We’re baptising Noé this morning on the Feast of the Conversion (and baptism) of St Paul. Paul’s is perhaps the most famous conversion experience in history. Saul of Tarsus, zealous teacher of the Jewish law and persecutor of the early church is on his way to Damascus with the authority of the chief priests in Jerusalem to imprison the Christians of that city. But God has a different plan. Jesus himself speaks to him and Saul is blinded for three days until the scales fall from his eyes as he comes to believe that Jesus is the Messiah and he is baptised. So the gamekeeper turns poacher and Saul becomes Paul, the greatest evangelist the church has ever seen.
But some might ask, what kind of conversion was this? How did Saul really change when he became Paul? That question might be asked particularly by those readers of Paul’s letters who, in various ways, continue to find this a rather difficult character. He goes from having the zeal of the Pharisee to the zeal of the convert. There is something unquestionably fanatical about Paul. He’s relentlessly opinionated and utterly uncompromising in what he believed. That unquestionably caused tensions in the church between him and those who actually knew Jesus of Nazareth before his crucifixion.
And if Paul’s conversion is thought to be primarily a conversion from belief in redemption through the law to redemption through grace in Jesus Christ, many readers of Paul still find him rather legalistic. He’s certainly not backward in telling people how they ought to behave and some of those prescriptions, be it in relation to women, slaves or homosexuals, sit very uneasily with our attitudes today.
Well, I don’t think that the Damascus road experience was quite the complete conversion that some make it out to be. Some want to think that in the split second God turned a violent persecutor of the church into a perfect and unquestionable spokesman for God’s will. But Paul’s conversion took place on a road and I think we can say (I think he would say) that it set him on a journey.
Paul wouldn’t have believed for a moment that the letters he wrote to churches around the Mediterranean in the decades after Jesus’ resurrection would come to be read in churches in corners of the world he’d never heard of two millennia later. In fact, it’s clear in his earlier letters that he doesn’t think time will go on that long. So to really appreciate Paul and to understand what his conversion meant we need to see things from his perspective than the perspective of his contemporaries. We need to read his letters as an excited and at times confused response to how he believed God had completely change the world. We need to recognise that a lot of his advice is a contextual attempt to make sense of God’s actions in Jesus for particular people in particular places. And we may need to recognise that some of the things he says are still scales that are falling from his eyes. There are tensions in Paul’s writing, particularly between a regulation of church and family life and a more mystical theology of life in the risen Christ that he himself is grasping to understand. And those tensions are still very much present in the life of the church today.
So what then is Paul’s conversion? Is this just the same man talking a different language? No. Some significant changes have taken place which are guiding and shaping him on his Christian journey. And the most radical of these is Paul’s conversion from striving to be top dog to rejoicing in his status as underdog. Saul was a man who strove to overcome his weaknesses through his rigorous compliance with the law and his success brought him acclaim and power. But after his conversion Paul embraces a very different view of himself. A word that comes up time and again in Paul’s letters is “boasting”. There can be no doubt that Saul the Pharisee was a boaster, proud of his piety and with an inflated sense of his own righteousness. But Paul comes to say, “If I must boast, I will boast of the things that show my weakness”. Paul came to realise that it is the proud, arrogant, strong aspects of ourselves that are our biggest obstacle to God. He came to know that it is in our weaknesses and failures that God works in us because they are openings to the need of his grace.
So this is a very different side to Paul from the macho opinionated fanatic we might sometimes see. This is a Paul who recognises human vulnerability and sees it as the area where God is at work. This is very much what baptism is about: dying to the self that is always striving and boasting, and rising to new life with the Christ who embraced completely human vulnerability and put himself alongside the weak.
I was reminded of this on Tuesday when I attended the funeral of a 45-year-old woman called Mandy who had worshipped at my church in Camden Town. Mandy had had an extremely difficult and complicated life, blighted by abuse and addictions of different kinds. I’d looked after her children for a couple of weekends before they were eventually taken into care and prevented from seeing her except on very rare visits. Mandy was weak and vulnerable and the premature end to her life was perhaps not unexpected. In the eyes of the world (no doubt, in the eyes of Saul of Tarsus) Mandy’s life had been a series of failures.
But the church on Tuesday was packed with members of that church who had loved Mandy and profoundly appreciated the contribution that she made to their common life. Because Mandy’s weaknesses had, in the most extraordinary way, been channels of grace both to her and to people to whom she had shown Christ love. Mandy was at every church event, contributing in whatever way she could. Example, in spite of all her own difficulties Mandy had been the most regular volunteer at the Camden churches cold weather shelter for which we are currently collecting starter packs. Church mattered to Mandy. It was the one place in her life she felt secure, where she could contribute, and where her weaknesses not only did not count against her, but actually seemed to open up opportunities for encounter and empathy and healing. As the preacher said at her funeral, “Mandy has shown us the glory of Christ” and he preached on a text of St Paul to the Corinthians: “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong.”
Like St Paul’s conversion, our own baptism is an ongoing journey where we continue to put to death in ourselves our pride and boastfulness and seek to open up to God our vulnerabilities and weaknesses. So we need to begin with recognising where our weaknesses and vulnerabilities lie and be honest about them rather than ignoring or simply striving to overcome. We need to offer them to God and recognise in patient prayer that these very wounds may become wells for our healing.
Embracing this is key to understanding both the writings of St Paul and baptism, because it opens us up to the conversion of grace. Paul writes about his own weaknesses, “three times I appeal to the Lord that they would leave me, but he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.’ So, I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may dwell in me… for whenever I am weak, then I am strong.”
Thanks be to God for his indescribable gift.