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What a great Bible story!

Can you picture it? Paul and Silas are in shackles, unjustly convicted and now held somewhere deep in the bowels of the Philippi City Jail. It is midnight, and they’re praying – and singing! What a strange thing to do – to sing – in jail – at midnight! I wonder what song they’re singing.

“Jailhouse Rock”? “Folsom Prison Blues”? “Please Release Me, Let Me Go”?

And while Paul and Silas are singing up a storm in their cell at the Philippi City Jail, all the other prisoners are listening and probably thinking bad thoughts about the mental state of people who would do such a crazy thing at such an awful hour and in such a miserable place.

But sing they do, and while Paul and Silas are singing their hearts out, the Philippi City Jail suddenly begins to shake, and the dirt floor begins to heave, and the walls begin to crumble and crack, and the anchor points for the chains break loose, and the iron doors of the cells are flung open. It is an earthquake!

And the warden – sleeping upstairs – is thrown from his warm bed. He dashes down to the cellblock and in the musty darkness sees that the doors are all wide open and the shackles are all broken. And knowing that he has been given specific orders to guard these prisoners with his life, the jailer knows what the consequences will be for letting them escape – and so he decides to save his bosses the effort, and just go ahead and kill himself.

And just as he draws his sword, a voice speaks from the darkness. “Don’t DO that! We’re still  here!” And when lights are brought into the cellblock, sure enough, the prisoners are all still there, unchained, cell doors wide open, but just sitting there and probably wondering what the heck kind of a song was THAT?

And the Philippian jailer is so overwhelmed by the experience that he falls on his knees and asks Paul and Silas what he must do to be saved.

And Paul says, “Believe in the Lord Jesus.”

And that night, the jailer and his whole family become followers of Jesus Christ.

What a story! What a song!

I wonder what song they were singing?

Probably it was a song like almost all the other songs we encounter in the Bible.

Probably, it was a simple song of freedom.

One of the very first songs found in the Bible is the song of Moses and his sister Miriam. After the Israelites had crossed the Red Sea, escaping from slavery in Egypt, Miriam organizes all the women together, and with tambourines striking a joyful beat they begin to dance and the whole company of people join their voices to sing this song:

“Sing to the Lord, for he is highly exalted.

 The horse and its rider he has hurled into the sea.

The Lord is my strength and my song;

He has become my salvation.”

It was a simple song of freedom. It is the song of our faith. And it is a song we need to learn to sing again today.

We modern Christians – in many quarters – seem to have forgotten the song of freedom that is the central hymn of our faith. Today, we are more likely to sing about going to heaven someday when we die than we are to sing about God setting people free in this world while we live. And yet freedom to live life as abundantly and fully as God created life to be lived is the very meaning of salvation in the Bible. The word “salvation” means “wholeness of life”, and the English derives from the word “salve.” Salvation is about God applying salve to the wounds of people, and setting them free from the powers that oppress. Listen again to Moses, Miriam and the escaped Hebrew slaves as they sing after crossing the Red Sea:

“Sing to the Lord, for he is highly exalted.

 The horse and its rider he has hurled into the sea.

The Lord is my strength and my song;

He has become my salvation.”

A simple song of freedom NOW!

And a song we need to learn to sing.

We need to sing it, first of all, because there is a world of people out there who are enslaved by the dehumanizing powers of evil.

Did you notice the little girl in the story from Acts 16?

I imagine her to be like my daughter Bethany when she was just a kid – bright-eyed, beautiful, so full of life and promise. I can remember the joy she found playing with her Barbie dolls, and how she could so easily coerce me into playing the role of Ken, and to perform wedding ceremonies for the two of them. I can still see her walking across the lawn to get on the school bus for the very first time. I can still hear the sound of her excitement when she learned something new, or accomplished something great, and when she fell in love for the first through thirty-first times.

The girl in the story is not at all unlike the kids in your family, except in one major way. She was a slave. Something was odd about her – the people believed it to be demon possession. She had some unique ability to tell the future, and so some profit-motivated adults decided to buy her, and to put her to work on the streets. She made them a lot of money.

Think, if you will, about kids who work in sweatshops in various places around the world, or who are lured into the tragic world of the suicide bomber, or become sex slaves to grown-up pedophiles, or who live in homes right around the corner where they are physically abused. Some kids in our world don’t stand a chance. Sometimes I wonder what my life would be like if I had been born to different parents, or of a different color, or into a different part of the world than the middle-class neighborhood in which I grew up. But for some unexplainable and uncontrollable roll of the dice, the slave girl in this story could be me – or you.

