(Homily for Gayton Road Christian Church's Worship on June 2, 2019, Easter VII)
Still Singing
One year ago, the Liverpool
soccer team made it to the Champions League final—which is basically the Super
Bowl of European soccer. As some
of you know, I am a fervent Liverpool supporter. So I was thrilled.
This was the first time in over a decade that Liverpool were competing
for a significant trophy. The day
of the final, I wore the team’s color, red; I exchanged hopeful messages with
Stephen, a good friend and fellow Liverpool supporter in England; and I got
together with my brother to watch the game.
Liverpool lost 3-1. We felt deflated. It was yet another year without a
trophy.
The next day, a strange video
surfaced on the internet. It was
the Liverpool coach, Jurgen Klopp, dancing and singing defiantly with a small
group of fans in the wee hours of the morning. The public response was a mixture of confusion and
criticism. Did he not know that he
just lost the final? What kind of
coach celebrates losing the biggest game of his life?
“Freedom” According to the World
I imagine that there were similar
thoughts running through the minds of the prisoners in Philippi a couple
thousand years ago. It was nearly
midnight when they heard the newcomers singing in the heart of the prison, in
the innermost cell. Hadn’t they
been severely flogged only hours earlier?
Weren’t they unable to move, their feet fastened in stocks? Did they not know that they were
prisoners? The inmates must have
thought that Paul and Silas were crazy.
What Paul and Silas are doing
flies in the face of our world’s understanding and obsession with freedom. According to our world, freedom means
having no restraints. It means
being able to go wherever you want.
It means having the time to do whatever you want. It means having the money to buy whatever
you want.
A little bit earlier in today’s
scripture, some of the Philippian merchants become upset when Paul casts out
the demon of their fortune-telling slave-girl. According to the scripture, they are distraught because
“their hope of making money was gone” (16:19). Much like us today, these merchants understood their freedom
in terms of money, in terms of the power to acquire whatever they wanted. The irony in this moment, however, is
that their slave-girl is now freer than they are. She is no longer captive to the unclean spirit that had
troubled her. But her owners are
captive to the denarius, the
dollar. And not just her owners
but all the town. When others hear
of what happen, a mob attacks Paul and Silas and the authorities throw them
into prison. Money rules this town
more than the magistrates.
Everyone, it seems, is captive to wealth.
We might wonder how much has
changed today in a world that still identifies freedom with money. Is it really freedom to forfeit more
and more of our time in order to earn an extra dollar or to gain a competitive
edge over our rival? Does freedom
look like medicine cabinet full of prescriptions to treat the stress and
anxiety that comes with our addiction to success? Is it freedom to add wall upon wall of security—financial
security, national security, home security—for fear of losing what we have?
The Prisoners Who Were Already Free
In the picture painted by today’s
scripture, it is the free citizens of Philippi who are imprisoned, and the
imprisoned Paul and Silas who are free.
While the mob in the marketplace fights and shouts for fear of the
trouble that might touch their money, Paul and Silas who are shackled to the
floor in the heart of prison are singing hymns to God. How can they who are deprived of every
freedom sing? Tertullian, one of
the first theologians in the church, answered it this way: “The legs feel
nothing in the stocks when the heart is in heaven.” Which is to say, Paul and Silas know that God is with
them. Their heart is in heaven
because they know that the Spirit of God is with them in the chains.
I wonder what they prayed, what
hymns they sang. Maybe they
prayed for rescue. Maybe they sang
with gratitude for the slave girl whose spirit had been set free earlier in the
day. Maybe their prayer was the
Lord’s Prayer: “Thy will be done.”
Whatever they prayed and sang, we know what was in their hearts:
trust. A trust that God could
transform even the worst of conditions into something good.
We know this because when the
earthquake came and their chains were broken and the doors flew wide open, they
did not run for their lives. They
stayed for an even greater good: to save another life. Seeing the jailer prepare to kill
himself, Paul shouts in a loud voice, “Don’t do it! We’re still here” (cf. 16:28).
What happens next is an event
that no one could have foreseen, which is to say it is the work of the Holy
Spirit, whose power is to make possible the impossible. The jailer, who surely had heard Paul
and Silas strangely singing in their cell, asks them how to be saved. If anyone knows, surely it is they who
had looked imprisonment and the possibility of execution in the face and
nonetheless sang. Their response,
born of experience, is simple: trust in the Lord Jesus. Trust in the one who died and yet
lived. Trust in the one who knows
our deepest agony and yet knows also that good can come from it. This trust, and nothing else, is what
makes us free. Free enough to sing
in the heart of prison.
And so it is that the captives
liberate their captor. The
scripture portrays a beautiful symmetry in the story’s resolution: first the
jailer washes the wounds of Paul and Silas, and then they wash him and his
family in the waters of baptism.
And then they gather around—guess what—a table. For the writer of Acts, this is not a
coincidence. It was at tables
where Jesus ate with outcasts, forgave sinners, lifted up the lowly. In short, it was at tables where Jesus
set people free. And it would be
at tables, he said, that we would see him again, that the kingdom would
come.
If this table-gathering between
jailer and jailed isn’t a glimpse of Christ’s liberating love, a glimpse of the
kingdom, I don’t know what is.
Freedom Despite the Conditions
Henry David Thoreau wrote that in
our society, “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” I see that in our world today, and
occasionally in my own life. When
we become fixated with the conditions that limit us, that restrict our “freedom,”
life feels more and more like an obstacle course or a chore. Life is full of “I have to”
moments. I have to do this; I have
to do that. I’m not as free as I’d
like to be.
But I am reminded by today’s
scripture that in Christ I am free. Paul and Silas model for us a different
kind of freedom. Instead of
freedom from conditions, freedom from all that “I have to” moments of life,
they show us freedom despite the conditions, a freedom that instead proclaims,
“I get to.” Paul, who stood
chained to the ground, lived by a freedom that said, “I get to sing, to share
my story, to be a light in this great darkness.” Paul and Silas show us one of the major revolutions that
following Christ accomplishes in our life: instead of living by the “I have to,” in Christ we live by the “I get to.” We are not always free from. But we are always free for. Free for the person who needs a helping hand. Free for the person who needs a
listening ear. Free for the enemy
who stands in need of God’s love just as much as we do.
In just a little bit, when we
gather around the Lord’s Table, we will perform a simple ritual symbolizing the
freedom that we have in Christ.
To prepare for that ritual, I invite us now to consider our personal
prisons. They could be any
condition beyond our control that limits us: aging, addiction, financial
hardship, physical infirmity, or other major changes.
When you have a personal prison
in mind, write it down on the card in your bulletin. We will have a moment of silence now for you to reflect and
write down a word that signifies your personal prison—whatever it is that is
beyond your control and that limits your life.
When we gather around the table,
I will invite us to renew our trust in Jesus Christ, the one who died and yet
lived, the one who has shared our deepest limitations and yet also knows the
good that can come from them. You
will have the opportunity to bring your card forward and tear it in two before
you receive communion, symbolizing that at the Table Christ has set you free. And it is my hope that like Paul and
Silas in stocks we might nonetheless rejoice, and that as we gather around the
table we might like the jailer celebrate that we are free indeed.
Prayer
Christ with us,
Who knows the prisons in which we
sit
And the prisons in which others
sit too—
We trust in you.
We trust that nothing
Is beyond the power
Of your redeeming love.
In this trust,
We are set free—
Not free from difficulty,
But free for full and faithful
life.
We get to live.
Thank you.
Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment