On Friday my son and I visited with a pastor who works for a ministry in Turkey that helps educate Kurdish girls. These girls are raised with two primary tracks for their life, either marriage, at an average age of 14, and often as a mistreated second or third wife, or being handed a weapon and sent to the mountains to join the fighters. This is your freedom, they are told. This is your salvation.
But instead, with this ministry, they go to school, they learn a trade, they start a business, and when the marriage proposal or the gun comes, they say No. The average marriage age for girls involved in this program is now 22. And they tend to marry men who see them more as partners. They teach their own children to read, they hire friends for their businesses, they strengthen and build their communities. And the church is growing in that place – just like it was in Paul’s day, and in much the same way. People are having dreams, “I saw a man on a white horse and he said his name was Jesus,” can you tell me more about this Jesus? What must I do to be saved? And the reality of God that breaks in and sets people free is embraced and shared and spreads.
What does salvation look like? What does it mean? Well-being, deliverance, wholeness… freedom in Christ looks different depending on what you are in bondage to. And lucky for us we have several examples right here in today’s text. Everyone in this story is enslaved to something. Everyone is aiming for their own salvation. They are working for their own well-being and security, striving for some semblance of safety and freedom. And yet they are all enslaved.
The slave girl is the first and most obvious. Doubly enslaved, to a demon and to human masters, she has managed to stay alive by staying useful to others and losing her entire self in the process, mind, body and soul. This wretched state of false safety gives an illusion life – she belongs to them, she has a role, she is useful in society. But her humanity is stripped away and tamped down.
And yet, on these days, as she follows around the Jesus-preachers, the demon in her announcing the truth to the world – “These are servants of the most high God who preach a way of salvation!” Did she know it was possible? Did she long to be free? And, when, (apparently because Paul got so annoyed), the girl is released from the grasp of the demon, the illusion crumbles. She is no longer a profitable commodity. She is useless to her owners. Her place in the world is gone.
This happens to us often, when we are set free from a deep and abiding slavery that has defined us – perhaps it’s addiction to our work and the accolades that come with it. Maybe it’s a story we’ve believed about ourselves for decades that falls apart. Maybe it’s when we stop drinking, or taking the pain pills that we’ve relied on for years, and the feelings we’ve avoided come flooding in and we don’t know what to do with them. It doesn’t feel like freedom. It feels terrible. It feels like disorder and disarray, and we wonder if we will survive it.
I wonder if the slave girl survived it. She’d been so enslaved for so long, what was there for her when she was set free? We might even be tempted to think it was more merciful to let sleeping dogs lie, or in this case, dogs that go barking at your heals all day to keep doing that. At least she had an identity and a purpose in the world. At least she had someone looking after her, even if that person was using and abusing her and disregarding her humanity. Isn’t that better than having nothing?
This is one of the lies that keep us from being saved. That freedom is too risky. Too unsafe. Too unpredictable. We could die, after all. Better to stay sick, or trapped, if it keeps our head above water. When you are set free the illusions die. The false salvation is exposed for what it was, and things can feel very, very precarious indeed.
The second example of those enslaved is the owners of the slave girl, who have their own path to salvation plotted out. They’ve found their way to make money and stay upwardly mobile in the world. They’ve worked hard to build a business and things are going well for them until their property regains her humanity and then their empire crumbles.
Turns out it can all be taken away in a second; it was never going to keep them safe or give them long-lasting wholeness or meaning. They are furious, and they get their revenge. False accusations against Paul and Silas, seeing them publicly and severely beaten, thrown into the darkest, most secure, most horrific cell in the prison with their legs in chains, that should help them feel better. Did they feel secure now? Did they reclaim their salvation? How far will you go on this quest? And just out of curiosity, in the pursuit of money and security, how much is enough before you are finally permanently ok?
The jailer is my favorite trapped person. He’s just doing his job. It’s a good job, a clear job. Put the prisoners in. Keep them there. But circumstances beyond his control – that is, an earthquake that, instead of breaking buildings and crushing people, shakes open doors and releases chains – threaten all of that. By the dim light of the midnight stars he sees the prison door hanging open and it’s all over for him. He has failed at his one task. He will be held responsible for all of them. The illusion of his own security is gone in an instant. He’s ready to put a sword through his own chest when a voice calls out from the deep darkness, Don’t do it! We are all still here!
Calling for a light he goes in and is stunned to see the prisoners all there.
Nothing makes sense anymore. Who is free? Who is enslaved?
The jailer falls down at Paul and Silas’ feet and begs them, What must I do to be saved?
What must I do to be free like you are?
The gospel of Jesus Christ turns everything on its head, every time and always. The weak are strong, the poor are rich, the secure are actually as vulnerable as the rest of us. Slandered, beaten and locked up, these are the ones who are free. No matter what and always, Paul goes on to say in all his letters, in Christ you are free, so live like that is true.
Every moment, any moment, you can live in God’s reality.
I want that, the jailer said. What must I do to be saved?
Salvation doesn't mean you instantly have security, the respect of others, money, a job, or a home, or a clear path in front of you. Those are the illusion of salvation. Real salvation often feels like scary unknown. We’d all like to see a better ending for the slave girl. But this isn’t her ending. It’s just the beginning. And Paul and Silas’ infuriating joy to sing in the darkness while their bodies lay bleeding is the most unfathomable thing, and yet it sweeps up all the other prisoners and the jailer too into this glimpse underneath the game, behind the illusion. It invites them to be saved as well.
The jailer takes them to his home and bathes their wounds. They baptize him and his entire household. They share a meal together, and stories about Jesus. And some time before morning Paul and Silas step over the broken rubble to sit back down in their cell, where the magistrates find them and attempt to ‘set them free,’ offering what they think is theirs to bestow.
