Today, we are conveniently going to pick up exactly where we left off last week in the Book of Acts, that is in the middle of Chapter 16. If you were here last Sunday, you may remember that we talked about how Paul was called in a vision to minister to the people in Macedonia, Greece, which led him and his companions to change their travel plans and head out to the city of Philippi, and the story tells us how, a few days after, they met Lydia and her friends who gathered to pray by the river on the Sabbath day. Luke describes how Lydia opened her heart to the Gospel, converted and received the baptism with her whole household, and so, like that, it was the beginning of the evangelization of Europe…And indeed, because we have a “Letter to the Philippians” in the New Testament, we know that Paul and his companions, Lydia, Silas and probably Luke himself, started there a church.
But for now, in our passage today we see Paul and his companions going back to the place of prayer where they first met with Lydia and others. We don’t know how many times has passed but it’s like they are in this in between time where they have started a Christian community but haven’t yet a dedicated building to worship, so we’re still at the beginning. In fact, the story itself gives us clues that it is only the beginning. Let me explain. Our passage starts with this strange story about the slave girl who had a spirit of divination and kept following Paul and company around, crying out: “These men are slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim to you a way of salvation“. Luke tells us Paul was very much annoyed and ended up ordering the spirit to leave the girl. Now the story can be quite unsettling: Why would Paul be annoyed, since the girl was proclaiming the truth? Why did he assume she had a demon and perform this exorcism, that was going to put them all through much trouble? Well, to understand that, we have to go back all the way into Luke’s Gospel, chapter 4, the beginning of Jesus’s ministry, right after he had started announcing the Gospel in Galilee. The story tells us that, when Jesus arrived in the synagogue of Capernaum: There was a man possessed by a demon, an impure spirit. He cried out at the top of his voice, “Go away! What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are—the Holy One of God!” and Jesus responded:“Be quiet!” and said sternly “Come out of him!” and the story says that then the demon threw the man down before them all and came out.We can conclude that, in the same way that the demons started to act out terrified when Jesus started his ministry, so did the demons in the pagan city of Philippi. They knew the truth about Jesus, as they knew the truth about Paul and his companions, they knew they had come to bring salvation to the people which meant, to them, liberation from the bondage those very demons had upon people. And the passage of Acts makes it very clear for us: the girl is indeed a slave, who is even twice exploited because her owners make a big profit out of the spirit inside her that seemed to be able to perceive what human beings could not perceive. And you know, this is really how demons operate, they can see truth but they don’t like the truth, and they use the truth to accuse people before God and I think we’ve already talked about that many times: In the Bible, the devil is the one accusing us before God, and also accusing us before ourselves, pointing out our wrongs and trying to convince us that there is for us no forgiveness, no hope, no salvation. No wonder they didn’t like Paul and his message!
But let’s go back to our text. From this exorcism started a cascade of events: The owners of the girl had Paul and Silas arrested, and then they managed to have everybody turn against them and they were thrown into prison, a prison from which they would make this dramatic escape, an earthquake throwing the doors open and unfasting everybody’s chains, the jailer himself dropping on his knees when confronted with God’s power and asking for mercy. So it’s a powerful story indeed and quite explicit too. You know, sometimes we read the Bible and we wonder what it is all about, what does it all mean, but here Luke makes it pretty easy for us: The whole passage is about liberation, liberation symbolized by those open gates we have on the cover of the bulletin. What is clear though, is that it’s about much more than liberation from prison for Paul and his companions and actually for all those who happened to be there at that moment, it’s also, and mostly, about spiritual liberation, liberation from the demon, concerning the slave girl, liberation from her oppressors, liberation from oppressing as well concerning the jailer, liberation from ignorance and sin, as he came to hear the Gospel and receive baptism.
So what does it mean for us?
