Grace Under Fire

Scriptures:     Acts 1:1-11,  Psalm 93

Acts 16:16-34    John 17:21-26

This past Thursday was Ascension Day, when we remember Jesus’ return to heaven after his birth and earthly ministry, death and resurrection.  According to Luke, “he presented himself to them and gave  many convincing proofs that he was alive.  He appeared to them over a period of forty days and spoke about the kingdom of God.”   And then he gathered them for one more time.  He told them to stay in Jerusalem and wait to be baptized by the Holy Spirit.  His disciples once again, even after all that had happened, missed the point of all he had done, asking, “Lord, now are you going to restore the Kingdom to Israel.”  But Jesus told them that it was not for them to know God’s itinerary – in other words, “mind your own business” – but that they would receive power when the Holy Spirit came upon them, and would be Christ’s witnesses in Jerusalem, in Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.  As an aside, this verse is the basis for our UCC logo which you see in the bulletin – the crown and cross, representing the Lordship of Christ, and then the globe divided into three parts, representing Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, and the ends of the earth.

And then he was lifted up from them!  And they were left with the question, “Where do we go from here.”  Jesus had told them to wait for the coming of the Holy Spirit, and that would happen soon.  But until then, that question, “Where do we go from here?”

It goes without saying that this marked a major shift in the disciples’ relationship with Jesus.  In his earthly ministry, Jesus was right beside them, a companion on the journey.  Now, Jesus no longer walked beside them…..and yet with the coming of the Spirit, Jesus would still be guiding them.

Perhaps we can think of this transition as similar to the way our relationship with our parents evolves.  As infants, our parents are always there.  But as we grow older, they slowly give us more space and more freedom to make discoveries and to make mistakes.  And finally, the day may come when we go off to college or trade school or perhaps move from home to start families of our own.  All that time, our relationship with our parents evolves, is renegotiated…..and this is necessary for our own development.  In the same way, the disciples’ relationship with Jesus entered a new stage of development, a new level of maturity.

For those days between Jesus’ ascension and the coming of the Holy Spirit, which we’ll celebrate next Sunday as Pentecost, the disciples weren’t completely idle.  Peter thought it was appropriate that they elect someone to replace Judas Iscariot.  As Peter said “21one of the men who have accompanied us during all the time that the Lord Jesus went in and out among us, 22beginning from the baptism of John until the day when he was taken up from us—one of these must become a witness with us to his resurrection.” (Acts 1:21-22)  Two candidates were proposed, they cast lots, and one of them, Matthias, was thus selected to become one of the Twelve.  But after this election, we never hear from or about Matthias again.

Our other reading from Acts, which follows immediately after last week’s reading from Acts, shows the power of the Spirit, the powerful difference the Spirit had made in the lives of the disciples.  We remember from last week’s reading that Paul and Silas had traveled to Macedonia, in response to a vision Paul had.  They came to Philippi, and met a group of women praying down by the river, led by a forceful woman named Lydia.  It is at this point that today’s reading picked up.  They returned to the place of prayer by the river and discovered that they had attracted a heckler, a young woman who we’re told was possessed by a spirit of divination.  She was a slave, and told fortunes in order to make money for her owners.  She would follow Paul and Silas, saying, “These men are slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim to you a way of salvation.”  Sounds like a harmless, if slightly distorted and off-kilter, description of the mission of Paul and Silas, but perhaps there was something in the young woman’s tone to indicate that her intentions were not helpful.  She followed them around for many days, repeating her message like a broken record – “these men are slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim to you a way of salvation” – over and over, to the point where Paul had had enough of her public service announcements.  Paul ordered the fortune-telling spirit within her to come out.  So the woman was freed from possession by the spirit – but also rendered useless to her owners, who presumably abandoned her, kicked her to the curb – and we hear no more of her.  And we may well ask why Paul and Silas didn’t invite the slave girl to join them – that part of the story is left hanging, a loose thread.  Perhaps we might say that even Paul and Silas had a blind spot in their vision for ministry when it came to the slave girl.

The owners had Paul and Silas arrested on bogus charges.  Paul and Silas were severely flogged, and then locked and shackled in the inner cell of the prison.  But what the people intended for harm, God used for good.  In prison, at the midnight hour, Paul and Silas sang hymns, and the prisoners listened.  By the way, this is common even today when people are arrested for civil disobedience, disobeying an unjust law in order to witness to the higher law of God, singing together in order to maintain morale, often with fellow protesters outside the prison singing also, in what is called jailhouse solidarity.  In any case, Paul and Silas literally had a captive audience, and so they made the best use of their time to spread the good news of Jesus.  An earthquake came, shaking the foundation of the prison, opening the doors and breaking the chains holding the prisoners.  The jailer came, and after learning that this prisoners had not tried to escape, asked Paul and Silas, “What must I do to be saved.”  And they responded, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household.”  And the jailer and his household were baptized.

