it’s a gift from God when it comes, as it did to St. Paul. But we can all experience what we might call the “second phase” of Paul’s conversion, whether or not the first is needful in any person’s life—we can all experience the gradual growth of stability and wisdom and confidence in God’s saving action.
In other words we can reach the stage of spiritual maturity Paul himself wrote about in his Epistle to the Ephesians, not being as “children tossed to and fro and carried about with every wind of doctrine”, chasing spiritual highs as if they were a drug, but “speaking the truth in love… grow[ing] up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ.” This life, the life of a Christian, may start with a dramatic, burning bush, or it might not. In either case, the end-point, I think, is full of peace, a down-to-earth sort of joy, and quiet confidence. It may come sooner or it may come later, but that is the promise we have when God grants us continual conversion.
+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.