Following Jesus Into Trouble
January 25, 2026 – Conversion of Saint Paul the Apostle
Acts 26:9-21; Galatians 1:11-24; Matthew 10:16-22
I used to think that Jesus would keep me out of trouble. I grew up in a household where the right answers to most of life’s problems could be found in the Bible. I knew today’s gospel lesson. “When they hand you over, do not worry about how you are to speak or what you are to say,” Jesus said, “for what you are to say will be given to you at that time.” I trusted Jesus. I took him at his word. When I got dragged before the teenage equivalent of governors and kings, which is to say when my friends and I got into trouble and faced interrogation by our parents, I didn’t think we would need to coordinate our stories to make sure we got them straight. Because Jesus said so. Boy, was I wrong!
For most of my life—even after I realized that Jesus’s advice wasn’t intended for mischievous adolescents—I assumed these words were supposed to comfort those who faced persecution by assuring them that the Holy Spirit would give them the right words to say at the critical time…and get them out of trouble. I assumed that those who became vessels for the Holy Spirit to speak through them would somehow offer such a powerful witness to God’s truth that they would be set free. After all, Jesus said, “Those who endure to the end will be saved.” But bearing witness to the gospel of Jesus Christ and enduring in the power of the Holy Spirit will not save you from persecution and death. In fact, that sort of faithfulness will cost you your life. Just ask the namesake of our parish, Saint Paul.
In our reading from the Acts of the Apostles, Saint Paul recalls the moment of his conversion—the moment when Jesus appeared to him on the Damascus Road and changed his life forever. But, in this passage, Paul does not recall that moment in a sermon or in a letter, like in the passage we heard from Galatians. Paul is speaking to King Agrippa while in chains. He is on trial for his life.
As had happened more times than he could count, Paul’s preaching had run afoul of the political and religious leaders of yet another community, this time those in Jerusalem. While praying in the temple, Paul had been arrested and interrogated and locked up in jail. On his first night behind bars, Paul had received a vision of the Lord Jesus, who had appeared to him and said, “Keep up your courage! For just as you have testified for me in Jerusalem, so you must bear witness also in Rome.”
From that moment on, Paul knew that Jesus was calling him to spread the good news of God’s love not in pulpits or marketplaces but in courtrooms and tribunals. Instead of sharing his faith with those who had never heard of Jesus, he would bear witness to Christ in the face of those who were vehemently opposed to God’s reign of love. And, for Paul, that required a costly choice. Each time he was interrogated by a Roman authority, Paul was found to be innocent of any charges against the empire. As far as they were concerned, this was a purely religious matter—one that should be settled by the Jewish authorities. All Paul had to do was keep his mouth shut and he would be released. But Paul wasn’t interested in being set free.
Paul knew that that the Way of Jesus was more than a religious matter. He believed that the gospel had something to say to those in power, and he knew that the only way he would get a chance to say it was if he remained in chains. Because he was a Roman citizen, Paul had the right to appeal his case all the way to the Emperor, the highest authority in the land, and so he did.
Before shipping him off to Rome, Herod Agrippa II, the Roman-appointed client-king of Judea, wanted a chance to hear from Paul himself. No faithful Jewish person would have respected the authority of this servant of Rome, but Paul seized the opportunity to speak to him. “I myself was convinced that I ought to do many things against the name of Jesus of Nazareth,” Paul said. “…I not only locked up many of the saints in prison, but I also cast my vote against them when they were being condemned to death. By punishing them often in all the synagogues I tried to force them to blaspheme; and since I was so furiously enraged at them, I pursued them even to foreign cities.”
“But then Jesus came and found me.” Paul’s recollection of that moment on the Damasus Road must have made Agrippa squirm a little bit in his seat. As an instrument of the empire, Agrippa would have known well what it meant to use the authority given to him to lock up the saints in prison and cast a vote against them when they were being condemned to death. Just like Paul, Agrippa had used his power to support the kingdoms of this world, the kingdoms of death. Only when deluded by the forces of evil do human beings believe that violence and torture and imprisonment can bring about a God-given reign of peace. Only Satan could convince us that God’s ways can be brought to the earth by locking people up and putting them to death.
Into this false allegiance, confronting the misalignment of religion and power, Jesus himself had spoken to Paul. And Paul wanted Agrippa to hear what he had said. “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” Jesus had said, using the Hebrew form of Paul’s name. “It hurts you to kick against the goads.” You are only hurting yourself with your anger. When you use violence, imprisonment, and death to accomplish your goals, you are not standing on the side of God, but you are working for the very kingdoms that put the Son of God to death upon the cross.
In that encounter with the crucified and risen Lord, Paul discovered that there can be only one faithful response. “After that, King Agrippa, I was not disobedient to the heavenly vision, but declared first to those in Damascus, then in Jerusalem and throughout the countryside of Judea, and also to the Gentiles, that they should repent and turn to God and do deeds consistent with repentance.” We, like Paul and like Agrippa, are in need of a Damascus moment.
The kingdoms of this world are convinced that they can use the power of death to bring about life, and the One who was victorious over death now confronts us and calls us to repent and forsake our allegiance to them. As Willie James Jennings wrote, “Every road that leads to violence must become a road to Damascus, where faith aimed in the wrong direction becomes faith focused on the One who raises the dead.”[1]
Do not fool yourself into thinking that the gospel has nothing to say about the political issues that are manifest in the violence that has been unleashed in Minneapolis and in all the other places in our country where families are being torn apart and where people are being thrown into prison by political actors who claim that their actions are justified by the rule of law. The Way of Jesus stands against those who seek to impose their vision for what is good and right if it means denying the dignity of another human being in order to discard them like a sub-human animal. And those who wish ill or pray that violence would befall the officers of the state who enforce those anti-Christian policies are no better, for we are all susceptible to Satan’s power and the temptation to celebrate violence when the result is a victory for our side.
As Jennings wrote, “All violence is religious violence [because] all violence acts in the place God, gesturing toward the prerogative of the life-giver to withhold the fullness and goodness of life. All violence is rooted in the false belief that we can bring life out of death and create the good out of the destruction of what we deem bad. Violence has always been the tool of those who pretend to the throne of the creator. Yet violence’s seductive power is quite overwhelming, and only the foolish refuse to see its awesome temptation.”[2]
Paul knew that the gospel has something to say to anyone and everyone who believes that peace and freedom can be enforced by the sword. He had devoted his life to bringing about God’s reign by wielding the very instruments of death that God’s reign had promised to overthrow. Only when he met Jesus, the one in whom God has bound Godself to the bodies of the incarcerated, beaten, tortured, and killed, was Paul able to hear the call to repent and leave behind his allegiance to the way of death.
Those of us who follow Jesus are the ones who know what it means to see God and God’s reign of love and peace bound inseparably to the bodies of those human beings who suffer as he did. And that means that we are also the ones who, like Paul, accept the call to repent of our participation in those kingdoms that hold them prisoner and do them harm. Doing deeds consistent with repentance, as Paul instructs us, will not keep us out of trouble but lead us right into the heart of God’s battle with the forces of evil that have a grip on this world.
But “do not worry,” Jesus tells us, “about how you are to speak or what you are to say; for what you are to say will be given to you at that time; for it is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you.” In this critical moment, may our words be nothing less than God’s words, and may God use us to bear witness to God’s reign of love and peace even before the principalities and powers of this world. As Jesus has promised us, “The one who endures to the end will be saved.”
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