Untitled Sermon (16)

Paul’s “Conversion”: Sunday School Edition

The story of Paul’s conversion story is one of those Bible tales that everybody knows. Even growing up as a non-believer, I knew about Paul’s vision on the Damascus road. It only makes sense, really, that the story of the man who wrote most of the New Testament would be important to Christians.

It doesn’t hurt that Paul’s story is so exceptional and inspiring. In many ways, it reflects how we as Christians imagine evangelism and the power of the Gospel.

Paul, a non-believer, used to hate Jesus. He was an evil, terrible person who even murdered Christians. Then, one day, he met Jesus, and accepted Christ into his heart. Paul converted to Christianity: he suddenly became a better person, he started going on mission trips all over the world, and all because he suddenly found God on that Damascus road.

Paul’s Conversion: A True Story

This is what I like to call “Paul’s Conversion Story: Sunday School Edition”. It’s something similar to what I was told growing up, often in Sunday School or by friends. I’ve even heard it used for politicians and criminals: “If God can change Saul to Paul, he can change anybody.” It’s nice, tidy, neat, and completely wrong.

This telling of the story dehumanizes Paul, and ultimately misses the greater point of the story as Acts tells it. For one thing, Paul was not an atheist or “non-believer”. He was a Jew, and by his own account in his letters after the Damascus road incident, he continued to be a Jew. There was no great distinction between a Jew and a Christian in the early Church, except that Christians thought the Messiah had already come, and Jews were still waiting on him.

Importantly, this means that Paul did not “find God” on the Damascus Road. From all that we know of Paul, he was already a fiercely devoted and faithful man. He had devoted his life to learning under Gamaliel, a great rabbi. He studied the scriptures since he was a young boy. He prayed, he fasted, and he hoped and waited on God to deliver his people Israel from the oppression of Rome.

It is of the utmost importance that we see Paul as a faithful follower of God before meeting Jesus, because it was his faith that lead him there to begin with. By his own account in Philippians and elsewhere, Paul tells us that he was zealous for the Lord. Zeal, for Paul, was something learned from stories like that of Elijah, who in his Zeal killed all the prophets of Ba’al. Like the story of Jehu in 2 Kings 10,

The New Revised Standard Version Massacre of Ahab’s Descendants

“Is your heart as true to mine as mine is to yours?” Jehonadab answered, “It is.” Jehu said, “If it is, give me your hand.” So he gave him his hand. Jehu took him up with him into the chariot. 16 He said, “Come with me, and see my zeal for the LORD.” So he had him ride in his chariot. 17 When he came to Samaria, he killed all who were left to Ahab in Samaria, until he had wiped them out, according to the word of the LORD that he spoke to Elijah.

Paul was consumed by zeal for the house of the Lord, and so, filled with righteous indignation at the blasphemies of those Christians, he sought to wipe them out. It was not atheism that lead Paul to persecute the Church, it was a strong and devoted faithfulness to God.

What of our faith, then? Paul’s story is a warning to us that all faith is not good faith. Paul’s story is a lesson to us, as followers of Christ, about the kind of zeal we ought to have for God. Paul’s zeal lead him to bring suffering on others, but Jesus reveals to Paul that true zeal means that we suffer in the name of him.

Paul’s conversion was not to belief about God, which he already had. It was to understanding God: a God who is “gracious and merciful, slow to anger, abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing.” And this understanding meant that Paul had to rethink what zeal truly was: not zeal to go to war for God’s sake, but zeal to suffer for his sake.

Hellfire and Brimstone: What Happens to the Church’s enemies?

Paul’s story is also one about what happens to God’s enemies. Paul, before encountering Jesus, was certain that what awaited God’s enemies was death. He saw the Christians spewing blasphemies against God, and felt that they should be stoned, tied up and dragged off to prisons, tortured, that they must pay dearly for being enemies against God. He would have made a very good Fire and Brimstone preacher.

How very terrifying it must have been, then, when Paul discovered that he was the enemy of God! “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” Paul must have been horrified.

But the next words were not, “Therefore you are condemned to death and hellfire!” but, “Rise and go, and you will be told what to do next.” They were not words of condemnation, but of transformation.

In many ways, this was perhaps more painful than condemnation. Paul likely spent many days in prayer, tossing and turning at night, coming to grips with a realization about God that was so contrary to all he’d ever thought. While Luke does not give us much detail, from pieces of Paul’s own writing and a little imagination, we can see that this must have been very much like a Jonah moment for Paul. The moment when Jonah realized that God had not come to destroy Ninevah, but to save it.

Would God, then, not crush the Romans? Would God spare our enemies? His enemies?

Constant Conversion: Rethinking our Faith

It is for this reason that the “Sunday School Edition” of Paul’s story simply won’t do. If we imagine that Paul was an atheist or pagan who came to know the one true God, then simple belief seems to be enough. But if we realize that Paul was a believer in God, that Paul did pray, and fast, and read scripture, then we must admit that belief in God is not enough. We can believe in God and yet still be his enemies. As James tells us, “Even the demons believe- and shudder!”.

The story of Paul suggests that a one and done conversion event is not what God wants of us. I would still argue, however, that Paul’s story is a conversion story. Not a conversion from unbelief to belief, or even a conversion from dead faith to live faith, but a conversion from man to child.

When Paul set out on his journey, he was ready to persecute the Church, he thought he saw clearly the will of God, and he sought to bind Christians up and lead them away. After meeting Christ, however, Paul became like a child. He would not inflict suffering, but would himself suffer. He did not see clearly, but was blind. He did not lead others, but himself was lead helpless and child-like by the hand. For three days Paul fasted and prayed. And for many years, Paul would continue to rethink his faith.

Paul’s encounter with Jesus forced him to rethink everything he thought he knew about God. It shows us that conversion to Christ is not a one time event, but a lifetime event. We are always being converted. We are always having to correct our understanding of God. Christ calls us to a child-like faith, a faith that utterly depends on him, and a faith that recognizes we don’t have it all figured out.

Specifically, Paul’s story draws attention to two areas we must rethink about our own faith.

Firstly, zeal. The Church in the West has long been in a position of power. We have a long history of “zeal” for God, but not zeal of the right kind. The Church has a history of persecuting Jews. It has a history of lynching Blacks. It has a history of demeaning and berating gay people. It has a history of causing much suffering, but suffering little itself. In short, we have often embraced the same zeal to persecute others with which Saul persecuted the Church. If our defense of the faith looks like this, it is not the Jews or the Gays or anyone else who is the enemy of God. We have become the enemy of God.

But this misunderstanding of zeal is rooted much deeper in the second thing Paul’s story asks us to rethink: What happens to God’s enemies? For many Christians, we have been taught a fire and brimstone gospel. We have an understanding of Jesus as one who saves us from an angry, wrathful God. A God who not only kills his enemies, but who does so in the most horrific and grotesque of ways. It only makes sense, then, that if we understand God as one who burns his enemies alive for eternity, that we are granted permission to do likewise. If God is justified in condemning people to an eternal Hell, what difference does it make, really, for us to condemn people to a much briefer hell on earth?

But, all doctrines of Hell aside, this is not the gospel. Christ calls us not to cause suffering, but to take the suffering of this world onto ourselves. If only Christians could remember not just John 3:16

The New Revised Standard Version Nicodemus Visits Jesus

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.

But John 3:17 as well:

The New Revised Standard Version Nicodemus Visits Jesus

Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.