FREE FROM THE CHAINS

A Sermon by Bill McDonald from Acts 16:16-34

May 20, 2007

Acts 16

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.” ²²The crowd joined in attacking them, and the magistrates had them stripped of their clothing and ordered them to be beaten with rods. ²³After they had given them a severe flogging, they threw them into prison and ordered the jailer to keep them securely. ²⁴Following these instructions, he put them in the innermost cell and fastened their feet in the stocks.

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.

“Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose; nothing ain’t worth nothing, but it’s free.” That’s how Kris Kristofferson wrote about freedom in the song “Me and Bobby McGee,” made famous by Janis Joplin. You aren’t free if you still care about anything. Siddattha Gotama, the Buddha, trying to break the spell of earth over our spirits, put it this way, “If you have a thousand loves, you have a thousand woes; if you have a hundred loves, you have a hundred woes; if you have one love, you have one woe; if you have no loves, you have no woes.” Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose. In the midst of grief over a lost loved one, we might wish never to have loved because of the pain it is causing us. In the throes of thrashing out a relationship, sometimes we want to just turn and walk away and take life’s trail alone. Crushed under the weight of worry about how to support our family or whether something terrible will happen to one of them, we might daydream about being a self-reliant world drifter, too tough to be hurt. But, when we come back to reality and experience the intense love that humans can share, then that “nothin’ left to lose” option doesn’t sound like any kind of freedom I would like to have, does it to you?

Free from the chains. When I was about five years old we had a dog, a Spitz named Skipper whose life was twenty feet long and six feet wide. By that I mean that we kept him chained to the clothesline outside. He spent the day running up and down that narrow path and barking. Occasionally we would bring him inside in the evening where he seemed to me like a playful ball of fluffy cotton. I couldn’t understand why my parents kept him chained to the clothesline—so one day I let him loose. He was so happy. He jumped and spun around, licked at my hands, barked joyously—and then ran around to the front of the house and bit the mailman. I didn’t know that was what he always did, but the mailman seemed to know. Skipper rather enjoyed biting the mailman; I’m not sure why. I have never bitten one myself, so maybe I shouldn’t pass judgment on the dog’s choices. But I saw it as a poor choice for a creature who had just gotten his freedom.

Free from the chains. I intentionally chose a college 400 miles from home, so that I could escape the critical frown of my father and the smothering love of my mother. As freshmen at Transylvania College all we had to do to get a fresh set of bed sheets was go to the basement of the dorm on Mondays and pick them up. Of course that meant you would have to actually change the sheets and make up the bed—too much like the rules of home for my tastes. But you can only sleep on one set of sheets so long before the bed ceases to look inviting even to a sleep-deprived college student. So I just took off the old sheets and slept on the mattress—for two months. When my affectionate mother arrived to pick me up for spring break, she wouldn’t even hug me because I smelled so bad. She asked how in the world the girls I was dating could stand my musty odor. I suddenly realized that I wasn’t dating any girls! Hmmm…. I was free to choose to disregard the rules of cleanliness, but there was obviously a price to pay. Not having anyone waiting for me when I got home to the dorm at nights was an unexpectedly refreshing freedom. Mom had always waited up on the couch until I walked through the front door of our house no matter what time of night or morning it was. I was now free from the guilt of knowing that she was waiting up for me, her smothering love. But then I called home one day and discovered that Mom had been in the hospital for a week without me knowing it. I was mad at her for not telling me. But suddenly I realized how important connectedness is, how much I yearned for the closeness that sometimes smothers but always fills your heart.

How do we respond to freedom? What does it mean to be free from the chains? Does it mean irresponsibility, carelessness, unaccountability, selfishness, or is there a higher value to be found in freedom?

Paul and Silas had their chance for freedom. They had been dragged through the streets, beaten with rods—who knew what tomorrow was going to bring? Tossed into prison, put in the innermost cell, solitary confinement, probably underground, feet locked into wooden stocks, their future looked as grim as the plot lines of the TV series “Lost.” But an amazingly convenient earthquake tears off all the doors without tearing off their legs also and jars loose the locks without knocking the stone walls down on their heads. Here was their chance. But they didn’t take it. Not only Paul and Silas but all the rest of prisoners who had been listening to them pray and sing songs simply sat there waiting and then prevented the distraught jailer from harming himself. The jailer, who in reality was imprisoned by his work and by his superiors, found a new life of freedom where the rules made sense finally, where the world wasn’t all about who had the most swords or the biggest clout. Though the scripture doesn’t mention them again, we have to believe that the other prisoners experienced a new sense of freedom as well. Paul and Silas could have run away but they stayed to prove that in Christ we are already free. In Christ we are free from Old Testament laws and prohibitions; the only law now is love. But love constrains us as well as frees us, or maybe it is better to say that love causes us to constrain ourselves. Knowing that my mother was waiting up for me, and loving her as deeply as I did, I made sure to phone if I was going to be out very late and I came home earlier than I probably would have chosen otherwise. Love causes us to constrain ourselves.

Fred Craddock defines God’s love as “power restrained.” Craddock claims that without love, the righteous part of God’s nature would cause God to crush us all for the sinners and rebels and egotists that we are. But God’s love restrains God’s righteous wrath and gives us a God who mothers us and smothers us, a God who gives us everything and saves us from nothingness, a God who gives us a lot to lose and a lot to treasure and comforts us when in the course of natural time we do lose it. The Judge is overshadowed by the Father, the divine Jailer by the divine Rescuer. Because of love, by the power of love, God breaks the chains of our lives and sets us free.

Free to bite the mailman? Free to sleep on the mattress? Free to discard all cultural norms? None of those are really being free; they are simply being chained to negative principles, negative responses. We are really only free when we can choose to be bound to others and to be bound to Christ in love. Bound by a love freely chosen, freely given.

When I was training as a volunteer firefighter, our trainers set an old house on fire and for the first time in our lives we were sent into smoke and flame. Three of us trainees took an inch and a half line through the front door, me on the nozzle and two men behind me wrestling the hose. Down a smoky hallway we struggled and turning a corner we encountered the flames, roaring in our ears, licking at the ceiling, jumping at us like a snapping dog on a chain. Suddenly the hose felt heavier and I looked around to find that the other two men had dropped the line and run. I did much better than they did. I hit the fire with one short spray and then made a mad dash for the door! That first step out into cool, fresh air, that first cleansing breath, and we were sure that nothing could get us to go back in that house again. But we learned to; it was what we were called to do. We hear stories of normal citizens running back into the flames after struggling to escape and be free. Why would they choose to do that? Why give up freedom so urgently won? Because someone they loved was still inside. Because love binds us to one another. We are really only free when we can choose to be bound to others and bound to Christ in love. So, all of you graduates here today and all of you Christians, be free. And use your freedom wisely, lovingly, for the right purposes, and you will find chains falling away and doors opening and a higher way unfolding.