Set Free

Acts 16:16-34

One day, as we were going to a place of prayer, we met a slave girl who had a spirit of divination and brought her owners a great deal of money by fortune telling. While she followed Paul and us, she would cry out, “These men are slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim to you a way of salvation.” She kept doing this for many days. But Paul, very much annoyed, turned and said to the spirit, “I order you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her.” And it came out that very hour. But when her owners saw that their hope of making money was gone, they seized Paul and Silas and dragged them into the marketplace before the authorities. When they had brought them before the magistrates, they said, “These men are disturbing our city; they are Jews and are advocating customs that are not lawful for us as Romans to adopt or observe.” The crowd joined in attacking them, and the magistrates had them stripped of their clothing and ordered them to be beaten with rods. After they had given them a severe flogging, they threw them into prison and ordered the jailer to keep them securely. Following these instructions, he put them in the innermost cell and fastened their feet in the stocks. 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 t aloud voice, “Do not harm yourself, for we are all here.” The jailer called for lights, and rising 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.

Psalm 97

The LORD reigns; let the earth rejoice; let the multitude of the isles be glad. Clouds and darkness surround the LORD, righteousness and justice are the foundations of God’s throne. Fire goes before the LORD, burning up enemies on every side. Lightnings light up the world; the earth sees and trembles. The mountains melt like wax before the Lord of all the earth. The heavens declare your righteousness, O LORD, and all the peoples see your glory. Confounded be all who worship carved images and delight in false gods. Bow down before the LORD, all you gods. Zion hears and is glad, and the cities of Judah rejoice, because of your judgments, O LORD. For you are the LORD, most high over all the earth; you are exalted far above all gods. You who love the LORD, hate evil! God guards the lives of the saints and rescues them from the  hand of the wicked. Light dawns for the righteous, and joy for the honest of heart. Rejoice in the LORD, you righteous, and give thanks to God’s holy name.

Revelation 22:12-14, 16-17, 20-21

“See, I am coming soon; my reward is with me, to repay according to everyone’s work. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.” Blessed are those who wash their robes, so that they will have the right to the tree of life and may enter the city by the gates. “It is I, Jesus, who sent my angel to you with this testimony for the churches. I am the root and the descendant of David, the bright morning star.” The Spirit and the bride say, “Come.” And let everyone who hears say, “Come.” And let everyone who is thirsty come. Let anyone who wishes take the water of life as a gift. The one who testifies to these things says, “Surely I am coming soon.” Amen. Come, Lord Jesus! The grace of the Lord Jesus be with all the saints. Amen.

John 17:20-26

[Jesus prayed:] “I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. Father, I desire that those also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory, which you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world. Righteous Father, the world does not know you, but I know you; and these know that you have sent me. I make your name known to them, and I will make it known, so that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.”

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Have you ever seen a mob in action? There are days when I am afraid of this thing that Jesus prays for, that all who believe in him shall be one. Days when I look at the way those who claim our faith band together to bully and shun and shame and kill others, for whatever reason they decide to justify, based on a verse or two taken out of context. Days when I see the mob of Christians re-enacting the crucifixion against one another, and I wish more of us would think for ourselves instead of following the high anxiety crowd rising up yet again to crush another minority group, feeding fear of anyone else who has dared to say they also are created in the image of holiness.

And we are in the time between Ascension and Pentecost, the ten days where we wait for the promised Holy Spirit because the risen Jesus has returned to the Father. How are we to decide what to do, who to follow in the meantime? Waiting can be so uncomfortable, not knowing, anxious, wondering. Was the promise true? Will life really be different now? Can we trust this new thing or would it be better to return to what we knew before all this nonsense got started?

