In the Name of God:  Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.  Amen.

God just won’t leave us alone.  It really can be quite annoying.  There we are minding our own business, taking care of what needs to be taken care of, going to work, taking care of our family . . . leading our lives, getting on with it . . . and suddenly God barges in and turns everything upside down.  And not just once, but over and over again . . . God seems to like messin’ with us.  It really IS annoying . . . God just won’t leave us alone.

I’ve certainly experienced this in my own life.  I first thought I might be a priest when I was a little boy . . . but I avoided the call for as long as I could . . . until middle age, in fact.  Most of you know that I was raised as a Roman Catholic.  Part of the problem was that, as I began to grow up, I began to disagree with the Roman Church’s stand on some very important issues . . . like women and gay people . . . and I didn’t see any way that I could be a priest . . . even though I thought God wanted me to be a priest.  Fortunately, I was very blessed, because the ONE thing I was absolutely certain of, and richly experienced, was God’s love for me.  So . . . even though I did my very best to avoid the whole priest thing . . . God never let up.  God kept buttin’ in, getting in the way, turning things upside down . . . until I said, “Oh, alright!  Enough already . . . I give in.”

Well, at least that’s the way it seemed to me to happen.  I suppose I won’t know for certain that I got it right until my life on this earth is over.  But you don’t have to trust my story to believe that God is actively involved in our lives.  I expect many of you have had an experience of this.  And we can certainly look to Scripture for stories about this.  One of the most famous stories of God breaking into our lives is the one we heard from the Book of Acts this morning . . . the story of the conversion of St. Paul.  Talk about God arriving with a bang!

But before we talk about Paul’s conversion, I’d like us to take a moment to consider what kind of person this Saul/Paul would have been.  Through references to his life in his letters and the Book of Acts, as well as through the study of Jewish documents, we can actually learn quite a bit about Paul.  He was born in Tarsus, which is on the southeastern coast of modern Turkey.  His father was a Roman citizen and a Jew, and Paul’s family was much attached to the traditions and observances of the Pharisees.  Paul was a member of the tribe of Benjamin, and at his circumcision was given the name Saul in memory of the first king of the Jews.  As a Roman citizen, Saul was also given the Roman name of Paul; you see, it was a common custom at the time for Jews who were also citizens of Rome to have two names, one Hebrew and one Latin or Greek.

Paul was still very young when he was sent to Jerusalem for his education.  He attended the school of Gamaliel.  Now, Gamaliel was the leading authority in the Sanhedrin and the grandson of the great rabbi, Hillel.  Like his grandfather, Gamaliel was also a great rabbi; in fact, he is still considered one of the greatest of teachers in the history of Judaism.  So, before his conversion, our St. Paul was not a “nobody” . . . he was a Roman citizen, from a family of Pharisees, taught by the leader of the Sanhedrin, one of the greatest teachers in the history of Judaism.  It looks to me like Paul was headed for a pretty illustrious career as a leader of the Jews.  No wonder he was upset by some upstart Jews claiming some nobody from Galilee named Jesus was the messiah.  It seems clear that Paul was determined to protect his faith from such nonsense, and I expect that his teacher, the leader of the Sanhedrin, approved of his zeal.  Paul observed and approved of the stoning of St. Stephen . . . the first martyr of the church.

And so we get to today’s story.  As we heard just a few minutes ago, Paul, still breathing murderous threats against the Lord’s disciples, goes to the high priest and receives permission to go to the synagogues of Damascus and arrest any followers of Jesus he can find.  He will bring them back to Jerusalem for trial.  But on the road to Damascus, God butts in . . . big time.  A bright light flashes around Paul and he’s thrown to the ground.  There he hears the divine voice of Jesus, telling him to go into the city and wait to be told what to do.  Oh, and he’s been struck blind.  It’s quite a story, isn’t it?  We probably all know it pretty well.

God simply won’t leave us alone.  God barges in and turns everything upside down.  He certainly did this quite dramatically in Paul’s life.  In Paul’s case, God seems not simply to have offered a change of career, but to have removed the very foundations upon which Paul had built his life.  This man, who had been so resistant to God’s newness, so certain that the old settled patterns of tradition and authority were correct, had all this resistance and certainty taken away from him.  I imagine that Paul’s understanding of how the world worked was taken away from him completely.  I can NOT imagine just how shattering that might be.  He comes out the other side, however, a completely new person.

I suppose we could spend some time now contemplating the differences between Paul before and after.  But, actually, I’m more interested now in the change in the FAITH brought about by the Spirit through Paul.  As the theologian Walter Brueggemann wrote in a blog on this text,[1] the church is always running, even now, to catch up with Paul in his radical, daring newness in the Gospel.  Not only did Paul come through his conversion experience completely transformed, Paul’s understanding of God – his teaching of the faith (and remember he was himself taught by the best) – was utterly transformed.  The church is still grappling with Paul’s radical message.

A window into just how radical Paul’s message is, can be found in verse 15 of today’s text.  This is where God, referring to Paul, says, “He is my chosen instrument to bring my name before the Gentiles and kings and the people of Israel.”  Don’t just nod your heads and say to yourselves, “Well, sure . . . we know that . . . the Gospel is to be spread throughout the whole world.”  Yes, that IS what’s being said . . . but said in a particular way . . . in a way that’s remains profoundly challenging to the church and to us.  Look at the particularity of the peoples named, who are to receive the good news of Jesus Christ.

First, the name of Jesus is to be brought to the Gentiles.  In other words, the Gospel is to be brought to those who are radically other, unlike us, impure and without our traditions or inheritance.  This is the very center of Paul’s articulation of the Gospel.  Paul is so familiar to us that we easily miss the dangerous point of his conversion.  The radical grace in Paul’s thinking and teaching shatters all of our attempts to limit, tone down, and domesticate the Good News.  Jesus is to be brought to exactly those people we most disapprove of.

The name of Jesus is also to be brought before kings.  Yes, this may mean the little “underling” kings – like Herod – who submitted to Rome . . . but it also means Rome itself.  Eventually, even the emperor himself will be confronted by the church.  The stories that follow this morning’s story in the Book of Acts show the apostles constantly in and out of court before the authorities.  The Gospel preached by Paul is profoundly public, challenging settled authority everywhere with the new authority of the “Easter king.”  None of this business of parking our faith at the door of the church on our way out, only to be picked up again next Sunday when we return.  Our faith is to inform our lives . . . entirely! . . . at work and at play . . . in the privacy of our homes and in the public square.

Finally, the name of Jesus is to be brought to the people of Israel.  This may make us 21^st century Americans extremely uncomfortable . . . but it cannot be ignored.  For Paul, the point is that Jews and Gentiles are BOTH invited to be alongside the early Christians . . . for Paul it is a matter of inclusion . . . that business I mentioned earlier about the Gospel being spread throughout the whole world.  We, however, look at this invitation with powerful and painful irony.  It is deeply ironic that today’s story concerns a Jew who persecuted Christians when, in the long history of the west, it is Christians who have persecuted Jews.  But we should not let our discomfort – our sin – keep us from considering just how the name of Jesus might best be brought to EVERYONE.  See what I mean?  This is radical, unsettling stuff.

And none of this is easy.  Neither Paul nor anyone around him expected the newness of the world under the God of life to be received easily by the world’s systems of death.  But remember, it’s not up to us all alone.  Easter is all about the impossible breaking into the world.  Easter is not done yet!  God keeps barging in and turning everything upside down.  God seems to love to mess with us.  God just won’t leave us alone . . . Glory, Alleluia!

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