A Most Necessary Conversion
January 26, 2025 – Conversion of Saint Paul the Apostle
Acts 26:9-21; Galatians 1:11-24; Matthew 10:16-22
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.
© 2025 Evan D. Garner
