Acts 16:16-34Common English Bible (CEB)

Paul and Silas in prison

16 One day, when we were on the way to the place for prayer, we met a slave woman. She had a spirit that enabled her to predict the future. She made a lot of money for her owners through fortune-telling. 17 She began following Paul and us, shouting, “These people are servants of the Most High God! They are proclaiming a way of salvation to you!” 18 She did this for many days.

This annoyed Paul so much that he finally turned and said to the spirit, “In the name of Jesus Christ, I command you to leave her!” It left her at that very moment.

19 Her owners realized that their hope for making money was gone. They grabbed Paul and Silas and dragged them before the officials in the city center. 20 When her owners approached the legal authorities, they said, “These people are causing an uproar in our city. They are Jews 21 who promote customs that we Romans can’t accept or practice.” 22 The crowd joined in the attacks against Paul and Silas, so the authorities ordered that they be stripped of their clothes and beaten with a rod. 23 When Paul and Silas had been severely beaten, the authorities threw them into prison and ordered the jailer to secure them with great care. 24 When he received these instructions, he threw them into the innermost cell and secured their feet in stocks.

25 Around midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the other prisoners were listening to them. 26 All at once there was such a violent earthquake that it shook the prison’s foundations. The doors flew open and everyone’s chains came loose. 27 When the jailer awoke and saw the open doors of the prison, he thought the prisoners had escaped, so he drew his sword and was about to kill himself. 28 But Paul shouted loudly, “Don’t harm yourself! We’re all here!”

29 The jailer called for some lights, rushed in, and fell trembling before Paul and Silas. 30 He led them outside and asked, “Honorable masters, what must I do to be rescued?”

31 They replied, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved—you and your entire household.” 32 They spoke the Lord’s word to him and everyone else in his house. 33 Right then, in the middle of the night, the jailer welcomed them and washed their wounds. He and everyone in his household were immediately baptized. 34 He brought them into his home and gave them a meal. He was overjoyed because he and everyone in his household had come to believe in God.

Will you pray with me please? May the words of my mouth and the meditation of all of our hearts and minds be acceptable in your sight O Lord? Our Rock and our Redeemer. Amen

There is a part of me that has always been at odds over the reading we heard today from Acts… I am at odds with it because most of my life I have heard this passage used for Evangelism. The jailer asks “What must I do to be rescued or saved” and the answer is; “Believe in the Lord Jesus and you will be saved…you and your whole household.” Even in my readings this week, that is that tact that most people took. And I understand that, and I don’t want to diminish that but gosh that just seems too simple and I kept feeling that there was something more here, something that was lurking just under the surface that I just could not put my finger on. That is part of the frustration and the beauty of the scriptures…there is always some sort of overt idea that is kind of in your face and no getting around it…but there is also always an undercurrent of something else for us to think about and sink out teeth into and I found it in these lines…

“All at once there was such a violent earthquake that it shook the prison’s foundations. The doors flew open and everyone’s chains came loose.”

And maybe it is because of everything that is going on in the life of the church right now…maybe it is because of all of the things that I see going on in my life, in your lives, in the world right now that the imagery of a violent earthquake made sense to me.

Thanks to modern news feeds, and the internet and camera phones now days we can see the immediate and devastating destructive power of earthquakes in our world. The Teutonic plates shift and groan and resettle themselves under the ground, the earth moves and a once bustling city, a quiet suburban street, a safe home, a superhighway are reduced to rubble in an instant. Earthquakes literally shake the foundations. The earth beneath our feet is normally the one thing that we feel certain about, it is solid, it can hold the weight of our bodies, our belongings, our buildings. But when an earthquake happens, when a literal or figurative earthquake happens, everything that we have relied on as being “rock-solid” is shaken and suddenly unstable.

“All at once there was such a violent earthquake that it shook the prison’s foundations. The doors flew open and everyone’s chains came loose.”

You know, I think we build so many walls around us. We do such a good job of setting in a firm foundation that is not necessarily a good thing because the foundations that we lay and the walls that we build up from it are way too often erected for us to hide behind. We hide from others and we even hide from ourselves. We repress the memory of something that is too painful to deal with. We conceal our feelings of inadequacy, we wall in our concerns that we are different from others, we build a barrier to keep out things we don’t understand, we close the doors to being open minded about new things or new ways or new ideas. We build walls with bricks made of stubbornness, fear, anger, hate, excuses and gossip. We build walls that are supposed to keep us safe, but all too often they end up keeping us locked in and keeping others locked out. We build and we build until we end up with is a castle-like structure, inner wall, outer wall, moat…we build to keep the enemy out but somehow they end up turning into a prison where we become our own jailer. We build fortresses that are cold and lonely places because we can’t be what we want to be and do what we want to do when we are all locked up. People on the outside can’t see through the wall to be able to tell who we truly are and half the time we can’t see who we are very clearly either because we have been walled up for so long.

We build up these massive walls as individuals or organizations, or families and then we chain ourselves to them and bemoan the fact that we are imprisoned by our circumstances, there is no way out, we are stuck, everything is awful and we are all going to hell in a handbasket.

And once we start believing that, we start living that and once we start living into a life of no hope we truly do- have- no –hope. And when we have no hope we start blaming things or people, or yes, even God for a life that feels bricked in and bricked over.

“All at once there was such a violent earthquake that it shook the prison’s foundations. The doors flew open and everyone’s chains came loose.”

Paul Tillich was a prominent Christian existentialist philosopher and theologianof the 20th century. I remember studying him in college Philosophy class and I was less than thrilled when we had to rekindle our relationship in systematic theologyin Seminary because he gets a little dry sometime… but that was until I really began to listen to the way that he talked about God. Tillich wrote a book called The Shaking of the Foundations in which he puts forward the idea that sometimes God has to shake us to the very center of our foundation in order for us to change, in order for us to understand how much God really loves us. Those spiritual earthquakes we feel in our lives sometime are not to flatten us, not to destroy us, not to test us, but to allow the doors to fly open and our chains to break. The walls that we have built around us, the bad habits, thoughts and ideas that we have forged that keep us unhappy, that hold us into a less than happy life, the things that we have said are more important to us than a relationship with God.When God shakes us to our very foundations we are being given the opportunity to let go of everything that holds us back and start again.

Today is the last Sunday of the Easter Season and next week we will celebrate the birthday of the church with Pentecost. During this Easter season we have had the chance to remember again and again that resurrection was not just for Jesus, it is for us too. We are promised a new life in Christ; a new life and a new way of living into Gods Kingdom. When we follow Jesus into the world we are guaranteed that we will be changed, we will be empowered to change the world through Jesus Christ and we can transform the world and transform our lives after we break the chains that hold us down and keep us from recognizing our full potential as people of faith.

When God shakes us to our very foundations we are being reminded that our God is the God of creation and every day, every hour every minute, we can be made new in God’s love. We are not consigned to the same old same old; we can break our chains and move forward every day being transformed by God, being empowered by Jesus Christ.

So get ready for the earth to quake, be prepared for the very foundations to shake, watch for the doors to fly open and the chains to break, God is waiting and we will be transformed.

“All at once there was such a violent earthquake that it shook the prison’s foundations. The doors flew open and everyone’s chains came loose.”