“What If?”
Acts 16:25-34
In case you’re wondering how and why Paul and Silas landed in jail, let me explain why that’s not a part of our lesson:
First, it’s all there in the preceding verses of the 16th chapter of Acts: How Paul and Silas cast out a spirit of divination from an enslaved woman who was following them around, and then her owners got upset when they were no longer able to make money off of her. It’s a lot of detail that is both confusing and not clearly connected to the message I want to share with you today, so I left that out of the lesson.
Second, and more to the point: As we are discovering in our present dystopian circumstances, empires, corrupt officials, and authoritarian systems don’t believe they need a valid reason to torture someone and lock them up. In such an environment, why someone gets locked up sometimes boils down to the fact that the governing systems wanted them locked up and had the power to make it happen.
The dangerous and devastating situations created by such abuses of power succeed—by design—in perplexing those of us in the justice-making business.
Where do we focus our efforts? Do we highlight procedural matters, the fact that unknown numbers of immigrants, international students, and U.S. citizen children have been disappeared, detained, and/or deported without due process? Or do we do everything we can to ensure their release and their return to their families? Or do we focus on supporting the detainees’ families—or all of the above?
While we may agonize over which is the best approach, the devastating truth is that, at present, the tyrannical and racist administration doesn’t care. It undermines and ignores the rulings of the judicial branch while doubling down on its illegal actions against immigrants and others.
We have yet to arrive at my core message this morning—which, I promise you, does contain some good news—but I can’t continue before mentioning another parallel between the predicament of Paul and Silas and our own terrifying state of affairs:
The official charge against Paul and Silas was disturbing the peace or, to be more crass, acting more like Jews—which is to say foreigners—than Romans. (Is any of this sounding familiar?) In essence, Paul and Silas were arrested, tortured, and imprisoned for preaching the gospel— the good news of liberation, empowerment, and the realm of God—instead of simply going along with the customs of empire.
Now we could go down the rabbit hole of righteous indignation and get stuck there—or, we could, like the writer of Acts, focus on what happens next.
But, first, I simply must honor some of the imprisoned truth tellers and persecuted foreigners of our own time and place by saying just a few of the names we know:
Mahmoud Khalil. Ruymesa Ozturk. Kilmar Abrego Garcia.
Ozturk has been released, thank God, but Khalil is still detained in Louisiana, and Abrego Garcia continues to be held in an overcrowded prison camp in El Salvador. And just last week two unnamed immigrants were taken from Amherst by immigration officers.
May we never get so distracted by a thousand other injustices and unimaginable levels of cruelty and corruption that we forget those detained and deported. May we never become so discouraged by the challenges of trying to crack a rigged and racist system that we surrender to it.
Which brings us back to Paul and Silas and their jailer, and my central question for us this morning:
What if the very people being disappeared, detained, and deported are—like Paul and Silas were for their jailer—the ones who can save us from the horrible and heartbreaking mess we are in?
For emphasis and elaboration, I’m going to say that again:
What if the very people being disappeared, detained, and deported have the Spirit, the faith, the strength, and the love that could deliver us from what imprisons our society?
For the sake of discussion I am going to say that the fundamental things imprisoning us, limiting us, and deceiving us are our society’s utter failure to internalize the truth that we are all connected, our false divisions into camps of us and them, our privileged notions of superiority and inferiority, and our tendency to dehumanize or demonize those who are different from us.
With that framing, let me ask the question yet again:
What if the dismissed, despised, and demonized hold the keys to our liberation?
I suppose it would feel less dramatic and more realistic to reframe the question to something like: What can we learn from them? What do we need to learn from them?
I suppose it might feel more practical to consider whether we ourselves are bound by something personal—a fear, an unhealed wound, a regret, shame, bitterness, guilt, grief, a lack of forgiveness, a festering anger, . . . you get the idea. As individuals, we might be living in a prison cell and not even realize it. Or we might be grumbling about the burdens and restrictions on our lives and, all the while, the door leading to new life stands wide open. What kind of shaking will it take to release us from our chains?
Those, too, are important and necessary questions for our spiritual growth and personal liberation.
But it seems to me that the times we are in call for a more sober assessment of our shared situation and more faithful, focused action.
Jesus, after all, had a lot to say about freedom: Not just how the truth would set us free, but also how living in love and trust—caring for one another, turning the other cheek, loving our neighbors and our enemies, and seeking God’s way first—would free us from the oppressive, divisive, demeaning ways of the world and liberate us from worry, striving, and brokenness. The apostle Paul, writing to the church in Corinth, went so far as to say that freedom is what it’s all about. “Where the Spirit of the Lord is,” he said, “there is freedom.”
And so it was that, even though beaten, imprisoned, and chained, Paul and Silas sang songs of praise that filled the air and caught the attention of all the prisoners. Their singing tells us that the good news of God’s healing, life-saving, liberating grace simply cannot be contained or suppressed—not by death, not by tyranny, not by chains or bars or prison walls. The Spirit of boldness and power and cannot be contained by injustice.
One way or another, the transforming, transforming Spirit will do its work: Liberating us from all that enslaves, entombs, binds, and oppresses; providing ways of escape from the messes we get ourselves into; delivering us from our brokenness; waking us up; and beckoning us of our chains and into the light of our freedom.
Or, as in the case of Paul and Silas, the Spirit will free us from our chains and usher us into the joyful, Spirit-fueled work of liberating others by the love of God.
Or, as in the case of their jailer, the Spirit will lead us out of our privilege and security and into the strength, wisdom, respect, and graciousness of the marginalized and persecuted. Out of our safe, isolated lives and into the passion and purpose of those who realize that we are all connected, and that we cannot be free until all are free and safe and living in peace.
What if we could entertain the possibility that the Spirit of God living and working within the people being disappeared and detained by our government and deported from our country—and other people like them—could free us from our enslavement to an us vs. them worldview?
What if we were to seek God’s guidance in creating the conditions that would liberate persecuted immigrants, international students, and their U.S.-citizen neighbors? What if we refused to stand by while our neighbors were detained and, instead, took public actions on their behalf? What if we were to grow bolder in declaring the gospel of inclusion, justice, and love for all?
Might we keep singing and praising the God of Love through the darkest of times? Might we sing so loudly, persistently, and joyfully that people from all around would listen, feel their hope renewed, and want to join us in the holy work of healing and liberation?
Might we, with Spirit’s help, generate a spiritual earthquake so powerful that unjust systems would crumble and prison chains would fall off?
Stranger things have happened.
Paul and Silas’s jailer surrendered to his prisoners’ saving power only after his own life was in danger, only after he was distraught and they assured him there was love, goodness, and community worth living for.
How bad will things have to get for us before we realize that our liberation is bound up with the well-being of the marginalized?
May we not wait a moment longer.
