Sermon

25th January  2026

Last week, we were thinking about the early Christians.  We read how, from the very earliest days, they gathered together to “devote themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of the bread and the prayers”.  However, despite the Church continuing to grow, Christianity was essentially a local religion, based in Jerusalem primarily for former Jews in the Palestine area.  There wasn’t an overwhelming ambition to make it the worldwide religion that it is today.

We know, however, from that first reading, that the Christian faith was being practised as far as Damascus, just under 200 miles north east of Jerusalem.  This spread was obviously troubling the leaders of the Jerusalem Jewish community, so they dispatched Saul, one of their most fanatical members, with letters to the synagogue at Damascus, urging them to put a stop to it.

We know what happened on that road to Damascus.  The conversion of St Paul, which we celebrate today, was to change the whole idea of Christianity.  No longer was it to be that local, almost inward looking, religion for folk of a Jewish background, in and around Jerusalem.  Because of Paul’s preaching on his so-called missionary journeys, it spread throughout the Roman Empire, and thus to the capital Rome.

The distance that Paul covered, mainly by foot, alone is extraordinary.  Add the hardships that he faced, including beatings and imprisonment, and the fact that, on top of that, he still needed to work to pay his way.  He founded Churches, up through Asia Minor (modern western Turkey) including Ephesus and Colossae, and then down through Greece, from Philippi and Thessalonica in the north to Corinth in the south.  He left leaders in all those Churches, but he didn’t forget them.  For we still have the letters that he wrote to those Churches, those epistles to the Ephesians, Colossians, Philippians, Thessalonians, and Corinthians.  

There can be no doubt that St Paul played the leading role in transforming the early Church from local to international, from inward looking to missionary, from just another Jewish sect to a worldwide religion open to all. But it all started on that road to Damascus, with that sudden conversion. 

Most folk never experience anything that dramatic.  I think that, for most Christians, the process of coming to faith, or of discerning what God has in mind for us was, or maybe still is, a slow and difficult process with as much uncertainty and doubt as certainty and conviction.  We’ll return to this is a couple of weeks when we look at how our patron St Francis heard and gradually responded to God’s call.  

Today, we remember and celebrate the conversion, missions, and writings of St Paul.  We give thanks for our own calling to follow Christ, however and whenever, it came.  And we pray that God’s call to follow Him, may continue to be discerned and accepted, in our world today.

Amen