Sunday After the Ascension: Lord, Get us Out of this Mess
TranscriptioN
Well, good morning everybody. It is good to see you this morning. I'm the vicar here at Corpus Christi Anglican Church and this is, as I mentioned before, the final Sunday and Eastertide, this long Easter season that we celebrate. Next week we'll get to celebrate Pentecost together and so we'll be wearing red.
It will be a joyous celebration. And on this last Sunday of Easter, in this little 10 days that we often refer to as Ascensiontide, we are reminded of Jesus going and ascending where he rules and reigns and the disciples waiting for the Spirit to come and to empower them for the work that God is calling them to do, which is to carry on the work of Jesus. And so as we think about Ascension, one of the things that we did on Thursday is we celebrated the Feast of Ascension and we were reminded that there are two realms to creation, heaven and earth, that the Scripture describes.
And Jesus is Lord over all. And what he is doing in Ascension is bringing heaven's realm into earth, breaking in. And this is why each day we pray in the Lord's Prayer, Lord may your kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven.
God's doing this cosmic work of salvation that we're a part of, uniting heaven and earth in new creation. And we see in part now what we look forward to in its fullness when Jesus comes again to restore all things at his second coming. And so today we're still focused on this waiting period, these 10 days, where Jesus has ascended and he is reigning on high and yet hasn't given the Spirit to his disciples to dwell in them, to be his presence as they are to carry on his works.
But what Jesus' Ascension does remind us of, we might be tempted to think that he ascends and so he's absent, but actually the Ascension does not declare his absence, it declares his active presence as he rules and reigns and brings his kingdom to come on earth as it is in heaven. And I don't want to take us too far off on a tangent, but I don't know how many of you are aware of this, but in the Bible, in the book of Esther in Hebrew, how many of you were aware that it almost didn't make it into the canon? Okay, a few of you. It almost did not make it into the canon.
That and the book of Ezekiel are two books that almost didn't make it in for different reasons. For those of you who knew why Esther didn't almost make it in, do you know why? Yes, excellent, yes. It never mentions God, never mentions Yahweh whatsoever, explicitly I should say.
So essentially when you read it, it's this narrative about a Judean woman in the Persian period who saves her people through deception, like that's the basic storyline. Now, some have suggested that the name Yahweh in Hebrews, יהוה, those four letters show up as an acrostic pattern at different points in the book, and that might be true. It's debated, but if it is, and even if it's not true, it still highlights something that's very true about the book, which is that the Lord's name may not be mentioned explicitly, but he's far from absent.
He's in their preservation, and to me the book of Esther in that way, as we see God working in the background very actively, this is something like what it feels like to me when we talk about the ascension of Jesus. He's not absent. He's reigning, and his reign moves over our age and into our earthly realm in ways that you could put sort of on this spectrum of overtly miraculous and overtly ordinary.
Still miraculous, but ordinary. Somewhere in there you see the kingdom of God breaking in. You see Jesus's rule and reign as king breaking into our realm, and we can see it in today's passage in the book of Acts, chapter 16.
We see it in the stirring up of hearts. We see it in the disruption of corrupt and demonic systems, and we see it in this surprising deliverance that produces faith in a Gentile, a pagan, and so I want to look at this text together this morning in Acts, chapter 16. If you have your Bible or you have it on your phone, you can open up to Acts, chapter 16, and as we get into it, let me pray for us.
“In the name of God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen. Lord, may the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be always acceptable in your sight, O Lord, my rock and redeemer, amen.”
Lydia and the Stirring of the Heart
Well first I want to see how God's kingdom comes in stirred hearts.
