Seventh Sunday of Easter
June 2, 2019
Acts 16:16-34
With Paul and Silas, we came to Philippi in Macedonia, a Roman colony, and, as we were going to the 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 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 in 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.
Sermon Text
Last Sunday I preached on the topic of Wellness. I talked about how Jesus calls us to be well, and to make changes in our lives towards being well, using our own strength, creativity and wisdom, but also to tap in the power of God to help you. We all know change is hard, but we can with Jesus’ help, make decisions in our lives regardless of what life throws at us that help us feel whole, sound and well. It’s really in a nutshell the second part of the Rienhold Neibhur’s Serenity Prayer – “God grant me the courage to change the things I can.”
But one thing about sermons, there is always something that is unsaid. Every sermon that is preached is unfinished. At the end of a sermon there is a completely legitimate point where the listeners can say “yah but…”
And so today I am going to talk about the “yah but…” And the Yah But about choosing Wellness is that there are just some things in our lives we can’t change. So, this is really the first part of the Serenity Prayer – “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change.” There are just some circumstances that are beyond our control. Last week I talked about “Do you want to be made well?” being a powerful question. This week instead of a powerful question we have a powerful image – a prison. And when we talk about prison – it is not like our modern criminal justice system and incarceration at high and medium security prison. In this passage a prison is a powerful symbol of the loss of freedom. A loss of freedom because what we want is either 1) not available to us because we weren’t able to do what we wanted to because of other people’s actions or 2) because of our limitations in body, mind and spirit.
And when I was thinking about what is available to us when we find ourselves restricted, limited, have some degree of freedom taken away or we feel powerless – two different thoughts come to mind. The first thought are words from Victor Frankl who was a neuroscientist, psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor. As Frankl considered the profound and traumatic effect of the Holocaust – in his book Man’s Search for Meaning he wrote “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing; the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way”. He revolutionized psychotherapy with his belief that man’s primary motivation force is his search for meaning – meaning even within the most extreme and difficult circumstances.
Here is the second thought: And it is related to meaning. It was something I read recently in the book Girl Wash Your Face by Rachel Hollis who is a Christian, an author, and Motivational Speaker. She wrote, “I don’t believe everything happens for a reason [in reference to pain, trauma and loss] but I do believe you can find purpose in what does not have an explanation.[1] “
I just want to say that again: I don’t believe everything happens for a reason but I do believe you can find purpose in what does not have an explanation.
These two quotes are powerful reminders that in every moment of our lives we can choose to respond constructively rather than react destructively either to myself or others. And Rachel Hollis’ words are a reminder that in every situation we are faced with we can find purpose and meaning, no matter how awful the circumstances. These are two ways we can demonstrate the content of our character and the depth of our faith.
And we find Paul as an example of this. Imprisoned, he still finds purpose – and actually opts to stay in prison although he could have made a jail break after the earthquake – but he stays imprisoned so the guard does not get in trouble. And he takes this imprisonment as an opportunity to preach the gospel which results in the guard’s conversion and then subsequent baptism of his household.
This story from Acts reminds me of countless stories of imprisonment where people have found purpose and meaning in the midst of the loss of freedom.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote some of his most inspiring letters and papers while in a concentration camp in Nazi Germany. His collection, Letters and Papers from Prison stands as one of the most important of Christian writings in the last century. Dr. Martin Luther King, wrote “[A] Letter from Birmingham Jail,” one of the most important written works of the Civil Rights Movement. In that letter he both spoke of the power of Non-Violent Protest but he also urged Christian leaders to stand up for civil rights now, and not at some other more “convenient time” – some time in the distant future. And then there is Nelson Mandela, the President of South Africa from 1994-1999. While imprisoned for 27 years, he studied at night for a law degree, and began work on an autobiography – which laid the groundwork for his later presidency and his pioneering work in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
And we think of those who for whatever reason imprison themselves – like Julian of Norwich – the Christian mystic who lived as an anchoress in the later 14th century, early 15th century, in a church in Norwich in England. The content of her divine visions became the basis of her writings that have for centuries been considered the best expressions of Christian mysticism. We know little about why Julian attached herself to the church and was cut off from all of society except through a small opening in a wall. The mostly likely hypothesis is that she went into isolation to avoid the ravages of the plague.
But this morning, I want to end by talking about another self-imprisoned woman much closer to home – Emily Dickinson, the 19th century American Poet. Dickinson spent her formative years in school and travelling locally around her home in Amherst – the furthest she travelled was to Boston – and she travelled because her family sent her there hoping the change would improve her health. But in later life, Dickinson increasingly became a recluse. We don’t really know why – some have speculated that she suffered from agoraphobia – or possibly she suffered with epilepsy. But what we do know is that she spent years producing profound, beautiful, and unconventional poetry – most noted for being written in short and pithy lines and verses. No iambic pentameter for her.
According to the Poetry Foundation website, Dickinson, like other writers such as “Charlotte Brontë and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “crafted a new type of persona for the first person. The speakers in Dickinson’s poetry, like those in Brontë’s and Browning’s works, are sharp-sighted observers who see the inescapable limitations of their societies as well as their imagined and imaginable escapes. To make the abstract tangible, to define meaning without confining it, to inhabit a house that never became a prison, Dickinson created in her writing a distinctively elliptical language for expressing what was possible but not yet realized.”[2]
And so what I think is the good news of our story from Acts of the Apostles, and from the lives of Bonheoffer, King, Mandela, Julian of Norwich and Dickinson, is that we can still find meaning and purpose where we are, not just in some future place where we think we will be better equipped to live out our purpose – we can live out our faith in the very circumstances we find ourselves in – we do not need to change to do God’s work, we don’t have to be our best selves to do God’s work, and we need not achieve a single thing to do God’s work – we can be just as we are – to be both loved by God and be an agent of God’s mercy, grace and hope.
And it is interesting to me, in one of my favorite poems by Emily Dickinson, that she herself holds the tension of both my sermon last week and this week. In her poem 1176 with the first verse “We never know high we are” she talks about how each of us in present conditions, may find ourselves rising to the occasion when we are called to do so – and the only thing that draws us back from doing so is our fear of being great. Before I read this short poem – there is one phrase I just want to define – she writes “Did not ourselves the Cubits warp” – cubit meaning distance – so it means in modern parlance and plain speaking – “if we did not hold opportunity at an arms distance” “hold opportunity to rise away from ourselves.” And I have left a few copies of this poem for you in the narthex should you wish to read it later.
We never know how high we are (1176)
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
We never know how high we are
Till we are called to rise;
And then, if we are true to plan,
Our statures touch the skies—
The Heroism we recite
Would be a daily thing,
Did not ourselves the Cubits warp
For fear to be a King—
[1] This is a near quote of Rachel Hollis because I listened to this on Audiobooks
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