Sermons from St. Paul’s Episcopal Church

Lay Homily by Mark Lloyd Taylor
The Seventh Sunday of Easter (Year C)
Acts 16:16-34; Psalm 97; Revelation 22:12-14, 16-17, 20-21; John 17:20-26
May 23, 2004

Because we are so fast approaching the end of the 50 days of Easter and won’t be saying it much longer, let’s repeat again our Easter Acclamation:

Prisoners.

How can we not think about prisoners this morning, what with the news headlines of the past several weeks? How troubling and yet how important that we think about prisoners at this time and in this sacred place. As we do so, hold on to the promise of today’s gospel lesson that nothing less than God’s love for Jesus is present within and among us.

Prisoners.

Prisoners are vulnerable. Prisoners stand or sit, eat and sleep – or not – at the command of others. Behind prison walls and bars, human dignity is in danger of being abused. Prisoners can be stripped; prisoners can be hooded and posed and ridiculed; prisoners can be beaten, they can even be beheaded. The humanity of the prisoner has been delivered into the hands of others. All too often the vulnerability of the prisoner, the bound one, unleashes the worst cruelty in those who are free to come and go through prison bars and walls.

Prisoners.

As Christians, we are called to bring the compassion and justice of the Lord Jesus to all situations of violence, oppression, and degradation. But our foundational story ought to make us especially sensitive to particular forms of human degradation. Given the circumstances of Jesus’ birth and infancy, for instance, we Christians ought to be especially active in caring for the homeless and for refugees; in reconstructing the economic and social systems that render people without homes, without homelands, in the first place. Given the content of Jesus’ deeds, we Christians ought to be the very first to effect the healing of the sick, the loving inclusion of the outcast and untouchable, the restoration of the possessed, the mentally ill, and the addicted.

And so, too, prisoners. For our Lord Jesus was made a prisoner. He was delivered into strong and cruel hands. He was brutally interrogated. He was stripped and posed and humiliated. He was mockingly dressed up and crowned with thorns for the sport of his captors. Our Lord Jesus was tortured and crucified. Therefore, in one of the forms of our Prayers of the People, we beseech the Lord’s mercy “for prisoners and captives, and for all who remember and care for them.” Therefore, in the Eucharistic Prayer we have been using throughout this Easter season, we recall that Jesus proclaimed the good news of salvation to the poor, joy to the sorrowful, and “to prisoners, freedom.” We Christians ought to see the face and hands and feet and body of Jesus in every prisoner, whether the anonymous Iraqi or the American businessman named Berg.

Paul our patron was familiar with imprisonment as we heard in this morning’s lesson from the Acts of the Apostles (16:16-34). Consider that story with me. It shows Paul at his most faithful to Christ Jesus. And it sets before us a powerful example of true Christian freedom, which, paradoxically, takes the form of service to others.

The story revolves around freedom and bondage. Everyone in the story who appears to be free and in control of their own destiny betrays a deeper complicity in systems of injustice, while those enslaved or imprisoned exhibit or receive from the Lord Jesus true freedom.

In Philippi, Paul and his companions meet a young woman who is doubly un-free: she is a slave and she is possessed by an unclean spirit. But because the demon enables the girl to foretell the future, she is a valuable commodity to her human owners. They get rich through her diminished humanity.

As happens frequently in the gospels with Jesus, the demon senses the divine power at work in Paul and has the slave girl make a nuisance of herself shouting constantly: “these men are slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim to you a way of salvation” (16:17). After many days of this, Paul casts out the demon in the name of the Jesus, freeing the girl and restoring her to herself.

Why, do you suppose, would people have paid for the services of this girl – or, rather, for the power of the demon that held her captive? My guess is they hoped to gain some magical advantage in business or love or revenge. So the dehumanization and abuse of the possessed slave girl enabled those with enough money to abuse and dehumanize still other people: their enemies or their competitors or the objects of their desire. The web of un-freedom kept expanding – until Paul halted it.

Now the owners of the slave girl step on to the scene. Paul’s act of freeing the girl from demonic possession comes into conflict with wealth and the power wealth bestows. The owners depended for their prosperity on the un-freedom of the girl just as much as the 19th century cotton industry and transcontinental railroads depended on African slaves and Chinese laborers, or our current agricultural and construction industries on brown-skinned, Spanish-speaking people. Paul and his companions are immediately seized and dragged before the authorities – appropriately located in the middle of the marketplace.

The complaints against Paul and his companions should sound familiar. “These men are disturbing the city” (20); that is, they are interfering with our way of life, our comfortable life-style, our profit margins – a life-style made possible by the girl’s captivity and less than fully human status. The girl’s owners graduate from threatened economic prosperity to religious and ethnic hatred. These men “are Jews and are advocating customs that are not lawful for us Romans to adopt or observe” (21). Paul and his companions are posed as foreigners, outsiders, who undercut Roman identity and security. I doubt the girl’s owners would have given Paul’s religion any attention if it had remained a private and individual affair. But when his faith in Jesus intruded on the public life of the marketplace, then it looked foreign and dangerous. And the slave girl’s owners all too easily stir up in the crowd similar hatred of foreigners. Paul and his companions are attacked, stripped, and beaten with rods. It’s hard to tell where the actions of the mob end and those of the authorities begin.

