We again approach the hours of the year when those of the Judeo-Christian traditions reflect on thoughts of atonement, renewal, and freedom to seek and live a new life, rather they be framed within the concept of Passover or Resurrection. It is a time provided by a divine hand to not erase the past but to put it behind, replaced with a vision and hope of principled brotherhood.

I have written before of the “common man” qualities of Simon Peter, the foundation rock of Christ’s Church. He, like so many others, reminds us that God usually chooses individuals from among us who might seem so unworthy as to make their contributions true miracles themselves. They serve to remind us that as frail and flawed as man can be, he has the divine within him to be released when purpose and passion mix with reason and faith.

If there is another all too human “founding father” of the Christian faith to stand beside Peter, it would surely have to the apostle known to us as Paul. Roughly half the New Testament consists of either writing attributed to him or descriptions of his activities. He stands as the very symbol of Christ’s reach to all nations, all peoples.

But Saul of Tarsus was hardly one who would have been selected by Hollywood’s central casting to play the lead role in changing the religious focus of the world’s greatest empire and eventually touching every corner of the globe. If the conclusions drawn from different accounts can be trusted, he was hardly an impressive figure. He was short, even for that ancient time, with a ruddy reddish complexion, a bald head, hooked nose, eyebrows that met in the middle, bowed legs, and a “thorn in the flesh” handicap which we can only guess about. No, central casting would not consider him hero material.

He hailed from Tarsus, a Mediterranean trade center that had been an international crossroads since Alexander the Great who was dead more than 300 years before Saul was born. He was of the tribe of Benjamin and “born of Pharisees”. He had been educated in Jerusalem but held Roman citizenship in a time when it was a distinct advantage.

But that small stature could barely contain a near-fanatical spirit. The man known then as Saul saw the new faith of a risen Jesus as blasphemy and stood ready to do his part to remove it forever. He did not just speak out, he acted. From the stoning death of Stephen to arresting Christians for trial in Jerusalem, Saul persecuted the followers of Christ “beyond measure”.

As many of us know, he was on the Damascus road to arrest more Christians when he had his famous “moment”. Struck blind for three days after being confronted by the Christ he attacked, the man who would be from then on referred to as Paul became the ultimate missionary for the faith that would soon become the center of the Western world.

That fanatical spirit that had driven Paul to erase Christianity from the hard soil of the Holy Land now became the force that actually spread its message of salvation for all across Asia Minor, into Europe all the way to the shores of the Atlantic and into the heart of Rome itself.  Paul’s message and his example were that a divine gift was paid for in actual suffering and blood and then offered freely in genuine love and concern to all who would accept regardless of background, traditions or the depth of their past sin. His message was that no matter how badly we had “acted ignorantly in unbelief”, a believing acceptance and dedication brought not just atonement for the past but a new life and a new vision of the world.

Paul is still a reminder that if one who had so savagely and ruthlessly fought the Christian message can be so completely forgiven and be made into such a strong, enlightening, and effective voice that a whole continent changed, we certainly can in our small way forgive in the face of true repentance, find renewal for our own battered lives and seek with a purpose to change the hearts of those who would deny that peace to themselves and others. Paul reminds us that our physical, emotional, intellectual shortcomings are to be expected in a secular world but that they are challenges, not sentences. Beyond them lays purpose, direction, and fulfillment. For Nature and Nature’s God, an empty grave has no more power than the scales that have fallen from a blind man’s eyes. On the other side of each lays a bright, new life for all who will accept it.

There is no nation on this earth that relies more on the freedom of faith and conscience to function than the United States. The divine moral compass embedded in the faith of those who almost four millennia ago gathered to tract across an empty desert to leave behind slavery and those who two millennia ago believed in the fulfillment of a promised Savior is at the center of our founding documents and the system devised to allow all men the secular and spiritual liberty intended. That compass is not magnetic. It points to true north. In this season intended for atonement, renewal, and freedom of a new life we need its direction desperately. There are Pauls among us. There always are. Let us pray that the scales fall from all our eyes and we see not just the direction but our own path toward it.