Freedom Worth Having

Photo of the Rev. Canon Sue Sommer by The Rev. Canon Susan Sommer

It was a beautiful May evening as Rick and I drove south from Atchison on Kansas Highway 7. If you’ve driven that road, you know that it gently winds up hill and down dale. And if you drive it while twilight gathers, as we did,  you’ll eventually see tall bright lights off in the distance which at first glance on a beautiful May evening you might mistake for lighted baseball diamonds. That is, until you realize that you are approaching Leavenworth and that the lights illumine something a bit more sinister than a ball park. The prison there is a foreboding place. Foreboding, but positively palatial compared to the prison in Philippi to which this morning’s reading from Acts is set.

Paul and Silas have been travelling throughout Asia Minor in their mission to the Gentiles. Last week we heard about Lydia, the wealthy woman who was converted by Paul to Christianity. This week’s passage, by contrast, opens with the story of a very different woman – an unnamed girl who is doubly enslaved. Possessed by a spirit of divination, she is an object of economic exploitation by her owners. Paul casts out the demon – which interestingly enough correctly identifies Paul and Silas. The girl’s owner responds predictably to this sudden economic downtown by stirring up the crowds and inciting the officials to arrest Paul and Silas, flog them, and throw them into the innermost cell of the prison – a dark, windowless place that would have seemed very much like a tomb.

This, of course, is Luke at his story-telling best. The characters are Paul and Silas, but the motif is pure Jesus Christ – the healing and restoration of a vulnerable person who cannot even ask for what she needs, the crowd responding in fear to this new world order, the arrest on trumped up charges, being beaten and ultimately thrown into a tomb, and finally, an earthquake that frees them from the chains that bind them. These narrative details should all sound incredibly familiar because, of course, they are. In this account of Paul and Silas, we hear again the passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

But Luke, of course, isn’t done with us. Resurrection doesn’t just hand us a Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card so that we can resume the life we had before bondage or death intervened. Paul and Silas don’t use their miraculous freedom, for example, to throw the jailer into their newly vacated cell just before hitting the road. A spirit of revenge had landed them in prison, but that is not the spirit that now illumines their lives. Resurrection, after all, leads to new and transformed lives in ways that ripple outward – the way seismic shock waves radiate outward from the epicenter of an earthquake. There are more chains to be broken – specifically, those of the jailer. To be sure, he was not enslaved by demonic possession or by an economic system built on human exploitation, as the slave girl was. His bondage was one that we contemporary middle class folks perhaps recognize better. His bondage was to a social system that makes failure the unforgiveable sin.

Truly, he said a mouthful when he asked, “What must I do to be saved?” This was not some abstract theological question here. In a culture bound by codes of honor and shame, any jailer whose prisoners escaped was toast. His life was about to change radically. He just didn’t know then to what extent. “What must I do to be saved?”

“Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ,” came the answer. Or better, trust that life shaped by Resurrection is freedom worth having. Paul and Silas were not suggesting that the jailer, in the midst of his panic, assent to a set of theological precepts. They handed him a lifeline because in fact, he was every bit as imprisoned as his own prisoners were. Only he was imprisoned by a death-dealing system of fear, violence, and scapegoating.

Paul and Silas were on a mission in Asia Minor, preaching the good news of the resurrection when they themselves experienced resurrection. They were freed from particular bondage and they used their freedom to free others. The jailer and his household were baptized and they, in turn, became agents of healing and nourishment for Paul and Silas. This is what the baptized community of believers looks like. And this is what the baptized community of believers does. In Christ, we are freed from the power of death, and from the power of death-dealing systems, so that we can be made free for lives of service.

This is the Seventh Sunday of Easter. Last Thursday we observed the Feast of the Ascension, where Luke tells us that Jesus was swept up into the heavens. Next Sunday, we celebrate Pentecost, the coming of the Holy Spirit and the beginnings of the Church. But on this day, in this liminal period between the Resurrected Christ ascending to his Father and the sending of the Holy Spirit, we are invited to think about what Christian community looks like, and what we are called to do. In today’s passage, Luke seems to put flesh around what Paul himself wrote 2 or 3 generations earlier in his letter to the Galatians– that in Christ there is neither slave nor free, Jew nor Gentile, male nor female, but all are one. Lydia and her household, the jailer and his, the slave girl, Paul and Silas – as diverse a community in Philippi as we see….well…as we see at the Cathedral.

And our task? No different than theirs, and no less challenging. To believe on the Lord Jesus. And let’s be clear, this doesn’t start with intellectual assent to a series of theological principles. That comes later.  It starts with trust –  trust in the saving action of a sovereign God who enters our humanity to take it up and redeem it.[1] Trust that the life shaped by Resurrection is freedom worth having.

[1] “Trust in….redeem it” is a direct quote taken from Ronald Cole-Turner’s reflection on this periscope in Feasting on the Word, Year C, Volune 2; WJK Publishers, Louisville, KY p. 526.