TRUE FREEDOM
Acts 16:16-34
A sermon preached at First Presbyterian Church by Carter Lester on
May 16, 2010
What does freedom look like to you? I don’t mean political freedom, the kind we
celebrate on July 4. I mean personal freedom – what picture pops up, what
understanding forms in your mind, when you think about personal freedom?
The freedom of getting your driver’s license at age 16 and never having to be as
dependent on your parents to get where you want to go? The freedom at age 18 of
leaving the rules at home to go away to college? Or would you define freedom as
having enough money to be able to buy whatever you want? Or do you think of living
free as an adult with a good paying job and no confining relationship? Or does the
freedom of retirement come to mind, at least as you imagine it – with no boss and no
schedule imposed by others? Perhaps, a simpler, more limited image comes to mind –
the freedom of a day at the beach or in the mountains on vacation – when you can do
what you want to do when you want to do it.
Acts 16 offers none of those particular images but it does offer important insights
about what it means to be free – and what it means to be shackled or confined. Indeed,
you might say that everyone in this passage is bound or confined in some way. The
great irony is that those who appear most free are in reality most confined and
shackled. And, in the end, we find that the people who are truly free are those who
have been confined to jail. Look again at Acts 16.
First, there is the young slave girl, who is not only bound as a slave to multiple
masters, she is also confined by some form of mental illness. In her case, her mental
illness is quite lucrative – at least for her owners. She brings her owners a great deal of
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money from fortune-telling. Or at least she does until Paul frees her in spirit, if not in
legal terms, by healing her and casting out the spirit or demon that plagues her.
Then there are the masters of the slave girl. Obviously, they are free in that they
own the young fortune-telling girl. But in a way, they are bound, too. Because their
income comes from exploiting the girl. They are like those in the business of payday
loans and rent-to-own who gain their profits by exploiting young military families and the
poor with exorbitant interest rates. The freedom to exploit is hardly true freedom.
The magistrates are town leaders who hear the charges brought by the owners
against Paul and Silas. Surely, they are free to do what they want when Paul and Silas
are hauled before them. But they are pressured by the mobs who almost lynch Paul
and Silas. The angered owners of the slave girl are smart. They know that antisemitism and patriotism can stir up the mob. Paul and Silas are Jews and foreigners
and they don’t worship as we do, the owners charge.
Some things don’t change do they? Even today, the probably the best way to stir
up an angry mob is to claim that someone is un-American and doesn’t worship God the
way we do. In the case of the magistrates, they are so flustered by the mobs that they
forget to check if either Paul or Silas are Roman citizens, and therefore subject to more
rights. That will be something they will deeply regret later, as we learn at the end of
chapter 16.
Then there is the jailer. He is the one who holds the keys to the jail. But when
the earthquake comes and everyone is able to escape from jail, the jailer is the one with
shackles: he feels compelled to kill himself. Why? Perhaps because that will be the
penalty decreed by the magistrates: there is little room for mercy for a jailer who loses
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his prisoners. Or perhaps, he is bound by shame for so publicly failing his
responsibility. In any case, he has drawn his sword and is about to kill himself when
Paul shouts in a loud voice: “Do not harm yourself, for we are all here.”
Which brings us to Paul and Silas. They would appear to be bound and shackled
more than anyone else in this passage. As the demon in the girl accurately proclaims,
they “are slaves of the Most High God.” And then once they heal the girl, they are
seized and dragged before the authorities. They are beaten by the mob and then
stripped and beaten by the orders of the magistrates, and thrown into jail. You would
hardly say they were free – that is, until you see what happens to them in jail.
Though confined in shackles in prison and uncertain what the morning might
bring, they are not full of despair or fear. Instead, they are full of faith and song,
“praying and singing hymns to God,” Luke, the author of Acts, tells us. And then, once
the earthquake happens and they are free to flee, Paul and Silas choose instead to
remain in jail. By doing so they give the jailer “the gift of unexpected grace.”1 The result
is that instead of taking his life, the jailer and his entire household offer their lives to
God, and they are baptized without delay.
As one commentator observes: “By the end of the story, everyone who at first
appeared to be free – the girl’s owners, the judges, the jailer – is a slave. And everyone
who first appeared to be enslaved – the poor girl, Paul and Silas is free.”2 How is that –
how would this commentator call Paul and Silas free? Because, true freedom is a not
so much a matter of having endless choices as it is a matter of living faithfully no matter
what circumstances we face. True freedom is not so much a matter of claiming our
rights as it is a matter of being able to extend grace to others, even giving them more
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than they deserve, just as Jesus gives us more than we deserve. True freedom is not
so much a matter of doing whatever we want to do as it is a matter of doing what we are
created and called by God to do.
