Shaking the Foundations

The Reverend Max Lynn, Pastor

St. John’s Presbyterian Church

2727 College Avenue, Berkeley, CA 94705

Telephone 510-845-6830    Fax 510-845-6837

office@stjohns.presbychurch.net    http://www.stjohns.presbychurch.net

This story of Paul and Silas and the fortune-telling slave in Philippi is interesting for a number of reasons.  First there is the character of the fortuneteller and her social context.  Then we see the power of faith' which gives freedom despite suffering and imprisonment, and shakes the foundations of a violent and hateful world.  And then we see how this powerful faith may even transform oppressors.  In life we ought not seek to be a martyr, but by seeking the faith demonstrated by Paul and Silas in the Phillippian jail, by looking at the lives of those who have endured punishment and imprisonments, we find the strength for joy and freedom no matter what our circumstances.  

Paul comes from a woman’s worship gathering at the home of Lydia, and is confronted by the fortune telling girl on the street.  We know very little about the girl from the story.  We are told she predicted the future and earned a great deal of money for her owners by fortune telling.  She followed Paul and Silas around shouting, “These men are servants of the most high God, who are telling you the way to be saved.”  Paul became annoyed with her. 

Perhaps our fortune telling girl is like those folks you find just about anywhere, right, left and center who seem to have received some kind of accolade for superficial knowledge and then get stuck there, never really going any deeper.  Their role serves some function for survival, but also keeps them from going deep.  The expert at trivial pursuit, the baseball fan who can tell you all about the upcoming draft, the troubled youth who finds fame and fortune working the pool table down at the local bar, the good looking romantic who can melt you with his smile and complements but can’t stay put, the surfer who can’t stop insisting that if you haven’t been to Indo, you haven’t surfed, the Freudian who won’t stop talking about Freud, the perpetual protester who never tires of the same conversations about the same conspiracies and can’t quite quit the drugs,  the Rosie O'Donnell who is just smart and unique enough to draw attention and popularity among the populous, but quickly so obnoxious and grating that after a small dose you are ready to stick your head in a bucket of water just so you won’t have to hear her again. But for some reason we can’t help ourselves -she must have touched on some truth, and we find her on again.

We see here that it is possible to speak the truth, even an important truth, and to still be annoying or avoid the impact that the truth can have.  I wish more Christians could learn this lesson.  Christianity is not just about mouthing the right words, quoting the right scripture passages, and screaming it out to the world.  We are not to be Jesus groupies, feeling special because we can name the members of his band, rushing up to interrupt his supper to get his autograph.

          In the passage from John we find ourselves in one of the most intimate scenes in scripture.  Jesus and those with whom he is especially close are gathered on his last night in the upper room, and he is praying out his hopes for all those whom he loves.  Think about how you say goodbye with someone who is truly important to you.  You gather together.  Perhaps you reminisce, looking at old photo albums, telling old stories.  You recollect your joys and good times, your hopes and dreams, you listen to their blessing and admonitions, you bear their fears and embody their determined hope.  You eat a meal together, you pray together.  Jesus is not praying for people to scream out his name, he is not looking for his future to be told.  His future is clear enough, though he is trying to give the future meaning.  He doesn’t want to sign autographs, he wants to share a meal, he prays for unity and love between us and God, between you and me.  Jesus is praying for the deep intimate relationship that lasts beyond the pain and trouble of this world, beyond death.

          When someone touched by that intimate power calls us on our stuff, challenges us to a role more fulfilling than popularity or financially motivated pats on the back, and we accept the challenge, don’t expect the old friends to be happy about it.  Imagine Rosie’s agent's reaction if someone helped exercise her demons and she felt free enough to stop her act.  What kind of reaction would those making money off her have?

          And here is an interesting twist in the story.  It is only as the financial comfort of the slave owners are disturbed, that they trump up political and religious charges of heresy.  They pull up old stereotypes of immigrants and Jews, call on the patriots of God and country in the marketplace to throw the intruders in jail.

And the masses are all too happy to jump on the scapegoating bandwagon.  Through the entertaining sideshow prophet, our vices are affirmed in their truth telling.  We appear less gross in comparison to the sadly entertaining.  We are, in a sense, addicted and enslaved to their exploitation even more so in TV land than in ancient Philippi.

          Unfortunately this is the last we hear of the fortune-telling slave.  We can only hope that she knew something of the joy of freedom in her heart and soul, even if not from her angry owners.

