# 2026-04-19 — St. John's UCC, Paul's Conversion **Summary.** Worship service at [[St. John's UCC Chambersburg]] on the 3rd Sunday of Easter, led by Rev. [[Caroline Saxton]]. Theme: **Paul's Conversion** on the Damascus road. The sermon "Converted, Called, and Commissioned" read Acts 9 through a progressive mainline lens — conversion as **interruption of certainty**, calling as **draft rather than decision**, and commission as **communal sending**. The bulletin itself carried several notable liturgical choices (Year C swap, *The Inclusive Bible*, Roddy Hamilton's "You Break In," hymn arc). ## Service at a Glance - **Date:** Sunday, April 19, 2026 - **Liturgical season:** Easter (3rd Sunday of Easter), Year A, Liturgical color white - **Preacher:** Rev. Caroline E. Saxton - **Scripture:** 1 Corinthians 15:1-11; Psalm 30; Acts 9:1-20 - **Hymns:** #205 "Christ Is Alive"; #704 "Glory Be to the Father"; #706 "Praise God from Whom All Blessings Flow"; #57 "Be Still, My Soul" - **Sermon title (thematic):** "Converted, Called, and Commissioned" ## Sermon Analysis — "Converted, Called, and Commissioned" ### Opening — "I Saw the Light" Saxton opened with the **2024 Wild Goose Festival** and its Beer and Hymns gatherings (alongside Rev. J.T. Gills), landing on Hank Williams's **"I Saw the Light" (1948)** as the imaginative hinge for the sermon. She invited the congregation to hear Saul/Paul singing something like it after three days of blindness — *"the light from heaven first encircled him, and then everything went dark. And now, the light that is Jesus shines through."* Pastoral move: **an embodied, musical, publicly-Christian entry point**, not a doctrinal one. Consistent with her broader preaching voice (see [[Caroline Saxton]]). ### Point 1: Saul's escalation — "in need of an intervention" Saxton traced Saul's violence as an escalating arc across Acts: - **Acts 7:58** — Saul stands by as Stephen is stoned. - **Acts 8:1** — Saul *approves* the murder. - **Acts 9:1** — Saul is "breathing out murderous threats." *"Saul is escalating. He is in need of an intervention. And that is exactly what Jesus does."* A small but load-bearing clarification Saxton named: **Saul does not receive the name Paul at conversion.** The name change comes in Acts 13, chapters later. The change of heart precedes the change of name. This corrects a widespread folk assumption in evangelical preaching that the Damascus Road is *also* the rename moment. ### Point 2: Theophany — certainty undone Saxton read the Damascus road as a **theophany**, patterned on Abraham, Moses at the burning bush, Samuel in the temple, and Isaiah's vision. Saul, as a trained Pharisee, recognizes the *pattern* of a divine encounter even before he knows who is speaking. The exegetical hinge comes at Saul's question "Who are you?": > **Andrew E. Gardner:** *"He recognizes that God is speaking and that something does not add up."* Jesus asks back, *"Why do you persecute me?"* — and **Saul's certainty collapses**. He had been *certain* he was doing the Lord's work. He was wrong. Saxton held this up as a spiritual hazard worth naming: **certainty as the condition Jesus interrupted.** Then, stripped of his sight, Saul does "the things a faithful Jew would do in the face of a divine encounter" — fast, abstain, pray, wait. *"The powerful Pharisee is literally laid low... It does not humiliate him — it humbles him."* ### Point 3: Ananias's obedience — "Brother Saul" Saxton pulled Ananias forward as the unsung structural pivot of the narrative. Ananias is eager until he's told *who* God is sending him to — then he argues. *"I can't say that I blame Ananias for arguing."* Ananias goes anyway. He lays hands on Saul. He calls him **"Brother Saul"** — the moment the feared persecutor is claimed as kin. *"If not for Ananias, where would Saul be?"* Saxton paralleled this with the resurrection witnesses: *"If not for the women, where would we be?"* The resurrection community is built on people **willing to trust God about the very people they have every reason to fear.** ### Point 4: Converted, Called, *and Commissioned* The sermon's structural claim: | Movement | Paul's experience | Our experience | |----------|-------------------|----------------| | **Converted** | Light, voice, falls to ground; three days of fasting/prayer/waiting | Encountering the risen Christ; letting certainties be undone | | **Called** | *"This man is the agent I have chosen to carry my name before Gentiles, kings, and Israelites"* | Named and sent to a new way of life, including suffering for others | | **Commissioned** | Baptized; begins to preach Jesus in the Damascus synagogues *right away* | Sent out and sent forth to tell and show the love of Jesus | The Godly Play wondering question **"Who are you in this story?"