Saved From What?

Based on Acts 16:16-34

    “What must I do to be saved?” This question asked by the jailer as he falls to his knees trembling before Paul is one of the big questions asked through the book of Acts and down through the ages. Isn’t this what the Christian faith is all about, to be saved? We say that Jesus is our lord and savior. People have said that the church is in the salvation business.

But there is a follow up question we may want to ask, “Saved from what?” Are we saved from hell? From death? From the consequences of our sins? That’s part of it. Salvation does have something to do with what happens to us after we die. This season of Easter we are in is all about celebrating the resurrection of Jesus and the promise that we too will experience resurrection and enjoy eternal life. But is salvation only about what happens after we die? The story we heard this morning helps us understand what we are being saved from. We will see that salvation is something we can experience while we are still living in this world.

The story begins with exploitation, prejudice, mob justice, and false imprisonment. These are life experiences that are all too common in our own day. Human nature has not changed over the centuries, only the means and methods. As the story proceeds, we see a shift. In the back end of the story we hear of freedom, hospitality, and celebration. We experience this as well. Which kind of life do you prefer? Is it a life of exploitation, prejudice and mob justice? Or is it freedom, hospitality, and celebration? That’s a rhetorical question. And yet, for some reason, we continue to experience plenty of the first kind and not enough of the other. I wonder why? I wonder if the answer to this perplexing question comes when we consider what it means to be saved? Let’s look closer at this story and see what we find.

There was an enslaved woman who had a spirit of divination. For a price, people who are desperate for answers would come to her and receive a prophecy revealing to them what will happen in the future. This spirit has a name by the way. In the Greek we read that the woman was possessed of a pneuma pythona, a spirit snake. This may be a reference to the famous Delphic oracle, a place where people could go to hear their fortune, that had been guarded by a python that the god Apollo killed. In Greek myth, the snake was a source of wisdom and insight. Regardless, the main point here is that she had this spirit and was being exploited by her owners who would take the money people paid to receive their fortunes from her.

The woman starts tagging along with Paul and Silas as they make their way through the town. She follows them for days. As Paul and Silas try to engage people in conversation the woman keeps telling them that Paul and Silas are slaves of the most high God who offer a way of salvation. When she says the most high God, is she referring to Zeus? Probably. She says they offer a way of salvation. Saved from what? Does she even know?

The thing that gets me though is that Paul puts up with her for days until, annoyed, Paul has enough and casts the snake spirit out of her in the name of Jesus. This act proves the truth of what the woman has been saying about Paul. She has been saved from possession of this spirit. But why didn’t Paul cast that spirit out sooner? The only reason he does it is because he is annoyed. Not exactly the greatest motivation. Nevertheless, she is freed from this spirit.

Not only has she been delivered of the spirit, now she has no benefit to her owners. They can no longer exploit her. What’s the point of keeping her? I wish we knew what happened next. Did they just let her go? Was she no longer a slave? We can only guess. But maybe she was set free not only of the spirit but also of her servitude. At least she isn’t being exploited anymore. Is this also being saved?

The exploiters though are not happy about this turn of events. They grab Paul and Silas and drag them to the agora, the marketplace, where the magistrates are. But look what they do. They don’t accuse Paul of making their slave useless. Instead, they intentionally rile up the crowd by accusing them of being Jews, which they are, and also saying that they teach customs not proper for Roman citizens to perform. In other words, Paul and Silas are outsiders, foreigners, who are undermining the culture, the moral order. It’s nothing but base anti-Semitism, raw ethnic supremacy and bigotry. And the crowd turns into a mob.

Caught up in the mob mentality the magistrates strip Paul and Silas and severely beat them with rods. Beaten and bloodied they are then thrown into prison. Not once are they given an opportunity to speak for themselves. They have been dehumanized, demeaned, victims of injustice and Roman supremacy. And the crowd probably laughed at them and thought to themselves that those Jews deserved it. They shouldn’t be here anyway. They should go back to wherever they came from. They don’t belong here. Sound familiar?

But here is the turning point of the story. In that prison cell, chained to the floor, beaten and broken, in the darkest hour of the night, Paul and Silas are praying and singing while the rest of the prisoners listen in. No moaning. No cursing. They pray and sing. What a powerful witness! They do not let their circumstances break their spirit. They maintain their dignity. They know that in that moment they cannot plead their case. They cannot get out of the jail cell. There’s not much they can do. But they can pray. And they can sing. In the darkest hour of our lives, when we find ourselves in situations where little of anything is in our control, we can pray and we can sing.

