About midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the prisoners were listening to them. Suddenly 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. When 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. But Paul shouted in a loud voice, “Do not harm yourself, for we are all here.” The jailer called for lights, and rushing in, he fell down trembling before Paul and Silas. Then he brought them outside and said, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” They answered, “Believe on the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household.” They spoke the word of the Lord to him and to all who were in his house. At the same hour of the night he took them and washed their wounds; then he and his entire family were baptized without delay. He 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.
Acts 16:25-34 (NRSV)
Ever since I started attending Travelers Rest United Methodist Church five years ago, I have participated in the TRAIL Class on Sunday mornings. We have been on a bit of a hiatus lately, but hopefully we will soon start meeting regularly once again. On one Sunday morning a few years ago, as part of the class discussion, we were asked to consider what the mission statements of our lives might be. I had not previously considered my own personal mission statement, but somehow I immediately knew what mine was. I told the class that my mission in life is “to tell a better story than the one I was told.”
For eleven years, I attended a Christian school attached to a fundamentalist church. At this school, my classmates and I studied all the same subjects that we would have studied at any other school. We were also taught the Gospel message, and we were taught how to share it with others. The word
gospel is derived form the Old English word
gōdspel which means “good news” or “good story.”
1 The good news, as I heard it, was prefaced by such an overwhelming amount of bad news that the good news didn't seem very good at all. The good news was that I had the opportunity to be saved, but the bad news was that a vast majority of humanity is effectively doomed. This “Gospel” was not a story I wanted to share with other people. It did not fill me with hope; it filled me with fear. It was not, as the title of one movie about Jesus would imply, “the greatest story ever told.” It was a horror story that would make the most gruesome fever dream of the most twisted independent film director look like Disney cartoon.
One reason I started preaching is that, as I told my Sunday school class, I want to tell a story that is better than the one I was told. I want to share messages that give people hope and alleviate their fears. It is with this mission, that I bring you this message today.
In the Acts of the Apostles, we read that Paul and Silas, two of the earliest Christian missionaries, found themselves in a bit of trouble while they were ministering in the city of Philippi. In this city, there was a certain slave girl. In our day, we might say that she suffered from a mental illness
2; in her own time, however, she was thought to be possessed by a “spirit of Python” which gave her prophetic powers.
3 Python, according to Greek mythology, was a serpent deity associated with the oracle at Delphi.
4 Still, some people at that time might have thought that the slave girl was possessed by a demon.
5One day, while Paul, Silas, and their partners in ministry were on their way to meet with other believers in Philippi for prayer, this slave girl started pestering them. She followed them around, shouting, “These men are slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim to you a way of salvation!” Whether or not she actually received her prophesies from something supernatural, this one happened to be accurate. The girl's pestering went on for a long time, until Paul had finally had enough. Annoyed, he turned to the girl and said to whatever had taken control of her, “I order you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her.” From that point onward, the slave girl was in her right mind.
6It has been said that “no good deed goes unpunished.” Paul's actions doubtlessly brought the poor girl a great deal of relief. Unfortunately, her masters were not quite so happy. They had been exploiting her condition and making money off the prophetic power it had supposedly given her. Thanks to Paul, that power and that source of income were gone. The girl's masters grabbed Paul and Silas, took them into the marketplace, and started hurling accusations against them, stirring up anti-Jewish sentiments among the crowd.
7 The city magistrates ordered that Paul and Silas be beaten and thrown into the most secure part of the prison.
8While in prison, Paul and Silas prayed and sang praises to God well into the night, while the other prisoners listened to them. Around midnight, there was an earthquake that shook the prison, loosened all of the prisoners' chains, and opened the doors to all of the prison cells. When the sleeping jailer awakened, he saw that all of the prisoners had been freed. Knowing that he had failed in his duties, he drew his sword and prepared to impale himself. Suddenly, Paul shouted, “Do not harm yourself, for we are all here!”
The trembling jailer fell down at the feet of Paul and Silas. He took them aside and asked them, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?”
Paul replied, “Believe on the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household.”
This morning, I want us to ponder the Philippian Jailer's question and Paul's answer. What did the jailer mean when he asked what he must do in order to be “saved”? If he wanted to be saved, then there must be
something from which he wanted to be saved. What exactly did the jailer fear? How would believing in Jesus, as Paul instructed him, save him from it?
Nowadays, when Christians speak about salvation or about being “saved,” they are often speaking in terms of what happens after death. If a person is “saved” in this sense, having put her faith in Jesus Christ, then “some bright morning when this life is over”
9 the person will go to heaven, a place of everlasting bliss, and not to the “other place,” a place of everlasting torment. The fate from which a person is saved is the eternal punishment she supposedly deserves because she is a sinner. To share such a message of salvation with other people, one must first convince them that their eternal destiny is in peril and that they need to be saved. One must first convince them of the bad news before they can share the Good News with them.
