We sing the glorious conquest
Before Damascus gate,
When Saul, the Church’s spoiler,
Came breathing threats and hate;
The ravening wolf rushed forward
Full early to his prey;
But lo! The Shepherd met him,
And bound him fast today!

O Glory most excelling
That smote across his path!
O Light that pierced and blinded
The zealot in his wrath!
O Voice that spake within him
The calm reproving word!
O Love that sought and held him
The bondman of his Lord!

Lord, teach thy Church the lesson,
Still in her darkest hour
Of weakness and of danger
To trust thy hidden power.
Thy grace by ways mysterious
The wrath of man can bind,
And in thy boldest foeman
Thy chosen saint can find!

Blessed be God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit:

And blessed be his kingdom, now and forever. Amen

From Easter to Pentecost:

Allelulia. Christ is risen!

The Lord is risen indeed. Alleluia

In Lent and other penitential occasions:

Bless the Lord who forgives all our sins;

His mercy endures for ever.

The Lord be with you.

And also with you.

Let us pray:

Almighty God, to whom all hearts be open, all desires known and from whom no secrets are hidden: cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love you, and worthily magnify your holy name, through Christ our Lord.  Amen.

Lord, have mercy.

Christ, have mercy.

Lord, have mercy.

This prayer is omitted during Lent and Advent:

Glory to God in the highest, and peace to God’s people on earth.  Lord God, heavenly King, almighty God and Father, we worship you, we give you thanks, we praise you for your glory.  Lord Jesus Christ, only Son of the Father, Lord God, Lamb of God, you take away the sin of the world: have mercy on us; you are seated at the right hand of the Father: receive our prayer. For you alone are the Holy One, you alone are the Lord, you alone are the Most High, Jesus Christ, with the Holy Spirit, in the glory of God the Father.  Amen.

 Holy God, holy and mighty, holy and immortal, have mercy on us.

O God, by the preaching of your apostle Paul you have caused the light of the Gospel to shine throughout the world: Grant, we pray, that we, having his wonderful conversion in remembrance, may show ourselves thankful to you by following his holy teaching; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.

Amen.

Acts 26:9-21

This is the Word of the Lord.

Thanks be to God.

Psalm 67

Deus misereatur

1 May God be merciful to us and bless us, *
show us the light of his countenance and come to us.

7 May God give us his blessing, *
and may all the ends of the earth stand in awe of him.

This is the Word of the Lord.

Thanks be to God

All stand for the Acclamation and Gospel reading.

Alleluia, Alleluia!

We have found the Messiah: Jesus Christ, who brings us truth and grace.

Alleluia!

The Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ according to:

Matthew 10:16-22

After the Gospel reading

This is the Gospel of the Lord.

Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ

Paul, to my way of thinking, is quite possibly the most interesting and utterly fascinating character in the whole of the New Testament, save of course for Our Lord Himself!

Most of us, when challenged to name each of the 12 apostles, would in all probability include Paul without giving it a second thought as we grappled to conjure up the less familiar members of the apostolic band.  This though would be quite wrong – Paul’s encounter with Jesus was on the road to Damascus, as we heard in our 1^st reading, and this was, of course, some little while after the Death, Resurrection and Ascension of Our Lord.   Although Paul was actually only a few years younger than Jesus, there is nothing whatsoever to suggest that the two of them ever met, or necessarily even set eyes on one another during Jesus’s earthly ministry.  In order to understand though just what ’made him tick’, some biographical detail could be helpful, as might have been revealed in his obituary in the Jerusalem Chronicle of the time!

