The Conversion of Saint Paul
Deacon Richard Buhrer

I have a confession to make. For most of my life, I have not really liked Saint Paul very much. I haven’t often relished reading his epistles, which have seemed to me mostly a wasteland of run-on sentences with occasional eruptions of the beauty of God. And I have been afraid that the feeling would be mutual. I’ve often wondered how he feels about having a parish as inclusive and affirming as ours named in his honor and I have often wondered what he might think of me, a Gay man ordained a deacon (a name he took to himself frequently) in a church known by his name.

I remember a time last summer when the epistle for the service began with “Wives, obey your husbands….” I don’t know whose distaste that day was greater: Debra Sequeira, (who had to almost visibly gulp down her revulsion before she read the reading) or me, listening to her knowing I had to preach on it..

But I have recently read a book that gave me a whole new idea about who Paul really was. The book is In search of Paul: How Jesus’s apostle opposed Rome’s empire with God’s Kingdom by John Dominic Crossan and Jonathan L. Reed.[1] The book explores the archeological evidence and the contents of the texts of the New Testament to come up with a picture of St. Paul in his historical setting. Like a triptych, Paul is portrayed in the scriptures by Luke in Acts, by Paul himself in the letters he clearly wrote himself and by his later followers who wrote in his name after his death. Crossan and Reed focus on Paul as he describes himself. They also point out that the description of Paul in Acts and the later letters (we usually call them deutero-Pauline) are to some degree anti-Pauline because they abandon his radical approach and try to make Christianity and the Roman Empire safe for one another. Crossan and Reed call this one giant step on the road to Constantine.

Paul, as Crossan and Reed, portray him, is very different than the Paul we encounter in a less careful reading of the New Testament.

First of all, Paul was committed to a radical equality among Christians based on baptism. In Galatians, Paul argues with the church in Galatia saying: “As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, therer is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” This is not just a turn of phrase or a convenient argument for the time but a deep commitment of Paul.

Paul was a feminist. In I Corinthians 11, there is an extensive discussion of proper attire when in church. In Roman practice men veiled their heads when they prayed so the change for men to pray with uncovered heads and women veiled was probably more radical for the men than for the women. Paul meticulously balances his comments between men and women (in what would pass now for extreme political correctness) and nowhere in the passage does he forbid women to speak in the assembly. In the last chapter of the Letter to the Romans, Paul greets by name twenty-seven members of the church at Rome: ten females and seventeen males. In many cases, the women are named before their husbands. One couple is singled out for special praise: “Greet Andronicus and Junia, my relatives (meaning fellow Jews), who were in prison with me; they are prominent among the apostles.” Generations of translators have tried to make the name Junia into a male name to or to change the preposition “among” to “to,” in order to try and remove this reference to a woman among the apostles.

Paul opposed the institution of slavery in the ancient world. In the letter to Philemon, we read Paul cajoling one of his converts to free his slave Onesimus. You’ve heard about that is some detail from me not many months ago (sermon for September 5, 2004).

Paul also opposed the system of privilege and wealth that marked the Roman Empire. The Empire was characterized by a systems of patronage so that from the highest to the lowest levels of society there were pyramids of patronage marked by the gift and expenditure of money. A person’s importance was portrayed in public by the number of retainers and clients who accompanied the person on his (definitely his) movement in public. In Ephesus and Phillipi, Paul did not scruple to take financial support from his converts but in Corinth, Paul refused to accept any money from the assembly there, because he found that they bought into this system of patronage and expected Paul to play this patronage game in his relationship with them. Now Paul, it seems to me, was much more radical in his beliefs than I had ever thought, but he was every bit as bad tempered as he appears in his letters. And Paul refused to be bought by anyone at any price.

The Roman Empire was based on a theology that emphasized this sequence: piety, war, victory and peace. By piety, they understood Roman men embracing the patriarchal ideal of Roman society, fulfilling their familial and societal obligations and participating in the wars of conquest that enlarged the Roman Empire. War led to victory and victory led to peace.

Paul came, following Jesus more radically than I ever expected, preaching a sequence that went from faith to non-violence to justice, which led to peace. So the Pax Romana, the Roman peace, was a very different experience than the Pax Christi, the peace of Christ.

A brief passage from Crossan and Reed struck me with special force. In a chapter that discusses the Eucharistic theology of Paul from I Corinthians, they describe a trip to the archeological digs in Corinth. “It is Wednesday, May 10, 2000, and the site (at ancient Corinth) is relatively empty except for an American pilgrimage group of around forty people listening intently as the tour guide tells he story of Paul’s judgment before Gallio at Corinth from Acts 18:12-17. She mentions the governor’s tribunal…. (Then later, when the pilgrims begin to celebrate communion) What was most Pauline about that day in Corinth for you was not the (tribunal) itself. The story about Paul’s trial before Gallio and the latter’s declaration of Pauline innocence is almost certainly Lukan fiction rather than Pauline fact…. What was definitively Pauline and definitely not Lukan, what was most vitally and importantly in continuity with Paul and not Luke that day at Corinth was that the Eucharistic celebrant (for the pilgrimage group) was an Episcopal priest, A Cathedral canon, and a woman.”

Now where does all of this leave us today? I think that the American Empire is based on a similar theology to that of the Roman Empire: piety leads to war with leads to victory that leads to peace. We are still called to follow the way of Christ and move from faith to non-violence to justice and then to peace.

Paul would not disapprove of this motley crew we call our parish family. I believe with a modern understanding, he would revel and rejoice in the way we practice the radical baptismal equality that he taught: All of us who have been baptized have put on Christ and there is no longer among us Jew or Gentile, gay or straight, people of color and Anglos, male or female, rich or poor, powerful and powerless, all are one in Christ.

Paul might prefer that we live our lives in a little less hierarchical way—we carry a lot of artifacts from the Roman Empire in our liturgy and our lives, like organizing processions with the (supposedly) most important people at the end (the clergy). He would want us to realize and exercise our equality and our freedom in Christ even more radically than we are now accustomed to.

Biblical Science has restored our patron to us as someone who would have reveled in our identity, who would rejoice in our choice of Mother Melissa as our rector and rejoice in the welcome we extend to all variety of human beings.

Let us give thanks for the gift of his good example, ask God to help us contend with less bad temper than he did but with no less of a commitment to the truth of God revealed in Christ Jesus. And let us pray to live out our baptismal equality with grace and truth as a reflection of our Patron’s teaching and to the honor and glory of our God.

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