Acts 16:16-34
February 23,2014
One 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.
While 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.’ She 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.
But when her
owners saw that their hope of making money was gone, they seized Paul and Silas
and dragged them into the market-place before the authorities. When they had
brought them before the magistrates, they said, ‘These men are disturbing our
city; they are Jews and are advocating customs that are not lawful for us as
Romans to adopt or observe.’ The crowd joined in attacking them, and the
magistrates had them stripped of their clothing and ordered them to be beaten
with rods. After they had given them a severe flogging, they threw them into
prison and ordered the jailer to keep them securely. Following these
instructions, he put them in the innermost cell and fastened their feet in the
stocks.
About midnight
Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the prisoners were
listening to them. Suddenly 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. When 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. But Paul shouted in a loud
voice, ‘Do not harm yourself, for we are all here.’ The jailer called for
lights, and rushing in, he fell down trembling before Paul and Silas. Then he
brought them outside and said, ‘Sirs, what must I do to be saved?’ They
answered, ‘Believe on the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your
household.’ They spoke the word of the Lord to him and to all who were in his
house. At the same hour of the night he took them and washed their wounds; then
he and his entire family were baptized without delay. He 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.
When things aren’t going your way, how do you react? When
you get into a situation where everything you’ve planned for, everything you
worked for, starts to come undone, what do you do? It’s bound to happen at some
point. You make plans, and they all go awry. How do you respond when they do?
One of my favorite movies has to do with these questions.
It’s a British movie called “Clockwise.” I think I was one of the few Americans
to have seen it, but I loved it. It starred ex-Monty Python, John Cleese as John
Stimpson, the headmaster of an English
private school (which is what the British call the equivalent of our public
school). He has been named the chairman of the British Headmaster’s
Association, which is made up mostly of headmasters from British public schools
(which is what the British call private schools—it’s very confusing). He is
proud of his achievement because he is the first private school headmaster in
history to be named to that post. His installation is to take place at 3 p.m.
that afternoon in Norwich—a three-hour drive from his home, or two hours by
train. He spends much of the early morning working on his speech, while making
sure things were in order in his school.
Mr. Stimpson rules his school with an iron fist. He
watches the students gather in the courtyard from his office window, often
using binoculars to see who is smoking, bullying, cheating, or any other
illicit activity. He is quick to use his microphone and carefully placed
loudspeakers to call out students: “Lydia Portsmouth, put out that cigarette
and get to class! Mr. Johnson, tuck in your shirt!” He is a man who demands
order, and who lives by the clock. But things start to go awry as he tries to
get on the train to Norwich.
He asks the stationmaster which train it is to Norwich.
The man says, “Left.” Stimpson replies, “Left,… right!” (that’s the English way
of saying “okay”). Suddenly he sees two of his students skipping school. He
yells at them to get back to school, turns to the station master and says,
“Right!” The station master, not sure if he’s saying “okay” or asking “is the
train is on the right?” says back, “Right?” Stimpson heads to the train on the
right. He sits down and goes over his speech. Then he hears the station master in
front of the other train yell, “Train to Norwich! Last call!” He asks another
passenger, “This is going to Norwich, right?” The mans says, “Plymouth.”
Stimpson runs out, forgetting his speech. He misses the train to Norwich. He
runs back to get his speech, but the train to Plymouth pulls out. Stimpson
stands up straight, and says to himself, “Right! Must find Gwenda.” That’s his
wife who had dropped him off. She had actually stayed long enough to see the
train to Norwich leave, making certain he was on his way.
Stimpson runs out of the station just in time to see his
wife drive away, despite his yells. So he takes a taxi home, hoping to find her
there and to drive to Norwich. But she had gone to her volunteer position of
driving older dementia patients around the countryside to look at scenery.
Stimpson runs after the taxi that has left him off, but it drives away. He
looks to his left, and there at the stop sign is one of his students, Laura
Wisely, who is skipping school and has snuck off with her father’s car. She
tries to duck out of his sight, but he sees her. “Laura Wisely! You have study
hall! Study hall is not a free period.
