"Set Free"

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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." ²³After they had given them a severe flogging, they threw them into prison and ordered the jailer to keep them securely.

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.

Sermon: “Set Free”

“I was not born with a hunger to be free,” writes Nelson Mandela.  He continues, “I was born free: free in every way that I could know. Free to run in the fields near my mother's hut, free to swim in the clear stream that ran through my village, free to roast mealies under the stars and ride the broad backs of slow-moving bulls. 

It was only when I began to learn that my boyhood freedom was an illusion, when I discovered as a young man that my freedom had already been taken from me, that I began to hunger for it.

I slowly saw that not only was I not free, but my brothers and sisters were not free.

I am no more virtuous or self-sacrificing than the next person, but I found that I could not even enjoy the poor and limited freedoms I was allowed when I knew my people were not free.

Freedom is indivisible; the chains on any one of my people were the chains on all of them, the chains on all of my people were the chains on me.

It was during those long and lonely years that my hunger for the freedom of my own people became a hunger for the freedom of all people, white and black.      I knew as well as I knew anything that the oppressor must be liberated just as surely as the oppressed. A man who takes away another man's freedom is a prisoner of hatred, he is locked behind the bars of prejudice and narrow-mindedness. The oppressed and the oppressor alike are robbed of their humanity.

When I walked out of prison, that was my mission, to liberate the oppressed and the oppressor both. Some say that has now been achieved. But I know that that is not the case. The truth is that we are not yet free; we have merely achieved the freedom to be free, the right not to be oppressed. We have not taken the final step of our journey, but the first step on a longer and even more difficult road. For to be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.”

I think Nelson Mandela and the writer of Acts might have been friends.  You see, they are telling the same story of freedom, for oppressed and oppressor alike.

The central story of freedom in this passage is the earthquake that releases Paul and Silas from prison, but there are several other stories of freedom here that are easily overlooked.

The first person to be freed is that unnamed slave girl.  She had an evil spirit which helped her tell fortunes, the fortune from which she of course never saw.  Her owners enjoyed that. 

I wish I could say she was freed because Paul was compassionate and kind to her.  In actuality, it seems like he was more irritated and annoyed with her following them around and being so loud, so he shouted, “Okay, that’s enough!  Spirit, in the name of Jesus, it’s time for you to go.”  And it did.  She was freed, though we do not find out about her fate after that.  Her owners were irate, but they were freed in a way, too: from a life of greed and exploitation. 

Paul and Silas were beaten and then chucked into prison for that act of liberation, and they sang hymns and prayed into the night.  Let us never forget that worship is a great act of resistance to evil! 

An earthquake came and all the prison doors were opened.  But they weren’t free yet; they didn’t leave.  The jailer thought they did, though, and was about to take his own life.  But Paul stopped him, freeing him from his despair.  “Do not harm yourself, for we are all here!”  What powerful words of hope that we need to speak over and over again whenever despair overwhelms and people, in their pain, cannot see a way out of that darkness.

Paul wasn’t willing to take his freedom, and the freedom of his friends, if it meant taking the life of that guard.   The unnamed guard was overcome with the grace of that moment, and we’re told that he brought them all outside.  Because he was first set free, he could then be an agent of God’s freedom.

And we hear of the fifth and final account of liberation in our story: his entire household sees and experiences the good news of Jesus and are all set free and baptized into faith.

Each of these accounts of liberation teaches us something different about the sort of freedom God brings. 

In the young slave girl, we see that God’s freedom breaks chains of greed and exploitation, chains that need to be broken in Bangladesh and in our own supermarkets.  In her owners, we see that God’s freedom calls us to change our way of life, and that it is often easier to respond with anger and bitterness to this change than to embrace it.  The jailer shows us that even in those places of deepest despair, God is bringing freedom through those who stay and say, “Do not harm yourself, we are all here.”  The prisoners who said those words, including Paul and Silas, reveal that this freedom is not just for those who sing hymns and pray long into the night, but also for those who are simply sleepless with curiosity or worry.  And, finally, in that entire household being saved, we see that acts of grace and generosity pave the way for the gospel, resulting in the freedom that comes from faith in our Risen Lord. 

As people set free from greed and exploitation, from despair, hopelessness and the power of death, we are called to set others free.  For to be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.

Thanks be to the God who sets us free, to the Spirit who stirs in us a holy passion to liberate others and to the Son who was emancipated from the grave that all may know that liberty.  Alleluia!  Amen.