A Most Necessary Conversion

 

January 26, 2025 – Conversion of Saint Paul the Apostle (transferred)

Acts 26:9-21; Galatians 1:11-24; Matthew 10:16-22

© 2025 Evan D. Garner

Audio of this sermon can be heard here. Video can be seen here.

Unity…is the threshold requirement for people to live together in a free society; it is the solid rock, as Jesus said…upon which to build a nation. It is not conformity. It is not a victory of one over another. It is not weary politeness nor passivity born of exhaustion. Unity is not partisan. Rather, unity is a way of being with one another that encompasses and respects differences, that teaches us to hold multiple perspectives and life experiences as valid and worthy of respect; that enables us, in our communities and in the halls of power, to genuinely care for one another even when we disagree. (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jan/24/bishop-mariann-edgar-budde-sermon-that-enraged-donald-trump)

Bishop Mariann Budde, the Bishop of Washington, offered those words near the beginning of her sermon at a prayer service held on Tuesday at the National Cathedral. It was the end of her sermon, when she asked President Trump to be merciful, that has received outsized attention, inspiring both celebration and vitriol. 

Some people are calling Bishop Budde a hero. Others are likening her to Satan. Hardly anyone is talking about whether it was a good sermon, which is what happens when preachers decide to tack on a juicy soundbite that overshadows the rest of their carefully chosen words. The polarized response to Bishop Budde’s sermon is further evidence of what she called “the culture of contempt that has become normalized in our country.” No matter what side of our nation’s political divisions you land on, how you heard her words is likely a manifestation of the convictions you held long before you knew that there was a prayer service on Tuesday at the National Cathedral. 

And you know what? No matter what those convictions are, you are still a child of God. And so are the people whose convictions are the opposite of your own. Those who celebrated Bishop Budde’s sermon love Jesus just as much as those who called her an instrument of Satan. Those who believe that her words were important, prophetic, and appropriate are seeking to be faithful to God just as much as those who believe that her words represent everything that is wrong with mainline Christianity and this country. Until we can accept that, the vision of unity that Bishop Budde held out in her sermon—the unity that God has promised in the kingdom of God—will remain nothing more than an aspiration. To achieve that unity will require our conversion.

Today we celebrate the Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul the Apostle, the patronal feast of this parish. But I wonder what sort of conversion we should be celebrating. I think it’s safe to say that St. Paul was converted to the way of Jesus—to Christianity—but the word conversion implies not only a new destination but also a point of departure—a starting place or status quo which one must leave behind if one is to undergo conversion. 

Throughout the centuries, many Christian preachers have done a lot of harm—both to Paul and to his Jewish counterparts—by stating or implying that, when Paul became a Christian, he gave up being a Jew. But that isn’t the conversion we see manifested in Paul’s letters or the in record of his missionary activities contained in the Acts of the Apostles. Paul was Jewish from the day of his birth until the day of his death. But, when he met Jesus on the Damascus Road, he underwent a conversion which enabled him to recognize and participate in the reign of God. And, if we’re going to be a part of that reign, it’s a conversion that we must undergo as well.

“You have heard, no doubt, of my earlier life in Judaism,” Paul wrote to the Christians in Galatia. “I was violently persecuting the church of God and was trying to destroy it.” Have you ever wondered why Paul was so angry at the early church? In his book, Paul: A Biography, N. T. Wright explains that Paul belonged to a branch of Judaism that believed that the kingdom of God was near—very near. Any day, they believed, God would send the messiah to deliver God’s people from their oppressors. And the only thing standing in the way of the fulfillment of God’s promises, they believed, was the faithlessness of God’s people. 

Paul believed that God’s reign would only come to the earth when God’s people were of one mind and one heart, purified in their religion and united in their worship of the one God. To a religious zealot like Paul, the way of Jesus—with its willingness to embrace notorious sinners and its less-than-scrupulous approach to sabbath observance and dietary restrictions—worked directly against all of that. And he believed that God had called him to put a stop to it. “If we can just get rid of these half-hearted believers and get everyone to take God seriously,” Paul might well have thought to himself, “then we can bring the kingdom of God to the earth.”

We know what happens when unwavering conviction is married to religious fervor. If you really believed that the fullness of God’s reign would come to the earth if you only took the life of another human being, you, too, would become as murderous as Paul. That may be the very bottom of a slippery slope that starts with something that seems far more innocent, but who among us isn’t tempted by the proposition that the greatest obstacle to God’s vision for the world is those people who disagree with us. The problem with that sort of thinking—besides the fact that it is based on an understanding that God’s reign could ever be revealed through violence—is that it makes the kingdom of God something that depends on us. And, as soon as the coming reign of God is something that depends on us, God becomes as narrow as our own idolatrous imaginings.  

