Radicals of a different stripe

This is the tale of two men.
Both men were brought up in a dangerous, hateful world; one committed to what was his versus what was theirs. His family was wealthy, he attended the best schools, was taught by action or word to hate the largest nation in the world, an occupying force that had the greatest, most well-equipped army in the world, and had a great future planned for him.
He was radicalized religiously early in life. He loved his religion like few others. He would do anything for his religion, including kill.
According to definition, radicalization is a process by which an individual or group comes to adopt increasingly extreme political, social, or religious ideals and aspirations that reject or undermine the status quo or reject and/or undermine contemporary ideas and expressions of freedom of choice.
As if to show this, part of his call, he felt, was to pull the minority Christians in the arid land in which he grew into adulthood out of their homes, and beat them till they denied Jesus as Lord. Sometimes he had them killed anyway.
He watched a group of righteous men pick up large stones and beat an innocent man to death, because the man loved this man named Jesus and would now disavow him.
If being radicalized meant giving all one had for the cause of one’s religion then he was as radical as any who ever found themselves in the position to make blood color the sands of the Middle East.
In a letter he left some friends, he wrote, “And I persecuted this way unto the death, binding and delivering into prisons ...”
For his religion he would do anything. Anything.
And he was absolutely certain he was right, that God was on his side.
Then one sunny afternoon he went on his way south to extract some believers from their homes and either beat them or behead them if necessary. Oh, he loved his job.
And his world changed.
Therein lies the tale of the second radicalized man.
The second man was born poor and remained that way. He was an undocumented child refugee, no papers. Not part of any census. He would grow up and eventually run headlong into the first man because he was despised by many. But he was radicalized somewhere around his 30th birthday not to a religion but to the Father of lights, as he called his God.
Two men, radicalized because they wanted to do exactly what they believed their “religion” wanted of them.
One, a man named Saul, would run into the other man, one named Jesus of Nazareth, on a dusty road that ran down from Jerusalem into Damascus in Syria. Saul would be changed, radicalized as much as any man ever could be, turned into someone who understood grace and mercy came through this other man.
Radicalized Catholics, radicalized Baptists, radicalized Methodists and on and on and on have changed the world ever since.
Some of the problems that exist in our world today aren’t because there are persons being radicalized to Islam, but instead because those aforementioned Catholics, Baptists, Pentecostals, Methodists and on and one have forgotten just what it means to be radicalized to Jehovah God, to Jesus Christ his only Son and to the Holy Spirit.
Somewhere along the line, we forgot to love our enemy. We forgot to give all we have to all we meet. We forgot what Saul turned Paul learned when he met the very much alive Jesus. We forgot that they will know us by our love.
Count me as radicalized this morning.
The Rev. Billy Turner is a pastor of the United Methodist denomination and a retired journalist.