So these are the days we wrestle. These are the days we make decisions, and learn, and pray, and change, again and again. It would sure be easier to just sit back and fit ourselves into a pre-defined box, follow the crowd, whichever one we feel is least dangerous for us at the moment, but sometimes the crowd is wrong. We were in the crowd almost fifty days ago when we sent Jesus to the cross, after all. From Palm Sunday to Good Friday we went from shouting “Hosanna!” to  making ourselves hoarse yelling “Crucify!” If we’ve learned nothing else from that week just over a month ago, it’s that crowds are fickle. Not only are crowds fickle, but they take away our individual responsibility and power - consider how stoning works, for example. If everybody takes up a rock, like a firing squad where only one gun is really loaded, nobody can claim to have thrown the stone which delivered the death blow, right? If society is a mess, it’s sure not my fault.

But that’s also the power we have as a community when we stand together in love. None of us can know which smile, which vote, which word of encouragement or public stand in support of human dignity tips the scales toward the Kingdom of God.  Consider the story we’re given from the book of Acts this morning - it starts with one ridiculously annoying slave girl, caught in a system of human ownership which is all kinds of complicated and abusive. Yet once Paul loses his patience and shuts her up - not because he thinks slavery is wrong but because he has gotten sick of listening to her - the series of events which follows had a pretty big impact they probably couldn’t see coming.

I love this story from Acts. I’m only a bit biased, since I got to play that slave girl in a dramatic reading back in college, and there are still folks in Illinois who know me as “the possessed girl from church.” But it’s such a fun story, exciting and active, and even though it technically takes place after Pentecost, we have it in our lectionary now, in the in-between time, while we’re still (liturgically) waiting for the promised Holy Spirit. Because waiting doesn’t mean only sitting silent. Waiting is a combination of remembering and looking forward. There is contemplation, to be sure, but waiting is also dreaming, and building, and preparing. We may have thought Easter was the culmination, but there’s even more to come now that we’re living in a world that’s been touched by Resurrection. Resurrection means we don’t have to be afraid of what might kill us if we try to live like Jesus, because even death isn’t the end of things. I mean, how much do we steer away from because it makes us afraid, even though it’s the right thing?

And here’s the hope behind our waiting - Jesus prays for his disciples before he is killed, and that prayer is the only time in the entire Gospel of John where Jesus tells God what he wants. All throughout the rest of John’s Gospel Jesus is talking about doing the Father’s will, and here in this prayer Jesus tells God what his will is, what he wants: he wants us. He wants us, and he wants us all, and he wants all of us. See, that guard in the Acts reading was technically Paul’s enemy. The slave owners whose livelihoods were ruined when Paul set that girl free, they were pretty much against Paul all the way after that. But those social classes, those distinctions between Jew and Gentile, between jailer and prisoner, those did not change the far-reaching love of God, the love which at the end of the day unlocked the chains of more than just Paul and his companions. 

This is why God’s claim on us is so important. We are both jailer and prisoner, back and forth, now and again. We have suffered, and we have inflicted suffering, we have been silent and we have been pestered to the point of losing our tempers. The center that makes us one, through all of our soaring highs and crashing lows, is that Jesus wants us, loves us, all of us and all there is to us. It isn’t that we all vote one party or have one way of making coffee or even that we all speak the same cultural language. Our unity as the Body of Christ depends not on what battles we fight or ignore, but on the love which took on flesh to live with us so we wouldn’t live or die alone. “Let everyone who wishes take the water of life as a gift,” says the reading from Revelation today. It’s not something we earn by living according to any set of rules, it’s not something we deserve because we checked all the right boxes on a secret list somewhere, it’s a gift, pure and simple and freely given.

We may not see our unity in the news or even when we open a can of worms at work among friends. We may not know our unity in the fights and silences. We may forget our unity when we are hurt or angry. But the love which unites us is not the love we have for one another, if it were it would never come to pass. Instead, the love which unites us is the love which God has for us, the love by which Jesus prayed for us in the hours leading up to his public execution by the religious and political authorities. The love which stared death in the face for our sake and still did not let go of us but carried us through that hell, carries us still, and sets us free whether we are in chains or holding the key to someone else’s chains.

This is the way of salvation, kindred: you are loved. Entirely and eternally.