Bible Text: Acts 16:25-40 | Preacher: Pastor Dorry Newcomer | Series: Acts | Before reading our scripture lesson for today, let’s set the scene a bit.  We’re all the way back in time to the year 51.  The Christian church is a little less than twenty years old and growing like crazy.  Paul was on his second missionary journey, this time traveling to the Roman province of Macedonia, which is part of modern-day Greece.  He was stationed temporarily in Philippi, the key city of Macedonia.

While in Philippi, Paul and Silas met a slave girl who was a type of psychic.  She worked as a fortune teller, and she made quite a lot of money for the men who owned her.  Luke says she was possessed by a “python spirit”—an evil spirit associated with worshipping the pagan god Zeus.  She followed Paul and Silas around town, crying out, “These men are slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim to you a way of salvation.”  That might sound flattering, but to her, the Most High God was not the God of Jews or Christians.  And so her message may have been mocking them, or was at best confused.  Finally, Paul turned to her and spoke to the evil spirit within her: “I order you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her.”  Immediately the evil spirit left her, and the woman was made well.

Great news, right?  The woman was healed, but her owners were very upset.  She no longer had the spirit that enabled her to predict the future and earn money!  And so they dragged Paul and Silas before the local authorities and accused them of disturbing the peace, of advocating customs that are illegal for Roman citizens.  The crowd joined in on attacking them, and the local magistrates had them stripped of their clothing, beaten with rods, and thrown into jail.  They told the jailer to make sure they were locked up tight, and Luke says they were put in the innermost cell and their feet locked into stocks.

Not good.  But listen to what happened next.  (Read Acts 16:25—“About midnight, Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the other prisoners were listening to them.”)

Isn’t that amazing?  Can you imagine having a faith so strong, that locked in jail, further constrained by being locked into the stocks, that you would spend your time singing hymns and praying and praising God?

They had come to Philippi specifically because Paul had a vision of a man in Macedonia, begging him to come.  After Paul had this vision, they left at once, thinking they were being obedient to God’s will for them.  But what did they get for his obedience?  They got arrested.  Arrested for doing something good, for helping deliver a slave woman from being controlled by an evil spirit, and they end up in jail.  They could have easily been angry!  They could have been cursing God, not praising God!  They could have said, “God, after all we have done for you!  We have gone everywhere you told us to go.  We have done everything you asked us to do.  And what do we get in return?  Beaten severely with rods.  Crowds ready to take my life.  Thrown into jail, locked into stocks.  What kind of God are you, anyway?”

But Paul and Silas do not say any of those things.  In their distress, Paul and Silas don’t curse God.  They bless God.  In their suffering they don’t rail against God.  They praise God.  Let me put it very bluntly:  they do not say, “gosh darn it” like so many of us do when we are frustrated, and that’s the G rated version.  Many of us, we can on occasion utter another prayer when we are frustrated, with different words starting with G and D before the it.  None of us would blame Paul and Silas for saying those words!  But Paul and Silas do not curse their situation.  Instead they say, “God has blessed it!”  How are they able to do that?  I want a faith like that!

Let’s read the rest of the story.  (Read Acts 16:26-40)  Paul and Silas had a faith so strong, that even when they could have broken free, they stayed.  They could have left that jail when the earthquake happened.  They could have run when the jailer took them outside. They could have escaped when the jailer took them home for supper. They could have walked out first thing in the morning when the magistrates let them go.  But they didn’t leave, even when they had the opportunity, not until they felt God saying the time was right.  They didn’t need to leave—because they were already free.

I want a faith like that.  I need a faith like that.  I think we all do, because we too are people who will be taken places we don’t want to go by forces beyond our control.  Not that we’re likely to get carted off to jail for our faith like Paul and Silas.  But I know a lot of people who are trapped in situations they don’t want to be in.  There are people in our church family who have been to the unemployment office because of a layoff at work, the skilled nursing unit because of an aging body, the funeral home because a loved one passed away.  And that’s just this month!

All of us get taken to places we don’t want to go.  We get taken to a place of anxiety by our fears.  We get taken to a place of discouragement by our worries.  We get taken to a place of hatred by our anger.  We get taken places we don’t want to go by forces out of our control.  But no matter where we are, God is right there with us.  In our distress, in times of confusion, in all the places we really don’t want to be, God is with us.  And because God is with us in those places, we can trust that where we are at is OK.

That kind of trust leads to freedom.  Not physical freedom—Paul and Silas were still in jail when they were singing and praising God.  But they had the spiritual freedom to choose peace over anxiety, love over hate, hope over despair.  Spiritual freedom.  I’ve never seen anyone put it on their to do list. No one says, “Today I will procure spiritual freedom.”  That’s because it’s not something you can go out and get by itself.  It comes as a by-product, of day by day, season after season, saying yes to God.  Spiritual freedom develops the same way we build strength in our muscles—through challenge and exertion.