What confronted Paul on the Damascus Road was his own failure of faithfulness. Despite being more advanced in Judaism than almost any of his contemporaries—despite being more faithful to God than anyone he knew—Paul had allowed his zealotry for God to stand in the way of God. But God did not let Paul’s failure stand in the way of God’s reign. Instead, that reign came to Paul in exactly the way that Paul sought to undermine it—through Jesus. In that moment, when Jesus showed Paul that God’s reign did not depend upon Paul or his zealotry but, instead, had already come through Christ’s own death and resurrection, Paul was converted. He was converted from a vision of the kingdom that began with his own faithfulness to a vision of the kingdom that begins with the faithfulness of God.

“I want you to know, brothers and sisters,” Paul wrote with clarity and enthusiasm, “that the gospel that was proclaimed by me is not of human origin; for I did not receive it from a human source, nor was I taught it, but I received it through a revelation of Jesus Christ.” In other words, you couldn’t make this up if you tried. If it were up to us, we would tell God exactly how and when and where and to whom the kingdom of God should be revealed. And it would always be to people like us and for people like us and to the exclusion of people who are not like us. When God’s reign is only allowed to show up in ways that confirm our deeply held convictions, the result is always antithetical to the way of God—no matter whose deeply held convictions are in control. When we believe that God’s kingdom depends on us, we become inflexible, rigid, and unyielding, and that is nothing like God’s gracious and loving reign.

The fullness of God’s reign is not revealed through human effort or triumph but through the cross of Christ—the ultimate symbol of human failure. When we allow ourselves to believe that the kingdom of God is waiting on us to make the world right, we cut ourselves off from the work that God is doing in the world and in our lives. Then, we only hear from preachers and politicians what we expect to hear. And, then, we begin to demonize those who hear something different. And, then, our hope for unity falls apart because the kingdom of God is far from us.

If we are to receive God’s reign, we must be converted from the arrogance of believing that God’s reign is dependent on us. It’s not. And that is most definitely good news. Now, that doesn’t mean that we are supposed to sit idly by and wait on God to sort everything out. The apostle Paul did not stop working for God after he met the risen Christ. Instead, his zeal for God’s reign was transformed into a zeal for sharing God’s love with the world. There is much work ahead for the faithful people of God, but we labor not to make the reign of God a reality on the earth but because, like Paul, we have seen that reign in Jesus, and we have felt it take hold in our lives.

You Belong Here

 

January 12, 2025 – The 1st Sunday after the Epiphany: The Baptism of Our Lord

Isaiah 43:1-7; Acts 8:14-17; Luke 3:15-17, 21-22

© 2025 Evan D. Garner

Audio of this sermon can be heard here. Video can be seen here.

How many of you remember your baptism? In our tradition we baptize infants, children, youth, and adults, so those of us who were baptized as little babies won’t remember it. Those of you who grew up in a tradition that doesn’t practice infant baptism have the advantage of remembering what it felt like, and I hope your memories of your baptism are joyful. 

I was less than two weeks old when I was baptized. My mother tells me that, when she realized that both sets of grandparents were already in town to meet their new grandchild, she called the minister and asked if we could go ahead and get it over with. It was short notice, and I can think of at least one seminary professor who would roll his eyes at how brief my parents’ and godparents’ catechetical formation was, but it still took. On that Sunday morning, I was sprinkled with water in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, and I was sealed with the indelible mark of Holy Baptism.

We believe that Baptism is the sacrament by which God adopts us as God’s own children and makes us members of Christ’s Body, the Church, and, thus, inheritors of the kingdom of God. That’s what it says in the catechism in the back of the prayer book. As we say in the Thanksgiving over the Water right before someone is baptized, it is through the waters of Baptism that we are united with Christ in his death and resurrection and reborn by the Holy Spirit into a new life of holiness. In other words, a lot of important stuff happens to us in the moment of our baptism, but as today’s reading from the Acts of the Apostles reminds us, our baptism is only a starting point. It’s what comes afterwards that really matters.

“When the apostles at Jerusalem heard that Samaria had accepted the word of God, they sent Peter and John to them.” Our lectionary only gives us a tiny piece of a much larger and more interesting story. It started with the death of Stephen, the first Christian martyr, who was stoned to death by the religious leaders as Saul, our church’s namesake, looked on. After that, a severe persecution broke out, and most Christians scattered throughout the region to avoid arrest, torture, and death. The apostles, we are told, stayed put in Jerusalem, but other leaders, like Philip, fled to the countryside of Judea and to Samaria.

