SunMay162010
Acts 16:16-34
16One day, as we were going to the place of prayer, we met a slave girl who had a spirit of divination and brought her owners a great deal of money by fortune-telling. 17While she followed Paul and us, she would cry out, “These men are slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim to you a way of salvation.” 18She kept doing this for many days. But Paul, very much annoyed, turned and said to the spirit, “I order you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her.” And it came out that very hour.
19But when her owners saw that their hope of making money was gone, they seized Paul and Silas and dragged them into the marketplace before the authorities. 20When they had brought them before the magistrates, they said, “These men are disturbing our city; they are Jews 21and are advocating customs that are not lawful for us as Romans to adopt or observe.”
22The crowd joined in attacking them, and the magistrates had them stripped of their clothing and ordered them to be beaten with rods. 23After they had given them a severe flogging, they threw them into prison and ordered the jailer to keep them securely. 24Following these instructions, he put them in the innermost cell and fastened their feet in the stocks.
25About midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the prisoners were listening to them. 26Suddenly there was an earthquake, so violent that the foundations of the prison were shaken; and immediately all the doors were opened and everyone’s chains were unfastened.
27When the jailer woke up and saw the prison doors wide open, he drew his sword and was about to kill himself, since he supposed that the prisoners had escaped. 28But Paul shouted in a loud voice, “Do not harm yourself, for we are all here.”
29The jailer called for lights, and rushing in, he fell down trembling before Paul and Silas. 30Then he brought them outside and said, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” 31They answered, “Believe on the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household.” 32They spoke the word of the Lord to him and to all who were in his house.
33At the same hour of the night he took them and washed their wounds; then he and his entire family were baptized without delay. 34He brought them up into the house and set food before them; and he and his entire household rejoiced that he had become a believer in God.
The Story
The lectionary text this morning comes from Acts 16. Paul is on his second missionary journey and has entered Europe for the first time. He, Silas, Timothy and Luke, the author of Acts, are in Philippi.
Paul’s standard operating procedure, when beginning missionary work in a new area, is to connect with the local Jewish religious community. He does that in Philippi, finding a group of women, who are part of a prayer group, which meets by the river outside of the city each Sabbath. Lydia, one member of this prayer group hears Paul’s message about Jesus and is converted. She is a successful businesswoman, a dealer in purple cloth. Not only she, but her whole household are converted and baptized. Afterward she invites Paul and his missionary companions to make her home their center of operations, while they are in Philippi.
Dr. Ralph Earle, my New Testament professor in seminary, used to say that, practically everywhere Paul went, first there was a revival and then there was a riot. That is in fact what happened in Philippi. Lydia and her household and, presumably members of her prayer group and others are responding to Paul’s message, a message about a new and more meaningful life available to us through Jesus.
So far so good. But then the story gets interesting. Much of Paul’s evangelism is open-air evangelism, done in the street rather than the synagogue. One day he begins to be harassed by a slave girl. This young woman has a gift for fortune telling and, as a result, provides her owners a considerable, steady stream of income. No doubt her owners found her harassment of Paul amusing, until Paul ran short of patience and exorcized the clairvoyant spirit, which empowered the girl.
Deprived of the livelihood the slave girl provided them, her owners are no longer amused. They bring two false charges against Paul and Silas: disturbing the peace and urging Roman citizens to practice a foreign cult. The latter is a law usually ignored, but used when convenient.
In the Roman system of justice at the time, if the accused were non-Roman citizens, they could be flogged and jailed before they were tried. Assuming wrongly that Paul and Silas are not Roman citizens, the Philippi magistrates have them beaten and thrown in jail.
In the middle of the night, rather than cursing their fate or bemoaning the injustice done to them, Paul and Silas are praying and singing hymns to God. “And the other prisoners were listening,” Luke tells us in his account of this incident. If you’re like me, you can’t help wondering what the other prisoners were thinking. Perhaps: “What have these guys been drinking?”