** was offered as a congregation-wide practice, not a children's one. ### Closing charge > ***"The truth is, we won't change the world by going to church. We will change the world by being the church — by telling the love of Jesus wherever we are sent."*** ## Key Quotes - **Andrew E. Gardner** on Saul's "Who are you?": *"He recognizes that God is speaking and that something does not add up."* - **Caroline Saxton (refrain):** *"We are not just converted. We are called. And we are commissioned."* - **Caroline Saxton (closing charge):** *"We won't change the world by going to church. We will change the world by being the church."* - **Ananias to Saul:** *"Brother Saul..."* — the moment the persecutor becomes kin. ## Notable Pastoral Choices ### Year C readings instead of Year A The Revised Common Lectionary Year A readings for the 3rd Sunday of Easter are: - Acts 2:14a, 36-41 - Psalm 116:1-4, 12-19 - 1 Peter 1:17-23 - Luke 24:13-35 (Road to Emmaus) The bulletin deliberately swaps in **Year C** readings (Acts 9:1-6 [7-20], Psalm 30) and pairs them with 1 Corinthians 15:1-11 to build a thematic unity around Paul's conversion. The Prayer of Dedication is also drawn from *Feasting on the Word Worship Companion Year C, Volume 1*. This is a pastoral decision, not a lectionary error. A congregation whose worship team treats the lectionary as a framework, not a mandate — consistent with mainline progressive practice. See [[Liturgical Calendar]]. ### The Inclusive Bible for Psalm 30 The responsive reading uses *The Inclusive Bible: The First Egalitarian Translation* (Priests for Equality, 2007). Notable features visible in the Psalm 30 text: - **YHWH** rendered in place of "the LORD" — signals respect for the divine name's Jewishness and resists the flattening of God-language into English convention. - **"The realm of the dead"** rather than "Sheol" or "the grave" — theological register adjustment. - **Gender-expansive and gender-neutral pronouns for God** where the Hebrew permits. This translation choice is itself a theological statement — feminist-theology adjacent, aligned with the concerns of Priests for Equality (a Roman Catholic–originating movement for inclusive language). ### Call to Worship from Roddy Hamilton Roddy Hamilton's "You Break In" (*Mucky Paws*, adapted). Hamilton is a Church of Scotland minister who writes freely-available progressive liturgy. Key move: > *"You break in, O God, on the road. You break in, O God, exactly the way we don't believe. You break in, O God, and change everything."* The theology is **God-as-interrupter**, not God-as-guarantee. The liturgy *prepared* the congregation for the sermon's central image — certainty interrupted. ### Hymn selection - **#205 "Christ Is Alive"** (Brian Wren, 1968) — progressive, justice-forward, gender-inclusive. See [[Brian Wren]]. - **#704 "Glory Be to the Father"** — Gloria Patri; ancient ecumenical doxology. - **#706 "Praise God from Whom All Blessings Flow"** — Thomas Ken; universal mainline doxology. - **#57 "Be Still, My Soul"** — 18th-century Pietist text to Sibelius's FINLANDIA; contemplative sending hymn. Together they balance **progressive theological content** (Wren) with **ecumenical anchors**. See [[Worship Songs Evaluated]]. ## Scripture Observations ### Acts 9:1-20 — The Damascus Road - **Ananias as the unsung hero.** Saxton made this structurally central. - **Saul's blindness as re-catechism.** Three days of fasting and darkness before baptism — a liturgy of unmaking. - **Called, not recruited.** Paul does not volunteer. The conversion is imposed, and it reorients his life. This is a different model than "decide to follow Jesus" decisional conversion. ### 1 Corinthians 15:1-11 — Paul's own creed Paul's earliest recital of the gospel tradition. The oldest Christian creedal formula in the New Testament, datable to within years of the resurrection event. Ends with Paul's Damascus-road encounter: *"last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me... by the grace of God I am what I am."* The epistle reading lets Paul testify in his own voice, including about the suffering his calling carries. ### Psalm 30 — Inclusive Bible rendering *"You brought me back from the realm of the dead, YHWH... Then you changed my despair into a dance — you stripped me of my death shroud and clothed me with joy."