There are many forms of bondage in the story. The slave girl is doubly enslaved, both to the spirit within her and to her owners.  The owners make money off the girl – but they, too, are bound up in a system of economic exploitation, though they profit from their bondage – you might say they enjoy their golden handcuffs. The magistrates are also bound up in this economic exploitation, as they follow the golden rule that says “He who has the gold makes the rules.”  And while the jailer binds Paul and Silas, he too is bound up in a system of exploitation, a cog in the wheel of an economic machine that breaks people and grinds them to dust.  But the Spirit broke all these chains.

How did the disciples bear up and keep faith through arrests, floggings, imprisonment?  Of course, the Holy Spirit sustained them.  But I would also say a word for the unity of Spirit for which Jesus prayed in today’s gospel reading when he asked the Father that his followers would all be one, all united in purpose.  Paul and Barnabas, and later Paul and Silas, ministered as a team, with other supporters, including the writer of the Book of Acts, accompanying them. 

All of this seems very distant from our experience.  And yet, we may want to ask ourselves, are we as free as we think we are?  Or may we be bound in ways we don’t even realize, bondage we just shrug off as ‘the way things are’?  Addiction is an obvious form of bondage, driving its victims to do things they hate for the temporary high they crave or to avoid the withdrawal pains they dread.  But like the experience of the slave girl, we may find ourselves in less obvious forms of bondage, in forms of economic bondage, as there are many ways in which people get rich off of human need and even human misery.  How free are we really when we have to choose between heat for our homes or food for our tables?  How free are we really when, at a whim and with the snap of a finger, a pharmaceutical company executive can raise the price of insulin or other medications sky high – literally telling us, “Your money or your life.”  How free, really, are those in impoverished communities in which military service is seemingly the only honorable ladder out of poverty – what has been called an economic draft.  Theologian Walter Wink wrote of the principalities and powers, and spiritual wickedness in high places that enforce these and other forms of bondage.  What chains might the Spirit want to break in your life, in mine, in the lives of our neighbors?  And how might the Spirit be inviting us to take part in breaking our chains, or those of others.

It’s also striking that this whole chain of events – the arrest, imprisonment, and conversion of the jailer and his family – were set off by what Paul considered an annoying distraction, the heckling of the slave girl.   Paul didn’t want to free the slave girl from her spiritual captivity.  He just wanted to shut her up so that he could go on to do the ministry he wanted to do – but in that moment, liberating the slave girl apparently was the ministry God wanted Paul to do, and not a mere distraction.  We may well ask ourselves, when we encounter distractions in our day, whether there might be opportunities for ministry, opportunities to share good news, in these distractions.  It takes sensitivity to the movement of the Spirit to discern the opportunity in our distractions.

Today we will be installing Gail as an elder and Carol and Jim as deacons of this congregation, to help oversee respectively the spiritual life of the congregation and the material concerns of the church such as charitable work and stewardship.  I’m going to be away on sabbatical for eight Sundays, and so this will be a challenging time to be in leadership, and they will need all of our support.  It’s pretty safe to say that they probably won’t be arrested and imprisoned for their work on behalf of the church.  But, like the slave girl who got under Paul’s skin,  responding to random requests and occasional distractions and the human highs and lows of our members and regular worshippers – and the occasional off-kilter visitor – responding to all of this is part of being in church leadership.  For example, there are sales calls, such as the guy from the Servant Keeper software company who keeps calling every few months to try to sell me database software so I can keep track of our thousands of church members.  [I’ve told him, more than once, that we have 40-something members on the rolls and get maybe two dozen out on a good Sunday, and I have a nifty cutting-edge program called Microsoft Word that does a jim-dandy job in keeping our modest membership list current.] There are  geneology calls and emails – every year, two or three people call to ask me to help find their great aunt Methuselah in our cemetery –  I’ll follow up on those calls when I return.  [If great-aunt Methuselah is in our cemetery now, she’ll likely still be there in September.] There’s the occasional random oddball who shows up, like one twenty-something young woman a few years back, clearly high on one or several controlled substances, who walked into the church while I was preparing to update the information on the sign outside, and kept rambling on in a one-sided barrage of word salad, when all I wanted in that moment was to get her out of the building and off the property.  There are the occasional out of left field calls with messages such as, “do you know there are children playing on your church roof”.  And there are the constant, endless, endless, endless calls for help with food, SEPTA fare, diapers, you name it.  It takes discernment to sense where there are opportunities for ministry, and where there is only distraction. 

By the power of the Holy Spirit, Paul and Silas showed grace under fire during the time of their arrest, and the jailer and his family were led to salvation.  May we, too, rely on the Holy Spirit to grant us grace in our times of stress, and may others see Jesus in our words and actions.  Amen.