January 25, 2026 – Conversion of
Saint Paul the Apostle
© 2026 Evan D. Garner
Audio is available here. Video is available here.
I used to think that
Jesus would keep me out of trouble. I grew up in a household where the right
answers to most of life’s problems could be found in the Bible. I knew today’s
gospel lesson. “When they hand you over, do not worry about how you are to
speak or what you are to say,” Jesus said, “for what you are to say will be
given to you at that time.” I trusted Jesus. I took him at his word. When I got
dragged before the teenage equivalent of governors and kings, which is to say when
my friends and I got into trouble and faced interrogation by our parents, I didn’t
think we would need to coordinate our stories to make sure we got them
straight. Because Jesus said so. Boy, was I wrong!
For most of my life—even
after I realized that Jesus’s advice wasn’t intended for mischievous
adolescents—I assumed these words were supposed to comfort those who faced
persecution by assuring them that the Holy Spirit would give them the right
words to say at the critical time…and get them out of trouble. I assumed that
those who became vessels for the Holy Spirit to speak through them would
somehow offer such a powerful witness to God’s truth that they would be set
free. After all, Jesus said, “Those who endure to the end will be saved.” But
bearing witness to the gospel of Jesus Christ and enduring in the power of the
Holy Spirit will not save you from persecution and death. In fact, that sort of
faithfulness will cost you your life. Just ask the namesake of our parish, Saint
Paul.
In our reading from the
Acts of the Apostles, Saint Paul recalls the moment of his conversion—the
moment when Jesus appeared to him on the Damascus Road and changed his life forever.
But, in this passage, Paul does not recall that moment in a sermon or in a
letter, like in the passage we heard from Galatians. Paul is speaking to King
Agrippa while in chains. He is on trial for his life.
As had happened more
times than he could count, Paul’s preaching had run afoul of the political and
religious leaders of yet another community, this time those in Jerusalem. While
praying in the temple, Paul had been arrested and interrogated and locked up in
jail. On his first night behind bars, Paul had received a vision of the Lord
Jesus, who had appeared to him and said, “Keep up your courage! For just as you
have testified for me in Jerusalem, so you must bear witness also in Rome.”
From that moment on, Paul
knew that Jesus was calling him to spread the good news of God’s love not in
pulpits or marketplaces but in courtrooms and tribunals. Instead of sharing his
faith with those who had never heard of Jesus, he would bear witness to Christ
in the face of those who were vehemently opposed to God’s reign of love. And, for
Paul, that required a costly choice. Each time he was interrogated by a Roman
authority, Paul was found to be innocent of any charges against the empire. As
far as they were concerned, this was a purely religious matter—one that should
be settled by the Jewish authorities. All Paul had to do was keep his mouth
shut and he would be released. But Paul wasn’t interested in being set free.
Paul knew that that the
Way of Jesus was more than a religious matter. He believed that the gospel had
something to say to those in power, and he knew that the only way he would get
a chance to say it was if he remained in chains. Because he was a Roman
citizen, Paul had the right to appeal his case all the way to the Emperor, the
highest authority in the land, and so he did.
Before shipping him off
to Rome, Herod Agrippa II, the Roman-appointed client-king of Judea, wanted a
chance to hear from Paul himself. No faithful Jewish person would have
respected the authority of this servant of Rome, but Paul seized the
opportunity to speak to him. “I myself was convinced that I ought to do many
things against the name of Jesus of Nazareth,” Paul said. “…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.”
“But then Jesus came and
found me.” Paul’s recollection of that moment on the Damasus Road must have
made Agrippa squirm a little bit in his seat. As an instrument of the empire,
Agrippa would have known well what it meant to use the authority given to him
to lock up the saints in prison and cast a vote against them when they were
being condemned to death. Just like Paul, Agrippa had used his power to support
the kingdoms of this world, the kingdoms of death. Only when deluded by the
forces of evil do human beings believe that violence and torture and
imprisonment can bring about a God-given reign of peace. Only Satan could
convince us that God’s ways can be brought to the earth by locking people up
and putting them to death.
Into this false
allegiance, confronting the misalignment of religion and power, Jesus himself
had spoken to Paul. And Paul wanted Agrippa to hear what he had said. “Saul,
Saul, why are you persecuting me?” Jesus had said, using the Hebrew form of
Paul’s name. “It hurts you to kick against the goads.” You are only hurting
yourself with your anger. When you use violence, imprisonment, and death to
accomplish your goals, you are not standing on the side of God, but you are working
for the very kingdoms that put the Son of God to death upon the cross.
In that encounter with
the crucified and risen Lord, Paul discovered that there can be only one
faithful response. “After that, King Agrippa, I was not disobedient to the
heavenly vision, but declared first to those in Damascus, then in Jerusalem and
throughout the countryside of Judea, and also to the Gentiles, that they should
repent and turn to God and do deeds consistent with repentance.” We, like Paul
and like Agrippa, are in need of a Damascus moment.
The kingdoms of this
world are convinced that they can use the power of death to bring about life,
and the One who was victorious over death now confronts us and calls us to
repent and forsake our allegiance to them. As Willie James Jennings wrote, “Every
road that leads to violence must become a road to Damascus, where faith aimed
in the wrong direction becomes faith focused on the One who raises the dead.”
Do not fool yourself into
thinking that the gospel has nothing to say about the political issues that are
manifest in the violence that has been unleashed in Minneapolis and in all the
other places in our country where families are being torn apart and where
people are being thrown into prison by political actors who claim that their
actions are justified by the rule of law. The Way of Jesus stands against those
who seek to impose their vision for what is good and right if it means denying
the dignity of another human being in order to discard them like a sub-human
animal. And those who wish ill or pray that violence would befall the officers
of the state who enforce those anti-Christian policies are no better, for we
are all susceptible to Satan’s power and the temptation to celebrate violence
when the result is a victory for our side.
As Jennings wrote, “All
violence is religious violence [because] all violence acts in the place God,
gesturing toward the prerogative of the life-giver to withhold the fullness and
goodness of life. All violence is rooted in the false belief that we can bring
life out of death and create the good out of the destruction of what we deem
bad. Violence has always been the tool of those who pretend to the throne of
the creator. Yet violence’s seductive power is quite overwhelming, and only the
foolish refuse to see its awesome temptation.”
Paul knew that the gospel
has something to say to anyone and everyone who believes that peace and freedom
can be enforced by the sword. He had devoted his life to bringing about God’s
reign by wielding the very instruments of death that God’s reign had promised
to overthrow. Only when he met Jesus, the one in whom God has bound Godself to
the bodies of the incarcerated, beaten, tortured, and killed, was Paul able to
hear the call to repent and leave behind his allegiance to the way of death.
Those of us who follow
Jesus are the ones who know what it means to see God and God’s reign of love
and peace bound inseparably to the bodies of those human beings who suffer as
he did. And that means that we are also the ones who, like Paul, accept the
call to repent of our participation in those kingdoms that hold them prisoner
and do them harm. Doing deeds consistent with repentance, as Paul instructs us,
will not keep us out of trouble but lead us right into the heart of God’s
battle with the forces of evil that have a grip on this world.
But “do not worry,” Jesus tells us, “about how
you are to speak or what you are to say; for what you are to say will be given
to you at that time; for it is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father
speaking through you.” In this critical moment, may our words be nothing less
than God’s words, and may God use us to bear witness to God’s reign of love and
peace even before the principalities and powers of this world. As Jesus has
promised us, “The one who endures to the end will be saved.”
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