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.”
Conversion: what is it? What is conversion in the lives of individuals like you and like me? What is conversion in the life of a community of people? What is conversion in the life of this parish?
Earlier this week I traveled to Atlanta to visit my mother who recently moved into an assisted living facility just outside Atlanta named “Ashley Glenn.” I took an afternoon flight from Seattle and got into the Atlanta airport at midnight. After picking up the rental car, I found my way in the dark to my mother’s house, got the key from under the doormat, let myself in, and crashed.
The next morning, anxious about what condition I’d find my mother in, I drove to the assisted living facility.
My sister, looking harried, greeted me at the front door. We went to the font desk to sign me in and them made our way down a long hall past tables of residents in wheelchairs to get to an oversized elevator that took us to the second floor. Once on the second floor, we found our way to suite 222 and went in. There on a couch that used to be in my mother’s living room sat my mother, her head back against a pillow, her eyes closed, oxygen connected to her nose, her thin beautiful hands in her lap. She opened her eyes, called my name and started to cry. I called back, went to her and the tears came.
I had come to Atlanta for two reasons—to see and care for my mother in whatever way I could and to relieve my younger sister of the responsibility of caring for my mother if only for a few days.
But even I was a little surprised when after fifteen minutes of my arrival, my sister got up, put on her coat and began going over a list with me.
These were some of the things on that list:
- Check on our mother’s new prescription—had it been faxed over to the nursing home yet? If not, call the doctor’s office and find out what the hold up was.
- Check on when the physical therapist would come—once he shows up ask if can come at least three times this week to work with my mother to get her stronger.
- Check on when the facility’s beauty shop would be open—when would someone be able to wash and style her hair?
And so after my sister left I got into gear and got things done. By the end of the day my mother was on her new prescription, had worked for the first time wit her new physical therapist and had an appointment at the beauty shop. What a lot to accomplish on day one!
But the longer I stayed the more things began to change. As it turned out, my mother did not have enough energy to do her physical therapy exercises, as it turned out, my mother’s, appetite began dropping off, as it turned out, my mother wanted to spend more and more time in bed, as it turned out the wheelchair was the only way my mother could get around.
And while I was not completely sure of things, what I felt inside was a kind of jolt followed by the first glimmer of a kind of turning, a kind of shifting of all my industrious energy away from trying to get my mother back into shape so that she could return to a normal life in a smaller space—I felt a kind of turning away from that. And at the same time, I felt a turning towards something else—towards spending my energy on what I could do to give my mother the tenderest care possible, the greatest intimacy with those she loved as she prepared to leave us.
I tell this story not just because it’s what’s happening to me right now, but because I believe what I just described has something to do with conversion.
And conversion is what we are all about today on our Patronal Feast, the Feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul.
One way to think about conversion is that it’s about a turning away from a path that has never been or is no longer life-giving and turning towards another path—one that participates in God’s gracious favor towards us and others—and that path is a path that honors, forgives, makes peace, accepts or rises to a needed challenge.
Paul’s conversion, of course, is dramatic. There he is going full tilt in the direction of the persecution of Christians when, as the story goes, God intervenes and Paul is knocked to the ground, blinded by light and then questioned by the voice of the Holy One who redirects his energy away from persecution and toward the proclamation of God’s gracious favor towards all.
But not all conversions are like this. Rather, what happens to many of us is a series of moments of redirection in which we, like Paul. find ourselves on the ground for a moment and where, if we are open to it, we, like Paul, can see things in a different light, hear a voice encouraging us to turn toward something that is more life-giving, that more fully enacts God’s gracious favor toward us and others than the path we have been so determined to go down.
Where are you on the ground? What light of understanding is shining on you or within you? What is the voice within you or within the mouths of others telling you about turning away from what is no longer life-giving? What are the same voices telling you about turning towards something that more enacts God’s gracious favor for you and for those in your life?
Steven Covey might as well have been talking about a question central to conversion when he posed this question: What happens when “we’ve painstakingly climbed (our) ‘ladder of success’ only to discover as we reached the top rung that the ladder is leaning against the wrong wall”?
Conversion, I would say, is often the experience of being bumped off some ladder we are industriously climbing and finding ourselves on the ground. Conversion is being given the grace to ask the question: which wall do I, with God’s help, want my ladder to be leaning against? And then conversion is having the courage to resituate that ladder against a wall that is life-giving to us, to those we love, even to those we have never met and to begin a new climb.
Conversion is not just for individuals. The questions related to conversion are alive in communities, companies, nations, and in parish churches like St. Paul’s. How do we know what to turn our energy away from and towards? How do we know which life-giving walls to lean our ladders against and to climb? How do we remain open as God’s conversion moves us?
I’ll end with another passage from Esther de Waal’s book on Benedictine spirituality entitled Seeking God: The Way of St. Benedict. This is a passage from her chapter entitled “Change” which is on one of the three Benedictine vows (Stability, Obedience which means “listening” and Conversion of Life, in Latin conversatio morum which means more like “conversion of habit”).
“To realize that the whole of life must be open to the possibility of change asks not for a static keeping of the Rule but for an open and free response to the challenges with which God will face us. If the vow of stability is the recognition of God’s complete faithfulness and dependability, then the vow of conversatio is a recognition of God’s unpredictability, which confronts our own love of cosiness or safety. It means that we have to live provisionally, ready to respond to the new whenever and however that might appear. There is no security here, clinging to past certainties. Rather we must expect to see our chosen idols successively broken. It means a constant letting go. It is actually, as so often in the Rule, a living out in daily life of the biblical demands, in this case, St. Paul’s words: ‘Forgetting what is behind me, and reaching out for what lies ahead, I press towards the goal to win the prize which is God’s call to the life above, in Christ Jesus.’ A modern rewriting of the vow simply calls it the vow of openness.”
Works Cited or Consulted
Steven Covey: First Things First
Esther de Waal: Seeking God: The Way of St. Benedict
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