“Old men ought to be explorers,” wrote T.S. Eliot in one of his poems.¹ And in our reading from Second Timothy we hear the apostle Paul in his later years from a Roman prison cell, expecting a death sentence. We don’t know what Paul’s age was when, according to Christian tradition, he was executed under the emperor Nero. Probably he wasn’t much older than 60, if that. But that would have been considered old by first-century standards.

            In his earlier days Paul had been an explorer, “going where no one had gone before” and doing new things. Paul didn’t “find” Jesus, as people sometimes say. The risen Christ found him, knocked him to the ground as he was going to arrest those who believed in that strange idea of a crucified Messiah, and called him to be an apostle.

            Paul wasn’t the first follower of Jesus to speak to Gentiles about the promise and hope that came through the resurrection of that crucified One. Some earlier converts were people who’d been attracted to the Jewish worship of one God, and who had then heard about Jesus when they came into contact with Jewish Christians. But after his own conversion, Paul wasn’t content just to wait for Gentiles to show interest in Jesus. He was inspired to go actively on missionary journeys into predominantly Gentile territories and proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ. He believed that his mission was especially to “the nations,” to those who didn’t know the God of Israel. That mission was the reason Christ had appeared to him on the road to Damascus.

Paul’s “exploration”

            We can read about some of that missionary work of Paul and his companions in the book of Acts, and in his own letters Paul talks about some things he experienced. It certainly wasn’t the kind of “exploration” you can experience by going on a guided tour of some foreign country. We can read about Paul bei

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