Even though the church was still very young, this was not Paul and Silas’ first rodeo.  This was not the first time they had experienced hardship.  Their capacity to see the light, even at midnight in the darkest of jails, was hard-won.  Their ability to say, “God has blessed it”, even though they had been beaten and were in pain and were locked up deep in a dungeon, that ability had developed over time.   This experience would go on to serve Paul well.  He would later be arrested and jailed many more times, without the blessing of having a friend like Silas beside him.  God used persecution, struggle, and suffering to refine and strengthen the faith of the early church.

What about modern times?  Do you think God still uses struggle and suffering to refine our faith?  Many years ago I read an article written by a German theologian named Wolf Krötke.  In the late 1950’s Wolf was a theology student at a state university in Leipzig, East Germany, and while there, he made one little mistake:  he wrote a poem making fun of his Marxist-Leninist philosophy professor, and he accidentally left it on the desk at the end of class.  That’s probably not a good way in any culture to earn points with your professor, but in East Germany, this was the equivalent of treason.  One of Wolf’s classmates found it and turned it over to the Stasi, the secret police.  Wolf was arrested and sentenced to 21 months in prison for being an enemy of the state.

In jail, Wolf was assigned to a small private cell.  Most of his cell was taken up by a wooden bench that served as his bed.  But he wasn’t allowed to lay down on the bench until 10 pm.  During the day he was only allowed to sit on the bench, and he had to sit in the middle of it, where the guards could see him through the peephole in the cell’s door.  Wolf found sitting there mind-numbing, so he took to walking the floor space in his cell.  Two paces front, three to the side.  That was all the space he had, two paces to the front and three to the side.

You might think that over a year and a half of pacing day after day like that might make a man go crazy.  But Krötke wrote about how, in pacing through that small space day after day, God showed his infinite and steadfast love to him.  Instead of going crazy, Wolf went “faith-y”!  He wrote about how his captors designed imprisonment to break him down.  But God used that time to build him up.

Wolf spent his days pacing and reciting things he had memorized, like poetry, hymns, the writings of Luther, and scripture.  He realized that, “my way in front of the wooden bench slowly because the way into a future that the guard behind the peephole and the people who interrogated me didn’t have.”  In other words, the guards had the ability to move about freely.  They had physical freedom. But they did not have spiritual freedom.

But miraculously, spiritual freedom is what time of imprisonment gave to Wolf Krötke.  Despite the limit of two paces to the front and three to the side, in pacing and reciting all the inspirational text he could remember, God broadened his soul.  In that tiny little cell, Krötke felt the infinity of God’s world open up to him in a way that he would have never discovered if it weren’t for such great hardship.  What a powerful story.

Eventually, Krötke was released from prison and regained his physical freedom.  Years later, the wall between Eastern Germany and the west was removed, and intellectual freedom was restored.  Krötke went on to earn a PhD in theology and teach at a seminary in Berlin.  According to Facebook, he is now 80 years old and retired.  He has written over a dozen books, all in German so I have a good excuse for not reading any of them.  From what I can tell, he went on to have a productive and faith-filled life that influenced many people for good.

Thankfully, not many of us will ever have a jail experience like Paul and Silas, or Wolf Krötke.  But a lot of us will go through times when we feel trapped by life’s circumstances.  Stuck in an unhappy marriage, or job, or neighborhood.  Confined by a body that will no longer do the things we want it to do.  Chained to past hurts and painful memories.  Limited by our past mistakes and current responsibilities.  Stuck in place that barely gives us enough room to breathe, let alone move about.  Almost every Christian will at some point experience a “dark night of the soul”, a time of crisis and confusion.  Thankfully, these experiences don’t last forever.  But instead of just being glad when they’re over, people like Paul and Silas and Wolf Krötke give us a model worth investigating further.  What will we do while we feel stuck?  What will we do in times of distress?  Will we curse God for bringing hardship upon us?  Or will we use challenging situations as a time of blessing, a chance to develop our faith so we can live in spiritual freedom?

This summer many people have commented on how loud the cicadas are around the church building.  Cicadas lie dormant underground, and every so many years, emerge to live in trees and make a lot of noise!  People have also noticed a lot of butterflies for some reason around the church this summer, too.  Both cicadas and butterflies experience a time of being in jail—being trapped underground or in a cocoon.  When they emerge, they each in their own way spend their energy praising their creator.  The cicadas sing out loud and strong.  The butterflies are quietly embodying joy and freedom.  The dark time prepared them to zestfully live in the light.  And as amazing as that is, we know that God has even bigger plans for us in terms of honoring our Creator.  We can come to know God so well, we can learn to live zestfully and joyfully, even when life feels dark.  May the witness of Paul and Silas inspire us to greater devotion and peace.  Amen.