In all this brutality, the owners show themselves to be bound by their own self-interest; and the whole city – owners, crowd, and authorities – show themselves to be bound by fear and hatred of those who look or sound or behave differently.

For freeing the possessed girl through the power of Jesus, Paul and his companions are made prisoners. They are thrown into the innermost cell of the prison with their feet in stocks so no escape is possible. Only now does the paradoxical character of Paul’s freedom in Christ Jesus begin fully to emerge. The same Paul who felt free to take on and disrupt powerful economic and political interests, although now beaten and imprisoned, remains transparent and available and gentle with the powerless, his fellow prisoners. Paul feels free to sing and pray even at dark midnight in his cell. He does not act much like a prisoner at all. Paul continues to minister to others, to reach out to them in love and generosity; and they listen.

Then a prisoner’s wildest fantasy comes true – the miraculous chance to escape. An earthquake breaks their bonds and opens the prison doors, freeing the prisoners to run away. And now a final character enters the drama – the jailer. Like the owners of the slave girl, he appears to be free – after all, he is in charge of the prison, keeping Paul and the others captive. But the jailer is not truly free. He knows that when his superiors find out that the prisoners have escaped – as if the earthquake were his fault – his life will be forfeit. He prepares to kill himself with his sword – the very sword he used to subdue prisoners and keep the community safe from them. That’s hardly freedom. His occupation has diminished his humanity; he’s caught in an institution and a system that bind him.

Once again, Paul shows himself truly free, free as Jesus was free, free to serve, free to encourage the life and health and humanity of others. Paul cries out to the jailer that there’s no need for him to kill himself – no one has escaped. Paul had earlier used his captivity to minister – to pray and to sing to those bound. Now he declines to take advantage of his miraculous chance for escape or of his chance to take revenge. Instead, he continues his work, Jesus’ work, of compassion and redemption.

The work of Jesus in Paul leads to the jailer’s conversion and that of his entire household. “Believe on the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved,” Paul assures him. Not merely rescued for the afterlife, but healed and freed here and now: your life, your humanity, will be returned to you. The bad work of degrading others, of exerting coercive power over others, of dehumanizing others had the jailer himself in bondage and put his own humanity at risk. This unclean spirit of brutality is cast out in the name of Jesus. Re-clothed and in his right mind, a compassionate mind, the jailer begins to exercise true freedom as he serves others. He washes Paul’s wounds – wounds inflicted by the very economic and political system that simultaneously employed and enslaved the jailer. His new-found freedom in Christ compelled him first and foremost to dress and redress the wounds he had helped cause. He brings Paul and companions into his house and serves them a meal. They are no longer dangerous foreigners, but honored guests. The community of freedom, of service, is expanding. From Jesus through Paul to the possessed girl to the powerless prisoners to the jailer.

Well, that’s the story of Paul’s imprisonment in Philippi. Does it speak any challenge or insight or comfort to your heart and mind in the context of our current national and international situation? It speaks to me in three ways.

First. Martin Luther said this about the follower of Christ: A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none; and a Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all. Paul embodies this paradox: free from and free for. Free from bondage to any human authority, however powerful; free for service to all human beings, especially the most powerless.

Second, I’ve had scenes from the film “The Shawshank Redemption” running through my mind for days. If you haven’t watched it in a while, or if you’ve never seen it, I would commend it to you as a retelling of Paul’s imprisonment story and maybe as a way of coming to terms with the images of abused prisoners in Iraq. Andy Dufresne is an innocent man sentenced to life imprisonment for murdering his wife. In prison, he is brutalized by both guards and some fellow prisoners. But Andy remains truly free, free to serve, free to build a prison library, to help a young punk pass his high school equivalency exam, to find ways of bringing joy and beauty to the prisoners – some cold beer after a hot day re-roofing a building, a few sublime moments of a soprano aria from an opera played without permission over the prison’s loudspeaker. Above all, Andy, a white man, uses his freedom to redeem the life of a black man, his friend ”Red” Redding, and give the two of them together new life and new, good work.

Third. The story of Paul’s imprisonment in Philippi poses some questions. Is my faith in the Lord Jesus anything more than a private and individual affair completely invisible when I am outside the church, when I am at work or in the marketplace or in the wide world? Does my baptism, does my feasting here at the Lord’s table, free me from bondage to systems of human oppression so that I can do good work, even if that good work interferes with the marketplace? How might I use my Christian freedom to dress and redress the wounds of racism and sexism and economic injustice and hatred of the outsider?

We have been basking for nearly 50 days in the presence of the risen Christ. We have heard the Gospel of John’s repeated message about oneness with Christ as he is one with God. But the season is changing. We marked the beginning of the change on Thursday, with the celebration of Jesus’ ascension. We await the celebration of Pentecost next Sunday. We await the coming of the Holy Spirit as the power that will draw us out of out intimate, upper room experience of the risen Christ and set us on our baptismal mission to turn the world upside down – or right-side up. Only in the power of the Spirit can we seek and serve Christ in all persons, loving our neighbors as ourselves; only in the power of the Spirit can we strive for justice and peace among all people, respecting the dignity of every human being.

In the meantime, we pray with John of Revelation: Amen! Come, Lord Jesus!