As Tertullian would write about 165 years later, the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church, and it was during that dispersion of the faithful that the good news of Jesus Christ began to reach those outside the geographic, ethnic, and cultural center where it had started. Even under duress, Philip preached the gospel to the Samaritans—those ancient relatives of the Jewish people whose way had diverged from their southern counterparts after the Assyrian conquest of the northern kingdom of Israel. 

When the Samaritans, whose tradition included an early form of the Pentateuch but did not include any of the prophets who anticipated the coming of a messiah, heard about Jesus and saw the signs that Philip did, they were amazed. In accordance with the earliest Christian practice, these new converts were baptized into the faith. The Way of Jesus had spread beyond its Jewish roots. But something was missing.

When the apostles back in Jerusalem heard that the Samaritans had accepted the word of God, they sent Peter and John to them. When the two apostles arrived, they immediately recognized that, although these new Samaritan converts had received baptism in Jesus’ name, they had not yet received the Holy Spirit. So the apostles, who were the bearers of the Spirit’s power—those who had received the Holy Spirit when it descended upon them at Pentecost—prayed and laid hands on the new believers, who were immediately filled with the Holy Spirit. 

I don’t know exactly what that looked like, but I’m pretty sure it was a noisy, frenetic, uncontainable display of energy, love, enthusiasm, and faithfulness. In some traditions, the primary manifestation of the Spirit’s power is the gift of tongues. We don’t do a lot of speaking in tongues in The Episcopal Church, but I absolutely think we’ve got to leave room for the Holy Spirit to surprise us and unsettle us and encourage us in ways we didn’t see coming. 

That’s what so interesting about this little story—that the Holy Spirit and Baptism are inextricably linked, but sometimes they don’t show up together. And I think the key to understanding why is found not only in the experience of the Samaritan converts but also in the experience of the apostles, who in this encounter faced their own sort of conversion. 

It is impossible for us to appreciate how radical it was that the Way of Jesus and, thus, the family of God bent around to include the Samaritans. They were universally and unequivocally hated by the Jewish people. Just as it is often easier for us to accept the inclusion of someone who never had a part in our endeavors than to welcome back someone who betrayed us, so, too, would it have been easier for the apostles to accept a group of Gentile converts than these Samaritans. They belonged to a religious sect that had defined itself largely through their rejection of the messianic tradition, especially one that was traced back to King David, and now they wanted to belong to God through Jesus the Messiah. 

It is no accident that the Samaritan Christians’ full participation in the Body of Christ and the community of the Holy Spirit is put on hold until the apostles can lay their hands on them. That’s not because the apostles have magic fingers. It’s because they are representatives of the church, and the church is the place where the life of the faithful is lived out, and the Samaritans cannot live out that life until the church has made room for them. 

The Samaritans were already believers. They already had faith in Jesus. As far as historians and theologians can tell, their baptism in Jesus’ name was the same trinitarian baptism that we still use today. What was different was the fact that the church had never received someone like them, and the church had to undergo its own conversion before these new Christians could live out their faith.

In our tradition, we use the sacramental rite of Confirmation as a way for those of us who were baptized as children to confirm the promises that were made on our behalf and accept the Christian faith for ourselves. But there’s a reason that we only allow bishops to administer the rite of Confirmation. That’s because, when we are confirmed, it is not only we who are confirming our acceptance of the Christian faith, but it is also the church itself, through its apostolic representative, who is confirming our place within the community of faith. Bishops are our link to the apostles, and, when Bishop Harmon comes for confirmation, he comes to make room in the church for each one of us.

The truth is that we don’t need a bishop to welcome us into the Christian community. We recognize that Baptism is the full initiation into the Body of Christ. But we also recognize that Baptism is only a beginning. As Father Chuck often said during baptism rehearsals, there’s nothing in the baptismal rite that says that, once you present your child for baptism, we have to give them back. This is the place where those who are baptized live out the faith that they declare or that is declared on their behalf. This is the community in which our faith comes alive. We are the family through which the Holy Spirit moves and breathes and comes among us with power. 

Whether you have been confirmed or not, whether a successor of the apostles has ever laid hands on your head, whether you think of yourself as a member of this church or you’re just here as a visitor, all of us who have been baptized into the Body of Christ are called to seek the Holy Spirit. Baptism is just a starting point—our initiation into the Way of Jesus. If we are going to follow that way and live out that life, we need the help of God’s Spirit, and we need the church, where we share in its power. 

The story of Philip and the Samaritan Christians shows us that the Christian life can only take shape within the context of the church and that the church can only take shape when it makes room for everyone. This is the family of God, the community of the Holy Spirit. If you have ever been baptized, this is where you belong. And, if this is where you belong and you have never been baptized, let me know. There’s already room for you here.