The Conversion of Paul
The Conversion of Paul
A Sermon preached by the Precentor, Canon Anna Macham
Sunday 25 January 2026
Acts 9:1-22 and Matthew 19: 27-end
One of my favourite discoveries, as an undergraduate studying English literature, 30 years ago now, was a Victorian novel called ‘Lady Audley’s Secret’ by Mary Elizabeth Braddon. This novel is a sensation novel – a genre of fiction that emerged in the mid-19th century, and that was characterised by its focus on sensational events, crime and scandalous behaviour. Like modern day crime novels or thrillers, sensation novels provided a different type of reading experience from the grittier realist novels of George Eliot or Dickens, and often – as the title suggests – had a secret at their heart, which is only revealed through complex plots, with many melodramatic twists and turns, and usually involving crime, bigamy, adultery, arson and arsenic. I won’t reveal the sinful secret at the heart of this novel, but when ‘Lady Audley’s Secret’ was published in 1862, it established its prolific author as a leading ‘sensation’ novelist and a rival of the master of the genre, Wilkie Collins. Flouting the Victorian convention of the ‘blue-eyed wax-doll’ heroine, and based on a real-life crime, Braddon presented a sexually attractive woman with great depth and complexity of character: a woman, as one contemporary critic put it, “high-strung… full of passion, purpose, and movement – [and] very liable to error”.
Like other sensation novels, ‘Lady Audley’s Secret’ was vehemently attacked at the time by Evangelical critics for its impropriety and immorality and condemned for supplying “the cravings of a diseased appetite”. Yet even they had to admit that the emotional manipulations and alleged immorality of the novels they were criticising owed a lot to the conversion narratives favoured by Evangelicals of the time. There were a several big Evangelical revivals around the 1850s and 60s. Often these featured large events and depended on dramatic accounts of religious experience and powerful stories of conversion for their effect. To accentuate their account of God’s work in people’s lives, Evangelical testimonies frequently described in lurid detail the pre-conversion experience of sin. The leaders of these events were often praised for their dynamism. And like the rhetorically slick preachers that accompanied them, speakers were likened to performers on a stage, yet their testimonies were also roundly criticised for being emotionally highly charged and open to emotional manipulation, not dissimilar to the plots of sensation novels.
Many of us could probably attest to a certain scepticism about conversion narratives in our own time. Around the same time as I was reading ‘Lady Audley’s Secret’, a friend I had took great pleasure in describing all the dramatic sins he’d committed before converting to Christianity, whilst seemingly having no problem with condemning the same sins in others, especially fellow Christians. Or later another friend who, in the dramatic and sudden nature of her conversion, was adamant that God had cured her from her depression. Now also we know of the harms of so-called conversion-therapy – an attempt to ‘cure’ or ‘repair’ a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity, distinct from but not totally unrelated to, religious conversion, whose dangerous effects were brought again to prominence in recent weeks by Traitors’ star Matthew, who revealed on the show the damage that undergoing such conversion treatment had done to him in his past.
The story we celebrate today was no less dramatic or life changing in its time than some of the conversion narratives we’ve been describing. Today the Church remembers the conversion of Saul, the persecutor of Christians, into Paul, the super apostle, which is related in the book of the Acts of the Apostles and that we heard read to us. In fact, this story is so significant and so life changing in the life of the early church, that Luke tells it three times.
Saul is on the road to Damascus where he sees a blinding light that transforms his life. Until now, he had been a leading Pharisee, zealous in his religious practice and conversant in the law, one of Israel’s great scholars who prided himself on his learning and status as a Roman citizen. He had been breathing out murderous threats against Christians until Jesus appears and speaks to him in a vision. Only when his sight is taken away and he’s blinded, when the ability to read is gone and therefore the intellectual powers which are such an important part of his identity are denied him, does he receive the gift of faith. It’s not clear exactly how this happens; elsewhere he mentions some sort of epiphany or understanding he has, given by God, but whatever it is, it changes him. The experience is powerful and transforming, for Paul himself and for those who witness it.
But we do Paul a disservice if that’s as far as we take it- because this is a story not just about one decisive moment, when someone’s life is touched by Jesus and turned around in a dramatic way, although it is about that. It’s also about being called to do something. It’s not just about the new person Paul now is; it’s about what happens next: not a once and for all change, but a moment of transition.
And Paul saw his new life very clearly. He had a special task- to take the message of Christ out of the purely Jewish arena to the non-Jews, the Gentiles, and this is exactly how he spent the rest of his life, establishing small Christian communities across Asia Minor, Macedonia and Greece. Saul, the persecutor of Christians becomes Paul the apostle, the one sent out with the power from God to heal and reconcile and proclaim the love of God in Christ for all people. By forming communities out of diverse members, he says in Ephesians, we have the opportunity to capture the attention of the world (Ephesians 3:9-10). And so he goes off to begin the work in the name of the Holy Spirit, as persecutor become apostle.
Did he do it perfectly? Not at all. His letters make clear the ways in which he failed to live up to people’s expectations of him, and generally got things wrong. He got angry with his parishioners, and furious with his colleagues when they wouldn’t preach the inclusive Gospel he believed in, insisting instead that Gentiles had to be circumcised, therefore becoming Jews before they could become Christians. At times, Paul is arrogant and bigoted, full of himself and overly proud of his spiritual and intellectual abilities, all the qualities he was supposed to have renounced at his conversion. Yet despite all that – there is a Church all over the world today, witnessing to the Good News of God in Christ. The Christian hope, the faith that proclaims the depths of the love of God for every person, has never died- all because Paul, and others, imperfect though they were, answered the call of God to become apostles and be sent out to proclaim the good news of Christ.
In church, we gather each week within the comfort of our worship and our communities, to be in the presence of God, to experience his healing and to allow the words, the liturgy, prayers and music, to transform us. We need these things, because to be converted isn’t just a one-off event; it’s a constant turning to God, a life’s journey, in which we ask for God’s help to live as Christians and nurture our relationship with him. But to be an apostle is also to be bold, to risk, to venture, to step outside the safety and support of the gathered community and into a world of people caught in suffering. It takes courage to be an apostle.
This week, the Bishop will commission LGBTQIA+ chaplains, to minister to a community often excluded from the Church. This event has been a long time in the making, a fledgling community of chaplains and others that is already helping – at a time when other voices seem to be shouting louder in Church and of society – to make the voices of LGBTQIA+ people heard. Like Paul, we each have our own places and our own communities to which we are called – families, homes, workplaces and groups – wherever there are people searching or in pain. Like Paul, we won’t be perfect. We will make mistakes, miss opportunities; we will fail to live up to other people’s expectations. But our God is endlessly forgiving. And he keeps sending us back out into the world, in his name to gather and build diverse, inclusive communities of the Church. Saul the persecutor of Christians who became the apostle Paul turned the world upside down in the power of God. We too can do the same.