St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Wesley Chapel, FL
Preacher: The Rev. Adrienne R. Hymes
Feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul (January 25th Transferred)
January 30, 2022
Gospel: Acts 26:9-21
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 seminary, I took classes with those who were already clear about their vocational call and who were 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, wrestling with my vocational call to the priesthood, I listened to God speaking through my friend and stopped protesting against God’s will, and said, “Yes.” Later in my journey, I was given two pieces of wisdom, which I carry with me today. The first: Your vocation finds you; you don’t find it. The second: 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 Paul 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 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. The Jews who were now following the Jesus movement, and the Gentiles, knew his reputation.
It is at this point, in today’s passage in Acts, that Paul told King Agrippa about his life-altering encounter with Jesus which we know as Paul’s conversion on the road to Damascus. Damascus was 60 miles northeast of the Sea of Galilee. Paul, whose name was Saul at this point, was on a mission to persecute followers of the Jesus Movement there. Wherever this impurity of belief had spread, Saul was on a mission to stamp it out.
It was while he was enroute to persecute Jesus’ followers, that the risen Christ intervened and met him right where he was. 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 said, “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 direction. It is the ancient form of a cattle prod. When the goad was used, the animal might get mad and kick. To curb this behavior, the herder put the goad behind the leg of the animal so that a kick met the sharp end of the goad. After experiencing the partially self-inflicted pain, the animal would eventually learn that resistance was futile, to stop resisting. Doing so meant that the animal would learn to willingly move 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 made manifest through the very people Saul sought to eradicate. 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 Jesus many times in his violent encounters with Jesus’ followers, and yet his terrorizing behavior—the kicking against the goads—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, their words were absorbed into his being.
In this 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 gets what God wants.
Theologian and author, N.T. Wright, said that Paul’s perspective as an apostle was to launch, “…A ‘heaven-and-earth movement,’ not the offer of a new otherworldly hope.” The conviction that through obedience to God, humanity can help to bring about God’s will, now on earth, as it is in heaven.
If Paul’s extraordinary encounter with the risen Christ leaves you wondering if you have had one, and missed it; or wondering when yours is coming, I offer to you that by your created being, by your faith, and even by the sheer wondering, you are already in the encounter with Christ. Sometimes these encounters may stop you in your tracks, like Paul, and others may be so subtle that they are hardly noticed. The point is that these encounters need not be one-time happenings. Indeed, we must remain prayerful, and expect the wisdom of God to come into our lives, as He wills it, over a lifetime. We are to be obedient and resist kicking against God’s goads, His divine guidance, even when He leads 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.[a] The Holy Spirit is the wisdom that animates the soul of the church. Through prayer and intentional discernment, we encounter the wisdom of God which provides us with the steady goading we need to obediently follow God’s will for our lives—individually and collectively as the church. The wisdom of God guides us toward obedience, through the regular reading of, and wrestling with, holy scripture. 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 for those who have been dehumanized by the unjust structures of society and those who uphold them.
For Saul, it was easy for him to terrorize, people whom he perceived as objects of impurity, not human vessels which could be used by God to be Jesus in the world, and to glorify God.
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 the will of God, as expressed through this shared endeavor of planting and growing a 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 believers, who may have strayed, and for those who do not yet know Christ—those who may grow weary of the pain caused by sin when one rejects God’s goading.
In those times when we may find ourselves protesting God’s will too much, let us be clear that we did not find this vocation that God has placed on the heart of this faith community; it found us!
We must be faithful to that call by being that heavenly light, that shines brighter than the sun in this world, in this community of Wesley Chapel, so that all might turn, as Jesus said, from darkness to light, from Satan to God (vv. 17-18). And, God gets what God wants. Amen.