Paul, named Saul at his circumcision, a Jew of the tribe of Benjamin, was born at Tarsus, the capitol of Cilicia, a Roman province on  what is now the southern, Mediterranean coast of Turkey, to the north-west of the island of Cyprus  – hence the bible frequently refers to him as ‘Saul of Tarsus’.   He was by birth therefore a Roman citizen, but nevertheless was brought up as a strict Jew, and later became a violent and fanatical persecutor of those first Christians.  He not only had been present at, but actually took an active part in the stoning of Stephen, the 1^st Christian martyr, whose feast is celebrated just the day following the Birth of Our Lord himself, in other words, on December 26^th.  While on his way to Damascus to make new arrests, he was suddenly totally blinded, and thereby converted by a miraculous apparition of Our Lord himself.  Initially the Christians in Damascus were wary of him in the extreme, because he had been viewed rather as if he had been a member of the Gestapo, the KGB, or the Stazi.  Nevertheless, from being the fierce, obsessive persecutor, Saul, he became Paul, the great Evangelist of the Gentiles.  He made three extended missionary journeys, which brought him in turn to all the great centres of Asia Minor and southern Europe, and there is no doubt whatsoever that during the course of his travels he made a great many converts – like Our Lord himself, he was a man of great charisma!  Fourteen of his Epistles to ‘the brothers and sisters’ in the various places he visited are to be found in the New Testament.  He was beheaded in Rome around 66 A.D., and his relics are in the Basilica of St. Paul Outside-the-Walls near the Ostian Way.

Back now though to the events which preceded his conversion. Saul had acquired a zealot’s hatred of all that Jesus stood for, as he began increasingly to harass the Church, rather like the groups of secret police to which I have just alluded, “……entering house after house and dragging out men and women, he handed them over for imprisonment” as we read in Chapter 8 of the Acts of the Apostles.  Can’t you just visualise the same treatment being handed out to European Jews during the Second World War, and so comparisons therefore are neither invidious nor out of place!

Now though,  it was he himself who was “entered”, possessed, all his energy now harnessed to the one goal – that of being a slave of Christ in the ministry of reconciliation, an instrument to help others experience the one, true and only Saviour!

I can’t call to mind any similar event in the whole of the gospels, where Our Lord quite deliberately and so unmistakably targeted someone in such dramatic and undeniable circumstances.   One sentence, which Saul heard on the road to Damascus, determined his whole theology and made such an indelible impression on him: “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting”.   Jesus was mysteriously identified with people – the loving group of people Saul had hitherto been hunting down like criminals.  Jesus, he suddenly realised, was the mysterious fulfilment of all that he in his ignorance had been blindly pursuing!

From then on, Paul’s only work was to “present everyone perfect in Christ. For this I labour and struggle, in accord with the exercise of his power working within me”, as we hear in Colossians.  “For our gospel did not come to you in word alone, but also in power, and in the Holy Spirit and with much conviction”, as he declaims in the 1^st Epistle to the Thessalonians.

Paul’s life henceforth became a tireless proclamation and living out of the message of the cross: Christians die baptismally to sin and are buried with Christ; they are dead to all that is sinful and unredeemed in the world.  They are made into a new creation, already sharing Christ’s victory and someday like Him to rise from the dead.  Through this risen Christ the Father pours out his Spirit on them, making them completely and utterly new.

So Paul’s great message to the world was, quite simply: You are saved entirely by God, not by anything that you yourselves can do.  Saving faith is the gift of total, free, personal and loving commitment to Christ, a commitment that then bears fruit in more “works” than the Law could ever contemplate.

Paul’s entire life then can be explained in terms of that one, overriding and utterly overwhelming experience—his meeting with Jesus on the road to Damascus.   In an instant, he realised that all the zeal of his dynamic personality was being senselessly squandered, like the strength of a boxer swinging wildly, but with all the powerful punches missing their mark.   Perhaps more particularly, so did Our Lord, who knew that the whole success of the early Church would depend largely on the impact  this man would make, and which in all probability was far greater than any of the  apostles themselves – there is certainly more written about him than probably all of the others added together!

Paul is undoubtedly hard to understand on occasion.  His language frequently reflects the distinctly rabbinical style of argument current at that time, and often his thought skips on mountaintops while we plod along in laboured steps in the valleys down below.  But perhaps our problems are accentuated by the fact that so much of his beautiful phraseology has become part of the everyday coinage of our Christian language.  Quite possibly then, in this, as in so many other respects, familiarity breeds contempt?