Well, it seems that at first, it can be helpful for us to be reminded, once in a while, that the Gospel is indeed about liberation, when most of the time we understand the Gospel as a guide on how to be kind to others, or maybe about finding hope or making sense of things. But as it is, exorcism, liberation from bondage, is the first miracle performed by Jesus as it is the first act of ministry of Paul when he arrived in Philippi and it is also for us the first ministration we receive when we become Christian. Now I know that for most of us, exorcism evokes some terrible stuff we have seen in movies. Okay, but if we open our prayer books on p.302 and 306, we will realize that renouncing the evil powers and being set free from the bondage of sin is actually the first part of the baptismal liturgy. And what it means is, in a culture where we have been so used to think about freedom as something we’re born with or has been given to us by society, or something our nation has to fight for, or something we have to preserve with force if needed, the Gospel tells us that freedom comes from the inside out, that we have to accept God’s forgiveness and receive God’s spirit to be really free and this freedom is about our inner disposition more than anything else. Our passage makes it very clear that those who are really free in the story are Paul and Silas, and not only are they free but they are themselves made the liberators, through the spirit, through their lives of prayer that shake the foundation of the prison itself and bring their jailer to his knees. Although Paul and Silas are locked in the innermost high security cell, although their feet are fastened in the stocks, and it’s midnight and they are in this hole in complete darkness, they pray and sing hymns, and share their hope with the other prisoners and even extend mercy to the jailer, free him from spiritual bondage and share a meal with his whole family. Paul and Silas endure great suffering, but they are never the victims there, and although their circumstances are terrible, they manage to turn the whole situation upside down, not because they’re super heroes, they’re obviously not since they got trapped and beaten, but they manage to turn the whole situation upside down through the strength of their faith and the power of prayer and praise.
And so I think it means pretty clearly that we, also, can turn our circumstances upside down. It may not mean that we will be able to be freed from the cause of our suffering, whether it’s oppression, disease, broken relationships, but we can be freed from being trapped. What do most people talk about when they go to therapy? They complain about being stuck, being stuck in their lives, being stuck in their heads, like when we feel victims of our circumstances, when we feel that we don’t have agency anymore in whatever happens to us. So how does this freedom of the Gospel come about? Well, again, the Bible is quite clear about that, it comes about through the freedom of worship. Now, again, we have been used to think about freedom as the ability to do whatever we want to do, and if we talk about freedom of worship (and I know that because it was on my citizenship test!) we think about the freedom to practice or not a religion, freedom to pick our religion. But freedom of worship it’s not only about that in the Bible. When Moses takes the slaves out of Egypt, he freed them so they could go worship their God in the wilderness. Indeed, they could worship their God instead of the gods of Egypt, so that’s freedom of choice, but mostly, they were freed from slavery to be able to go worship, they were freed in order to be able to worship God. In the same way, we are freed from our bondage, from death, sin, fromthe prison of self, selfish desires and ambitions and preoccupations, so we can worship God, so we can belong to God, so we can be filled with God’s spirit. And that can turn everything upside down because our circumstances don‘t define us anymore, who we are isn’t what we have done or what happens to us. And that’s exactly what was going on with Paul and Silas, in their darkest time, in the darkest place, they were still free to worship, they were not so trapped that they couldn’t ask God for help, that they couldn’t thank God, that they couldn’t praise God. Quite the opposite actually, they made so much noise praying and singing that it started an earthquake, as it sometimes happen during a metal concert (or so I’ve heard). Luke’s Gospel and the Book of Acts have certainly a great deal of adventures, miracles and extraordinary stories to tell us, but it’s mostly about prayer and how prayer is the center of everything. Today we see prayer as this little light Paul and Silas kindle in the darkness of their cell and how it’s going to propagate like fire to everyone among them.
We all struggle with dark places and dark times, whether our circumstances are obviously distressing or not, because even if nothing terrible is going on for everyone to see, we all know what it means to be trapped in the innermost cell in the depths of our beings: When the voice of the adversary accuses us, when we feel stuck with no escape in sight, when people take advantage of us, make fun of us, when we’re hurt, when we’re lonely, when it seems impossible to forget or to forgive. The story in Acts remind us today that it is still possible to turn to God, when all seem lost and impossible, we can ask for help and if we have the strength, we can still say thanks and praise, and God will show us a way out. God will show us a way out. Nothing can contain the power of God for those who continue to put their trust in God.