"Get Out of Jail Free"

First Presbyterian Church
May 20, 2007
Peter S. Buehler
Acts 16:16-34

Then he brought them outside and said,
"Sirs, what must I do to be saved?"

In today's scripture from Acts 16 we hear similarities to last week's passage. Last Sunday we read about major changes in Paul's travel plans, his vision of a man from Macedonia speaking to him, saying Come over and help us -- a dream that diverted him from Asia Minor to Europe, bringing Christian faith to that continent.

The church began in Europe, in the Macedonian city of Philippi, with a businesswoman named Lydia, a "worshiper of God" -- someone who believed in the God of Israel and was a friend of the Jewish community. We read that while Paul was preaching, The Lord opened her heart to listen eagerly to (his message) -- something took hold, the good news became good to her, and Lydia found herself changed. She responded with baptism -- for her and her entire household -- then by insisting that Paul, Silas and the others accept her hospitality and stay in her home.

Today's passage also involves someone coming to faith, in this case a supervisor in the Philippi Department of Corrections. How Paul, Silas and the jailer happened to come face-to-face -- like the way Paul came to meet Lydia -- is equally remarkable. Fed up with the ranting of a slave girl, a prophetess who followed the missionaries for days on end shouting These men are slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim to you  a way of salvation -- which, of course, was true, but became unbearably annoying when it was screamed over and over, day after day -- Paul conducted an emergency exorcism, freeing the girl from her pesky fortune-telling spirit, but also depriving her huckster handlers of their handsome profits. Hauling Paul and Silas before the city officials and accusing them proselytizing for Judaism, the magistrates did the expedient thing, having the men thrashed and thrown into jail, where the jailer placed them in stocks in a cell in the high security area in the center of the building.

There we see Paul and Silas praying and singing hymns! Whether outside by the river, or inside chained to a wall, they were content, happy just to worship. It's material for another sermon, but remarkable things happen to Christians when they find themselves in prison. The story of Presbyterian missionary Ben Weir, Hostage Bound, Hostage Free, Ben and his wife Carol's account of his abduction from a street in Beirut on May 8, 1984, after which he was held hostage with others for 16 months, including an Associated Press correspondent and a Roman Catholic priest, is also about the freedom he felt as a prisoner -- freedom from other distractions, freedom for closeness to God and fellow prisoners.
I'll never forget his telling a group of Presbyterians that after his release he found himself missing the time he had to read his Bible.

I found that amazing; I still do. Ben's point was not to diminish his predicament, or look at it through rose-colored glasses, but to acknowledge that God was, and is never, absent, even in the most extreme places, even in times of the most extreme isolation, deprivation and fear.

Amazing things happen. And here today's passage takes a surprising turn, because the jailer, we realize, is not at all like Lydia -- he's no worshipper of God, he is not gathered with other believers in a place of prayer, he is not listening to the preaching of an apostle. In fact, there is no indication of any religious curiosity, any spiritual seeking in this man's heart whatsoever. The fact is, he's fast asleep. His prisoners are secure and so is he. Life is good; time for a nap.
What could go wrong?

Then God surprises. God, it seems, does not want people to sleep walk through life. God created the heavens and the earth, and God creates moments to bring people to faith.

How did you come to faith? How did God find you? Where did your faith begin?
And do you believe that God is still at work in you, that your conversion is unfinished?

Presbyterians, people in our faith tradition, have long believed that there are no unspiritual people, that even the Philippian jailer was ready for God. In our tradition, we affirm that every human being is spiritual, not just a select few, those others label as "spiritual." In our theology, we believe that if people are breathing, if they are inhaling, they are spiritual, for breath, the very air we breath, is God's life-giving Spirit -- both the Old and New Testaments affirm this truth. Going a step further, in the words of Howard Rice, formerly of San Francisco Theological Seminary, "To be human is to be created for relationship with God, and anything other than such a relationship leaves us unsatisfied, even when we cannot name what we want (Reformed Spirituality, p.22).

Even when we cannot name what we want -- which was my experience. My own conversion to faith in Christ has included many times of not being able to say what it was that I wanted. My search began at a young age, with music. I was in the 2nd grade, and to this day I remember being stirred in my soul when my teacher played a recording of a well-known choral group. In that moment every other sound in the room, my classmates' laughter, their conversations, fell away and I was enveloped by sense of beauty so powerful and deep and glorious that I knew there was a dimension to life that was different, extraordinary.
I don't think I was aware of it, but for years I sought after that feeling -- that assurance of beauty, of depth and goodness, of holiness. It wasn't until years later, and after some unexpected and undeserved grace in the midst of personal difficulty, that I realized the One reaching out to me, the One who had been there all along, was Jesus.

Your story may be similar. Yours may be like Lydia's: your conversion a gradual process. Perhaps over the course of your life you've found yourself down by the river listening, even eagerly listening, your mind and heart open to God's life-giving promises. Perhaps this has been so for you since birth, you've believed ever since you were little, inheriting a strong and sincere faith from your parents, or from a parent, making it your own. Your journey may have involved some wandering from the church, and some significant course corrections now and again, but you have never doubted the grace of God in Jesus Christ.