This was a source of comfort for me this past week after the massacre in Texas. I’m sure this broke the hearts of all of us. It filled me with sorrow. But also anger that these keep happening. And then the feeling of despair that nothing will change, that the rest of the world will look on at our country baffled that we are incapable of preventing these massacres. I felt hopeless. But then I was reminded that there are things I can do, that all of us can do, when our hearts are broken and we feel hopeless that anything will get better. We can pray. I know the phrase “thoughts and prayers” is getting old. But prayer is no small thing. And we can sing. Or we can listen to others sing. Music has the power to heal. Music can lift our hearts and give us strength. In these difficult days, when so much is wrong, we can pray and we can sing. And others are watching us as we grieve and navigate through these hard times.

Then the earthquake. Was it divine intervention? Maybe. In previous jail breaks an angel appears to release the chains and open the jail doors. But this time it is an earthquake, which was a common occurrence in those days. Divine intervention or natural occurrence? It is uncertain.

But the jailer is certain that the prisoners have taken the opportunity to run away. Why wouldn’t they? It’s common sense to run away. He immediately despairs and prepares to fall on his sword, to get it over with quickly rather than face the torture and death that would await him from the hand of an unforgiving magistrate. But Paul, with compassion toward the jailer, calls out to him so he doesn’t fall on his sword. What amazing grace! What a witness. The one who has been beaten and broken prays and sings and cares for the jailer. Paul and Silas are opposite of how most people would act in those days, and in these days. Their dignity, their integrity, their grace and compassion is incredible. It is undeniable. They are different. They are not like everyone else.

And the jailer runs to them, falls to his knees and trembling asks the question, “What must I do to be saved?” Saved from what? From hell? I don’t think that’s what the jailer was thinking about. What did he want saved from? Maybe he wanted to be delivered from living in a society where people were exploited, where bigotry led to mob violence, where people could be unjustly beaten and thrown into jail while everyone else laughed at them. He wanted to be set free from a society that is dehumanizing, violent, cruel and unjust. He wanted saved from that.

Paul tells him to believe on the Lord Jesus and he will be saved along with his household. To believe in the Lord Jesus was to no longer believe in the Lord Caesar and all that Caesar represents, a society of exploitation, ethnic superiority and brute force. Instead, he was to believe in the Lord Jesus, who represents a society of dignity for all people, integrity, compassion, and grace, which Paul and Silas demonstrated in that prison cell. By believing in Jesus as your lord, this changes the way you live.

And look what happens. The jailer who is an agent of that corrupt system of mob justice, washes the wounds of Paul and Silas. Just sit with that image. Can you picture it? An incredible act of compassion this jailer shows. See how quickly he has been converted, from just doing his job, to almost killing himself, to now washing their wounds. Amazing. And then Paul and Silas baptized the whole family, ritually bringing them in to a new society, a new way of living together. And then to top it off, food is brought out, they all gather around the table, no one is left out, and they eat and celebrate together, Jews and Greeks, slaves and free, women and men as they celebrate that the jailer had come to belief in God. Salvation.

Saved from what? We have seen in this story that salvation has to do with freedom, compassion, grace, hospitality, and celebration. Peter tells us in Acts 2:40 what we are to be saved from: “Save yourselves from this corrupt generation.” The corruption Peter was referring to was exploitation of others, prejudice, mob rule, cruel violence at the hands of state authority. We need saved from this corrupt generation, where there is exploitation of the vulnerable, ethnic superiority, cruelty, violence, where a young man can impulse buy an assault weapon and hundreds of rounds of ammo but can’t buy a beer or rent a car and the proposed solution is to arm teachers and make our schools like prisons. We need saved from this corrupt generation.

So, we believe in our Lord Jesus. We follow his way of life. We live under the reign of God. When times are hard, we pray and sing. We live in our freedom and in our dignity. We are merciful. We are compassionate. We aim to heal and not kill, to be merciful and not judgmental, to unite and not divide, to be hospitable, to make room for everyone at the table, and to celebrate life. And what I have come to realize is that when you and I live this way, with open heartedness, with freedom, with dignity and integrity, that people are watching. And sometimes they will approach you and say, maybe even with a little tremble in their voice, “What must I do to be saved?”