Paul is in a missionary journey in this context, a different one than the last one we talked about. This time he's traveling with Paul, Silas, Timothy, possibly Luke himself, and they arrive at Philippi, which is a major Roman colony, a very urban place in northeastern Macedonia today, northeastern Greece, and he does what he normally does, which is to find a local synagogue to preach out of, to share the story about how Jesus ties all of history together for people's deliverance and salvation, but Philippi is so pagan that there are no synagogues in Philippi, so what is he to do? He hears a rumor that there are some people who pray down by, there's a regular place to pray down by the water, and there it's mostly made up of women, and when he's down there, this is before the passage we read today, he encounters a woman named Lydia, and Lydia is a God-fearing Gentile, meaning she was a pagan Gentile that converted to worshiping the God of Israel, so she's a monotheist, and as he encounters her, he ties together the stories of Jesus for her in a way that shows her what God has done for her in the Jewish Messiah. She believes this gospel, and then she is baptized, her and her household, so the gospel comes to a successful businesswoman, a woman who is very well known, well off, and she and her whole household are baptized, so we see the gospel being fruitful, multiplying, and filling the earth in this woman, Lydia.
Even in pagan Gentile cities where there's not even a synagogue to preach out of, we don't see all the parts of Lydia's life that lead up to this moment, but we do know that in Acts, God had given Paul a dream to go to Macedonia, and so we see Jesus reigning and bringing together the story of salvation in ways that Paul's not aware of, that Lydia is not going to be aware of until it happens, and Lydia reminds me that we often see the kingship of Jesus when we're open to looking for the ways that God is stirring hearts. Sometimes people will call these God moments, right? There's these ways that you couldn't have guessed that God would bring these moments together, but he does, and in the stirring of hearts, we see God's rule and reign. In Lydia's time, paganism was the norm, and especially in Philippi, this city to preserve its welfare, sacrifice to gods and to the emperor who was considered a god.
They were trying to keep the gods happy, to procure the blessing on their city, and so it was tied together. Economic, politics, religion, it's all brought together in a cohesive system, in this religious system that was intertwined, and this is what it meant to be Roman, and so to follow Christ was a Roman identity, and it was a threat to these Roman nationalists who didn't want anybody threatening the safety or the Roman-ness of their colony, and in our context, you know, there's often a veneer of Christianity that we can see in places, or at least if there's not a veneer of Christianity, people are pretty familiar with the story of Christianity. That might be less and less true, but even now, someone at least knows what this term means, generally, but the reality is our neighbors are still bound to the kingdom of darkness.
No matter where we go, our physical neighbors, our co-workers, and in this place where God, where people are still bound to the kingdom of darkness, Jesus is still stirring up hearts to find him, to discover his goodness, and you and I, like the disciples like Paul here, are called to be attentive to what God is doing, when to speak, when to listen, but we should be prepared to listen and then connect somebody's story to the story that God is telling in them and through them when the opportunity is presented to us. So that's Lydia that we encounter. Jesus is stirring hearts, as in Lydia's case.
The Gospel Disrupts Demonic Systems — the Freed Slave Girl
Jesus also disrupts demonic systems, no matter how embedded they become. This is an amazing aspect of the gospel. So they go another time to the place of prayer.
This is what we read this morning. They encounter a female slave. She's not given a name in the story, but they harass Paul and Silas, and he turns at some point, and he commands the demon to come out in the name of Jesus, and if you think about this, what's astounding is you have this Lydia, who is a well-off businesswoman who comes and believes the gospel.
She's a Gentile convert to Judaism and then believes the gospel of Jesus, and now you have a pagan slave girl who's being profited upon, or she's being used for other people's profit by telling the future, but Luke wants us to see that the gospel comes to all, whether it's the well-off, whether it's the poor, whether it's slave, whether it's free. Her society told her that she only had value in as much as she benefited other people, right? She was valueless, but Jesus has an alternate gospel narrative that her life not only matters, she is an image-bearer of the king of the universe, and that is this holy economic deconstruction of the earthly emperor's gospel. This does battle with the good news of the Roman Empire.
The woman had a spirit of divination. She could tell the future, and Paul liberates this woman both from the spirit of divination that was holding her hostage and, as a result, from her masters. The slave girl is now freed to reign with the king of heaven for the first time in her life, and that is stunning, and so first Paul has to recognize that what this girl is doing is not truly her.
