The Year of St. Paul began on June 28, 2008 and it seems right to make note of it before it recedes in the revelries of summer, beginning with Fourth of July celebrations tomorrow. Prior to St. Paul’s conversion, he persecuted the Church and “was trying to destroy it” (Gal. 1:13). Paul recognized that his former sin marked him, calling himself “the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the Church of God” (1 Cor. 15:9). But Paul also knew why he was an apostle, a saint in the Church of God: “by the grace of God, I am what I am” (1 Cor. 15:9). Sometimes, I think, the burdens of past sins keep us from the sainthood to which we are called. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, it is told, know something about sin. It is not mine to judge, since I have never met them and they never return calls, but we all know something about sin, and we can find our own woundedness so great it seems impossible to rise above it. In a Rolling Stones’ song, “Saint of Me”, Jagger and Richards plumb the sins of a couple of saints, and their subsequent conversions, including that of Saint Paul: “Saint Paul the persecutor was a cruel and sinful man Jesus hit him with a blinding light And then his life began I said yeah I said yeah.” In this verse they reference Paul’s sinful past as a persecutor of Christians before his Damascus Road conversion, but in later choruses and verses boastfully, or perhaps humanly, state that they themselves are not on the same road as Paul: “I said yeah, oh yeah, oh yeah You’ll never make a saint of me Oh yeah, oh yeah You’ll never make a saint of me.” Why? The threat of suffering and martyrdom seems to be one of the reasons: “And could you stand the torture And could you stand the pain could you put your faith in Jesus When you’re burning in the flames?” The reality of martyrdom, of the suffering that St. Paul proudly states marks him as a follower of Jesus, can frighten those who fervently want to be saved: “And I do believe in miracles and I want to save my soul and I know that I’m a sinner I’m gonna die here in the cold I said yes, I said yeah.” “Saint of Me” brings to bear a powerful force in human life: the sense of Augustine’s “I want to be healed, but not yet”. Anyone who reads St. Paul’s story, scattered throughout his letters, sees a frail human being transformed by Jesus Christ into one able to persevere and accept all things that afflict him due to the power of his encounter with Jesus Christ and the Gospel. Jagger and Richards give us a sense of the human being faced with giving oneself over to the power of Jesus Christ, but drawing back from the possibility either due to fear or the sense that one’s sinfulness is too deep to be healed. There is, indeed, a fear that to be a saint is possible, but it means giving up too much and, perhaps even more, accepting too much. As we enter the year of St. Paul, let us remember the model of the one who gave himself fully to Jesus Christ and who did not let his manifest sinfulness stand in the way of saying, “make a saint of me.” In fact the term that Paul uses more than any other in his letters to describe his fellow Christians is the Greek hagioi, “holy ones,” or saints. You’ll never make a saint of me? Paul argues that this is our very call and it is to this that we need to answer “yes, I said yeah.” John W. Martens

John W. Martens is an associate professor of theology at the University of St. Thomas, St. Paul, Minn,where he teaches early Christianity and Judaism. He also directs the Master of Arts in Theology program at the St. Paul Seminary School of Divinity. He was born in Vancouver, B.C. into a Mennonite family that had decided to confront modernity in an urban setting. His post-secondary education began at Tabor College, Hillsboro, Kansas, came to an abrupt stop, then started again at Vancouver Community College, where his interest in Judaism and Christianity in the earliest centuries emerged. He then studied at St. Michael's College, University of Toronto, and McMaster University, with stops at University of Haifa and University of Tubingen. His writing often explores the intersection of Jewish, Christian and Greco-Roman culture and belief, such as in "let the little children come to me: Children and Childhood in Early Christianity" (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2009), but he is not beyond jumping into the intersection of modernity and ancient religion, as in "The End of the World: The Apocalyptic Imagination in Film and Television" (Winnipeg: J. Gordon Shillingford Press, 2003). He blogs at  www.biblejunkies.com and at www.americamagazine.org for "The Good Word." You can follow him on Twitter @biblejunkies, where he would be excited to welcome you to his random and obscure interests, which range from the Vancouver Canucks and Minnesota Timberwolves, to his dog, and 70s punk, pop and rock. When he can, he brings students to Greece, Turkey and Rome to explore the artifacts and landscape of the ancient world. He lives in St. Paul with his wife and has two sons. He is certain that the world will not end until the Vancouver Canucks have won the Stanley Cup, as evidence has emerged from the Revelation of John, 1 Enoch, 2 Baruch, and 4 Ezra which all point in this direction.