          We leave her as Paul and Silas are flogged and thrown in prison.  The power of the free human heart to overcome the torture and prisons of this world continues to defy reason and logic.  Such stories give us hope and perspective as we are faced with the feeling of pain and imprisonment in our own difficult circumstances. 

           One of the elements that allows us to endure the difficulties of this world, and the mistreatment of others, is the belief that we stand for higher values than our oppressors.  Certainly Christ was the ultimate radical in this regard.  Paul and Silas embraced this vision of Christ that love was more powerful than the sword. 

But I draw back from our savior’s extreme position for a moment, to address the issue of torture among the military we have commissioned to fight our wars.  Here I quote Senator John McCain from his Nov 25, 2005 article in Newsweek entitled Torture’s Terrible Toll:  

I don't mourn the loss of any terrorist's life… They have pledged their lives to the intentional destruction of innocent lives, and they have earned their terrible punishment in this life and the next. What I do mourn is what we lose when by official policy or official neglect we allow, confuse or encourage our soldiers to forget that best sense of ourselves, that which is our greatest strength… that we fight for an idea, not a tribe, not a land, not a king, not a twisted interpretation of an ancient religion, but for an idea that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with inalienable rights.

I've been asked often where did the brave men I was privileged to serve with in North Vietnam draw the strength to resist to the best of their abilities the cruelties inflicted on them by our enemies. They drew strength from their faith in each other, from their faith in God and from their faith in our country. Our enemies didn't adhere to the Geneva Conventions. Many of my comrades were subjected to very cruel, very inhumane and degrading treatment, a few of them unto death. But every one of us - every single one of us - knew and took great strength from the belief that we were different from our enemies, that we were better than them, that we, if the roles were reversed, would not disgrace ourselves by committing or approving such mistreatment of them. That faith was indispensable not only to our survival, but to our attempts to return home with honor. For without our honor, our homecoming would have had little value to us.”

In Man’s Search for Meaning, Victor Frankl, holocaust survivor and psychologist, talks about the tenacity of spirit in a few of those in the concentration camps, and how it helped them all to survive.  He talks of passing through three phases of imprisonment: shock, apathy, and depersonalization.  We see this process in all sorts of traumatic, horrible experiences: from physical and sexual abuse, to extreme poverty and violence of the inner city, to imprisonment in our diseased or aging bodies. 

“One could make a victory of those experiences,” writes Frankl, “turning life into an inner triumph, or one could ignore the challenge and simply vegetate, as did the majority of the prisoners.  In spite of all the enforced physical and mental primitiveness of the life in the concentration camp, it was possible for spiritual life to deepen.  This intensification of inner life helped the prisoner find a refuge from the emptiness, desolation and spiritual poverty of existence…Dostoevsky once said, ‘there is only one thing that I dread: not to be worthy of my sufferings.’  These words frequently came to my mind,” said Frankl, “after I became acquainted with those martyrs whose behavior in camp, whose sufferings and death, bore witness to the fact that the last inner freedom cannot be lost…We had to learn ourselves, and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing men, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us.”

To put that into our Christian faith perspective: it doesn’t matter what we expect from God, but rather what the Spirit of God makes possible from us.  We know that the freedom and joy is not dependant on what the world throws at us, but on the amazing grace of God and the radical love of Christ.  The love and freedom of Christ shakes the foundations of violence and injustice.  It shook the prison of Paul and Silas.  It shakes the foundations of our world today.

We know that this joy and love is not just a distant fairy tale from a primitive age.  If there is myth in the story, it is no less weighted with truth, but alive and well.  Can you feel your earth shake?   We felt it in the Civil Rights movement when Christians sang hymns in jail, and refused to treat their jailers as they were being treated.  We saw it when, after 28 years of prison in South Africa, Nelson Mandela gave his inaugural speech as President of South Africa with several of his former prison guards at his side. Can you feel the foundations shake?

In what way do you feel trapped, imprisoned by the circumstances you find yourselves in?  Perhaps you find your family relationships challenging, or the market forces are aligned against you?  Or maybe your body isn’t as pretty as the next, or you are troubled by disease or aging?  Maybe this church is shackled with the burdens of an aging building and a culture bent on youthful entertainment and superficial pleasures surrounded by a nation that is more over empire than under God. 

Certainly we have something to learn from those who have endured torture and imprisonment so faithfully.  I don’t want to imply that our job as Christians is to look for a way to be a martyr, a way to suffer and die.  But I do want to say that in Christ we see not so much a reason to suffer and die, but a reason to love and live.