Seventh Sunday of Easter Year C 2010

And the Prisoners Were Listening

07 Easter C 10
May 16, 2010

Acts 16:16-34

Psalm 97

Revelation 22:12-14, 16-17, 20-21

John 17:20-26

Happy Easter! Yes, it's still Easter. It began at the beginning of April and here we are halfway through May and we're still celebrating.

I've been led (I believe by the Spirit) to preach on the Book of the Acts of the Apostles. And I've been asking along the way if you can see Philippi, our own church, in these stories of the church in its infancy.

I know of an alcoholic, I won't name her, and she might not even be a woman, who found her way into a spiritual life and thus out of the grips of her addiction to alcohol. She had been a terrible drunk, ripping, as the twelve-step literature says, though the lives of those she knew and loved like a tornado. Her husband, especially, suffered. She was no kind of partner, of course. Her spending and her laziness and her moodiness and self-centeredness all conspired to make her terribly difficult to love. But the man was really a saint. No matter how often she disappointed him, he was always there to help her, to clean up the mess.

So of course, when she got sober, there was much rejoicing. The husband was very excited and all his friends congratulated him.

Then, one night, she came home from a meeting to find a bottle of her favorite gin on the table in the kitchen. It had a note taped to it. "I want my wife back."

The husband had bought her the alcohol not because he wanted her to continue to suffer, but because his own identity and status had become dependent on her being sick. When she began to heal, he suddenly lost his sainthood status. He had nothing further to suffer.

Exploitation takes many forms. In our story today, the slave girl's owners make money on her ability to predict the future. When she is healed she becomes useless. The resurrection agitates and unsettles a world that often exploits the suffering of many to make secure the happiness of a few. When God comes on the scene, wrapped in the flesh of the people of the church, those in bondage are set free, those in power are knocked down a notch, and those who are weak are lifted up.

So much of our daily efforts around the world are based not on healing the creation, but on servicing its disease. So many of our institutions and business ventures depend for their survival on the presenting problems they address remaining unfixed. We make a virtue of suffering and then laud the overworked and underpaid, instead of simply treating them fairly. We have a huge and costly health care system that depends for its profits on rampant food and drug addictions. We also have a huge and costly criminal justice system that depends on many of those same addictions. We have an increasingly global economic system that lays the prosperity of a relatively few on the back of a relatively large majority in poverty. Then, social service organizations, including the church, expend tons of life-draining energy putting bandaids on those who are bleeding to death, instead of loudly and fiercely casting out the demons that are doing the cutting.

How many of the working poor in our community might have been okay through this economic downturn if they'd been paid a living wage when the economy was good? How many Mexicans would be staying in their own country now if our nation's farmers hadn't dumped cheap corn on their markets? How much might our health care system have benefited if something other than economic growth at all costs were not the defining value taught and preached from every pulpit in the country, therefore encouraging compulsive behaviors that become the cornerstone of big profit?

The resurrection is the power of God to save the world. It is not give to us to help us cope with problems that can't be fixed. It is not given to us to favor a few at the expense of the many. It is not given to us to help us put up with injustice and keep our mouths shut. It is not given to us to gain social status as saintly individuals dependent on the suffering around us to look important. It is the power of God to save the world.

Harry Leach often serves as a spiritual mentor to me, and the Serenity Prayer is one of his favorites. He often reminds me that serenity depends on my willingness to put into God's hands those things over which I have no control. It is a worthy and important lesson, but one that can be misinterpreted.

That prayer is the favorite of recovering alcoholics and drug addicts all over the world, who begin their recoveries by recognizing their powerlessness over their own addictions. Giving their problem into the hands of God does not mean that they simply give into it. Turning something over to God doesn't mean forgetting about it, not thinking about it anymore, not doing anything about it. Recovering addicts turn their problem over to God through a series of very difficult steps. I believe those steps are the path taught by Jesus Christ. "God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change" does not mean accepting a life of active addiction. It means accepting that I must turn to God to change things I cannot change myself. I will need tremendous courage to do the things that I must do to turn my problem over to God.

This is the church's work, friends, the work of resurrection, of getting up from the dead, of being reborn as new creatures, of saving the world.

When Paul and his companions were locked into the prison, they sang praises to God. And Luke tells us that the prisoners were all listening to them. Think of that for a moment, friends. Think of that rotting, stinking, dark and dingy jail, the prisoners in near despair. Think of the sound of songs of praise drifting through those hallways.

That's the sound of resurrection.

Amen.