Acts 26:9-21

Paul said to King Agrippa, “Indeed, I myself was convinced that I ought to do many things against the name of Jesus of Nazareth. And that is what I did in Jerusalem; with authority received from the chief priests, I not only locked up many of the saints in prison, but I also cast my vote against them when they were being condemned to death. By punishing them often in all the synagogues I tried to force them to blaspheme; and since I was so furiously enraged at them, I pursued them even to foreign cities.

“With this in mind, I was traveling to Damascus with the authority and commission of the chief priests, when at midday along the road, your Excellency, I saw a light from heaven, brighter than the sun, shining around me and my companions. When we had all fallen to the ground, I heard a voice saying to me in the Hebrew language, `Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me? It hurts you to kick against the goads.’ I asked, `Who are you, Lord?’ The Lord answered, `I am Jesus whom you are persecuting. But get up and stand on your feet; for I have appeared to you for this purpose, to appoint you to serve and testify to the things in which you have seen me and to those in which I will appear to you. I will rescue you from your people and from the Gentiles-- to whom I am sending you to open their eyes so that they may turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God, so that they may receive forgiveness of sins and a place among those who are sanctified by faith in me.’

“After that, King Agrippa, I was not disobedient to the heavenly vision, but declared first to those in Damascus, then in Jerusalem and throughout the countryside of Judea, and also to the Gentiles, that they should repent and turn to God and do deeds consistent with repentance. For this reason the Jews seized me in the temple and tried to kill me.”

In the early 1600’s the Renaissance artist Caravaggio was given two commissions to paint the story of the Conversion of St. Paul, the story of Paul’s turning from Christian persecutor to the one who testified to the Gentiles that they too through Christ belonged to God. The two paintings, created only a year apart, give us two different depictions of Paul’s experience on the road to Damascus.
Caravaggio’s first painting is turbulent. In it, Paul has just fallen from his horse and is sprawled on the ground holding his hands over his face to block out an intense white light coming from about him. In the upper right hand corner we see where the light is coming from. There in the arms of an angel, Jesus leans down towards Paul, Jesus’ arms stretched out in a pleading and an exhorting gesture. Further intensifying the scene, a soldier standing behind Paul is trying to regain control of Paul’s rider less horse as it strains to gallop away.

The second picture, painted by Caravaggio only a year later is very different. The only human figures in the painting are Paul on the ground near his horse, and an attendant calmly holding the horse’s bridle. There is no soldier, no angel, no Jesus in the sky. There is no unruly horse, no turbulence at all. The focus instead is on Paul, himself. This Paul is not trying to shield himself from an intense and blinding light. No, he lies in a warmer, more diffuse light with his eyes closed, his arms outstretched in what looks like ecstasy, seemingly ready to embrace the something or someone who has captivated him

I have never had a conversion experience as dramatic or as weighty as the one described in the Book of Acts as having happened to Paul our Patron. I have never been blinded by light, or heard voices as I tried to determine which road to go down or which road not to take. My life, it seems, has been shaped by little nudges rather than strong pushes in one direction or another, faint glimmers and brief radiances rather than clear shots of light that send me without equivocation into a new direction.

But for all of the lack of big drama, I can readily identify with Caravaggio’s two depictions of the conversion of Paul as I think about anytime one of my little nudges or faint glimmers or brief radiances gathers momentum, leads me to an insight that will be costly to my life, that will mean, no, Melissa, you are not going to be able to go to Damascus today or any other day for that matter. That horse, that route, that life is not only not yours anymore, but is a death-dealing route for you or for others. You will, with God’s help, need to find another way.

And in that moment, it comes: holy turbulence, as I lose my grasp on the equine engine beneath me, as I fall to the ground and feel the presence of the dread holy one, as I cover my face to keep from seeing the light for just a moment more.

You too perhaps know how this feels—what it’s like to discover that your nothing-big-ever-happens to-me life, your I-don’t-have-conversion-experiences life has somehow, perhaps bit by bit, thrown you down upon a new ground where you must question which direction to take next.

My tendency is to think of this from the perspective of personal life or vocational questions because I spend so much of my time in conversation with myself and so many of you about these things. But these are not the only matters that throw us to the ground.

We live in a time when just to be going in a direction unconsciously is to risk being surprised and thrown down, for so many of our often unconscious assumptions about the way we live and the effect on others are being challenged.

We can no longer assume, for instance, that pursuing our political interests will have no effect on the world. We can no longer assume that the resource-consuming way we live our lives doesn’t affect others. We can longer assume that the earth itself, its climate and its habitats, will function as we thought they would, impervious to what we do. Yes, to live in our own time, we have discovered, propelled forward by our unconscious assumptions is often to land on our backs on the ground.

But before we think that the only way to look at these personal, vocational, societal and global spills is through the lens of turbulence, confusion and resistance, let’s remember that there’s another depiction of the conversion of St. Paul that we haven’t allowed to sink in yet. It’s Caravaggio’s second painting—the one with Saul on his back bathed in a warm light with his arms stretched out toward the something or someone, not in the painting, who has captivated him, and I would add, who has made him whole.

This is the other piece of the experience—the piece that has the power to turn our turbulence into something else: the internal recognition that to be knocked off a death-dealing route, personal, vocational, societal or global, whether that knocking off comes gradually or all at once, can on some level mean being given back to ourselves, and back into the arms of God.

To fully understand the story of Paul’s conversion and our own, then, we need to pay attention to Paul’s account of it in this morning’s Epistle to the Galatians. Paul says that it was the same God who had set him apart before he was born who called him by grace in the event we call his conversion. In other words, the Damascus Road experience did not transform Paul from a persecutor to a believer, from a devil to an angel. No, what really happened was that the experience stirred in him an identity and a vocation that had been given to him from the beginning, from the womb.

In just two weeks we’ll hold our annual meeting. As a parish that has doubled in size over the past five years, we have had, are having, and will have many turbulent moments. The question we need to hold open as we experience this turbulence is whether it is the precursor to the rediscovery of who are meant to be in a new time that still needs Paul’s testament that we, all of us, through Christ belong to God or whether it is something else. This is the same question that you and I have to ask ourselves all the time: is the turbulence I’m feeling in my life the precursor to a rediscovery of who I am meant to be, who I have been from my deepest and most holy beginnings, or is it something else?

We need courage and encouragement to live into these questions. And so as if to give us heart about this very issue, we turn to a monastic voice for that courage and encouragement:

“To discover God is not to discover an idea, but to discover oneself
It is to awaken to that part of one’s existence which has been hidden from sight.
And which one has refused to recognize.
The discovery may be very painful:
It is like going through a kind of death.
But, it is the one thing that makes life worth living.”

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