I do not believe that, when the Philippian Jailer asked Paul and Silas what he must do in order to be saved, he was at all concerned about what might happen to him in the afterlife. Remember that, just minutes before he asked his question, he fully intended to end his own life. He was running as fast as he could run toward the afterlife until Paul stopped him. Philippi was a Roman colony, meaning that the jailer was employed by the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire was notoriously cruel. From the perspective of the jailer, whatever awaited him in the next life would surely be a sweet relief compared to whatever awaited him in this life if all the prisoners escaped on his watch.
The jailer did not need to be convinced that he needed to be saved. He
knew he needed to be saved, and he desperately
wanted to be saved. Indeed he wanted to be saved from hell, but the hell he feared was a living hell. The jailer wanted to be saved from his own life.
Now compare the perspective of the jailer to that of Paul and Silas. Paul and Silas had been dragged before the authorities, maligned before a crowd, severely beaten, and thrown into the most secure part of a prison. Despite their dire circumstances, they prayed and sang praises to God all through the night, thereby sharing their faith with the other prisoners. Paul and Silas were bound, bruised, and bleeding, but still their hearts were full of hope and joy. They had every reason to despair, yet still they remained hopeful. They were so unfazed by their circumstances that they saw no need to flee when the earthquake loosened their chains and opened the door to their cell.
It was as if Paul and Silas were free the whole time.
So who is the real prisoner in this story? The jailer was supposedly a free man, yet he was a prisoner in his own life. Paul and Silas had been placed in the most secure part of a prison, and their feet had been placed in stocks, yet, somehow, they were still free. They were free in Christ, and nothing, not even the might and the cruelty of the Roman Empire, could take their freedom away from them. Once again, the biblical narrative shows us that not everything is as it appears. In the words of Bishop Will Willimon, “There is freedom, and then there is freedom.”
10 Willimon writes, “Having the key to someone else's cell does not make you free. Iron bars do not a prison make.”
11I think that the jailer witnessed the freedom Paul and Silas enjoyed in spite of their imprisonment. I think that, when he asked them what he must do in order to be saved, he wanted to know how he could rid himself of his own chains and experience the true freedom he had seen in them.
Paul said to the jailer, “Believe on the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved.” Paul restates this instruction in his Letter to the Romans, in which he writes, “If you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”
12 It seems to me that nowadays Paul's instructions are often understood as a type of transaction or contract. If a person signs off on certain theological statements about Jesus, then God will grant that person entry into Heaven upon death. I would like to suggest that salvation is not something one receives in return for one's belief in Christ but rather something one experiences
as a natural result of one's belief in Christ. In other words, wholehearted trust in the resurrection and lordship of Jesus Christ has saving power in itself.
Consider what these truths about Jesus would have meant for the jailer. There can be only one Lord, so, for the jailer, to confess that “Jesus Christ is Lord” would be to also confess that Caesar is
not Lord. It would be to proclaim that it is not the Roman Empire who holds his fate but rather Christ himself. This would indeed be good news for him, because Christ is not like Caesar. To believe that God raised Christ from the dead is to believe that death itself has been defeated. For the jailer, this would mean that the very worst thing the Roman Empire could do to him would not be for him the end of the story.
In the Gospels, we read that the Son of God took on human flesh and dwelled among us as a man known as Jesus of Nazareth.
13 He was the embodiment of God and the embodiment of love. He healed the sick, freed people from their demons, raised the dead, fed the hungry, touched the untouchable, befriended the friendless, gave hope to the hopeless, and proclaimed the coming of a Kingdom that is “not of this world.”
14 Everything Jesus did was an act of love, yet there were people who considered Him a threat.
Jesus, throughout His ministry, regularly clashed with the religious leaders of the day, but, on one fateful week, He put Himself on a collision course with the powers that be. One Sunday, He rode into Jerusalem on a donkey,
15 as if He was some long-awaited king reigning in an age of peace,
16 lampooning the imperial procession that was also happening that day.
17 The next day, He barged into the temple, turned over the tables of the people doing business there, drove everyone out, and condemned the hypocrisy that had infected the religious system,
18 lamenting that the “house of prayer” had been reduced to a “den of robbers.”
19 Jesus had gone too far. On Friday, the religious leaders colluded with the political leaders to have Him sentenced to death by crucifixion, a most heinous form of execution used by the Roman Empire to punish insurgents and to terrorize other would-be revolutionaries into submission.
20 Jesus died on a cross, seemingly forsaken by God.
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