She's bound to the kingdom of darkness. Then he has to take the risk to cast this girl's, the demon out in Jesus's name, and why was it risky? I mean, for a couple reasons. One is if he had said something and nothing happened, so that's a risk, but two, it's also a risk because he named something as demonic that was completely normalized in their culture, and it was something that was so normalized that it was expected to support the sustainability of their culture, so her masters are irate.
They tell the municipal authorities, these men are Jews and they're throwing our city into an uproar by advocating for customs that are unlawful for us Romans to accept or to practice, and I also wonder if there was, for these slave masters, a feeling of fear. If people start becoming Christians, then they're going to move away from Caesar as emperor and lord. They're going to move away from faithful citizens.
They're going to move away from what it means to be Roman, since it was Roman law to sacrifice to the emperor, and if these men's livelihoods could be lost, then perhaps other people's livelihoods could be lost too, as now Christians are just coming in and destabilizing the economy of the colony, especially when your commerce is, your commerce surrounds those gods, and so they're accused of a kind of revolution. People would rather be comfortable than free. Some people want to be told that they're okay, even if they're sick, because the process of healing can involve pain, it can involve suffering, and most difficult to swallow, it can admit that, it can, it can involve admitting that we were wrong, and that's really hard, especially when we're talking about religious political systems, and what if, if we think about the gospel here, what if there were a way to live in community in a way that didn't use slave labor, or exploit women, and that honored the image of God in all people, right? On this end of the empire, Roman Empire's collapse, it seems obvious.
It did not seem obvious to those slave owning Gentile pagans, but this is the power that the gospel brings, a society where the slave is free, that women are honored, that the image of God is honored in all people. This is what the gospel of Jesus offers, but healing can be scary and risky when patterns of acceptable corruption start to calcify and get normalized in the society, and so the kingdom of heaven comes when the calcified patterns of the kingdom of darkness are named, and they're broken up, and they're deconstructed, and Jesus's kingdom comes when individuals are then de-shackled from the lies of the kingdom of darkness. This girl had value as an image bearer of the king, and after the slave woman is free, we see her masters double down on systems that they're bound to, patterns that they've lived into, but Luke's point, which is helpful for us, is that even though they double down on their systems of bondage to the kingdom of darkness, that is not going to stop what God will bring about through the gospel, and that's good news.
So this work of the gospel bearing fruit might be surprising, it might be disappointing at times because it's painful, or there's an admission that we were wrong, but if we prepare our hearts to receive people's reactions, the circumstances that we find ourselves in, with curiosity, kindness, and trust that the Holy Spirit is at work in us, that he's with us, that he's at work through us, then we begin to see the kingdom of God break through into this earthly realm, and the suffering becomes redemptive as the healing begins.
Discerning the Movement of the Kingdom — The Philippian Jailer
And so we've seen Paul and Silas's disposition. They needed to have this disposition of openness, curiosity, and wonder at what God was doing.
They needed this because they're going to then be thrown into prison as a result of these masters and their complaints to the municipal authorities. They're thrown into prison and they're beaten with rods, but then we find them again in Acts 16 praying and singing hymns in the middle of the night, and there's an earthquake that takes place, the whole place is shaken, and all the prison doors are opened. And you have to understand in this culture, people take, the Gentile pagans take things like earthquakes, and they see them as signs of God's disfavor or favor, depending on if it's favorable to them or not.
There is a divine agent behind these natural disasters, and so this is frightening for the guard because the prison doors are open, and he was responsible for these prisoners. If they had escaped, he would be punished. There's little ears, so I just leave it out, he will be punished.
So Paul stops the guard from making a life-altering decision, and he reassures him that all the prisoners are there and they're accounted for. But God had used the earthquake to get the guard's attention, and the guard brings Paul and Silas out to ask them a question. Our translations make it sound so spiritual.