Now where does all this leave you and I?  Paul, more than anyone else, used his divinely-inspired understanding of the Lord, whose physical presence he had never actually experienced, to define so much of the doctrine, teaching and practice of the early Church.  For this he considered himself to be uniquely qualified, on account of all the suffering he had patiently endured for the love of his Lord and Saviour – shipwrecks, beatings and  imprisonment to name but a few of the things which are all to be found documented in the Acts of the Apostles.  Yes, he was proud to boast of these things as proof of his own faith and integrity.  Let us both hope and pray now that we in our day may find in Paul our shining example, having the same vision and courage to proclaim the faith of Christ Crucified, Risen and Ascended to our own increasingly sceptical and hostile generation.  He was more than ready and willing to lay down his life in the service of Our Lord – the uncomfortable question we must now ask ourselves is, quite simply, are we?    Amen.

Please stand for the Nicene Creed.

Let us together affirm the faith of the Church.

We believe in one God,

the Father, the Almighty,

maker of heaven and earth,

of all that is, seen and unseen.

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,

the only Son of God,

eternally begotten of the Father,

God from God, Light from Light,

true God from true God,

begotten, not made,

of one Being with the Father.

Through him all things were made.

For us and for our salvation

he came down from heaven:

was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary,

and became truly human.

For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate;

he suffered death and was buried.

On the third day he rose again

in accordance with the Scriptures;

he ascended into heaven

and is seated at the right hand of the Father.

He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end.

We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life,

who proceeds from the Father and the Son, who with the Father and the Son is worshipped and glorified,

who has spoken through the prophets.

We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church.

We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.

We look for the resurrection of the dead,

and the life of the world to come.  Amen.

Let us pray for the world and for the Church:

Prayers of intercession are now said and at the end of each prayer the priest says:

Lord in your mercy,

Hear our prayer.

or

Lord hear us,

Lord graciously hear us

At the conclusion of the prayers the priest says:

Almighty God, who has promised to hear our prayers.

Grant that what we have asked in faith we may by your grace receive, through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.

 Jesus said: Come to me all who labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.

or

God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.

THE CONFESSION:

God is steadfast in love and infinite in mercy, welcoming sinners and inviting them to the Lord’s table.

Let us confess our sins in penitence and faith, confident in God’s forgiveness.

Merciful God, our maker and our judge, we have sinned against you in thought, word and deed, and in what we have failed to do: we have not loved you with our whole heart; we have not loved our neighbours as ourselves; we repent and are sorry for all our sins, Father forgive us, strengthen us to love and obey you in newness of life; through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen

Almighty God, who has promised forgiveness to all who turn to him in faith, pardon you and set you free from all your sins, strengthen you in all goodness and keep you in eternal life, through Jesus Christ our Lord.  Amen.

THE PEACE:

The congregation stands.

We are the Body of Christ.

His Spirit is with us.

The peace of the Lord be always with you.

And also with you.

Please greet each other with a sign of peace.

A heavenly splendour from on high,
A light too great for mortal eye,
Deprives the hunter of his prey
And turns his threatening wrath away.

In darkened eyes, an inward light
Begins to shine upon his sight,
As in his heart he hears the call
To follow, and surrender all.

Blest Paul, the convert of the Lord,
May heaven’s light to us afford
A blindness to the lures of sin,
That we with thee a crown may win.

To God the Father, God the Son,
And God the Spirit, Three in One,
From saints on earth and saints in heaven,
Let everlasting praise be given. Amen.

THE OFFERTORY

Blessed are you, God of all creation. Through your goodness we have these gifts to share. Accept and use our offerings for your glory and the service of your kingdom.

Blessed be God forever.

 Let us pray

We do not presume to come to your table, merciful Lord, trusting in our own righteousness, but in your manifold and great mercies.  We are not worthy so much as to gather up the crumbs under your table, but you are the same Lord whose nature is always to have mercy. Grant us, therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat the flesh of your dear son Jesus Christ, and to drink his blood, that we may evermore dwell in him and he in us.  Amen.