Neill Morgan

Sermon Delivered May 20, 2007

Acts 16:16-34

¹⁶One day, 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. ¹⁷While 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.” ¹⁸She 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. ¹⁹But 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. ²⁰When they had brought them before the magistrates, they said, “These men are disturbing our city; they are Jews ²¹and are advocating customs that are not lawful for us as Romans to adopt or observe.” ²²The crowd joined in attacking them, and the magistrates had them stripped of their clothing and ordered them to be beaten with rods. ²³After they had given them a severe flogging, they threw them into prison and ordered the jailer to keep them securely. ²⁴Following these instructions, he put them in the innermost cell and fastened their feet in the stocks.

²⁵About midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the prisoners were listening to them. ²⁶Suddenly 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. ²⁷When 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. ²⁸But Paul shouted in a loud voice, “Do not harm yourself, for we are all here.” ²⁹The jailer called for lights, and rushing in, he fell down trembling before Paul and Silas. ³⁰Then he brought them outside and said, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” ³¹They answered, “Believe on the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household.” ³²They spoke the word of the Lord to him and to all who were in his house. ³³At the same hour of the night he took them and washed their wounds; then he and his entire family were baptized without delay. ³⁴He 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.

The Freedom of My Chains

Here’s a big leap, from Paul and Silas in prison to nineteen seventies folk music.  Please, bear with me.

Loving Arms (Tom Jans) up 3     G, C, D, Em

Intro:  / G - - - / C – D - / x2

                   G (2)

If you could see me now

C (1)            D (1)             G (2)

     One who said that he’d rather roam

C (1)            D (1)                G (2)

     One who said he’d rather be alone

C (2)                D (1)            G (2)

     If you could only see me now.                       

                   G (2)

If I could hold you now (hold you now)       

C (1)               D (1)                  G (2)

      Just for a moment, if I could make you mine

C (1)                D (1)                    G (2)

      Just for a while, turn back the hands of time

C (2)               D (1)            G (2)

       If I could only hold you now.                              

                   G (2)

If you could here me now (hear me now)

C (1)          D (1)                            G (2)

     Singing somewhere through the lonely night  

C (1)            D (1)                   G (2)      

      Dreaming of the arms that held me tight

C (1)                  D (1)             G (2)      

      If you could only hear me now                             

 Chorus

For all the men that may joke around about having a “ball and chain,” Tom Jans hit the paradox right in the solar plexus with this song.  “Looking back and longing for the freedom of my chains” goes to the heart of how we find our greatest freedom through ties that bind.

Isaiah, Hosea, Song of Solomon, Paul in Ephesians – all of them make the analogy between God’s passionate love for us and the yearning of two people for each other in marriage.  Meaning, joy, and a sense of freedom grow out of the discipline and structure of both marriage and the life of the Spirit.

As Paul and Silas walk through Philippi, a woman who is miserably enslaved both by men who own her and by a “Spirit of divination,” follows them around and cries out, over and over again, “These men are slaves . . . of the Most High God!”

And from there, Luke tells a story that asks us the nature of freedom and slavery.  The woman is set free from her spirit of divination, and her owners have Paul and Silas locked up.  They are locked inside a prison, their feet fastened in the stocks, and what are they doing?  They are “praying and singing hymns to God.”

No matter their physical captivity, they continue to exercise spiritual freedom to pray, sing, and tell the story of Jesus to the other prisoners.  When the earthquake opens the doors and breaks the chains that held them, the jailer, thinking the prisoners have escaped, knows that he will be subject to a horrible execution, so he begins to take his own life.  In this wild reversal, the prisoners are free and the jailer is imprisoned by his assumptions and his position as jailer.  Paul and Silas tell him the gospel, and, in case we didn’t get Luke’s point the first time, the jailer and his family are set free through the ministry of the prisoners.

Here’s where the passage takes us:  the biblical picture of faithful discipleship of Jesus Christ is a picture of both deep discipline and joyful freedom.  When we are following Christ faithfully, the deeper our spiritual discipline, the greater our sense of joy and freedom.

So, what does that spiritual discipline that creates joy and freedom look like for you?  It is not the same for everyone.  Sure, there are some things that we all hold in common – regular prayer, engaging the Scripture with friends, worshiping and eating together in fellowship with the community, and giving generously of our gifts.

And that’s where spiritual discipline looks different from one person to another.  As Paul writes, the Spirit gives each of us gifts as the Spirit chooses, and they are different, one from another so that the community of faith, like our bodies, can work together, each one acting according to our gifts.

The freedom of our chains comes when we stop doing the things that we’re no good at and set out to learn what our gifts are and use them generously.

The joyful freedom comes to a congregation when it designs its ministry around the gifts of its members rather than thinking up programs and then twisting people’s arms to fill the leadership and volunteer slots.  Groups of people doing ministry together, whether they call themselves a committee, a ministry team, or a small group, feed one another spiritually even as they set out to exercise their gifts in mission and ministry.  Whenever it feels like drudgery, that’s a pretty good sign that we’re taking on tasks while neglecting the spiritual feeding of one another.

Sometimes, Christians are called to do very difficult and demanding ministry.  Our graduating youth director, Audrey Burnett is about to embark on a Volunteer in Mission year in Guatemala.  It won’t be easy.  Between the heat, learning the dialects different from the Spanish she’s learned at Austin College and in Spain, the denominational bureaucracy, and the culture shock, she will find mission work difficult and sometimes frustrating.

But, it’s also clear that this gift of a year of her life that she is giving through the church is her way of putting her spiritual gifts to work in the service of Jesus Christ.  So, we can also be sure that she will find it joyful and meaningful.

Like Paul and Silas singing hymns to God in the stocks in the innermost cell of the prison, we find joy and spiritual freedom in any situation when we are putting our spiritual gifts to good use.

So, what makes your heart sing?  Where does your giftedness meet the world’s greatest need for the grace of Jesus Christ?  If you’re following that discipline in partnership with other disciples, blessings.  Just make sure you and your partners in ministry are spiritually feeding one another enough to keep the joy in your ministry.

If you’re doing it alone, the biblical notion of ministry says, “Be careful.”  If you set out alone in your ministry, when you stumble, so does the ministry.  When you need some spiritual nurture yourself, there’s nobody there to return it.  All through the Bible, ministry is carried out through relationships.

If the ministry you’re doing feels like drudgery instead of a joyful and meaningful exercise of your gifts, that’s a good indication that the group is spending more time on tasks and not enough on spiritual nurture of each other.

Joshua Heschel wrote a book on Sabbath in which he described Sabbath as an architecture of time, a gift given to the people of God by their creator that can never be taken away.  When the Jewish people were attacked, their homes and synagogues and temples destroyed, and they were imprisoned in the pogroms through the ages, this building could not be taken from them.  Observing the Sabbath every seventh day no matter what prepared them to enter this spiritual building at any time, any place, no matter what was going on around them. The Sabbath was always there, waiting, always on time, never late.  The discipline of Sabbath observance, whenever, wherever, the ability to shut out the difficulties and demands of the world and lift up our hearts and voices to God at any time, gives us the greatest freedom in the world, a freedom that no chains can take away.  Thanks be to God.