We continued to spend time with the apostle, Paul, during his stay in Philippi.
If last week, we could 'learn a lot from Lydia', and reflect on being open to God, this week we thought about freedom and chains as we encountered a female slave, a prison warder, and saw both Paul and Silas imprisoned...
Rather than one longer sermon, we had two shorter reflections.
The first, 'Prisoner 17', was a 1st person narrative looking through the eyes of a prisoner in the jail where Paul and Silas had been sent.*
The second, 'Chains and freedom', teasing out some thoughts and questions from the text.
READINGS/ Psalm 97; Acts 16.16-34
REFLECTION ‘Prisoner 17’*The longer you stay in prison, the harder it is to keep a sense of who you are.
Every day, they try to take away a piece of you.
It starts with your name:
me, I’m ‘Prisoner 17’,
not a name, just a number to be counted,
just another body to be kept in line.
Conform to survive – that’s the message.
The harder you fight against the system,
the longer you try to remain who you are,
the more they try and break you.
It can get pretty dark in prison:
not just physical conditions –
shut away from daylight –
but there’s a darkness that seeps into the heart as time goes on;
the loss of hope, the growing despair that this is all there is,
and this is all there will be;
there’s the darkness that seeps into your soul, too...
sometimes a loss of faith,
often a growing cynicism.
Prison knocks away your softness fairly quickly –
you harden up,
toughen up,
and if you don’t,
you crack up.
When the new prisoners turned up, bets were made: who would crack first?
I had my eye on the two missionaries.
They'd been beaten black and blue.
I bet they wouldn't last the night.
But I lost my bet.
Those guys should have been groaning in agony.
The jail was buzzing with just how harsh their flogging was.
But they had a whole different way of doing time.
Where others would have crawled into a dark corner like beaten dogs,
these two somehow found the strength to sit up,
propping themselves against the stone walls, gingerly inspecting the damage.
Where others would have cursed their fate, these two just looked at each other,
shrugged their shoulders, and even managed a wee chuckle.
When they were offered drugs and alcohol to numb their pain, they smiled and shook their heads.
When the usual grub-infested prison fodder came, they gave thanks.
I’ve been in this prison for a long time, and seen most things,
but never anything like that.
As the hours dragged on, they found out my talent
for being able to get things in – or out – of the prison: all sorts of things.
Favourite food, plonk, knives, even escape tools.
Paul wanted hymn books.
Well, that was weird.
Perhaps they planned to drown out the noise of trying to dig a tunnel?
But no, not that –
they... just wanted to sing...
And they seemed oddly confident:
as if they knew something was going to happen.
Well, hard-bitten as I am, this certainly piqued my curiosity.
Even as bruised and battered as they were, my word, their singing...
there was certainly nothing wrong with their lungs,
and they didn’t seem particularly bothered about keeping us all awake –
prisoners and jailer alike, even if it might mean more beatings.
It seemed there was going to be no sleep for any of us – and the strange thing was...
I don’t actually think any of us minded.
Rough and cracked as their voices were, there was something about the singing that lifted us –
lifted our spirits,
lifted our hearts,
lifted me in such a way that I was shaken to the core –
felt whole
felt like me, not a number;
felt... that God had not abandoned me;
felt that love of God which had seemed so far away,
for far too many years...
and realised it was me who’d closed my heart;
that God had always been there, but I’d been too busy being bitter, angry, resentful –
letting all of that wrap ‘round my heart like chains.
But then I realised it wasn’t just me that was somehow shaken to the core:
the whole prison was shaking and I thought the walls would fall down.
And so they did.
Stones came loose,
and so did shackles.
And still the singing.
We sat there, all of us prisoners, transfixed, listening to Paul and Silas...
even though we could have run away.
In the aftermath of the wall collapse there was a stillness –
peaceful, calm.
And then the sound of worried, hurried footsteps:
the jailer.
Odd.
I actually had some sympathy for him:
he was terrified.
If we’d escaped, he’d have been done for.
He saw the fallen wall,
fell on his knees,
pulled out his knife –
better he die here, than be publicly executed.
And in the dim light of that place,
among the scattered stones and loosened shackles,
Paul’s voice rang out once more, not in song, but in sympathy:
letting the jailer know that we were all still here –
that he wouldn’t get in trouble.
That night, they saved his life.
He washed their wounds,
wanted to hear more about the sort of god
who’d knock down prison walls at the sound of a song.
That night, they saved his life,
and his soul,
and saved his family too.
As for me:
I’m not sure why I didn’t run away –
would have been nice to see the sun and sky,
to feel the grass underfoot,
to taste olives and drink wine.
But, I’d seen the outside world –
and it wasn’t a touch on the freedom of Paul and Silas.
I didn’t run away because...
I wanted what they had.
We're all in our little prisons –
addiction, prejudice, loneliness, resentment, or whatever it may be.
That night my prison door was open.
Maybe I could find redemption,
even if it meant someone going through a whole lot of muck to bring it to me.
