May 16 Easter VII
Silas and Paul were dragged from the marketplace, stripped of their clothing, beaten, and thrown into the innermost cell of the jail with their feet locked in stocks. It’s hard to miss the way the experience of these two apostles parallels Jesus’ last days. The underlying message is that oppressors bind and silence anyone who seeks to free people from the shackles of religious, business, or political chains.
By contrast the message of Jesus Christ crucified and risen is a powerful message of freedom and new life. It’s proclamation is a threat to anyone with power over other peoples’ lives. Ironically, the Roman system of oppression provided the perfect playing field for Christians to witness to Jesus’ powerful message of new life.
Paul and Silas were bound, but so was their jailor. The conse-quences of failure in his job were so terrible that he would commit suicide to avoid them. Imagine the crippling affect of living in fear for your life if you “messed up” at work.
We may not know bars and shackles, but a personal prison for us can be anything that limits our bodies, our minds, or our spirits:
lost savings and tight budgets in an unpredictable economy, a perfectionist boss, a floundering child, and certainly a terminal sickness. Lots of things may bind and cripple us.
In her essay, “An American Childhood,” Annie Dillard tells what happened at her school one day. “It was only a fresh hatched Polyphemus moth,” she said, “crippled because its Mason jar was too small.” But,it was such a terrible experience, “it turned [her] to jelly…”
This is what happened: “The Mason jar sat on her teacher’s desk; the big moth emerged inside it. The moth had clawed a hole in its hot cocoon and crawled out, as if agonizingly, over the course of an hour, one leg at a time; (the) children watched transfixed.
After it emerged, the wet, masked thing turned around walking on the green jar’s bottom, then painstakingly climbed the twig with which the jar was furnished. There on the twig’s top, the moth shook its sodden clumps of wings. When it spread those wings – those beautiful wings – blood would fill their veins, and the birth fluids on the wings’ frail sheets would harden to make them tough as sails. That’s what they thought.
But the moth could not spread its wide wings at all; the jar was too small.
So the wings hardened while they were still crumpled from the cocoon.
A small moth could have spread its wings in that Mason jar, but the Polyphemus moth was big. Its gold furred body was almost as big as a mouse. Its brown, yellow, pink, and blue wings would have extended six inches from tip to tip, if there had been no Mason jar. It would have been as big as a wren.
The teacher let the deformed creature go. They all left the classroom and paraded behind her. She bounced the moth from its jar and set it on the school’s asphalt driveway. The moth set out walking. It could only heave the golden crinkly clumps where its wings should have been; it could only crawl down the school’s driveway on its six frail legs, because its shriveled wings were glued shut. Annie watched it go. She knew this moth could not travel more the a few yards before a bird or a cat began to eat it, or a car ran over it. Nevertheless, it was crawling with what seemed wonderful vigor, as if it was still excited from being born.
Sometimes our best gifts might be compromised by a personal prison, if we let them. Unlike the moth, we can know what might have been and what we know has been lost makes it hard to choose what we have at that moment. Sometimes our gifts may even land us in prison. When Paul and Silas freed the slave girl, they landed in jail, but their excitement about their power to heal couldn’t be contained.
When the doors of their cell were opened they declined to run. They gave up escape to save their jailer from imprisonment or a death sentence. The circumstances looked grim but their faith was fierce. Their faith was not bound by a Mason jar, or their cell; their faith was as big as God’s grace in them. They were still excited by their new life, and intent on Jesus’ ministry above everything else.
The prisons of our lives may seem as confining as a Mason jar or the hospital bed we inhabit, a stifling job, or tragic loss, but they aren’t. There is no darkness so dark that it can separate us from God.
There is no prison, physical, mental, or spiritual, strong enough to resist the saving power of God’s grace. The conviction to stand fast, or the courage to see life in a different light is always a choice we can make. Paul and Silas lived from a certain conviction, a point of view. Their conviction was that freedom was not escape, freedom was the courage to remain and show compassion for their jailer, the same compassion Jesus had shown for his prison masters.
The way we look at things, changes everything. I have a simple example, but it makes the point. I used to hate being cold. I would draw myself up tight and tense and hunch over shivering. One day, Cara Couch, a former member of Christ Church, was out for her daily five mile run. The temperature was low. I don’t remember how low, but it was very cold. Cara was running by our house just as I arrived home and she stopped to say hello. How you can run when it’s this cold? I asked her. It’s invigorating to me, she replied. Invigorating. I vowed to try thinking of cold as invigorating. The next time I stepped dripping wet from the shower into the cold air, I thought of my goose bumps as invigorating — and they were.
That’s not so important, but changing the way we think of illness or circumstances we can’t change is important. A change of view can be the difference between being in prison or being free. In the hospital, I have seen prayer make that difference time and again.
Prayer made the difference for Paul and Silas. Instead of hovering and shivering in their cell, they prayed and sang hymns. Sharing an experience like Jesus had once experienced, they recalled Jesus’ reactions: compassion for those who bound him, a word of hope to a man who suffered with him,
and concern for his followers and family.
An earthquake shook their prison. The jail no longer held them, but they stayed. They stayed for their jailer’s sake.
What they believed about Jesus did not matter to their jailer. How they responded to their situation for his sake, with their hearts and actions, made the difference. They chose a lasting freedom over a quick escape and by their choice, someone else was freed from his bondage to a cruel system.
We also are free to choose. By our choices we too may find new life whenever we need it. The compassion of Christ given to us, received, and given by us has the power to free us from any earthly prison.
The earthquake shook the prison. The doors were opened and the chains broken. They did not run away. That’s the kind of faith I want. Amen.