Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
May 20, 2007

Scripture:

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

One of the amazing things about great Bible stories is that as we read them over and over again they keep revealing new truths that we have never discerned before. We can think they mean one thing; then a new layer of meaning emerges, and we see the story in a whole new light. That happened to me this last week with our story from Acts that we just heard. I was in Tucson, being present with my twin brother Pete and his family as he struggled through the almost unbelievably difficult early stages of recovery from a very bad stroke, a struggle that continues as we gather here this morning. As time allowed I read the lectionary for today in the waiting room of the ICU in which Pete is being cared for. I tried to work on the sermon for this morning, since I knew I wouldn’t have much time after my return home. After a while, I had a sermon about half written. Not this sermon; a different one. Like this one it was based on our story from Acts. As I worked my way through that sermon, one layer of meaning in the story peeled away; and a new insight about the meaning of the text revealed itself to me. I thought that insight was more important than the one I had been working on. So I scrapped that sermon and began this one. Whether this one is better than that one we’ll never know because I didn’t finish that one, and you won’t hear it. So here goes with the one I did write about that insight I had missed at first but that arose to displace my earlier thoughts about this text.

The first important thing about this Acts story for this sermon is to realize why Paul and his friends got themselves arrested and thrown in jail. It may not be immediately apparent, but they got themselves arrested for preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The immediate cause of their troubles was Paul’s exorcism of a “spirit of divinization” out of a slave girl who had been going around saying “These men are slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim to you a way of salvation.” Acts 16:17 NRSV Now, you’d think that would please Paul and his associates, and maybe it did at first. But she kept it up for many days, and eventually it got to Paul. I guess even a word you want to hear can get annoying if someone keeps repeating it over and over and over. Finally Paul got so bugged by it that he turned on the girl and exorcized that demon right out of her. Paul probably thought he had achieved some peace and quiet. He was wrong.

Acts doesn’t say what the girl’s reaction to the exorcism was. Unfortunately, the Bible frequently fails to report details about the women who are part of a story, the Bible having been written for the most part by men in very patriarchal cultures that didn’t care that much about women. Acts does tell us what her master’s reaction was. He was—I’ll say angry to avoid a colloquialism that might be inappropriate from the pulpit. He had been making a lot of money off of his slave’s spirit of divination that Paul had driven out of her. So he stirred up the people of the town against Paul and his friends, but not by talking about what their real complaint was, that Paul had destroyed a source of income. Rather, they attacked our heroes for being Jews, for troubling the city, and for “advocating customs that are not lawful for us as Romans to adopt or observe.” Acts 16:21 NRSV That’s the charge that got Paul thrown into prison.

It might not be clear to us at first just what this charge amounts to. We want to ask: What custom would it be unlawful for a Roman to receive or observe? I can think of only one. All Romans (except Roman citizens who were also Jews, like Paul) were required to accept Caesar, the Roman Emperor, as a God and to give allegiance to Caesar as Lord, Dominus in Latin, which was one of his titles. Paul, of course, taught that Jesus Christ is Lord, is Dominus, the same title that Caesar claimed for himself. We probably don’t hear the confession Jesus Christ is Lord as a political statement, but every first century Roman would hear it that way. When they heard “Jesus Christ is Lord,” they also heard the necessary negative implication of the statement, that if Jesus Christ is Lord, Caesar is not Lord. The charge brought against Paul and his friends was then essentially one of sedition. They weren’t charged with costing the girl’s master money. They were charged with inciting the people against the Roman Empire. So they were thrown into prison and, and the jailer slapped into irons. The great domination system of their day acted to stop them from preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Rome was their enemy, and the jailer was the immediate embodiment of that enemy, the Empire’s agent in their oppression. The jailer was, as an objective matter, their enemy, whatever they may have felt about the jailer himself.

Then the miracle happened. An earthquake, that I’m sure Luke intends us to see as divine intervention, broke the prisoner’s chains and threw open the prison doors. Paul and his friends were free, or at least they had an opportunity to run for it, to flee the Roman prison and escape Roman oppression, to escape from the hands of their enemies.

But they didn’t. Our story doesn’t expressly say why they didn’t, but the reason seems clear enough. They knew that if they did it would go very badly for the jailer. Certainly the jailer thought it would go badly for him. He was so afraid of what would happen that he was prepared to kill himself rather than face the consequences of his prisoners escaping. We can only assume that Paul and his friends too knew how the Romans dealt with a jailer who let his prisoners escape, regardless of the circumstances. So they stayed put, as far as they knew giving up their chance for freedom in order to spare their jailer, their enemy.

In other words, they lived out Jesus’ directive to love our enemies. They didn’t say to him “we love you and God loves you” as they ran past, abandoning their jailer to his fate. They didn’t preach the Gospel to him, not then at least. They lived the Gospel. They sacrificed themselves for the sake of their enemy. They loved their enemy as themselves, and even more than themselves.

And what happened? Having seen the Gospel of Jesus Christ in action, the jailer ceased to be their enemy. He converted from the Roman way, the way of the enemy, the way of violence and domination, to the way of the ones he had been oppressing, to the way of love. He treated the wounds he or others like him had inflicted on them, offered them food and offered them shelter. The enemy became the friend. The oppressor became the host. Love made peace where hatred and violence could only have made more hatred and violence.

That’s the power of love. Love of the enemy lays bare the impotence of violence. Love breaks the cycle of violence that is so much the way of the world: Hatred and violence beget hatred and violence, which beget hatred and violence, which beget hatred and violence, and so on and so on until the entire world is consumer with hatred and destroyed by violence.

Love breaks the cycle of violence. It is the only thing that can, but love takes courage. Love takes at least as much courage as fighting does. It takes courage because, unlike what happened in our story from Acts, love doesn’t break the cycle of violence immediately. Love is more powerful than violence, but its power usually appears to the world as weakness. God’s power usually appears to the world as weakness, as Paul so powerfully states when he declares Christ crucified to be the power of God. 1 Corinthians 1:23-24 Love can even seem to be cowardice, but it isn’t. It isn’t because acting out of love requires the courage to bear the blows of the enemy who is still trapped in the cycle of violence. It even requires the courage to die without reverting to violence yourself. The great prophets of nonviolence have all known that truth. Gandhi knew it. King knew it. Most importantly for us, Jesus knew it. Love isn’t easy. Peacemaking is risky. Nonviolence can get you killed at least as easily as fighting can, but it is the only thing that can break the cycle of violence. It is the only thing that can stop the killing. It is the only thing that can bring true peace. Nonviolence and the love of the enemy is not the world’s way. It is, however, God’s way; and it is the way to which we are called as disciples of Christ.

Let those with ears to hear, listen.

Amen.