Or your story may be like the jailer's, your conversion happening out of the blue when you were fast asleep -- asleep in your own spirit, asleep to your need for God and for love and for purpose in your life. And then suddenly something happened -- something of earthshaking proportions -- and you could no longer live as an alien to your self and your Creator.

The late Howard Thurman, author, philosopher, and civil rights leader, wrote that "the experience of conversion is a crisis in which the individual is able to experience the grace of God in spite of a sense of personal unworthiness."

A crisis. Finding his prisoners unshackled and free, the jailer was about to take his own life when Paul shouted out to him and told him not to do it, for they were all there, no one had fled. Which is what true freedom does, freedom in Christ -- you don't need to go anywhere, you don't need to run away, you stay where you are and let God work through you. Which is what happened. The entire episode with the slave girl and the phony trial brought about the conversion of a man who didn't know what it was he wanted until he realized that it was the Christians who were free and he was the one in prison. A light went on: he wanted the freedom they had.

Perhaps the jailer's story is your story. Your conversion occurred in a moment of crisis, and you made a decision for freedom, a decision for faith in Christ as Savior and Lord. Or maybe your journey, like mine, combines aspects of the jailer's experience and Lydia's: your conversion to faith being a gradual turning, an ongoing movement away from pride, self-centeredness and ego, toward the steadfast love of God. But you also can admit that your journey has been jolted and redirected along the way; you've had your own lightning-bolt moments when you experienced the grace of God in spite of an overwhelming sense of personal unworthiness.

Either way, through times of gradual change and times of sudden redirection -- God has been good! Grace comes in many different ways, slow ways and surprising ways, but always for our well-being in mind, our wholeness.

I honor other churches and their traditions, but I am grateful for our church and its affirmation that a person's conversion to faith in Christ doesn't have to happen in a certain way to be authentic. We don't have to remember exactly when it was that we were saved in order for us to know that we are in God's hands.

By the same token, conversion is vital; our life in Christ, our salvation, matters more than we can know. It is the end of an old way of life; it is the beginning of something utterly new, a new way of living and trusting and loving.

And we all need it -- we all need redirecting, whether it be gradual or radical. We all need to move from second-hand faith, the faith of others, to the first-hand faith of Lydia and the Philippian jailer. We decide to be baptized, or to reaffirm our baptism and recommit ourselves to the Lord, responding to the grace we've received by using the gifts we are given: hospitality, in Lydia's case, compassion, in the jailer's case. There are a diversity of gifts and a multitude of ways to respond to the breath of God in us.

Two points in closing. First, it's lifelong; our conversion is always, it is what God does and is doing over the course of our lives. It doesn't stop at a certain age or a certain stage. When we reach a new point of understanding, of maturity, our journey only begins in a new way -- a bit like a wonderful marriage, or a long friendship, something new is always happening.

Yet in this way, our lifelong process of conversion is stunning. Because gradual change over time can result in a complete redirection -- we may not believe how different we have become, merely by following small daily, weekly habits of faith.

Author Diogenes Allen points out that "If we raise our arm vertically, in twelve hours it will be pointed in the opposite direction because of the rotation of the earth. Even though the earth turns at the rate of a thousand miles per hour, we do not feel it." So in Christian faith the main issue is being devoted to God; that is what we need to be about. Over time as we live lives of devotion, God changes us, God points us in the right direction.

Are there opportunities for us to grow in our devotion, our pointing, in small acts of faithfulness? Are there ways we can rededicate ourselves to prayer, to study, to service, and kindness, and compassion? 19th century Scottish preacher and writer, George MacDonald, writes:
But we who would be born again indeed,
Must wake our souls unnumbered times a day,
And urge ourselves to life with holy greed;
Now ope our bosoms to the wind's free play;
And now, with patience forceful, hard, lie still,
Submiss and ready to the making will,
Athirst and empty, for God's breath to fill.
(From MacDonald's Diary of an Old Soul)

Perhaps our prayer should not be that we are full and satisfied, happy and content. It's not a bad thing to be thirsty and empty, waiting with patience, lying still, trusting God.

A final thought: when our friends or neighbors, or the strangers we meet are shaken, let's be ready. What Paul and Silas did when that occurred was to stay put; then they cared for the most unlikely person in the building: the jailer, the man in control who had suddenly become most vulnerable. Their concern for him, for his life, is what made the difference: it caused him to change his mind, to believe in them, to believe in Jesus, to seek conversion, to become a free man and start life in a new way.

It's true for us; we never know how God will use us, when we will be in a position where our compassion can change a life. When it does happen, may God grant us a stillness of spirit, keeping us where we are, unafraid, ready to share the good news with our words, ready to share God's love with our deeds.

Because sometimes it's the people we least expect who are the most ready.