Hold On
Revelation
22, selected verses; Acts 16:16-34
May 8,
2016
Paul and Silas was bound in jail, had no money
for to go their bail. Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on.
Paul and Silas began to shout, jail doors
opened and they walked out. Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on.
Only thing that we did wrong, was staying in
the wilderness a day too long. …
Only thing that we did right, was the day we
rose up and started to fight. …
Hold on.
Hold on. Hold on.
You have
a right to the tree of life, and you can come on into the city of God by way of
the main gate. No walls nor prison bars will hold you back. Neither your race,
nor your gender, nor your sexuality, nor your economic situation will keep you
out. The one who testifies to these things – the Alpha and the Omega, surely he
is coming soon. Hold on. Hold on.
This is
essentially the proclamation that Paul and Silas are making as they travel.
Along the way, the text for today tells us, they pick up a fellow traveller
who, it turns out, is annoying. Now this is interesting, because the slave girl
who attaches herself to Paul and Silas is not contradicting them. In fact,
she’s pretty much gives an “amen” to their testimony:
“These
men are slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim to you a way of salvation.”
I
supposed that might have been alright at first, but, apparently, after several
days, it got bothersome. The text is silent on the precise nature of the
annoyance, but if we pay attention to the details of the story it begins to
make sense, and, I believe, it begins to speak to us anew for our own time.
To begin
with, the interruption comes from a slave girl whose owners are making a good
deal of money off of her special spiritual gift.
As Luke
A. Powery, dean of the Duke University Chapel describes it:
A gifted girl is enslaved for
the economic gain of the enslaver. Her gifts produce profits. W.E.B. Dubois
notes that such profiting stems from the gifts of the vulnerable and powerless,
particularly the “gift of sweat and brawn.” And he asks the poignant question,
“Would America have been America without her Negro people?” What he says of
Africans in America is true for all of those oppressed under the mighty hand of
pharaohs to build an empire in which they are deemed second-class citizens or
perhaps not human at all.[1]
Paul
becomes annoyed, the story tells us, after several days. In that time,
apparently, he discerned the reality of the girl’s condition – a reality the
Dubois would have recognized and understood well. Would that we might discern
such realities in so little time.
The
girl’s owners were clearly more interested in the profits than in the person.
We know this because, as soon as Paul orders the spirit out of the girl, her
owners turn on Paul and Silas, bring false charges against them, lie about
them, turn the crowd against them by painting them as foreigners and aliens,
and, then convince the civil authorities to imprison them.
Thus
Paul and Silas are seen as disturbing the peace by interrupting an ancient
tradition that remains an ongoing reality: the powerful profiting off the labor
and the gifts of those who have no power within the economy or politics of
their society.
As
Powery goes on to say:
Paul and Silas resist the
social status quo due to the “way of salvation” that they are following. Their
resistance to the status quo, even unjust economic systems, is not cheap. They
engage in costly discipleship. Their discipleship of resistance is serious
risky business, a matter of life and death.[2]
As
a result, they wind up in jail.
Somehow
I imagine that their time in jail was not quite the same as my own. I’m
guessing the civil authorities who imprisoned them did not ask if being
shackled would hurt their shoulders, and the jailers probably didn’t take much
care to not muss the prisoners’ clothes. Clearly, Paul and Silas were not
processed in a couple of hours and set free with polite good-byes and promises
to “be on your side when I retire next year.”
No,
they are pretty much left to rot in jail. The cost of their discipleship was
steep, and certainly a higher price than I have ever been called to pay. So
what do they do?
They
sing. I cannot hear that story of singing in jails without thinking of the
freedom songs of the American Civil Rights Movement. Now obviously, Paul and
Silas were not singing the songs that African Americans sang in southern jail
cells in the 1950s and 60s. The chain runs the other direction, back to
whatever songs of liberation were sung in the ancient middle east. But I like
to think it went something like this:
O freedom. O freedom. O
freedom over me; and before I’ll be a slave I’ll be buried in my grave, and go home
to my Lord, and be free.
No more hunger. No more
hunger. No more hunger over me; and before I’ll be a slave I’ll be buried in my
grave, and go home to my Lord, and be free.
There’ll be singing.
There’ll be singing. There’ll be singing over me; and before I’ll be a slave
I’ll be buried in my grave, and go home to my Lord, and be free.
This
too, of course, is part of the proclamation of “the way of salvation” that Paul
and Silas are preaching. Their proclamation is, ultimately, an invitation.
“Come, come within the gates of the holy city; come, come to the tree of life
and rest in its shade; come, all you who are thirsty, and drink from the wells
of salvation.”
A
friend of mine is working on a book on the improvised life, under the working
title Improvising with God. The key
to improv – the first principle, as I understand it – is “saying ‘yes … and.’”
In other words, whatever life throws your way – the given reality of the moment
– is accepted, but only as the starting place for a collaborative project of
moving ahead.
In
improv comedy, for example, one player might say to the other, “that is a
seriously hideous shirt you have on there.” To which the second player might
respond, “yes … and it smells terrible, too.”
Improvising
with God is about listening for the invitation, the intimations of the divine,
that still, small voice that whispers, “come and follow me,” and responding
with, “yes, and I’ll bring my best to this moment.”
It’s
about holding out, holding on, and reaching for more. It’s about holding out a
hand to receive an invitation. It’s about holding on to the given moment –
though holding it lightly, because it’s ultimately about reaching for a
transformed reality.
My
writer friend put out an invite the other day for stories about such
experiences, and I thought back to the summer of 2000, when, on a family
vacation to the Florida Gulf Coast, I heard that still, small voice agitating
me about speaking out on an overture then before the Presbyterian Church
(U.S.A.). Amendment O, as it was called, would have barred all Presbyterian
clergy and elders from participating in any service that approximated a wedding
for same-gender couples, and would have barred sessions from approving the use
of church property or facilities for any such services.
While
visiting Civil Rights historical sites in my birth-state of Alabama, I was
pondering the issue – not how I would vote when it came to my presbytery, for
that was a no brainer. No, I was pondering whether to cast a quiet vote and
keep my mouth shut, or to stand up and speak my convictions.
During
the trip we visited the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery. Dexter
Avenue dates back to the immediate post-Civil War era. It’s exterior was
constructed, in part, with bricks gleaned by freed slaves from the rubble of
the former slave-holding cells just down the hill from where the church stands.
The
founders of the church said, “yes,
those were slave cells, and we will
build from them a house of worship to the God of liberation.”
Dexter
Avenue was the first congregation that Martin Luther King, Jr., served. It’s a
small church, with a cramped fellowship hall in its basement, and, in 1954, the
community gathered in that small space and said, “yes, one of our own has been arrested for refusing to give up her
seat on the city bus, and now we’ll
all give up all the seats and boycott the whole system.”
Dr.
King, himself, said, “yes, I am
young, inexperience, frightened, and
I will give my all to serve my people and our God.”
“The
Spirit and the bride say, ‘Come.’ And let everyone who hears say, ‘Come.’ And
let everyone who is thirsty come.”
This
is our invitation to a new way of living. It is the same invitation that Paul
and Silas proclaimed. It is the same invitation that Dr. King proclaimed. It is
the invitation proclaimed by those who have sought and made justice and peace
in all times and places, in ways both grand in scope and deeply personal. It is
the invitation that Jesus offered, and offers still.
So
hold out your hand, and hold on to promise and invitation, to faith and to hope;
and say, “yes.” Amen.
posted by David Ensign at
9:06 AM
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