Imprisoned
Acts 16:16-34

May 20, 2007


There is nothing like a Biblical story and again here is a paramount example. The uniqueness of Biblical stories is that while narrating some spectacular and some quite mundane events, something always truly remarkable is slipped into the sentences. They sneak up on us with godly impudence and tend to overthrow the rest of the text and its story. Usually, however, we ignore these sneaky intrusions. After all, they are dangerous to your spiritual equilibrium.

The gang is all here in Philippi, the leading city in Macedonia, north of Greece, a country now back on the map. History buffs may recognize that Philippi is named after Philip of Macedon, the father of Alexander the Great. This is where the narrator of the Book of the Acts of the Apostles begins to speak in the first person plural, “As we were going to the place of prayer....” Most think this is Luke himself, the author of the Gospel of Luke and Acts, at the juncture when he joined the missionary venture with Paul and Silas. No matter what, We are all now part of the venture and our typical routine is to go to prayer and worship. A funny thing happened on the way to worship.

We were met by a slave girl who had a spirit of divination. She had some kind of psychic powers that her owners had recognized could be quite useful to turn more than a few bucks. So they prostituted her for their financial gain, not using her sexuality in this case, but her mental aberration that could tell fortunes. For Paul and company it was nothing less than demonic possession. Remember now that she is a slave girl, but when she yells at these men that they are possessed by the Most High God her mind is expressing both fear and hope - the fear that they might well change her dramatically, along with the hope that indeed that is what they will do and liberate her spirit.

Funny thing did happen on the way to the worship that no great alarm is expressed over the young girl’s slavery. Even Paul in his Letter to Philemon did not outright condemn slavery, so ingrained it was in the social structures of the day. Interesting how we hold up everything the Biblical witnesses accepted as the pristine age of moral purity. No one accepts slavery as morally defensible anymore, but since it is Biblically sanctioned and participated in even by the saints, it must be moral.

Funny thing too that Paul’s annoyance drove him to realize that there was a free girl who needed to be pulled out into the open. Annoyance is a surprising mood for Luke to admit about Paul. Not the worst of moods, but not that pleasant nor the height of Christian demeanour, but it got the slavery spirit out.

I just heard the old axiom again this week, “No good deed goes unpunished!” An exorcism in the name of Jesus Christ to free a young girl was not viewed as economically viable and was considered a hostile act. As a reward they were dragged in front of the magistrate, stripped and beaten within an inch of their lives and then thrown into jail where life was not supposed to live.

For the slave owners their “hope of gain” had vanished. The girl had to be subconsciously hoping for freedom; the slavers had lost hope for the profit on the slavery of another human being. This is one of those sneaky intrusions into the Gospel text. They don’t stop intruding.

“These men are Jews and are disturbing our city,” the slavers accuse. How many cities and towns and villages have launched this ploy and condemnation? You are not from here and being a foreigner and a stranger, your very presence disturbs our peace, especially when you print your impressions of us in Macleans.

“They are advocating customs which it is not lawful for us Romans to accept or practice?” Sound familiar? Is it not lawful to treat someone, even a young child, as an equal? Is it not lawful to heal someone of a debilitating affliction? Is it the custom to use other people as throwaway things for your own financial benefit? This is another sneaky intrusion, for while we know we are not Philippi, Macedonia, or Selma and Birmingham, Alabama, what are our customs in our city that outsiders are not allowed to violate? The Bible always talks about real cities, probably so that we get the hint that God does act in our real city too.

And in real cities there are jails. I have been in a number of them, visiting congregational members and other acquaintances. Some jails are old and dull and some are new and shiny. Personally, I feel less comfortable in the new shiny jails for they metallically exuded the feeling of sterility. Philippi’s prison was neither clean nor new, but in that inner prison Paul and Silas prayed and sang hymns at midnight. No one told them to shut up, though; the other prisoners were not annoyed and listened intently until the walls came tumbling down and all chains and locks were unloosed.

The sneaky part here is not the earthquake: this region still suffers terrifying and disastrous earthquakes. There is no scriptural linking this natural disaster to God’s providence. God did not particularly send the earthquake. It happened in God’s good time and this time was a particularly good time for Paul and Silas. There was no miracle, except the one when the jailer realized what had happened and was about to commit suicide because he thought he had lost all his prisoners, and then discovered no one had left. The jailer had heard the hymns and prayers and was so deeply gratified by his prisoners who did not abandon him he knew God was involved. Paul and Silas taught him the word of God and he came to believe.

Think about a jail like this in which if the jailer loses a prisoner he has to kill himself. Who really is the prisoner? Theoretically, the inmates can leave, but not the jailer. Despite all the media brouhaha, Paris Hilton is not going to Philippi.

But now the incarcerator becomes the hospitable one, inviting Paul and Silas into his home, feeding them, binding their wounds from the vicious beatings, and asking to be baptized. That is an earthquake of a change in the soul of a human being. The magistrates figured it was time to get the strangers out of the city, but feisty Paul insisted that they come and release them themselves as fellow Roman citizens. The magistrates were embarrassed beyond imagining for they lowered themselves without a second thought and apologized directly to Paul and Silas. Only then did the dynamic duo take their time, sauntering out of that strange city, bidding farewell to all their new friends and fellow Christians.

This is a Biblical story, but it is not a fairy tale. God did not rescue the afflicted, but God did change the whole being a man who denied people freedom into a person who included everyone he knew into his freedom and so became free himself. Paul and Silas healed some one afflicted and enslaved, but you are seldom awarded for your healing in that culture or in ours. They did not lose hope and sang their joy in the middle of the night. There will be more suffering in this world, in our experience, before the walls come tumbling down, but our hope empowered by the love and example of Christ keeps alive our truth and our love. There is nothing else more important.

Keep in mind that sneaky ending. In the ancient Roman Empire the most valued and precious possession was nothing physical, but the fact that one was a Roman citizen in any part of the empire. The magistrates were behooved to some powerful businessmen, a reality often the case even today, so they indicted Paul and Silas as foreigners who were disturbing the peace of their fair city by thinking and acting differently. Then they found out to their deep humiliation that Paul and Silas were Roman citizens - exactly who the magistrates were at their very best moment. The Christian preachers were not strangers, but their equals, their brothers in what matters the most. Perhaps that is another way of defining the Gospel: discovering that the people you have treated as strangers and foreigners are really your fellow citizens in the kingdom of God.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan