St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Wesley Chapel, FL
Preacher: The Rev. Adrienne R. Hymes
The Feast of the Conversation of St. Paul/Year C: January 26, 2025
Acts 26:9-21; Galatians 1:11-24; Matthew 10:16-22
For many years, my vocational call to the priesthood was slowly revealed. There was no bright flash of light that changed me immediately. Rather, there were points of light along my journey, many that were glaring, some barely detectable and some I just chose to ignore.
Prior to going to residential seminary, I took local classes with those who were already on the ordination track. After a year of telling my classmate, “Oh, no, I’m not called to be a priest; I’m just here taking classes,” my wise friend said to me, “Adrienne, I think you protest too much.” After years of kicking and screaming, heart break and losses and wrestling with my vocational call to the priesthood, I listened to God and stopped protesting against God’s will, and said, “Yes.” Since then, I carry with me two pieces of wisdom: Your vocation finds you; you don’t find it. And, God gets what God wants.
In our first lesson in the 26th chapter in the Acts of the Apostles, an imprisoned Paul stood before King Agrippa pleading his defense against the Jewish accusations that he was a traitor to God and to his Jewish ancestral context. Prior to our passage, Paul in verses 4-11, laid a foundation upon which his accusers might grasp some understanding about the extraordinary encounter with the risen Christ that changed his identity and his purpose—the moment when his vocational call found him.
By his own testimony, Paul had imprisoned many, cast his vote for those condemned to death, and hunted followers of the Jesus movement, even into the synagogues, to punish them and force them to blaspheme. Paul’s unrelenting terrorizing actions, which had spread to foreign cities, had earned him what some might call “street credibility” (or street cred) amongst his own people. But the Jews and Gentiles who had become followers of the Jesus movement, knew his reputation.
We enter today’s passage in Acts, where Paul told King Agrippa about his life-altering encounter with Jesus which we know as Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus. Paul, whose name was Saul at this point, was on a mission to persecute followers of the Jesus Movement in Damascus located about 60 miles northeast of the Sea of Galilee. Wherever this impurity of belief had spread, Saul was on a mission of terror to stamp it out.
On this journey, the risen Christ intervened. The light that shone from heaven, brighter than the sun, caused Saul and his companions to fall to the ground. But Saul was the only human to hear Jesus’ voice speaking to him. The voice asked, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? It hurts you to kick against the goads.”
What did Jesus mean by his statement, “It hurts you to kick against the goads”? A goad, was an instrument or stick with a sharp end used to poke an animal, in order to guide it in the desired direction1; it is the ancient form of a cattle prod. When the goad was used, the animal might get mad and kick. To curb this kicking behavior, the herder put the goad behind the leg of the animal so that a kick met the sharp, painful end of the goad, eventually resulting in the animal willingly moving according to the will of the one with the goad.
Saul’s very identity and purpose were defined by his enraged kicking against the goading of God represented by his violent persecution of Jesus’ followers. When Saul asked who was speaking, the Lord answered, “I am Jesus whom you are persecuting” (v.15). Though he did not recognize his voice, unbeknownst to him, Saul had encountered the face Jesus many times in his violent encounters with Jesus’ followers, and yet his terrorizing behavior—the kicking against God’s goading—continued. When he tried to force the followers to blaspheme, I imagine that Saul was not shielded from their testimonies to the truth of the risen Christ, for which they were willing to die. Surely, those words were absorbed into his being.
In his conversion, the collision of the divine risen Christ and the human Saul, the cosmic and the earthly, Saul’s identity and purpose were forever changed. Saul became Paul. The once bringer of pain and death became the dynamic bearer of the liberating, life-giving Gospel message, preaching it for Jews and Gentiles. God got what God wanted.
What about you? Have you had your own conversion encounter with the risen Christ? Sometimes these encounters may stop you in your tracks, like Paul, and others may be so subtle that they are hardly noticed. Perhaps you have noticed and have chosen to ignore. We are to be obedient and resist kicking against God’s goading, His divine guidance, even when He leads us where we do not want to go.
According to Ecclesiastes (12:11), The sayings of the wise are like goads, and like nails firmly fixed are the collected sayings that are given by one shepherd. The Holy Spirit is the wisdom that animates the soul of the church. Through the body of Christ, the Church, we encounter the wisdom of God, through holy scripture and our Baptismal Covenant, which provides us with the steady goading we need to obediently discern and follow God’s will for our lives—individually and collectively as the Church and as part of the human family.
And it is hard to deny that God’s wisdom goads the faithful as we follow in the footsteps of Jesus—the One who, in his humanity, modeled for us how to be more fully human—to show compassion and mercy for those who have been dehumanized by the unjust structures of society and those who uphold those who construct and uphold those unjust structures.
Paul was chosen as our patron saint primarily because he was the consummate church planter. But also because of his remarkable testimony of his conversion, from zealous persecutor to zealous apostle. Without his powerful testimony, Paul could not have successfully appealed to such broad and ethnically-mixed populations. Paul had a remarkable and compelling story to tell, and it was critical to his planting of multiple churches.
Like Paul, we, as the church that bears his name, also have a remarkable and compelling story to tell. Like Paul, your obedience and commitment to building God’s kingdom is expressed through this shared endeavor of growing this church. In sharing our remarkable story, may God use St. Paul’s as an example of obedience to His will, and as His instrument for goading those who do not yet know Christ.
When we may find ourselves protesting our call to be evangelists, let us be clear that we did not find this vocation; it found us! My fellow evangelists, let us be brave in the face of the terrors of this world. Speak truth to power in love, confident that it is the spirit of your Father speaking through you. Let us risk, in love, the real possibility of being hated all because we speak the truth of Jesus Christ.
May God’s vocational call within you shine brighter than the sun in this world, so that all might turn, as Jesus said, from darkness to light, from Satan to God (Acts 26:17-18). Most important, let us do so without resistance, and with full obedience, so that God gets what God wants.
Amen.
1-Schoenheit, John W. YouTube, “What Is an Ox Goad? Let Wisdom Be Our Goad.” what does goading mean in the bible – Google Search. Accessed January 24, 2025.
