Holy Spirit – Bondage Breaker

It seems that whenever the risen Jesus turned up in a place through his chosen messengers, things changed – sometimes for the easy and sometimes for the hard! We have both in this jail break account today.

Seems that we have a lot of ‘crowd power’ going on here this day in Philippi.

Some local ‘dodgy brothers’ get very upset because the gospel transforms a ‘cash cow’ for them into a non-earner!

They make a big noise about it down at the central markets. Like a Twitter account going viral, people join the rage. With the anger and frustration of a French farmer driving his tractor down the streets of Paris the crowd move en masse to the court house.

The legal people are a bit caught short. To calm things down they do a quick move. They sanction the beating of these two Jewish foreigners, Paul and Silas, and throw them in the lockhouse for the night. It works … But then it doesn’t!

There is major trouble at the lockhouse! The jailor, who has been given strict instructions to make sure that these two guys do not escape has all his worst nightmare comes true. Not only these two men, whom he locked in the inner cell and with leg irons attached to the wall, but all the other visitors to ‘His Majesty’s Hotel’ are able to escape – due a serious tremor causing enough shaking to swing the cell doors open and loosen off the leg irons!

He draws his word to do himself in because he knows that he will face certain execution in the morning…

And then to his huge relief, that Jewish bloke yells out from the darkness and dust that everyone is still in their cells.

Can you imagine the overwhelming relief of that voice!

The Jailor know his life is in the messenger’s hands – literally. The crucial question comes:

There is only one Savour who can save you from certain death.

The fearful man is transformed, as are his wife, his slaves and his kids …

The man given over to security, safety, rules, fear, violence and following orders is now transformed to a man who himself is free in the business of saving lives, healing people and even hosting people for a meal. Now he is following grace, not rules.

This is our baptism. This is our message. This is the grace we have known and live in now. This is our place – messengers of this message freedom that we take wherever we go among people in all kinds of prisons and leg irons.

To the beaten and the bruised in their various prisons, and the ones doing the beating and the bruising to keep them there, we, the messengers, carry the message, and the Spirit shakes up the ground so the lights go on and the tending, healing, caring, redirecting work of the Spirit emerges from the darkness and dust in our day.

But it may not always go well

It can be wonderfully well, as it was with Lydia and the other women praying down by the river. The Spirit opened her heart to receive this message of God’s life and forgiveness and hope in Jesus and a little church began in that city.

But then in that same city and time this – violent abuse, injustice and dark prison.

Both are part of living the Spirit’s calling to carry the message among people’s chains and prisons.

I learnt this again last week. I worshipped with what is left of the church we planted in WA from 2004 until 2011. They are now a small older group of Lutherans who will never be able to call a pastor and who have no church building in which to gather. But that is not the pain of it.

They were part of the founding of a new gospel community within a new Lutheran K-12 college, who at the high water mark, joined around 100 people every Sunday and saw whole families being baptised regularly. They worked hard and saw the rough and the smooth of the gospel mission and loved it. But that is all over and has been for several years now.

You might expect those Lutherans to be down-hearted and broken. They would have more reason to be than any Lutheran in the Barossa. They really did lose everything.

But there is joy in their little fellowship. There is thankfulness to God for what was, and amazingly, even though they are mostly all over 70, there is even the will to still reach out into the lives of local people – and they still do, in their own way.

I said to them as I gave greetings from us that I wish I could bus over small groups of every St Petri person to worship at their place every week for six months. We would see what church in mission can be and still is – to hear their story and catch their suffering and their joy.

It would be good for us to see and feel because for them church is really people not buildings, church is really personal cost and commitment to contribute, not a place where I come and go and never really invest myself or give my heart to, church is my responsibility to pitch in and share myself, not leave it to the institution.

In a high Lutheran populated area with a six or seven generations of story that for so long has included plenty of buildings and money and place in the community, we are insulated from such church pain. Sometimes, as a result, we lack the joy to be able to change and be open to the Spirit’s directing and transforming work. We can be so distracted by things that really don’t matter all that much.

But, the thing is that the Holy Spirit has been at work in this place too – for a long time. As a result, we are here, standing on the shoulders of the messengers who were before us.

And we have our own hard times too.

We had big and courageous ideas about making this space more current and useable that have at this stage not been able to be done. We have all been through this really disruptive pandemic that has changed things so much that we are not quite able to identify fully yet.

We have thanked God for a long and much-loved way of doing mission through a bookshop on the main street as we brought that to an end. We have sweated over how to make the most of the enormous opportunities to carry the message in our hearts to hundreds of people in other the other ways we have developed for doing mission, but have not been able to do as well as we know we can because of the pandemic – very frustrating!

We all carry the sadness of people in our lives who need to forgiveness and hope of Jesus but for whatever reason will not let his message we carry in yet.

We all have our own suffering and weakness to live in.

But I know that we have that same joy as those folks in WA, and Paul and Silas. I know we have the will to be open to the Spirit’s calling and Jesus’ message carrying here enough, because I know you, and we know the Holy Spirit is here enough and Jesus is enough!

So, no heavy hearts today or people weighed down with guilt about all that this church or the church is no longer able to be.

When our hope for our St Petri community and its mission to this town is bruised from the beating that covid and culture change and our own personal suffering and the Evil One dishes out to us we can keep singing with Paul and Silas.

We sing in the dark and we sing songs of faith in this resurrected Saviour and his ongoing presence and power to change things and people and me.

As we sing our hope in the dark in people’s prisons they overhear and some, by the Spirit’s leading, really hear and are transformed, like that Jailor, like Lydia, like that slave girl.

The Spirit is still calling us and powering us. Truth is that things may not be exactly how we would like them to be or go how we think or would like them to go. Same for Paul and Silas.

If Luke’s telling of the first church says anything it says that the Holy Spirit is agile and on the move. He calls his messengers to be agile and free to change and move.

When we want to go to Asia Minor, he calls us to go the other way to Macedonia. We are meant to follow, not persist in our own vision and plans. Change is often hard because we feel like we are losing a lot, but in Jesus it is never a prison and we always have him.

Anything that does not go as well as it once did or as well as we thought it should, still might be where the Spirit wants us to keep working. On the other hand, it could be something the Spirit is calling us away from to some other way he has for us.

Either way we are free to change direction. We are not beholden to the past or current expectations. We are free to change things, try things, learn things and experience the joy of being a part of the Holy Spirit at work in people lives.

We are free to move. Be re-filled with joy “because you have come to believe in God –you and this whole household”.

Paul prays for this church …

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