In the meantime, they seemed to chat a lot about some guy called Jesus;
sounded like a cool story...
maybe I'll see if I can find out more*
[*rewritten, based on a piece from 'Roots'/ 'The Philippi Redemption']
REFLECTION 2 ‘Chains and freedom’
Last week, our intrepid disciples arrived in Philippi.
There, they met Lydia, a wealthy merchant
who was looking for more depth,
more meaning to life...
looking to fill what seemed to be a God-shaped hole in her heart.
We heard how Paul shared the story of Jesus with her,
we heard her response:
a giant ‘yes’ to God – and then sharing the story of Jesus with her household;
of all of them being baptised – that great symbol of welcome into God’s family.
And, after all that, we heard how Lydia invited the disciples to come and stay at her house:
providing welcome and hospitality to those who had been strangers,
but who were now brothers in faith – spiritual family.
And, as we heard earlier in our reading, the disciples are still in Philippi.
'The adventures of the apostles continue in this wonderfully detailed story
of exorcism and outrage,
mob scenes and courtroom drama,
liberation and celebration,
with Paul and Silas at the centre of the action,
and God very busy at work everywhere.' [Kate Matthews]
If I had to squeeze this episode from Acts into a nutshell,
then the phrase that comes to mind is ‘chains and freedom’.
There’s the unnamed slave girl released from a demonic spirit in the name of Jesus;
there’s a jailer liberated from fear;
and there’s Paul and Silas, already spiritually free
but here, set free from imprisonment in the aftermath caused
by the slave girl’s owners, who create a stooshie as they realise
that the woman they were exploiting is no longer going to be so useful to them.
It’s a dramatic story that can leave us with as many questions as it does answers.
For instance:
What happened to the slave girl afterwards?
Sure, we know that Paul has released her from her inner shackles –
free in mind and spirit.
But, she’s still the property of the slave owners.
And, perhaps, in a more difficult situation, in one sense,
given that she now no longer is going to make as much money.
We, as listeners to the story, have to live with this odd ambiguity:
knowing that, at this time, slavery was real,
and, that Paul doesn’t use this moment as some kind of great teaching opportunity
to demonstrate the evils of slavery as an institution.
Moving on from this troubling part of the story in Acts, another question pops up.
Thinking now of Paul and Silas in prison,
and of the walls tumbling down at the sounds of their hymns of praise,
we meet a jailer so terrified of his bosses,
that he’d rather kill himself than face them.
‘What must I do to be saved?’
is a very pertinent question indeed:
''Why would a mistake on one’s job be seen as so horrific that he would invite death,
rather than face the consequences or shame of admitting to a mistake?
Is this kind of pressure self-imposed or a product of a hostile political environment?
It’s clear that the shadow of the empire looms large here;
Rome is mentioned numerous times in Acts 16.' [Jennifer Kaalund]
It seems that jailor, too, needed salvation.
Had the prisoners escaped, he would have faced execution.
But it’s the relief of realising that the prisoners haven’t escaped
that creates a spiritual dimension to his question of what to do in order to be saved.
What must he do?
Simply: believe in Jesus.
The story of Jesus is shared with the jailer, and, as with Lydia and her household,
they come to faith,
they are baptised,
and, as the verse 34 states:
they are filled with joy
because they had come to believe in God.
Joy.
Because to know God is to know true freedom –
the freedom that, even though in prison, Paul and Silas knew –
knew so well that they were able, in the face of dire circumstances,
to sing songs of praise to God.
There are so many things that can chain us:
literally, as in the ongoing blight that is human trafficking.
But also, spiritually and mentally...
fear can take hold,
we struggle to find peace,
we struggle to find hope...
it’s almost too easy to get so caught up in bad news stories
that we lose sight of the everyday goodness of people –
of small acts of kindness happening everywhere around the world that never make the news.
In our story from Acts, we have an interesting commentary on institutional power:
the power of the slave owners who had the law on their side;
the power of Rome who had the world at their feet.
In the end, however, what we see is what real power looks like:
the power that can free a soul from mental and spiritual chains,
the power that can cause fear to turn to joy,
the power that can cause prisoners to sing songs of praise.
The power that can break down prison walls
is the same power that can cause institutions and empires to crumble –
for this power comes from God and God’s power lasts forever.
Living a life of faith can be challenging:
Jesus never promised us that it would be easy –
but he did promise us that he would be with us in the midst of it all –
the joy and the pain.
Shortly, we’ll share in bread and wine,
and, as we remember the life, the death, and the resurrection of Jesus,
and, as we learn to rely on him,
we can find comfort, and, find hope:
for nothing is strong enough to hold us captive, or bad enough to separate us from God.
We don’t have to be chained –
we don’t have to be prisoners –
to fear, or anger, or disappointment, or ...
whatever it is that holds us down
and wrecks the fulness of life that Christ has called us to.
What must we do to be saved?
Simply...
believe in Jesus,
the One who frees us,
the One who has the power to fill us with deep, deep joy
even when the going gets tough -
especially when the going gets tough,
for God has the power to transform our very lives. Amen.
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