Acts
16:16-35 (36-40)
May
12, 2013
First
Presbyterian Church, Sterling IL
Christina
Berry
The scripture for today is the
last in our series on the book of Acts, and next week we will celebrate the day
of Pentecost. We’ve been tracking the apostles Peter and Paul in their early
journeys as they go out from Jerusalem to share the gospel of Jesus Christ. We’ve
been witnesses to the power of God at work in the world to redeem and redirect
and release people from sin, captivity, illness and ignorance, literally
raising one person from the dead, and figuratively setting all of them free for
new life. So we come to this story now, in Philippi, where we traveled last
week with Paul. Paul has been staying with Lydia, a new convert, as he and
Silas work in town to share the good news of Jesus with people. But every day,
on the way to work, there’s this crazy shouting after them by this woman who
tells fortunes for money.
Acts 16:16-35
One day, when we were on the way
to the place for prayer, we met a slave woman. She had a spirit that enabled
her to predict the future. She made a lot of money for her owners through
fortune-telling. She began following
Paul and us, shouting, "These people are servants of the Most High God!
They are proclaiming a way of salvation to you!" She did this for many
days. This annoyed Paul so much that he finally turned and said to the spirit,
"In the name of Jesus Christ, I command you to leave her!" It left
her at that very moment. Her owners realized that their hope for making money
was gone. They grabbed Paul and Silas and dragged them before the officials in
the city center. When her owners approached the legal authorities, they said,
"These people are causing an uproar in our city. They are Jews who promote
customs that we Romans can't accept or practice." The crowd joined in the
attacks against Paul and Silas, so the authorities ordered that they be
stripped of their clothes and beaten with a rod. When Paul and Silas had been
severely beaten, the authorities threw them into prison and ordered the jailer
to secure them with great care. When he received these instructions, he threw
them into the innermost cell and secured their feet in stocks. Around midnight
Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the other prisoners
were listening to them. All at once there was such a violent earthquake that it
shook the prison's foundations. The doors flew open and everyone's chains came
loose. When the jailer awoke and saw the open doors of the prison, he thought
the prisoners had escaped, so he drew his sword and was about to kill himself.
But Paul shouted loudly, "Don't harm yourself! We're all here!" The
jailer called for some lights, rushed in, and fell trembling before Paul and
Silas. He led them outside and asked, "Honorable masters, what must I do
to be rescued?" They replied, "Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you
will be saved—you and your entire household." They spoke the Lord's word
to him and everyone else in his house.
Right then, in the middle of the night, the jailer welcomed them and
washed their wounds. He and everyone in his household were immediately
baptized. He brought them into his home and gave them a meal. He was overjoyed
because he and everyone in his household had come to believe in God.
Benjamin Weir, a Presbyterian
minister and missionary, was taken hostage in 1985 by Muslim extremists in
Lebanon. He was held for 16 months and released without any explanation. He was
held with a number of other Americans, including Father Lawrence Jenco and
Terry Anderson. Weir’s deep faith carried him through that experience.
“…I remember saying to myself
that I was still in the presence of God. I was shackled and they taped my face,
leaving only a tiny spot open so I could breathe through my nose. After we
stopped at one place, they put me in a box and closed the lid. A truck took me
to what was to be my prison. They removed the tapes and put a blindfold on me
instead. …
I tried to get my bearings. It
was a small, bare room, seemingly completely cut off from the outside world. I
felt my faith becoming rather weak. I missed the presence of God in there. I
knew I must hold on to my identity at all cost. I let my imagination go to
work. I looked up and I saw a round metal weight suspended from the light
fixture above me. It looked like an eye. ‘Here's God's eye watching over me,' I
thought.
On Christmas Day 1984, Mr. Weir
said, “I thought of my family; of all the families who would be celebrating
together in the 'normal' world. Then I hit on an idea. I would sing all the
Christmas hymns and carols I could remember since my childhood. Now, my captors
had told me not to make much noise. So my singing was more like a humming. But
it helped.”
Like Paul and Silas, singing
through the dark night, Weir sang the songs of his faith through that bleak
Christmas. But also like Paul and Silas, Weir did not hate his captors, nor
wish them ill. Weir recalls that one of his guards lamented that he too was a
prisoner. He told Weir, “We've got to spend our time here looking after you,
and we're not free.”[1]
When Weir emerged from captivity,
it was with a new understanding of the plight of Palestinians and Muslims in
the Middle East. “What the extremists are doing is just the tip of the
iceberg,” he said. “The resentment towards our policies (is) widespread, even
among Arab moderates. They feel that our backing of Israel with $3 billion
worth of weapons and other materials is a grave threat to their own lives. Unless
the Palestinians achieve self-determination, there is little hope for peace in
the Middle East….”
Weir’s experiences and his story
informed the response of the church. After his release, he wrote a book
entitled Captive Bound, Captive Free. And the next year, he was elected
moderator of the General Assembly, At that gathering in 1987, the PC(USA)
shifted its public position on the issues of Israel and the Palestinians in the
Middle East. The final document recognized the importance of the Holy Land for
Jews, but it added an expression of sympathy for Palestinians and “all people
to whom rights of 'land' are currently denied.” In a separate action, the church
pledged to counteract bigotry against Muslims and Arabs in the U.S.[2]
A good story – captive bound,
captive free.
Paul and Silas, bound as captives
in a land far from home, are beaten and thrown into prison for healing a slave
woman. She’s being used by her owners to make money, and since she is a slave,
her owners are keeping that money. A common factor of all Luke’s narratives in
the two-book set of Luke-Acts is the special attention he gives to the poor and
downtrodden, and to women. But here Luke doesn’t mention that Paul felt
compassion or even love for the woman shouting after them every day. Paul
doesn’t feel sorry for her, enslaved and mentally off-balance. He is annoyed by
her. Annoyed. So he sends the evil spirit away from her. Cures her. Heals her.
