The Conversion of Saint Paul
Acts 9:1-22
Saint Mark 1:14–20
All of us have heard the old bromides: “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” “A leopard can’t change his spots.” Or, as Tamara Cohen wrote in the book The Mistress’s Revenge: “People don't change. They dig their heels into the shifting sand and cling on for dear life.”1
Change of any kind can make us uncomfortable. And so we resist by weeping over the goodness of imaginary yesterdays. We find things to blame for the flow of events we wanted to stop and could not. We blame God, our partners, government, books, fanciful combinations of unnamed individuals, and sometimes even the voices in our own heads that tell us that the “good-old days” were far better than whatever is now or whatever will be.
I know some friends for whom high school was the pinnacle of their lives to which nothing can be compared. Talk to them for even a moment and the conversation will return to the glories of those days. The band sounded better than the Chicago Symphony, the choir sounded better than the one at the Tabernacle in Salt Lake City, and the football team could have beaten the Bears. (Oh wait! The part about beating the Bears is probably true.)
Any awareness of being awkward, or having bad skin, or feeling out of place, or struggling with your identity has been expunged in favour of sanitized memories.
People go back because change is hard. It requires work, effort, and most of all an openness to a new and better tomorrow.
Certainly the guys who got up and went to work on their father’s boat one morning did not expect their lives to change.
They were fisherman. In their day the opportunity for change was non-existent and upward mobility was unheard of.
Fishing was a family trade: you fished if your father fished, and your sons fished if you fished. Frankly ... you did not have the opportunity to explore other possibilities for your life. You were born into your job and seen only as a unit of production rather than as a person. The fact that these fishermen had probably always known they would be fishermen ... allowing them to earn just enough money to scrape by but never enough money to even imagine getting ahead.2
Change was not on the horizon until, out of the blue, Jesus shows up with a direct invitation. He didn’t say “Hey! Nice boats! Maybe I’ll come and visit you again next week.” He said “Come and follow me and I will give you a whole new life.”
The amazing thing for me is that they took him up on the offer. They spontaneously changed jobs. They left their nets un-mended, the fish they had just caught uncleaned, and their father with only the highered hands to help.
Who knows why they did this? Nobody does.
We can only imagine the reaction of their wives and children when they didn’t show up for dinner that night and their family’s even more surprised reaction when they heard that their husbands and fathers went traipsing off after some person that nobody even knew.
Further, it was a job change and a lifestyle change that didn’t happen in the middle of the night but in the middle of the day.
Who does this? I wouldn’t and I bet you wouldn’t either. We’d investigate. We’d run a background check on this Jesus character. We’d ask for references.
It is far more likely that before we changed our lives and lifestyles we would be far more like Saul of Tarsus.
It didn’t look like any kind of change would be in the cards for him because he was absolutely certain about who he was and what he was about.
The disciple’s faith before they met Jesus was never mentioned. Saul’s faith was so central to his life and he was so dedicated to it that he decided that any challenge was a threat. For some change is not only difficult it is threatening.
Saul of Tarsus, Paul to us, for some reason viewed the followers of Jesus as a cause for real alarm. I have never been able to figure this out except for Saul’s zealotry as a defender of the faith. Followers of “the Way”, as the early Christians were known, were few and number and certainly not as big of a menace to the peace and stability of his faith as was Roman rule under which he lived. Still he wants to bring them bound and gagged to Jerusalem.
Paul ... was Church Persecutor Number One. He was busy, on his way to Damascus, with letters from high officials, determined to stamp out all of this Jesus nonsense once and for all. And Paul was stopped in his tracks by a blinding light from heaven. He heard a voice calling his name. The risen Christ stood before him.
Paul didn’t know whether what happened to him, in his Damascus Road encounter with Christ, was birth or death. It felt like both at the same time. For him, meeting Christ was a new beginning, but it was also a dramatic ending. Much of his past was over. A very different future awaited him.3
That’s what happens when change comes. Change always brings with it a very different future.
For the disciples Jesus was calling them to a bigger life than the fishing business could every offer. Now they were going to be in the people business! They are going to be able to see, first hand, how God would have us treat other people. They would see a healing touch offered to those who needed it. They would see outcasts welcomed, boundaries crossed, sinners and tax-collectors becoming a part of God’s kingdom before the righteous and religious.
Maybe it was the faith in action part of Jesus’ message that bothered Saul so much because he was the ultimate insider – righteous and religious beyond measure.
For Saul the change was so great that not only his attitude was changed but so was his name. The old man really had passed away because the Christ whom he had persecuted opened his blinded eyes and made him into a new man.
Things happen when change comes into our lives especially if Christ is the catalyst for that change.
Marianne Williamson put it this way:
When you ask God into your life, you think God is going to come into your psychic house, look around, and see that you just need a new floor or better furniture, and that everything needs just a little cleaning ‑‑ and so you go along for the first six months thinking how nice life is now that God is there. Then you look out the window one day and you see that there’s a wrecking ball outside. It turns out that God actually thinks your whole foundation is shot and you’re going to have to start over from scratch."4
That’s what happened to the disciples and Saint Paul. They had to start all over from scratch but they weren’t going to have to do it on their own. Christ was with them and his presence would prove to make all the difference.
We’ve faced a lot of changes in our lives in the past couple of weeks and in the last year.
We once again were able to witness what we have come to fondly call “the peaceful transfer of power” making some feel sad, others ecstatic, and all of us relieved.
We were also reminded that just one year ago last Thursday the first case of the Carona virus was diagnosed in the United States. This would irretrievably change the lives of the families of over 400,000 thousand Americans, (more than were lost during all of World War II) who were left to mourn their loved ones.
Compared to that the rest of us we were merely inconvenienced.
Through all of these changes we affirmed that Christ was with us. In every new day he was there. On the dark days and the bright days, on the happy days and the sad days, Christ was there. And his promise is that he will be there in all the days ahead.
And, if we let him he’ll change us into the persons he wants us to be. He’ll teach us, like he taught the disciples and Saint Paul, that “you can teach us old dogs new tricks” and maybe even go so far as “changing our spots.”
1. Tamar Cohen, The Mistress's Revenge (Leicester: Charnwood, 2012).
2. Shannon
Johnson Kershner, “The Tragedy of Zebedee,” Sunday Worship (January 21, 2018).
3. William H Willimon, “Do You Have the Time,” Pulpit Resource 49, no. 1: pp. 12‑15.
4. Marianne Williamson, Tears to Triumph: the Spiritual Journey from Suffering to Enlightenment (New York, NY: HarperOne, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, 2016).
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