They didn’t wonder long, because all of a sudden, a massive earthquake shook the foundations of the jail. All the doors flew open and even the prisoner’s chains fell off. The jailer is awakened by the disturbance. Assuming that all of his prisoners have escaped, he draws his sword, intent on taking his own life. He knew that if his prisoners escaped, he would be held accountable and the punishment of the Roman authorities would be slower and more painful than if he did it himself.
Paul sees what the jailer is about to do and shouts to him, assuring him that all the prisoners are present and accounted for. Moved by all that has happened, the jailer responds to Paul’s message about Jesus. He and his family end up being converted and baptized that very night .
By the next morning the local authorities know they have erred grievously in their treatment of Paul and Silas. They send the police to the jail to release them, hoping they’ll go quietly on their way. Knowing he and Silas have been wrongfully beaten and jailed, Paul demands that the magistrates come to the jail, apologize and personally release them, which they do. Before leaving Philippi, Paul spends more time with Lydia and the new faith community gathered at her home. He and Silas then leave for Thessalonica, their next mission field.
The Enslaved people in the story
$ As I read this story, it dawns on me that there are many different types of and things that imprison or enchain us. The most obvious example of imprisonment in this story is that of Paul and Silas. Going about their work, endeavoring to be faithful to where they feel God is leading them, they are unjustly accused, beaten and jailed. But they are not the only imprisoned people in this story.
$ The fortune-telling slave girl, bound by the greed of her owners, is another example.
$ The slave girl’s owners were bound in their own way by greed. In their quest for money and all that money will give them (material things, security, acceptance, etc.), the girl simply becomes an object to satisfy their desires and she ceases to be a person to them. Simone Weil, the french/Jewish/catholic mystic, writes in one of her essays about the frightful tendency to turn people into things, while they are still living. The slave owners had done that. When we do that, when we succumb to that temptation, we lose some of what makes us human beings in the process.
$ The magistrates in this story had their own chains. They were bound by their desire to please the crowd, or perhaps the accompanying fear that they might lose their jobs, if the tide of publican opinion turned against them. I’m guessing that is a fear of many politicians, who wrestle with the question, “Should I do what is right or should I do what is popular?” Struggling with that question may not be reserved only for politicians
What does being a person of faith mean?
1. Being a person of faith does not mean that we will be freed from all of the things that may chain or bind us:
Things like illness or injury or difficult economic times or persecution or being beaten or treated unjustly by others.
In 1967 I was a junior in college, pursuing my undergraduate degree in southern California. One day I went out to the school parking lot and found that someone had broken into my car and stolen my 8-track tape deck along with most of my tapes. (Some of you are old enough to remember 8-track tape decks.) I was a religion student at the time, working my way through college, intent on one day becoming a pastor. Doesn’t it seem reasonable to expect that young religion students, working their way through college, intent on one day becoming a pastor should be exempt from those kinds of indignities?
2. While being a person of faith does not mean we will be freed from all of the things that may chain or bind us, it does mean we can experience a deep sense of freedom in the those times, when we find ourselves chained and bound. Not freedom from, but freedom in.
The English poet Frederick Langbridge, who lived in the last half of the 19th and first part of the 20th Century wrote: “Two men look at the same prison bars. One sees mud and the other stars.”
It makes a difference which way you are looking. Sitting in a cold, dark prison, bruised and bleeding, Paul and Silas were not focusing on what had happened, on the injustices done to them. Rather they were focusing on the goodness of God, the joy of being part of God’s family, even if it sometimes meant suffering as they shared the message about Jesus.
In the movie Shawshank Redemption Tim Robbins plays a banker named Andrew Dufresne, who is wrongfully convicted of murdering his wife and her lover. He is sentenced to life in Shawshank prison, a mythical prison in Maine.
Morgan Freeman plays Red, a fellow inmate also serving a life sentence. The two become friends in prison.
One of Andy’s jobs is maintaining the prison library. When one donation to the library provides him with the opera, The Marriage of Figaro, Andy decides to play it over the public address system for all the inmates to hear, well-aware of the punishment of solitary confinement he will receive for the brief moment of bliss.