How free are we? On the one hand, we should be free as anyone on the planet
since we live in the wealthiest country in the world and have a degree of political
freedom that most peoples envy. But with us, as with the people in Acts 16,
appearances can be deceiving. To be sure, some of the things that bind and confine us
are quite obvious and out in the open: the obligations of work, the responsibilities we
have as parents or caregivers for our own parents. But some of the shackles that bind
us are as hidden and as real as the shackles that bind the people in Acts 16.
Consider peer pressure in school. What do you want to wear to school? Who do
you want to sit with or befriend? How free are you to choose? How many people wear
clothing with the brand name on it because you feel pressured to show – or want to
show – that you buy the “right” stuff? How many of you consider what effect it will have
on your own popularity if you hang out with, or befriend, another student who is not very
popular?
How many of us adults are shackled by the need to create a good appearance
and to “keep up with the Jones.” Dave Ramsey, who is the speaker in the video series
being used by the Financial Peace group meeting here on Sunday afternoons, tells of a
friend who works at a luxury car dealership. 75 percent of the cars that leave the lot are
leased, even though that is the most expensive way to obtain a car and the most
profitable for the dealerships. Why? People want an outward sign of success, even if
they struggle to afford it.
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Debt can shackle us. I knew of a couple in another church where the husband
reacted to stress by going out and impulsively purchasing something he wanted as an
antidote for the stress. Of course, when he did, their unpaid credit card balance grew
and that made the stress that much worst.
Perhaps more than anything else our fears can shackle us. In preparing for this
week’s sermon, I came across the words of a wise pastor and writer, Eugene Peterson,
who was a pastor in the Baltimore area when Kerry and I lived there. His words were
written in the early 1980s during the last great recession before the one we are still
being affected by now. This is what he wrote then: “When I looked at the people I was
living with as pastor – fairly affluent, well educated, somewhat knowledgeable about the
Christian faith – I realized how unfree they were. They were buying expensive security
systems to protect their possessions from burglary. They were overcome with anxieties
in the face [of a bad economy]. They were pessimistic about the prospects for justice
and peace in a world bristling with [enemies]. They were living huddled, worried,
defensive lives. I wanted to shout and object,” he writes, “Don’t live that way! You are
Christians! Our lives can be a growth into freedom instead of a withdrawal into anxious
wariness.”3
I think his words speak equally well to our times. There are many folks these
days, Christians and non-Christians, who are living huddled, worried, defensive, and
fearful lives. Jesus Christ came to set us free from all that. God does not want us to be
shackled by our fears. God wants us to grow into freedom instead of withdrawing into
anxious wariness.
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Here is the paradox of the Christian faith: we are freest when we are bound to
God. What Dean Inge, the dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, said two
generations ago is equally true today: “God promised to make you free. He never
promised to make you independent.” True freedom is found in trusting in God, and not
in our own bank account, nor in our plans to create peace or security. We discover true
freedom, the freedom of Christ, when, like him, we give up control and live by faith,
seeking not what we want, but what God wants, and trusting that he will provide what
we need every time, and in every situation.
True freedom is also not found in being disconnected from others. “No man is an
island,” because we were created by God not to be independent from all commitments
but to be in relationship with others. We are bound to others not by shackles of
commitment, but by freely given love, just as Jesus Christ is bound to us by his love
freely given to each one of us.
In 1520 Martin Luther began one his greatest works, his “Treatise on Christian
Liberty” with two propositions: “A Christian…is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to
none. A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.” He lived out those
paradoxical statements in his own life a year later.
On April 16, 1521, he arrived in the German city of Worms to face charges of
heresy by the Catholic bureaucracy because of his claims of freedom of conscience.
Imprisonment, and perhaps even death, was a possibility for his punishment. On the
day before his trial, he went to bed almost dead with fatigue.
Eugene Peterson tells the rest of the story: “When he woke the next morning,
what did he do? Did he spend a few feverish hours putting some finishing touches on
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his speech, as you and I would? No. He spent that morning as a ‘perfectly dutiful
servant…subject to all’ visiting a dying man who had expressed a desire to see him. He
heard this man’s confession and administered the sacrament [of communion]. We are
told that in the afternoon, when he went before his accuser, he entered the hall
smiling.”4
What picture pops up, what understanding comes to mind when you think of
freedom? How about a smile on the face of one going on trial or a song sung from a jail
cell? How about the love that takes Jesus to the cross? True freedom is found when
we learn to face whatever we might face without fear because we know that we are held
in the hands of a loving God. You are Christians! With God’s help, do not let
yourselves be shackled but live free!
Sam Purushotham, “”Thursday May 13” in Disciplines: A Book of Daily Devotions (Nashville: Upper
Room Books, 2009), 145.
2 William Willimon, Acts (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1988), 140.
3 Eugene Peterson, Traveling Light (Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 1982), 11.
4 Peterson, 183.
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