You need to be in school!” Suddenly he realizes that she can drive him to the
hospital to find his wife. “Right!” he says, “You can drive me to hospital to
find my wife, then it’s back to school for you.” She agrees.
He gets to the hospital, but doesn’t find his wife. He
then says to Laura, “Right! Can you take me to Norwich? It’s only three hours.
And if you do, I’ll forget that you skipped school. “ She has no choice. Off
they go. As they stop for “petrol,” Stimpson’s wife sees him with Laura, but
she can’t pull in to confront him. So she’s now convinced that he is having an
affair with his student, and sneaking around. Also, Laura’s parents have found
the car missing, and have called the police to report a stolen car. Eventually,
the police find that Laura is missing, and now have reports that she may have
been kidnapped by an older man. So Stimpson, just trying to get to Norwich, is
now in a car reported stolen and he’s suspected of kidnapping.
Everything continues to fall apart from there. He tries
to call the Headmaster’s Association from a phone booth to tell them he’ll be
late, but the phones have been vandalized. In frustration, he begins kicking
the phone, and a neighbor calls the police to report that vandals are attacking
the phones again. The police show up to arrest him, but they’ve driven away.
The police find them, but when Stimpson and Laura make a wrong turn, they
coincidentally evade the police by taking a shortcut. Unfortunately, this
shortcut cuts across a farm field. They get stuck in mud.
All along, with every setback, Stimpson calls out,
“Right!” He then tries to get things under control, but they continue to fall
apart. In an attempt to get the car unstuck, he falls in the mud and is covered
in filth. They find a nearby monastery, where the monks take his clothes to
clean them, leaving him in a bath and only monk’s robes to change into. He
realizes he can’t stay because he’ll be late, so he and Laura run out to
hitchhike to Norwich, with him dressed as a monk. She uses her feminine wiles
to lure a man in a Porsche to stop for them. Stimpson manages to get the man’s
clothes, which are much too short for him, and to drive the Porsche to Norwich,
which the man reports as stolen. So now Stimpson is suspected by his wife of
having an affair with a student, of kidnapping her and stealing their car by
her parents, and of having stolen a man’s clothes and car, all while
impersonating a monk.
You see where all this is going. The fun is in how
Stimpson reacts to everything falling apart. That’s where the humor is. But
when our world is falling apart, do we find humor in it?
The reality is that when things go wrong with most of us,
we have one of several reactions. Some of us react in frustration and anger. We
lose our temper and start to bang around, hitting things, knocking things over,
and yelling. Some of us react in anxiety and clamping down. We become immersed
in worry, and try harder and harder to gain control, although those attempts
can often cause us to lose control. Some of us react with helplessness and tears.
We freeze and break down in crying, thinking, “what can I do? It’s all falling
apart.” But some respond in the way Paul and Silas did in our passage. We
become calm and immersed in prayer.
There is a big contrast in the way the slave girl’s
masters reacted to things going wrong for them, and how Paul and Silas reacted
to things going wrong for them. The masters became angry, and in their anger they
began spreading lies. They incited an already existing anti-Semiticism among
the Greeks. They managed to have Paul and Silas flogged severely and then
placed in prison. This was no modern prison. Their badly beaten heads, hands,
and feet were placed in stocks. How did Paul and Silas respond? They prayed.
They centered, focused on God, and sang songs of praise. They were in dire circumstances,
and they responded with calm and prayer.
Then an earthquake suddenly hits, which wasn’t too
uncommon in that earthquake-prone region. The quake breaks their shackles and
the walls. They are free. All is dark, and suspecting that his prisoners have
escaped, the guard readies to kill himself. Things didn’t go right for him, and
so he becomes suicidal. That’s not an overreaction. Among the Romans, if a
prisoner escapes, the guard is typically executed as punishment. So his plans
to kill himself make sense—why wait to be killed? Paul and Silas, knowing what
he will do, yell out, “Do not harm
yourself, for we are all here.” He takes them to his house to guard them
(they are still his prisoners), and he washes their wounds and binds them up. He
then becomes a Christian, learning the ways of centering and faith in response
to calamity.