But she’s still a slave. Still owned by these men. And they are
furious. Paul and Silas have violated local customs, confronting a tiny sector
of the economic system, and destroying their livelihood of exploiting this
unfortunate woman. In short, Paul and Silas are a first century version of the
Occupy movement. Occupy Philippi. They are arrested, stripped, beaten and
thrown in jail. Never mind that they are Roman citizens, with rights as
citizens. Never mind that the act they have
undertaken was one of healing. They are guilty. Guilty of upsetting the status
quo. Off to jail.
But of course, the Holy Spirit is
at work in the world, and no jail cell can hold the
apostle if God doesn't want him imprisoned. So an earthquake comes and breaks
their chains. Sets them free.
The jailer is in despair.
When the warden finds out, he is
dead meat. So he prepares to take his own
life, to preempt the execution he must
certainly suffer. But … Paul and Silas aren’t
leaving, they reassure the jailer. He leads them out into the night
and asks that question which everyone must finally ask in
some way at some point in our lives: “What must I do to be rescued?”
They answer simply, “Believe in
the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved.”
So the jailer takes them home,
cleans them up, feeds them supper, and everybody in the whole
household gets baptized. He’s overjoyed. A good story – captives bound,
and captives freed.
Good story.
Really good story.
It’s got all the elements – good
guys, bad guys, slave and cruel exploiters,
innocent victims, unjust charges, singing in the jail cell, an
earthquake, a conversion for the jailer,
freedom, irony, and dissembling government
authorities. The temptation is to stay on the
surface of the gripping story and skim across the spiritual aspects without confronting the layers
and layers of relevance for us today. The temptation is to ignore the
questions that niggle and nudge at the back
of our minds.
Why didn’t Paul do something to
free that poor woman?
Maybe she was better off before –
now she is fully aware of her captivity.
Then there is this paradox of
freedom and captivity that we see with Paul and Silas in relation
to the jailer – who is really imprisoned, and who
is really free?
Then there’s the personal
element: What must I do to be rescued?
But to really get the irony to
this tale of Paul and Silas, we have to read on to the end of
the chapter. Here’s what happens after that
wonderful night with the jailer. The next day the authorities send
the police to the jail to turn them loose. Apparently without a hint of
irony, they say “You’re set free. Go in peace” But Paul’s not
having any of that! He tells the police to go tell
the authorities they are Roman citizens, and they have violated their
constitutional rights, as it were. This alarms the mayor and the
whole town council of Philippi. These boys are trouble. So they go and escort them out of
prison and then like the sheriff’s posse
in a western movie, tell them to get out of town by
sundown! Paul and Silas get out of
Philippi and head to Thessalonica, where they run into more troubles
with the locals.
There’s another good story.
When Benjamin Weir was released
by his captors, it turns out that it was an
arms-for hostage deal engineered by the Reagan
administration: Iran-Contra. The United States sold armaments
to Iran in a deal that was was brokered
and facilitated by the government of Israel. When he was asked whether the
recent U.S-Iran arms deal affected his release, Mr. Weir
said that he could not be certain. “Certainly … I would regret it
very much. The best way to stop kidnappings
of Americans is to help remove the causes that make some men choose that
drastic method in despair," he said.[3]
In approximately the year 50 AD,
the first Christians faced captivity, imprisonment, and persecution, and
they responded to their jailer with compassion, healing, and the
gospel. His despair, which led him to the
brink of suicide, was relieved by the message of
grace brought by his prisoners.
In 1985, a group that called
itself Islamic Jihad held a Presbyterian minister
captive, and when he was freed, he responded with compassion, an
attempt at healing, and the gospel. The message hasn’t changed. Believe in the Lord Jesus, and
you will be saved.
Now, more than 25 years later, we
still struggle with these issues.
To what forces are we held
captive?
What does it take for us to be
truly free from sin and truly captive to Christ?
What must we do to be released
from the chains of hatred,
from the prison of prejudice,
from the fortress of our past
mistakes?
How can we be set free from our
fear?
What must we do to be rescued
from the anxiety created by an onslaught of frightening
news stories, from a relentless pressure to
consume beyond our means, from the solitary confinement of lives that have no meaning beyond
pleasing ourselves?
The message hasn’t changed.
Believe in the Lord Jesus, and
you will be saved.
To believe in Jesus means more
than simply nodding when we hear his name.
To truly live in Christ and have
him live in us demands that we make ourselves
captive to the Holy Spirit, servants to the law of love, slaves to the message that Jesus
taught.
To truly live in Christ is to be his servants, and his
alone.
Through his pardon, we become
free from sin and in his spirit, our spirits
are captive to his grace. His love breaks the chains of
hatred, shatters all the walls that
divide us from self and neighbor, and emancipates us from the
slavery of our past.
In him, we are given the gift of
a new life of freedom, unbound to share the good news— and to shout it louder than the
evening news: through Jesus Christ, we are set
free.
The prison walls will crumble,
and we will live not in confinement but in the blessed sunlight of
community, and no matter what may happen, our spirits, through the Holy
Spirit, will be free.
Believe in the Lord Jesus, in what he said, what he taught,
what he did,
-- in his life, his death, and his resurrection, and you will be set free.
The songwriter said, “Freedom’s
just another word for nothin’ left to lose.”
In Christ Jesus, we have nothing
left to lose, and everything to gain.
Thanks be to God for freedom!
Amen.
Another great sermon - well done!
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