Sermon "Would We?"

This is the sermon I gave on Sunday, May 8, 2016.

Would We?

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

May 8, 2016

Scripture: Acts 16:16-34

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.

Have you ever found yourself in a place where it was hard to hang onto your faith? A place that caused you to lose faith in God? A place where you found you couldn’t trust God? Here’s a confession: I have. Maybe you don’t like hearing your pastor say that. Pastors are supposed to have rock solid faith, right? Pastors aren’t supposed to have doubts, right? Well, here’s the truth of the matter. We pastors are every bit as human as anyone else. Yes, maybe we’ve studied theology more than most people. Maybe we’ve spent more time with and learned more about the Bible than most people. Maybe we’ve been taught more about prayer than most people. Maybe we’ve been entrusted with the leadership of a faith community. That may all be true, but here’s the thing. All that doesn’t make us one whit less human than anyone else. We are as subject to doubt as anyone else. Maybe more so actually, because we spend more time thinking about God and our faith than most people. More so, maybe, because we’re acutely aware of doubts that maybe even we think we shouldn’t have. So yes, I have times when I doubt. I have times when it’s hard to trust God. Not all that often, but it happens.

So I was quite powerfully struck by our reading from Acts this morning. In that reading Paul and his co-worker Silas are in the Greek city of Philippi. We hear that Paul angered someone, who may have been a leading citizen of the city, when he exorcized a demon out of a girl because the girl kept following him around repeating the same thing over and over again for days on end. It seems he did it for rather selfish reasons, not to cure the girl but because he was so annoyed at her. In any event, she was a slave, slavery being something the Bible just takes for granted by the way. Her owner made money off of her possession by the demon because the demon gave her the power to predict the future. So this slave owner had Paul and Silas arrested and hauled up before the local authorities. He accused them of causing public trouble. The crowd turned against Paul and Silas. So the magistrates had them flogged, then threw them in prison in stocks. It must have been a physically and emotionally most painful experience for our heroes. Flogging is a terrible thing to do to any person, as is throwing them in prison unable to move because their feet are clamped down in stocks.

If all that happened to me, I suspect I’d be angry. I’d be angry at the girl’s owner. I’d be angry at the crowds. I’d be angry at the magistrates. I’d be angry at the jailer. I might even be angry at God. After all, I’m imagining myself in Paul’s place here, and Paul had been doing God’s work. He had been preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ. He was about the work of bringing people to God through faith in Jesus. And what does he get for his efforts? Arrest, flogging, and imprisonment, that’s what. Surely not the reward he was expecting for his holy work!

Now, Paul’s human. He got fed up with the slave girl who was pestering him the way any of us would. But when he’s arrested, flogged, and thrown in prison, does he get angry? Does he lash out at his accusers and oppressors? Does he curse God and abandon his faith? Absolutely not. When, with his friend Silas, he’s shackled and locked in the deepest part of some miserable ancient prison, what does he do? He prays. Now, our text doesn’t tell us what he prayed, what he said to God, or whether he said anything at all. It does tell us that he and Silas sang hymns.

Now, once again our text doesn’t give us any details, but I can’t help but think that they were singing hymns of praise to God. I think that what happens next in the story suggests that that must have been what they were singing. A miraculous earthquake happens. The stocks in which Paul and Silas were locked spring open. The door to the prison spring open too. As far as we know there’s only the one jailer on duty, and he’s asleep. There’s nothing to stop Paul and Silas from just walking out of the prison and hightailing it out of town. Don’t you think that’s what you would have done? I’m afraid it’s probably what I would have done.

Paul and Silas didn’t. Why didn’t they? The answer is: their faith. Their faith in God led them first of all to trust God in whatever happened to them. Then it led them to love their enemy. It led them to be concerned for the jailer, who surely would have been blamed for the prisoners’ escape and punished for it, perhaps with his life. That’s clearly what the jailer thought would happen to him when he thought his prisoners had fled, for he was prepared to kill himself rather than face the consequences of their escape. So Paul and Silas stay. They stay sitting in prison when they could have escaped. They do it to protect the man who was in charge of keeping them in jail. Then of course they convert him to faith in Jesus Christ.

That’s good of course, but it’s Paul and Silas staying in jail out of concern for him that really strikes me about this story. There is a powerful lesson for us in that part of the story. There is a powerful challenge for us in that part of story. Let’s take the lesson first. The lesson, I think, is that it is precisely in the worst times of our lives that faith can help us the most. Maybe I’ve told you my personal story of that truth before, but even if I have I’m going to tell it again.

Some of you know that my first wife Francie died of breast cancer. It happened almost fourteen years ago. We knew her death was coming, but even so, when it came I was devastated. It was easily the worst time of my life. I was devastated, and I had what many might find to be a strange reaction. I was at home with Francie when she died. Through my tears of that evening I had one very strong yearning. I wished that I had my robe and stole at home with me. I wanted to put them on. I wanted to wrap myself in the symbols of the faith. I wanted to clutch the symbols of my Christian faith and my Christian calling for comfort and strength. I didn’t have them at home. They were at the church in Monroe that I was serving at the time. I did have something else. I had this cross that I’m wearing this morning and that I wear most every time I lead worship. Francie gave it to me the day I passed my Ph.D. dissertation defense and became Dr. Sorenson for the first time. It has her initials, my initials, the date of my dissertation defense, and a Russian word that means essentially congratulations engraved on the back of it. So I put it around my neck like it is right now, and I held it tight. It helped. It helped in part I suppose because of its connection to Francie, but mostly it helped because it is a symbol of Christian faith. It is a symbol of Jesus Christ. It represents all that faith offers us in those most difficult times of our lives. It helped get me through. I don’t know how I would have survived Francie’s death without faith, and this cross is a symbol of that faith. In the worst times our faith can give us the greatest strength. When all seems lost it can give us hope. I think maybe that’s what Paul’s faith was doing for him in those stocks in a prison cell so very long ago. Yes, like I said a moment ago hard times can destroy faith; but they can also strengthen it. The hard times in my life have strengthened mine. I hope that maybe the hard times in your lives have strengthened yours.

That I think is the lesson in this story for us, but I said here that there is also a challenge for us in that story. Here’s what I think the challenge is. Let me use myself as an example again. By the time Francie died I had been practicing my Christian faith pretty actively for over twenty-five years. I had not only been a church member who attended worship regularly. I had gone to seminary. I gotten had a call as a Christian pastor. I had been ordained to the ministry of Jesus Christ. I hadn’t stashed my faith away in my attic only to drag it out when I thought I needed it. It was at hand, ready to give me its comfort and support, because I was no stranger to it, and it was no stranger to me. Paul had been practicing and living out his faith too for a long time before he got thrown in prison in the story we heard this morning. That’s challenge for us. This story challenges us to keep our faith active and alive at all times in our lives. It challenges us to practice our faith even when we don’t feel any particular need or desire to do it. And it challenges us to remember our faith in those times when it would be so easy to forget it, so easy to give up on God. Paul met the challenge. Would we?

Of course I know that you aren’t seminarians or ordained ministers. I know that none of us is the founding Apostle of Christianity the way Paul is. That doesn’t matter. We can all practice our faith every day. We can all pray every day. We can all come to church every Sunday. We can all study the Bible and other great works of Christian faith. So let’s accept the challenge so that we can reap the blessings of our faith. Let’s all be not just Christians but practicing Christians. If we will do that, our faith will indeed get us through whatever comes our way in life. Thanks be to God! Amen.