But Paul and Silas answer, No thanks. You publicly humiliated and beat us; you arrested us in front of the whole town. You are not going to release us in secret! We are Roman citizens– a fact that having been mentioned the day before may have spared them all of this discomfort – a fact which now reveals the bondage of the magistrates themselves!
It’s their job to uphold the law, to protect Roman citizens. They have failed at this spectacularly! Now their own safety is up for grabs, jeopardized by their wielding of their so-called power. Now their illusion of security and well-being is exposed as well, and they too are on shaky ground.
Groveling, they let Paul and Silas go with a public apology. And on they go – both preaching and living the way of salvation, just like they had the day before, and the day before that, recognizing that no matter what happens, every moment is an opportunity to live in the freedom of Christ. Every moment is a chance to invite others into that freedom.
I had an odd taste of this freedom last week. My lease on my car was almost at its end, so I stopped into a car dealership to find out about getting another car. There is nothing that feels so much like a board game in real life to me as buying a car. The bartering, the posturing, the pretending you’re going to walk out and check the dealership next door, the willingness to wait it out and wear them down… I kind of secretly love it.
So it was that I found myself sitting across from a man for an unexpected almost four hours. In between numbers and bartering we talked about faith, and dogs, and kids, and death and goals. He was Jewish and married to a Catholic, and at one point he showed me a photo of his Christmas tree. At lunchtime he invited me to come fill a plate at the employee catered Memorial day lunch and we ate together at his desk as we waited for a finance person to open up.
And for whatever reason on that day, something happened to me. I sat there across from him, seeing him, and seeing all the men and women rushing around me playing the game, typing on their computers, or pointing out features on cars, or herding their kids through the showroom. It was like time slowed down and I was struck by the two layers of reality I was witnessing. The first layer was the game. And I thought to myself, Why, this is all pretend! We’ve made all this up! Clever humans! The rules, the credit scores, the financing, the sales, it’s all pretend. But so is the money, and the jobs, and the transportation and the holiday weekend. This man in front of me goes home at night to his Catholic wife, and they talk to their grown son in New York on the phone, and before he hangs up he says the words he heard for the first and last time in his whole life sitting at his own dad’s deathbed, I love you, son. That’s the real.
This conversation we are having as two human beings eating together, That’s the real.
The rest is a game. The rest is pretend. And I am playing it, willingly, and, I hope, well.
But in this moment I can see that it’s all a game just the same.
This feeling of supernatural clarity between the pretend and the real made me ridiculously content in what normally would have driven me mad with impatience and restlessness.
Oh God! What must I do to be saved? What must I do to be free? What must I do to be awake to the real?
From that desk I was ushered to the finance office, where a pale, balding man in a buttoned suit on an 80 degree day sat surrounded by no fewer than 30 pictures of children under five that, I soon discovered, were all of his one son. This fact filled me with utter delight. The doting dad shared that preschool graduation had just happened the day before, and delicious summer now stretched out in front of them. And I loved him. I felt love for this man. Like the pleasure of chocolate melting sweet in your mouth, I found myself savoring the exquisite purity of his love for his child.
When my car salesman finally took me to my new car, after orienting me to the details, topping off the gas tank, and taking a photo of me in front of my old car so my daughter could say goodbye to it, he reached out and shook my hand and said, “It was really, really nice to meet you. I don’t say that to everyone. If you ever need anything, even if it isn’t car-related, call me.”
And I think what he was trying to say was that he had glimpsed the real too. I think he was trying to say that for him the illusion was punctured too, just for a bit, and like me, he had tasted salvation. The freedom of belonging to God and each other that exists and sustains us at every moment had touched him as well.
When I drove away, I said aloud to my new dashboard, Well. That was something.
And I haven’t stopped thinking about it since.
What must I do to be saved?
It’s the question we ask when the illusion crumbles, when the delusion of control, or the façade of security falls apart. It’s the question we ask when the lies of the world get holes poked in them, when the choices open up and we see there are others. What must I do to be saved? When we get a peek at what freedom could look like for us, or we see what it looks like when someone else is living it. When we are ready for something more, something deeper, something real, the question rises up: What must I do to be saved?
And the answer can seem trite or unsatisfying if it is seen through the lens of the world. If control and working for your own salvation are your thing, the answer is really going to disappoint.
Trust in the Lord Jesus Christ. That’s it. When the text says “believe” it is not a mind word, a head concept. It’s a heart, gut, being thing - trust, fall back into, lean on. Surrender to this realty. Surrender and trust in this God-person who interrupts the pretend with the real.
The real broke into that town that day, for the slave girl and her owners, the prisoners and the magistrates, the jailer and his household, and the church grew. And Paul and Silas left there and headed out to the next adventure, to see what might unfold.
Life is this. It’s an adventure. What might unfold? As people claimed and defined by Jesus Christ, even in the midst of the game, every moment is an opportunity to trust in Jesus. Every encounter may give us a glimpse of the belonging we share in God. Every conversation, every difficult circumstance or life shift, or mundane chore is a moment the real can break in and we can live like we are free because we are.
Church, this is what we will pray over Ava today as she is baptized. That she would grow up trusting more and more that she belongs to Jesus, that her life is safe in God, that she is free – free to be present with others, free to be real in the world, free to struggle, and feel, and cry, and rejoice, free to live and risk and learn and love. We pray that she will trust in the Lord Jesus Christ for her life and her freedom, and that she will help us trust in the Lord Jesus Christ for our life and freedom, so that in life or in death, in sickness or health, in triumph or despair, we are held in the freedom and wholeness and well-being of the life that transcends death.
And just as they are available to all of us whenever and every time we need them, the words are right there for her to say, What must I do to be saved? And when she does, we will answer, Trust in the Lord Jesus Christ. You have been set free.
Amen.
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