* Embodied, pre-Christian language that structurally echoes the Easter move. ## Contradictions > [!contradiction] > **Conversion as draft vs. conversion as decision.** Saxton read Paul as **called, not recruited** — conversion is imposed by Christ on the Damascus road, not chosen by Saul at an altar call. This sits in tension with the evangelical **decisional-conversion** model (altar call, "pray this prayer," date-and-time of decision) inherited from revivalist traditions and still dominant in charismatic/NAR-adjacent preaching. The progressive mainline reading treats conversion as something done *to* a person by God, often through another person (Ananias), often against that person's preferences, often with a long remaking afterward. The decisional model locates agency in the sinner and resolves conversion in a moment. Both claim Paul. Only one tradition reads Acts 9 as actually describing what they preach. > [!contradiction] > **Certainty as hazard vs. certainty as deliverable.** Saxton's central sermon move was that *Saul's certainty vanished* on the Damascus road, and that this was good news. Certainty is named as a **spiritual hazard** the risen Christ is willing to interrupt. This stands in sharp tension with [[New Apostolic Reformation]] epistemology, where certainty is a *deliverable* of the Spirit (prophetic words spoken with total confidence, "activations" that produce certainty on demand, apostolic decrees that admit no question). Where progressive mainline preaching treats the collapse of certainty as Easter's work, NAR treats the production of certainty as Pentecost's work. See also [[Faith and Doubt]] and [[Fallible Prophecy]]. > [!contradiction] > **Being the church vs. proper office-holding.** Saxton's closing — *"We won't change the world by going to church. We will change the world by being the church"* — locates the church's agency in **every baptized member sent out**. NAR/Bethel "five-fold ministry" frameworks locate ecclesial agency in the *restored offices* of apostle and prophet, with lay members accessing power primarily through submission to those offices. Both claim to be faithful to the New Testament church. Only one requires a chart of who outranks whom. See [[New Apostolic Reformation]]. ## Resolved Open Questions (from pre-service ingest) The pre-service scaffold flagged two questions. Post-sermon resolution: - **"Is Paul's Conversion being preached as individual religious experience or as communal inclusion?"** → **Both, with the communal side structurally primary.** Saxton named Ananias as the pivot ("If not for Ananias, where would Saul be?") and explicitly extended the claim to the whole church ("God works through messy and flawed people — like Saul, like Peter, like Mary Magdalene"). The individual theophany happens *inside* a community obligated to receive the feared person as kin. - **"Is the Year A → Year C swap a one-time thematic choice or a pattern?"** → Still a one-time thematic choice on the evidence available, but paired with the bulletin's use of *The Inclusive Bible* and a Scottish progressive liturgy, it confirms the broader pattern: **lectionary-as-framework, not lectionary-as-mandate**. Worth a concept page on progressive lectionary hermeneutics at some point; not yet a priority. ## Pastoral Announcements Worth Noting - **Monday Afternoon Book Study, April 20:** Chapter 8 of Norman Wirzba's *Love's Braided Dance: Hope in a Time of Crisis*. See [[Norman Wirzba]]. - **Bible and a Beer, April 20:** 3rd-Monday faith conversation at the Trojan Diner. Consistent with St. John's pattern of public-space faith conversation. - **Sunday Evening Bible Study on Esther, 2026-04-19:** Chapters 9 & 10 — final session. The Esther study wraps today; the James study starts 2026-04-26. - **Keystone Conference Annual Meeting, June 5-7, 2026** at Millersville University. Theme: *"Joy at the Table Together!"* - **Mercersburg Association Spring Meeting, May 3**, Grace UCC Greencastle. - **Pentecost Picnic, May 24**, and a **"What is Pentecost?" combined class, May 17**. ## Sources Cited in the Bulletin - UCC Book of Worship (Assurance of Pardon) - *The Inclusive Bible: The First Egalitarian Translation* (Priests for Equality) - *Feasting on the Word Worship Companion Year C, Volume 1* (Kimberly Bracken Long, ed.) - Roddy Hamilton, "You Break In," *Mucky Paws* (adapted) - *The Hymnal* (1933) for FINLANDIA arrangement of "Be Still, My Soul" - Andrew E. Gardner (biblical scholar) — cited in the sermon on Acts 9 - Hank Williams, "I Saw the Light" (1948) — sermon opening illustration - Godly Play / "God in Play" curriculum — *"Who are you in this story?"* wondering question