From Golden to Goat

Paul's life has some good lessons for politicians, or anyone who has ever taken a hard line stance on an issue: when you make a major shift in allegiances, you're going to piss people off.

In the Daily Office, we've seen the conversion of Saul as he becomes Paul. It's a really dramatic scene... with the booming voice from Heaven, blindness, fasting, a reluctant but obedient follower of "The Way" who heals him, and a 180-degree turnaround of a notorious persecutor of the Church to being one of it's most prolific apostles. What follows is a story many of us today I think can relate to in one way or another. Now that Paul has joined "them", his one time admirers in the majority are at first confused, and then they want to kill him. How dare he! Belief in Christ as God and Messiah must be stopped, and now the chief bounty hunter has switched sides. Get 'im, boys!!

Have you ever held a position or an opinion that was in keeping with the majority but, upon some light bulb going off in your head, you realize that maybe the opposite is true? I imagine this has happened to some of the parents of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered people . Even the ones who maintain that they are politically liberal when it's their kid who turns out to be queer suddenly find themselves facing unknown prejudices they might have been holding. I've seen this phenomenon happen with ministers in some denominations. They were content with "not seeing" the LGBT people in their midst. And maybe they told a joke or two about "those people" amongst their friends. Then--whammo--they learn that someone close to them (usually their child) is gay. Suddenly, the derogatory jokes and calling something "so gay" takes on a completely different flavor now that they've seen the incarnation of the very thing that they thought of as "other" and it looks remarkably familiar to them.

It happens in politics, too, where an elected official takes a stand on an issue. But then they do a swift turnaround... and it is usually because of something or someone in their personal life who has made them see that their hard and fast position might be doing more harm than good. In this country, especially today, that often spells political death. Political parties will turn on their own and start to devour them alive for having left a party line. And you wonder why Gov. Charlie Crist became an independent?

But, as with Paul, what the person with new eyes, and new perspective often finds is that once those in the formerly persecuted camp see that this conversion is the real deal, they will come to the aid of the convert and shield them from the wrath. Not all will do this, but enough will. And for Christianity, this is a good thing. Had there been no Paul, who knows how far the conviction of Christ as God incarnate would have moved and spread. And had Paul not gone through the steps he went to come to his belief in the resurrected Christ, who knows how passionate he would have been about the message delivered to the world through Jesus.

Stuff to think about on a Monday morning in mid-August.