Sunday: The Conversion of St. Paul the Apostle
Reading: Acts 26:9-21
Preacher: Anne Benvenuti

I always thought this prayer that Jim used to begin his sermons was a very brash prayer, and wanted to say, "Are you crazy? Jim, do you know who you are talking to? Do you have any idea what could happen? What if God took you seriously and you turned out like St. Paul?"

As we know, St. Paul was traveling between towns one day when he got knocked to the ground by a blinding vision, and then had to go around spending the rest of his life saying, "Jesus is Lord."

How unlikely it is, I think, that this unabashedly and very publicly passionate man, one so seemingly lacking in awareness of his own self-aggrandizing tendencies--"because of me all these people came to God"--and one who writes such syntactically challenging and grammatically questionable sentences; how unlikely that he should be our patron here in Hyde Park, where we are satisfied for the most part, like here at St. Paul and the Redeemer. The only problems we reported on our parish survey are a couple of small hungers, you might say, a hunger to have a deeper sense of connection in knowing each other, and a hunger to be spiritually alive during the week when we are not gathered around this table together. Can you imagine having our patron, St. Paul, set down amongst us? He would not fit in

I know I'm not alone in having some difficulty with Paul. In fact, I suspect that if he were on Facebook, people would sign up just to 'un-friend' him. And it's not just us with our Hyde Park consciousness; he was equally unpopular in his own time and place. Yet, in spite of himself, he alone of those who did not walk the earth with Jesus is called an apostle. Yes, irritatingly to many of us, it is an honorific that he gave to himself. But it is also a name that has been affirmed by the communities in which he lived and by history, St. Paul the Apostle. 100 generations later, we know who Paul was; perhaps better than we know who we are.
I don't know about you, but I can think of few things as frightening as having a vision that required me to go around telling everyone how they should relate to God! I think I'd rather do the going to jail part of Paul's story. But I have learned that what I really fear is not the call to be St. Paul but the call to be St. Anne. God has already called Paul to be Paul, but only I can be Anne and I must continually wonder what Anne would look like after her conversion. And, of course, I am inviting you also to look at what the converted form of yourself would be.

Let's take a minute to look again at Saul before his conversion and Paul after his conversion. We know well that Paul was arrogant and stuck on himself in the way that he proselytized; we know he gave us some truly great metaphors, like the Body of Christ of which we are all gifted members; we know that he wrote hopelessly convoluted letters and sometimes simply took the side of convention. We know that he was zealous to a degree most of us would find obnoxious. But what do we know of Saul? Well, he was zealous, and loud, too. He was furiously persecuting Christians by the direction and under the authority of the Chief Priests. So what changed when he met Christ on the road to Damascus?

When Saul saw God, he simultaneously saw Paul. He became God's Paul, no longer answerable to the Chief Priests, no longer bound by the Law, but free to become what he believed God told him to be; he no longer answered to any man. He became courageous rather than merely brazen, and his freedom seems to have softened him a bit. Though he was still passionate, he no longer furiously persecuted anyone.

You never get the feeling that either Saul or Paul would ever in a million years ask you about your precious opinions. Nope. He's going to talk and you are going to listen; that much is clear. He was not the kind of person most of us would invite to our party. Rather, he knew how to realize himself--dare we say his problematic self? -- after his vision. He changed from being a man living a very religious life under the Ecclesiastical authorities of his day to a man whose life was primarily a spiritual story defined by a living and intimate relationship with God. He had the absolute courage of his convictions that perhaps few of us will ever have. He endured in faithfulness to his calling, no matter the cost or the obstacles. For all his vainglory and tempestuousness, he made himself visible and vulnerable for the sake of Christ.

Last week I spoke of the naturalness of Jesus' first miracle at Cana, about how a need in the community combined with some pushing from his mother, pulled a response from Jesus that helped him to realize and grow into his unique vocation. Today, I'm dealing with the other side of the spiritual life, the non-ordinary, the seemingly extraordinary ways God breaks open our lives with dreams and visions and conversions, places where our unique souls find their unique inspirations. Because of this, we need to pay careful attention to these extraordinary moments, recall them, and allow ourselves to be formed by them. If we at SPR want to be more spiritually vital in the many moments when we are not gathered together around this table, if we want to deepen our connections with each other, one way to satisfy these hungers is to compose and to tell - and to hear-- our own spiritual stories.

The wonderful thing about your spiritual story is that you and God create it together and so only you can tell it. The scary thing about your spiritual story is also that it is not something anyone else can give you because it comes from the depths of your own subjective experience of living. For some of us, there may be a conversion story or two, the incidents that take us off one path and set us down on another? For me, there was a bicycle accident that interrupted my walking the path of the great cultural vision of the 80's, the idea of becoming a ‘Master of the Universe,' someone who has it all, does it all, is it all; and turned me into someone who could not master her own daily functions, but had to be awake, aware, effortful, grateful for every little thing.

And what about the visions and dreams, I mean the literal ones, not the metaphoric motivations, as in ‘my dream for my life is to...whatever.' No, I am referring to those moments when we see for an instant God's dream for our lives! What about the times when something or someone broke through to you in an extraordinary way? For me there was a waking dream in my late teens that became a kind of yardstick or framework for interpreting my own life for decades. What visions and dreams have awakened or empowered you, or carried you through times of crisis? These are the building blocks of our souls.
Listen to this poem by Emily Dickinson, herself a shining example of someone who dared to let God define her life, in stark contrast to the conventions of her times. Here she compares the soul of a person to a house being built.

The Props assist the House
Until the House is built
And then the Props withdraw
And adequate, erect,
The House supports itself
And Cease to Recollect
The Auger and the Carpenter.
Just such a retrospect
Hath the perfected life-
A past of Plank and Nail
And slowness-then the Scaffolds drop
Affirming it a Soul.

We can construct the house of our soul by hearing and responding to the unique graces of our lives. We can share and listen to one another's spiritual stories, not to give advice, but to be awestruck by the grace that flows quietly through our lives, building our souls. That's where we can find spiritual vitality and deep connection to each other.

Most of us will not be required to be as vulnerable or as strident as Paul. Most of us do not have personalities like Paul's. Whoever we are, though, we become differentiated, and whole, and unique human beings; and we deepen our relationship to God, to the extent that we listen to and allow ourselves to be motivated and formed by our visions. If you are not feeling especially close to God, if you are not awake and alive in that relationship, might it be that you are not listening to your visions? Of course, as we share our moments of extraordinary grace, others in our families and communities will shape these stories. Paul's story is still being shaped, 100 generations later, but only Paul could tell it.

So the good news this morning is that God is not going to ask you to be St. Paul.

The even better and scarier new is that God is going to want you to be St. You, defined by your relationship with her and not defined by any lesser thing. And God invites us to be the saints of Hyde Park, and is calling us to see in this moment of transition, the St. Us we can become.

In his conversion, Paul had to tell his story, becoming visible to himself and to others, and he became so deeply rooted and simultaneously so vulnerable that we can accurately both critique and rejoice in him 100 generations later. What story can we tell to deeply root us so that we can live courageously with our vulnerabilities?

What will they be saying about us in 100 generations?