Across the Pastor’s Desk by Mark Boorsma

 

This day in the church year is the feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul, and is also the final day of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity.  So who was Paul, and why should we care?

The majority of what Christians call the New Testament was penned by Paul, but there is little evidence he then thought he was writing what we now call the Bible.  Instead, Paul wrote practical letters to teach, encourage, correct and guide churches that were new, inexperienced and often fraught with problems.  In these letters he comes off as sometimes critical, sometimes tenderhearted and pretty much always opinionated.  Love him or hate him, it is at least apparent that Paul was motivated by deep affection and concern for these rookie churches, many of them started personally by him.

The “conversion” of Paul is quite dramatic.  We first meet him as a religious fanatic named Saul, who staffed the coatroom at the let’s-stone-Stephen convention (Acts 7:58-60).  Saul was an ambitious and vicious prosecutor of followers of Jesus, a vendetta that took him to Damascus intent on hauling Jesus-followers back to Jerusalem for trial and punishment.  But in Acts 9, the author, Luke, describes Paul’s roadside encounter with a vision of Jesus and his subsequent change of heart.

Paul tells the story in his own words in Galatians 1:11 through 2:14, detailing his strident clash with Cephas (Peter) over the hot-button issue of the day: whether new followers of Jesus first needed to convert to Judaism (since all the original followers of Jesus were Jews).  As is often the case with heated religious argument, the ‘I’m right, you’re wrong’ rhetoric won no friends, but only deepened distrust and division.

So there is great irony that this early divide within the fledgling church has become one of the bookends of this Week of Prayer for Christian Unity.  At the very least, it should remind us that unity is elusive.  People tend to love picking sides, warring with words and weapons until one side or another “wins.”

I laughed out loud at the T-shirt I saw at the Minnesota State Fair, proclaiming, “Jesus loves you, but I’M his favorite!”  There, in sharp comic relief, is the heart of the matter.  But the truth is, you are ALL his favorites!

Mark Boorsma is the pastor at Ascension Lutheran Church in Albert Lea.