Sermons from St. Paul’s Episcopal Church
The Feast of the Conversion of the Apostle Paul: January 29, 2006
The Rev. Melissa Skelton
Few things are more distracting and delightful than to sit in my office that looks out onto 1st Avenue on a Saturday afternoon and to watch the teeming world go by when I’m supposed to be pondering the readings for Sunday for a sermon like this one.
This was particularly so yesterday afternoon as the sky cleared and throngs of formerly damp Seattle-ites took to sidewalks and streets and did the things that city-dwellers love to do on a clear day: walk, talk, eat, sip coffee, push strollers, jog, drive, work, play and shop, all of this happening, of course, as our church, our dear St. Paul’s sits silently in the middle of it all.
The connection between this busy scene and our readings for this morning was particularly delicious yesterday in that the readings were those for our patronal festival transferred to today, the Conversion of St. Paul the Apostle. For Paul’s conversion, if we want to call it that, happened on a road in the middle of someone’s very busy day.
On that day, Saul, was not out, latte in hand, wandering around and chatting it up with friends. No, as I imagine it, he was speeding to his next meeting, behind the wheel of a fast car, talking on his cell phone, calling ahead to be sure everything was ready for his next important meeting, a brand new round of Christian persecution. Yes, he was going full tilt, fueled by the engine of his own personality and the believed rightness of his cause, when all at once—bam—the car left the road and Paul found his very busy day interrupted. Flat on his back and blinded by light, he heard himself being urged to follow a new path.
And it is this new path that is not the same as speeding through our lives convinced of our rightness and anxious to vent our anger on others that I want to talk with you about today as we welcome a throng of new people into our community. For in celebrating the story of Saul becoming the Apostle Paul, we’re celebrating not so much the dramatic nature of Paul’s conversion but the outcome of that dramatic turning: what it means for us, like Paul our patron, to be apostolic Christians today, to be sent out into the world as apostolic Christians today from this parish that bears his name.
So, the way I want to talk about this is by describing some of the characteristics of an apostolic Christian. And so that we don’t forget the connection between this and our parish, I want to connect these characteristics to some of the physical characteristics of this parish.
So, first, a little background about the word “Apostle.” It means “one who is sent forth, dispatched, entrusted with a specific mission, typically a foreign mission.” And so being an Apostle all about being sent to bring a particular word, a particular way of being, a particular way of responding to the world.
In some passages of the New Testament as in our gospel for today in which Jesus tells the original twelve what they are to do, being apostolic is described as going into hostile territory with a specific purpose of preaching and healing and doing so with both a simplicity and a wiliness. In other places in the New Testament, other images are used to describe what apostolic faith looks like—images like being salt in the world, being leaven, or being or bringing light.
From these images, we have the sense that being an apostolic Christian is as much about presence, a way of being in the world, as it is about purpose.
And so what if us? What our presence and purpose as apostolic Christians sent weekly, some of us daily from this parish?
First, as it was for the original twelve, as it was for Paul, the life and work of an apostolic Christ goes hand in hand with the willingness to be odd, to stick out the way a certain strange, steep A-frame building in lower Queen Anne does Think about it: there is really nothing else like our building for miles around. Tall, gawky, pointing to some kind of reality that doesn’t entirely fit or blend in with the neighborhood around it, it stands as a kind of symbol of what it’s like to be an Apostolic Christian in Seattle and in the world.
Yes, being an Apostolic Christian is all about being a bit strange, carrying around within you a way of seeing yourself, others and the world that means you will never really completely fit in. "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you odd." said Flannery O'Connor, a Catholic Christian in the South in the 1950’s and 1960’s. She might as well have been talking about being the Apostle Paul standing before Agrippa explaining why his own people had been trying to kill him, being an Anglo-Catholic Episcopalian in Seattle or any other city, or just being a person of faith in a world that for all of its beauty, is so easily fixed on power, status and the worship of material goods.
And so being an Apostolic Christian is rooted in being willing to risk being odd and out of step with the world you live in.
Second, being an Apostolic Christian means walking around with a sense that you’re in the grasp of a mysterious and loving power larger than yourself. For us, of course, sitting and standing and singing and praying in this vaulting space is all about experiencing the dimensions of what this means for us. Apostolic Christians understand, as Paul came to understand in his Damascus Road experience, that “there is more in heaven and on earth than is in our philosophy, Horatio” or in our history, our personality or our reason, for that matter, and that this “more” is a deep, powerful, loving force that is forever seeking after us.
Finally, being an Apostolic Christian means to have within us the pattern of Eucharist, the paradoxical pattern of losing life, giving away life to find it, letting go in order to receive, breaking bread and spilling wine as a way to be one with God and each other. Here in this space we see this most powerfully in the way that our very large crucifix, the ultimate depiction of loss and brokenness, hangs over the table, the altar around which we celebrate our banquet with God and with one another. It is these two things together, their relationship to one another, that reminds us of this paradoxical pattern of living.
It is this paradoxical pattern of living which both allows us to live through the many times our lives seem to disintegrate right out from under us and allows us to identify with the world’s brokenness in ways that cost us time, energy and money.
The willingness to risk being odd, an awareness of the size, height and depth of the power of the love of God, the paradoxical pattern of losing life to find it, giving our lives away to live abundantly: these are some of the marks of an Apostolic Christian. And this is the life we are trying to live together as we welcome new people into our community on our patronal feast.
And to circle back to where I began this morning, all these way of being present to the world, ways of finding purpose in the world come to us as we live our lives on the road, the many roads we travel, whether we’re ambling along or in a hurry to get someplace. The road to work, the road into our live with family members and friends, the road to the hospital for surgery, the road that leads to political action or civic life, the road we walk after the loss of someone we love, the road to a new home or the road we walk once we are in a new home.
The willingness to risk being odd; an awareness of the size, depth and power of the love of God; the paradoxical pattern of losing life to find it, giving our lives away, breaking our lives open to live abundantly.
Thanks be to God for Christ our brother, the odd one, the love of God incarnate, the crucified one whose broken life unites and feeds us all; Christ our brother who walks all our paths before us, our journey and our journey’s end.
Works Cited or Consulted
The idea of apostolic Christian faith being all about salt, light and leaven is drawn from Biblical sources but is summarized in Father Bob Gallagher’s “Renewal-Apostolate” model taught in The Church Development Institute. For more on this, see: www.cditrainers.org
