Sermon for the Conversion of St Paul / Third Sunday after Epiphany
“Be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind”
I know. You have heard this text already this year, perhaps more than once. Yet it befits, I think, The Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul which almost always falls within the Epiphany season as it does today, The 3rd Sunday after Epiphany. Paul’s words from Romans read on The 1st Sunday after Epiphany express an essential feature of Epiphany and of Christian life. This text highlights the radical meaning of Epiphany not just as teaching, not just as education, not just as healing (as signaled in the Gospel for Epiphany 3 – “speak the word only and my servant shall be healed”), but epiphany as conversion.
About the idea of conversion there is no end of difficulties. We have, perhaps, a rather skeptical if not negative view of conversion, particularly as a religious term, as conveying a sense of certainty and self-righteousness: ‘I saw the light’, unlike everyone else, I suppose. Paradoxically, it seems to play into our polarized world of ideologies and advocacy agendas with their competing claims to dominance and power.
We assume that conversion means a radical break from one position to another and thus retains a sense of opposition and conflict of opinions. There is, I think, another and more compelling way to think about conversion that Paul’s story suggests. It involves two moments: first, repudiation, and second, recapitulation. In other words, the apparent dramatic change from one position to another lead to a reappraisal and a recapitulation of the former position, a way of transcending opposed viewpoints but without simply negating them. This is especially the case in the conflict of partial goods each claiming exclusive and total control as if they were absolute.
The story of the Conversion of St. Paul, the so-called ‘Damascus road experience’, is told by Paul three times in The Book of the Acts of the Apostles. In one sense, the story is personal, in another sense, universal. It belongs, I think, to the idea of epiphany as conversion in the sense of the break-through of the understanding. It is about coming to see things in a new and deeper way but that does not happen without a struggle, the struggle of the soul to grasp and understand. In other words, conversion is not a passive event, not something which happens to us arbitrarily, inadvertently, or externally. It happens because of an intense struggle in the soul or mind about how to think what is good and right; an ethical struggle. Hence, conversion is an on-going affair. Conversion in this sense is education, the constant transformation through “the renewing of our minds”, to use Paul’s powerful and insightful phrase.
