I grew up in a textile mill neighborhood in South Carolina where the language we spoke was far from prose, yet it had a poetic cadence and was often quite colorful. Returning to my roots, here is my retelling of Saul’s conversion in Acts chapter nine.
There once a fellow named Saul. He was going about, hounding all of Jesus’ followers in the early church, throwing them in jail as the lawbreakers he thought they were. He’d even promote a lynching or stoning if there wasn’t a prison close by. Saul believed in God, and in a way that the confident often are, he was certain he was carrying out God’s will by preserving the right, the true, the holy tradition.
The risen Jesus was getting tired of Saul’s shenanigans. While on the road to a place called Damascus, Jesus caught up with Saul and smacked him to the ground. Jesus appeared in a blinding light, the kind of light you go toward when you’re dying but don’t want to see until then. Then Jesus spoke, “Saul, what the hell are you doing? Why are you being such a pain in my backside?”
Saul didn’t have any idea who would smack him down in such a way and then accuse him of doing wrong when he was so sure he had been in the right persecuting all of the followers of Jesus and shutting that movement down before it could get going good.
Saul asked, “Who is this?”
To Saul’s surprise, the voice replied as if Saul should have known, “It’s me, Jesus.”
Saul thought what all of us think when we were so sure we were right and got caught in the wrong facing the biggest butt whooping we’ve ever had, ‘Oh, #####!’
Jesus changed Saul’s name to Paul. Apparently, Saul was only Saul for the moment. Paul then traveled around much of the known world looking for Jesus everywhere he went. As the saying goes, surprise me once, shame on you, but surprise me twice, shame on me. Paul wasn’t going to let Jesus spook him like that again. Along Paul’s divine game of hide and seek with Jesus, he started new church communities and wrote much of the New Testament though he only thought he was writing letters at the time.
For much of this same era, Peter, who had spent a significant amount of time with Jesus before and after Easter, was going nowhere. He got stuck in Jerusalem trying to keep everyone together. The resurrected Jesus had instructed Peter and the other disciples to, “Go into all the world,” and promised, “I’ll be with you.” Peter didn’t seem to understand that in Jesus’ Godly way, he and the others had been tagged and were it, expected to continue the game and look for Jesus. Instead, Peter served the early church by working in conflict management. He sat on several committees. The most controversial was the one that not only debated what kinds of foods Jesus’ followers had to eat but more significantly was what accoutrements the genitals of Gentiles had to have before becoming card carrying church club members. Peter sought a consensus over circumcision, though even today Gentile Christian male babies are still being circumcised hoping to pacify first century Jews. While Paul was struck down trying to tear the church apart, Peter got stuck trying to keep it all together hoping the right policy would do it. The tragedy here is even greater when considering that, among the disciples, Peter was the brave one.
Read more in The Moment – 