Later Andy and Red are talking about what he did and why. Andy says, don’t forget “that there are places in this world that aren't made out of stone. That there's something inside...they can't get to, that they can't touch. That's yours.
Red asks, “What're you talking about?”
And Andy replies, “Hope.”
Later, reflecting on his conversation with Andy, Red says, “I have no idea to this day what those two Italian ladies were singing about. Truth is, I don't want to know. Some things are best left unsaid. I'd like to think they were singing about something so beautiful, it can't be expressed in words, and makes your heart ache because of it. I tell you, those voices soared higher and farther than anybody in a gray place dares to dream. It was like some beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage and made those walls dissolve away, and for the briefest of moments, every last man in Shawshank felt free.
Something like that happened to Paul and Silas at midnight in that Philippian jail. Before the earthquake happened and, even if the earthquake had never happened, they experienced a freedom in chains that is available to people of faith.
Sometimes as people of faith we experience freedom from chains. Other times we experience freedom in chains. Maren has a story told by Philip Yancey of a young teenage girl who sought freedom in all the wrong places, lost freedom and then found it again.
[Yancey story]
The Runaway – a parable of Jesus, retold by Philip Yancey in What’s So Amazing about Grace
A young girl grows up on a cherry orchard just above Traverse City, Michigan. Her parents, a bit old-fashioned, tend to overreact to her nose ring, the music she listens to, and the length of her skirts. They ground her a few times, and she seethes inside. "I hate you!" she screams at her father when he knocks on the door of her room after an argument, and that night she acts on a plan she has mentally rehearsed scores of times. She runs away.
She has visited Detroit only once before, on a bus trip with her church youth group to watch the Tigers play. Because newspapers in Traverse City report in lurid detail the gangs, drugs, and violence in downtown Detroit, she concludes that is probably the last place her parents will look for her. California, maybe, or Florida, but not Detroit.
Her second day there she meets a man who drives the biggest car she's ever seen. He offers her a ride, buys her lunch, arranges a place for her to stay. He gives her some pills that make her feel better than she's ever felt before. She was right all along, she decides: Her parents were keeping her from all the fun.
The good life continues for a month, two months, a year. The man with the big car—she calls him "Boss"--teaches her a few things that men like. Since she's underage, men pay a premium for her. She lives in a penthouse and orders room service whenever she wants. Occasionally she thinks about the folks back home, but their lives now seem so boring that she can hardly believe she grew up there. She has a brief scare when she sees her picture printed on the back of a milk carton with the headline, "Have you seen this child?" But by now she has blond hair, and with all the makeup and body-piercing jewelry she wears, nobody would mistake her for a child. Besides, most of her friends are runaways, and nobody squeals in Detroit.
After a year, the first sallow signs of illness appear, and it amazes her how fast the boss turns mean. "These days, we can't mess around," he growls, and before she knows it she's out on the street without a penny to her name. She still turns a couple of tricks a night, but they don't pay much, and all the money goes to support her drug habit. When winter blows in she finds herself sleeping on metal grates outside the big department stores. "Sleeping" is the wrong word—a teenage girl at night in downtown Detroit can never relax her guard. Dark bands circle her eyes. Her cough worsens.
One night, as she lies awake listening for footsteps, all of a sudden everything about her life looks different. She no longer feels like a woman of the world. She feels like a little girl, lost in a cold and frightening city. She begins to whimper. Her pockets are empty and she's hungry. She needs a fix. She pulls her legs tight underneath her and shivers under the newspapers she's piled atop her coat. Something jolts a synapse of memory and a single image fills her mind: of May in Traverse City, when a million cherry trees bloom at once, with her golden retriever dashing through the rows and rows of blossomy trees in chase of a tennis ball.
God, why did I leave? she says to herself, and pain stabs at her heart. My dog back home eats better than I do now. She's sobbing, and she knows in a flash that more than anything else in the world she wants to go home.