Sirs, what must I do to be saved? This is a Roman pagan. This is a prison guard. There is no way he's thinking in like Jewish kingdom messianic constructs.
So other people have translated it differently. I think they're right. Rather than saved, which is a pretty loaded theological term for us, I think what he's saying is, okay you guys, how do I get out of this mess? That's the essence of what saved means here in this passage.
So God has brought him to this point of realizing, I'm in trouble, I need to know how to get out of this, and I am open to hearing whatever you have to say, because you must know something I don't. And so Paul tells him, trust in Jesus and you will be delivered, you and your household. And we have to keep keep in mind what this means.
Trust in Jesus. He's asking him functionally to disavow his allegiance with the Roman Emperor, who is a god, and to realign his allegiance to Jesus as Lord and King. Jesus is Lord, there is no other.
Jesus is King, there is no other. Caesar is not Lord, Caesar is not King. And that night this man puts his faith in Jesus, and he says, you know, no matter what God brings me through, I trust that Jesus is King.
And he and all of his household that night are baptized, which includes his wife, it includes his children, and if his household had slaves, it includes them too. All of them are brought into the body of Christ. God in his kindness then does what Paul says.
He spares the life of this soldier, as the magistrates just decide that Paul and Silas are allowed to leave now. And so they're released, and they go forward to the next thing, and the life of this soldier and his family are forever changed. This is the beginning of the church at Philippi.
A Jewish woman, a freed slave girl, or a Gentile convert to Judaism, a freed slave girl, a Roman soldier. These are the beginnings of what God is doing in creating the body of Christ in Philippi, where he is shown to be Lord and King. So Jesus delivered this person and his family in a surprising way, that Paul and Silas had to live a life to prepare for.
They had to be recognizing this. They had to be careful to keep faithful rhythms of prayer and worship in order to keep a watchful eye and an open ear to what God was doing and to where his kingdom was moving, and they noticed it in the life of this jailer. They could have run for freedom, but they were attentive to what God was doing, and the result was an enduring faith in the Philippian jailer and trust in the kingship of Christ for this man and his whole household.
Imagine how many generations of Christians there are because of this man and his household. So when Jesus ascends, he is not absent. Quite the contrary, he is actively reigning as Lord and King, and we see his rule and reign where heaven and earth are united in the stirring up of hearts, like in the story of Lydia, through the disruption of demonic systems, as in the deliverance of the slave girl, and when people trust in Jesus, as in the life of the Philippian jailer, and all of us are called to sharing in this ministry of sharing in Christ's rule and reign together.
This is the community where Jesus is King and Lord, and people see that in the way that we treat each other, and it requires a life of attentiveness, regular prayer and worship to reframe our everyday moments, our proclivities, our desires, and our loves under the reality of the kingship of Christ. We need what is real to frame what is temporary, and this also involves curiosity about where we see Christ at work. Sometimes his work is subtle in our everyday moments, and sometimes it is glaringly obvious, but in any case, Jesus hasn't abandoned the project of creation.
He's become Lord of all things, and all things will be brought to their fullness in his work of new creation. His ascension is a promise that he will come back again and restore fully what he is doing in part right now. So I want to encourage us not to just think of heaven as a place we go to where when we die, a geographic space, but instead it's something that is breaking into our reality now.
It is taking over in individuals and households and communities in this community, and so we're to prioritize looking for it attentively, so that each day we can actually pray, may your kingdom come on earth as it is in heaven. Let me pray for us. Almighty God, you sent your son Jesus Christ to reconcile the world to yourself.
We praise and bless you for those whom you have sent in the power of the Spirit to preach the gospel to all nations. We thank you that in all parts of the earth, a community of love has been gathered together by their prayers and labors, and that in every place your servants call upon your name, for the kingdom and the power and the glory are yours forever and ever. Amen.
Transcribed by TurboScribe.ai. Edited by the Author.