Paul and Silas, still in Philippi, encounter a girl, a slave girl.  That wasn’t unusual.  This slave girl is possessed; a spirit is in her, that, as spirits do, reveals things and foretells the future.  The girl was a goldmine for her owners.  They didn’t care that she was a child.  They didn’t care that she was possessed—let’s say, for the sake of modern sensibilities, that she had a mental illness.  Her owners didn’t care that she was a slave—they loved that she was a slave: their slave!

How long could you watch a stranger being exploited and do nothing about it?  St. Paul held out for “many days” (16:18).  Finally, he couldn’t keep telling himself it was none of his business.  He couldn’t keep on acting as if the exploitation of that child was no concern to him.  My hunch is that the Holy Spirit had been telling him, all along, that he could do something, but Paul still had enough of worldly thinking to hold back.  “It’s none of my business”—how familiar!  In Christ, everyone is our business.  A missionary in Mozambique has two very quotable maxims: love looks like something is the first, the other is stop for the one.  Paul, knowing love looks like something, couldn’t just pass by that girl anymore.  He stopped for the one.  He set her free, free from the spiritual malady at the heart of her exploitation.  She was still a slave, but her chains were gone: the chains that bound her to evil, to death.

He sets her free.  Her owners have Paul and his fellow evangelist Silas imprisoned, but first they’re publicly stripped and whipped.  Can’t have any Jews stirring up trouble!  Scripture tells us they were given “a severe beating” (16:23).  Paul at times in his letters writes of the marks he bears on his body for Christ—he wasn’t being dramatic.  Flesh still torn, ragged, and bleeding, the two of them are thrown into the innermost part of the city jail, where their feet are fastened in the stocks.  They aren’t going anywhere.  They are under the power of the authorities.

Beloved, all manner of things, situations, and people have tried, are trying, and will try to throw us into the innermost part of the prison.  We can be hurt.  We have been.  We can feel isolated, abandoned, locked into some terrible thing, some terrible place we can’t get out of.  Consider Paul and Silas.  What will the next day, or even the next hour, bring?  They don’t know.  They know they are in a bad place.  That’s not all they know.  Sorrow, pain, and self-pity aren’t all that they have.  They also have faith.  They have God, in Jesus Christ, in the power of the Holy Spirit, who broke free from the darkest, hardest, heaviest prison: death.  Paul and Silas know that, no matter what happens, they are safe.  Isn’t that stupid?  Isn’t that silly?  Safe?  How can they be safe?  Their backs are raw with bleeding welts.  They are in the deepest, darkest part of a prison, their feet locked between heavy boards with chains.  Yes, they could sit there and feel sorry for themselves: “I knew I shouldn’t have helped her!”  “Just look at what stopping for the one has gotten us!”  “Love looks like something?  Yeah—so does being in chains!”

They could have talked and thought that way, ‘til doomsday, and they still would be stuck in prison.  I’m not talking about stones and bars.  I’m not even talking about the mental prison: so many seem to be serving life sentences, mentally!  No, I mean the spiritual prison: forgetting that God was with them, forgetting they were saved.  Because they are saved, they are safe, no matter what happens.  The Holy Spirit at work in them was not going to abandon them: in that was their strength, their faith, their hope.

So, what do we hear about Paul and Silas, thrown into jail for bringing salvation to a mentally ill girl being exploited by shameless, greedy people?  We hear them, “[a]bout midnight [. . .] praying and singing hymns to God, and the other prisoners were listening to them” (16:25).  A strange way to behave!  Exactly how God invites us to behave in the prison of this world, under the powers and authorities that seek to exploit and imprison us.  Our bodies are chained by one thing or another, beloved, but in Jesus Christ, our souls are free.  It’s from the soul that prayer and song flow.  Prayer and song bring comfort, courage hope; prayer and song exercise our faith, and they teach us faith.

The other prisoners were listening.  Maybe Paul and Silas prayed and sang so the others could hear; maybe that wasn’t consciously their intention.  The Spirit, beloved!  The Spirit takes us as he finds us, in whatever prison we happen to be in.  The Spirit uses our situation to speak to others, to have us pray for them, too, to have us sing of Christ and grace, freedom, hope, and life, sing through our songs, our words, through our hands, through our lives.  Love looks like something.

And what happens?  As the Spirit touches Paul and Silas, and, through the witness of the faith of those two disciples, touches all those other prisoners, there is an earthquake.  The Spirit is earth-shaking power.  The Spirit brings down the prisons we built by our sin, the temples we built to our idols, the dark rooms where we did the things it would kill us for others to know about (though God knows, has seen all of it), the cells where sin had us locked away and safe, safe for death.  Christ comes in earth-shaking power to save us.  The doors all opened, beloved, there, that midnight, the depth of the darkness.  The chains fell off, all of them.  I hear in this, see in this, a promise of the resurrection, a taste of eternity, eternal joy.  We already taste it, beloved, because in Christ, by the Spirit, the door has been opened, and our chains have fallen off.

Love looks like Jesus—who came to give us the Father’s loving promise, who was given his own severe beating by the powers and authorities of this world, who had a crown of thorns shoved down into his head, in mockery, who had large, heavy spikes driven through his hands and feet to pin him to his death, who died and was buried, locked away in the darkest, hardest cell of all, the tomb, Jesus, who arose in light, life, power, love, and grace.

The jailer, whose world has just been shaken down around him by the Spirit, asks a wonderful question: “What must I do to be saved?” (16:29).  Oh, you must keep and do all the law.  No.  Oh, you must make certain by the end of your earthly life, that your good deeds outweigh your bad deeds.  And get to Mecca at least once.  What?  How?  No.  Oh, salvation is an illusion.  Everything is an illusion.  Well, that’s helpful.  Oh, after several reincarnations, whether as a man, a dog, or a flea, you might make it out.  Yeah, karma.  No.  It’s so simple, so much simpler than all that, yet so much harder than any of those: “Believe in Jesus and you will be saved—you and your family” (16:31).

When we receive the bread and juice offered from this table, when we welcome the body and blood of Jesus, saying Yes, Amen to his sacrifice, we do the easiest and the hardest thing of all.  Anyone can eat and drink.  When we eat and drink with faith, we do so by the Holy Spirit; when we eat and drink with faith, we say Yes, Amen to what the Spirit alone can do: break down the prisons, set us free, and lead us into life.  We don’t.  We can’t.  Only the Spirit does because only the Spirit can.

That Yes, Amen that we say here, before this bread and this juice, say in the presence of the Spirit, is the way into joy.  Jesus Christ is the way into joy.  Jesus Christ is the joy of the Lord, and the joy of the Lord is our strength.  Take, eat, drink, and, with Paul and Silas, wounded and singing in that prison, rejoice.  The doors are open.  The chains are gone.

Now to the One who by the power at work within us is able to do far more abundantly than all we can ask or imagine, to God be glory in the Church and in Christ Jesus to all generations, forever and ever.