Three straight phone calls, three straight connections with the answering machine. She hangs up without leaving a message the first two times, but the third time she says, "Dad, Mom, it's me. I was wondering about maybe coming home. I'm catching a bus up your way, and it'll get there about midnight tomorrow. If you're not there, well, I guess I'll just stay on the bus until it hits Canada."
It takes about seven hours for a bus to make all the stops between Detroit and Traverse City, and during that time she realizes the flaws in her plan. What if her parents are out of town and miss the message? Shouldn't she have waited another day or so until she could talk to them? Even if they are home, they probably wrote her off as dead long ago. She should have given them some time to overcome the shock.
Her thoughts bounce back and forth between those worries and the speech she is preparing for her father. "Dad, I'm sorry. I know I was wrong. It's not your fault, it's all mine. Dad, can you forgive me?" She says the words over and over, her throat tightening even as she rehearses them. She hasn't apologized to anyone in years.
The bus has been driving with lights on since Bay City. Tiny snowflakes hit the road, and the asphalt steams. She's forgotten how dark it gets at night out here. A deer darts across the road and the bus swerves. Every so often, a billboard. A sign posting the mileage to Traverse City. Oh, God.
When the bus finally rolls into the station, its air brakes hissing in protest, the driver announces in a crackly voice over the microphone, "Fifteen minutes, folks. That's all we have here." Fifteen minutes to decide her life. She checks herself in a compact mirror, smooths her hair, and licks the lipstick off her teeth. She looks at the tobacco stains on her fingertips and wonders if her parents will notice. If they're there.
She walks into the terminal not knowing what to expect, and not one of the thousand scenes that have played out in her mind prepare her for what she sees. There, in the concrete-walls-and-plastic-chairs bus terminal in Traverse City, Michigan, stands a group of 40 family members—brothers and sisters and great-aunts and uncles and cousins and a grandmother and great-grandmother to boot. They are all wearing ridiculous-looking party hats and blowing noisemakers, and taped across the entire wall of the terminal is a computer-generated banner that reads "Welcome home!"
Out of the crowd of well-wishers breaks her dad. She looks through tears and begins the memorized speech, "Dad, I'm sorry. I know … "
He interrupts her. "Hush, child. We've got no time for that. No time for apologies. You'll be late for the party. A banquet's waiting for you at home."
Years before the story in today’s lectionary account the Apostle Paul had experienced the unconditional love and acceptance of God on the road to Damascus, and it had made all the difference in his life. No longer imprisoned by anger and hatred and fear and ambition, Paul was set free. There was no prison, physical or emotional or spiritual or otherwise that could hold him. Even when he was rejected and treated unjustly, when he found himself beaten and bleeding in a dark Philippian jail, even then he possessed a freedom which the world cannot give and the world cannot take away.
Paul’s faith in a God who loved him and accepted him unconditionally had provided him with a freedom from some of the things that imprison us in life. Other times it had freed him in some of the difficult times in life.
In the first half of the 20th century Haldor Lillinas was a well known hymn writer in the Nazarene faith tradition in which I grew up. One of the songs he wrote was entitled “Glorious Freedom.”
Freedom from fear with all of its torments,
Freedom from care with all of its pain;
Freedom in Christ, my blessed Redeemer,
He who has rent my fetters in twain.
Prayers of the People
Freedom from, freedom in, freedom through.
There are people in our own faith community who find themselves bound this morning. Some are bound by illness or injury. Others, and perhaps we ourselves, are dealing with our own prisons. Perhaps it is the prison of grief and loss caused by the death of a loved one. Perhaps it is the prison of fear and uncertainty caused by the loss of a job or the downturn in the economy. Perhaps it is the prison of rejection and anger that accompanies a fractured relationship.
May those who find themselves imprisoned by any of the myriad of things that bind us – may we find freedom from those things that bind us. And where freedom from is not a possibility, may we find freedom in and a freedom that will carry us through the difficult times and places of our live.
Liberate us by your overwhelming love and acceptance, in order that we may be channels of your grace and peace and goodness as we venture out into the world this week.
We pray in the name of our teacher and example and provider of genuine freedom, Jesus.
– Amen