Does our faith have anything to offer such children except a promise of a good life after they die?

And then there are the prisoners in the jail at Philippi. Sometimes people are enslaved because of their own bad choices. Whether those bad choices result in incarceration in the case of criminality, or just tragic results that must be lived with in the case of the mistakes we make, lots of people are enslaved to the errors of our lives.

A teenaged girl once called me on the phone to ask if I would baptize her baby. I said, “Of course, but I know you belong to the church up the street. Wouldn’t you want to have your baby baptized there?” She told me she had asked the pastor of her church, but he said that she would need to marry the father of the baby first. Then she explained to me how he was a drug addict and a thief and going in the wrong direction. With tears streaming down her cheeks, she said, “I can’t expose my little girl to that! I already made one mistake with him, but for the sake of my baby, I’m not going to make a second one.” She had learned something from her mistakes, but she had to live with the consequences. And I was proud of her for the way she was doing it. But her story reminds us that we cannot escape the poor decisions we make, and sometimes we have to live with the results for the rest of our lives.

Does our faith have anything to offer people who make tragic mistakes except a promise of a good life after they die?

And what about the jailer? His sense of worthlessness is so great that he thinks it would be better to just go ahead and kill himself.

I remember talking once with a middle-aged man who suffered with terrible depression stemming from the belief that he could never earn his father’s approval. All his life he had tried and tried and tried to please the old man, but all he ever got in return was rejection. He wasn’t at a point of wanting to end his life like the jailer, but he was miserable and broken in spirit.

Lots of people in our world bear the burden of meaninglessness. All they ever wanted out of life was to be happy, but happiness has eluded them for any one of a million different reasons. Even here in our own congregation today there are people who have achieved the pinnacle of success, but nonetheless find themselves feeling empty and just marking time until they die.

Does our faith have anything to offer people who’ve lost their zest for life?

Well, yes, our faith does in fact have something to offer people that can set them free from what enslaves them and that can lead them to life in its fullest!

Our faith has a simple song of freedom, and it is a song about freedom NOW. And the song goes like this, in the words of Paul to the Philippian jailer:

“Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved….”

That’s the song we have to sing into our own lives, and into the lives of the people around us.

“Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household.”

We Christians need to start believing in Jesus again.

Jesus stepped into the lives of little children and embraced them as his own. He taught us to stick up for them, and provide for their needs, and to protect them from the powers of evil.

We Christians need to start believing in Jesus again so fully that we will fight for kids to have safe homes, and good schools, and adequate health care, and a future overflowing with possibility!

We Christians need to start believing in Jesus again.

Jesus stepped into the lives of people who made the most egregious mistakes. He ate with tax collectors and sinners, and even while holding them accountable for their sins, found ways to help them overcome their mistakes so they could find their way to new life.

We Christians need to start believing in Jesus again so fully that we will work hard to help people get second chances in life, and provide opportunities for people to make restitution for their sins, and to call out the best in people, and even to make our prisons places of rehabilitation rather than the dead-end of punishment.

We Christians need to start believing in Jesus again.

Jesus stepped into the lives of women and men who were beaten and battered and broken in spirit. He befriended them, and told them God loves them, and gave them back the dignity of their lives.

We Christians need to start believing in Jesus again so fully that we will devote our lives and our church to the ministry of embracing ALL God’s children – no matter who, no matter what – and affirm their worth, and apply salve to their wounds, and remind them about who and Whose they are.

We Christians need to start believing in Jesus again.

That’s our song. It’s a very simple song, a simple song of the freedom that is found when you believe in the Lord Jesus, and then go and live out that belief in the reality of this world.

That’s all Paul and Silas were doing that day in Philippi. They were singing about Jesus – the most beautiful person who ever lived – and the One in whose life we find life – jailers, prisoners, slave girls, and even us!.

He is the world’s salvation.

So today, as you get ready to go back out into the world and face the challenges that are before you – in your families, with your health, among the people of our community, nation and world – I say to you what Paul said long ago: “Believe in the Lord Jesus and you will be saved, you and all your household.”

And living as Jesus lived, and loving as Jesus loved, go and sing his song – that others may be set free, too!