Delivered on Sunday 25 January 2009 in St George's Chapel

The Feast Day of the Conversion of St Paul

This week saw the inauguration of President Obama. He takes office at a time of great economic difficulty and not a little international tension. Yet he brings with him a great wave of hope and on his shoulders many people have placed a burden of expectation. As he begins his presidential journey, we wish him well. But you know what, I'm going to miss President Bush. Or what I should really say is that I'm going to miss his little funny quotes. Which other world leader could come out with things like this:

I've been in the Bible every day since I've been the president.

Anyone engaging in illegal financial transactions will be caught and persecuted.

Rarely is the question asked: is our children learning?

And yet the truth is I really don't know anything about President Bush other than what the press decide to tell me. It would actually be really good to understand something of the man himself - and not simply to concoct a picture that is drawn from misrepresentation and selective prejudicial accounts of others.

And you just might say the same thing about St Paul. We have a rather particular view of Paul - one that has its own feast day, the one we celebrate today 'The Conversion of St Paul'. There is a close association in our minds between Paul and conversion. But Paul is not the only famous conversion. You only have to think of Luther's tower experience. There was man who tortured himself with the question: 'how can I find a gracious God?' He recognised that the harder he tried, the more he fell short; he saw himself as a man who was walking - with determination - towards the gates of hell. In the depth of his despair he turned to Paul - the one who had the ultimate conversion experience - and in Paul's letters he came across the phrase: 'the righteous shall live by faith'. 'The righteous shall live by faith' - it's not a matter of what you do, rather it is a matter of your faith. A deeply troubled conscience was healed. Luther's inner conversion has become a hallmark of Western theology.

But the difficulty is that we read Paul's conversion in the same light. We imagine that Saul the Jew became Paul the Christian; we imagine that the one who had persecuted, saw the light - quite literally - and changed sides. And so we feel comfortable having a feast day on which we celebrate the conversion of St Paul.

I want to suggest to you that this reading of St Paul we are wrong. Just as we are wrong to evaluate President Bush by reading snippets from newspapers, we are wrong to evaluate Paul by reading his experience through the experience of others, and certainly through Luther's experience. Paul's experience was his own.

But what do we know about the experience that we commonly refer to as Paul's conversion? St Luke tells the story - actually he likes this story and tells it three separate times, in the Acts of the Apostles. And then there is the material in Paul's own Epistle to the Galatians. Now on the assumption that what a man reveals about himself is on the whole more accurate than what is told to us by others let us look a little at Paul's own account. Here is what he has to say about his conversion:

You have heard, no doubt, of my earlier life in Judaism. I was violently persecuting the church of God and was trying to destroy it. I advanced in Judaism beyond many among my people of the same age, for I was far more zealous for the traditions of my ancestors. But when God, who had set me apart before I was born and called me though his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son to me, so that I might proclaim him among the Gentiles, I did not confer with any human being, nor did I go up to Jerusalem to those who were already apostles before me, but I want away at once into Arabia.[1]

There several things to note about Paul's side of the story. First, he never uses the word conversion. Instead he places himself in the tradition of the prophets. We heard Jeremiah say - in the Old Lesson this morning - "before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations".[2] Isaiah has similar things to say. Paul thinks of himself in exactly this way. That's why he can say "God had set me apart before I was born" and why he can believe that his mission is to "proclaim God among the nations". Paul does not see himself and as being converted; he thinks he has been called. It is call not conversion.

Paul doesn't look back at his earlier years with embarrassment and with a troubled conscience. Actually he's quite frank about his achievements. Listen to what he has to say in this morning's New Testament passage:

If anyone has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more: circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee; as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless.[3]

'Blameless', no less. These are not the words of man sitting in a dark room with a wet towel on his head, considering just how wretched he is. Sure, he is willing to put all these achievements to one side, to concentrate exclusively on his calling. But that's what it is. Not a move from one religion to another but a calling to go to the Gentiles - the people who are not Jews - and to proclaim to them the good news that they too are regarded as God's children.

It is something of a shame that we have for so long - probably ever since Augustine, I had better not lay the blame on Luther - incorrectly emphasized conversion at the expense of call. I think 'call' is a radical understanding; it gives us other windows through which to view our existence. At the end of the week of Prayer for Christian Unity, Paul's more expansive view of himself as a Jew whose calling it was to be an Apostle of the Gentiles, broadens us to a greater understanding of what it is to be the people of God. Is it possible, for example that Christianity is not a religion totally separate from Judaism? Is it, as Paul would seem to advocate, the case that Christianity is a branch of Judaism. Oh how that understanding might have worked wonders in human history. And there is that window through which we see our own lives. Perhaps the Church has ventured too far in the direction of conversion, those radical experiences that provoke disunities in life. Such experiences are real. I suspect however, that more of us live existences that are more linear, slowly developing into what we are called to be. It is 'calling' that is at the heart of what it is to follow God. As St Birgit's prayer goes: Lord show me your way, [your calling], and make me willing to walk within it.[4]