Everyone around Paul and Silas responded to their
situation with anger, frustration, manipulation, or despair. Paul and Silas
responded with calm and prayer.
One of the keys to life, and learning how to deal with
life when it doesn’t go our way, is to learn the lesson of Isaiah. Isaiah said,
“Yet, O Lord, you are our Father;
we
are the clay, and you are our potter;
we are all the work of your
hand.” This is a common Old Testament imagery, used also by Jeremiah, comparing
us to clay (we are made from dirt) and God to the potter.
The metaphor is rooted in ancient communities, where the
potter was a central figure in ancient life. Much of home life revolved around
pots. Pots stored water for purification, drinking, and cleaning. It stored
food to be eaten. The bowls and cups and serving platters were pottery. And
pottery was used to cook with. It was quite common to gather at a potter’s shop
and watch the potter form his pot on the wheel. It is fascinating to watch and
was their entertainment. Find a video of a potter molding a cup or bowl and
you’ll see what I mean. The potter plops a lump of clay on spinning wheel. Then
he or she slowly uses the spinning motion to form a cup, bowl, or pot.
Isaiah understood that in the molding of a pot lies a powerful
metaphor for the spiritual life. For the potter to be able to do his or her
work, the clay had to be centered on the wheel. If the clay were off just a
bit, the pot would be misshapen. It all had to do with being centered. Nothing
was possible without being centered. But once centered, the clay could be
molded into anything.
That’s the metaphor for Christian life. We have to live
from the center. We need to place ourselves in a calm, centered place so that
God can mold us in any situation. We have to make ourselves available to God. That’s
what Paul and Silas did. Mr. Stimpson tried to be centered, but ultimately
failed to do because he was centered on the clock, not on God. The slave masters
and the guard were off-center, and so their lives reflected it. The slave masters
were manipulators. The guard was fearful.
The lesson of the potter is that we are called in life to
live life from a calm center, where ultimately God can molds us to serve God. One
of the reasons so many people in life have a hard time is that they aren’t
centered. They let the concerns of life push them all over the wheel, and it
warps them. Christian wisdom teaches that we can’t control what happens in
life, but we can control how we’ll respond. Yet for Paul and Silas, the more
life got out of control, the calmer they got. They learned the lesson of the
portion of St. Patrick’s prayer that we are focusing on this morning: “Christ in quiet, Christ in danger.”
The Christian and biblical example is always one of
centering. It is of Abraham in the desert, Moses in the desert, David in the
cave, Elijah in the cave, and Jesus in desert, on the mountain, and in the
garden, centering and praying. One of the problems of so much of the
contemporary Christian movement is that it is focused on constant stimulation,
not centering. In contemporary worship services, there is no time for
centering. It’s meant to be stimulating, but is stimulation the biblical model?
That doesn’t make them wrong, but this need for centering is one reason we
build so much time in our worship service for quiet and centering. We start off
that way with our chant and quiet prayer. We have time for quiet during our prayer
of humility. We have time of centering and prayer during communion and during
our pastoral prayer. We recognize the need for centering.
I want to end by asking you to do an exercise for at
least two minutes, which leads you into centering:
1.
Make sure you
are in a place of quiet.
2.
Place your feet
on the floor, your back straight and comfortably against the back of your
chair, and place your hands in your lap so that your shoulders are relaxed.
3.
Close your
eyes.
4.
Gently focus on
your breathing, letting go of thoughts in your head. You’ll have thoughts, and
it won’t be easy to let them go, but just gently let them go.
5.
Breathe back
and forth till you find yourself calming down.
6.
If you get
distracted, just focus on these words, “God, place me in your center.”
7.
When you’re
done, thank God and slowly go back to your day.
Something like this is a practice Paul and Silas did and
understood, and it’s what allowed them to remain calm when all was falling
apart.
Amen.
