Readings (click here for the readings):
   Acts 16:16-34; Psalm 47; Revelation 22:12-14,16-17,20; John 17:20-26

Back when I didn’t have a wife, toddler, and three jobs, I used to watch a lot of TV.  Even game shows.  And I’ll always remember on the old Hollywood Squares – which was basically just a fancy version of tic-tac-toe – when a contestant playing “O” somehow failed to notice that there were two X’s in a row and didn’t bother to block a potential winning move.  When the “O” guy chose some other random square, the host would always say, “Well, if it’d been me, I would have chosen to block the other guy, but this may work out.” In other words, that was a really dumb move, and even I can see that you should’ve done something different.

That’s a pretty common thing to say, I think.  You often hear people who are presumably older and wiser than the person they’re talking to telling them: “I wouldn’t have done it that way.”  Or “if you want something done right, do it yourself.” Or “here, let me do it.”

That’s all well and good when you’re talking to a game show contestant who’s so nervous that tic-tac-toe seems like nuclear physics, but it’s quite another when it comes to the Bible.  Yet that’s exactly what I said when I looked at what Paul does in today’s reading from Acts. If I’d been Paul, I’d have done it a lot differently.

Let’s take a look at what Paul does.  First he and Silas come across this fortune-telling slave girl who’s making a lot of money for her greedy owners.  Now in our modern world, the response to something like that seems pretty obvious.  Slavery is wrong!  It’s immoral, inhuman, and degrading.  So Paul obviously should have dealt with the issue of slavery, and not just this one girl.  He should have told everybody in the vicinity that slavery was unequivocally wrong.  Or, at the very least, he should have told this girl’s “owners” that they needed to set her free, because no human being belongs to anybody else.

But what does Paul do?  He takes away her spirit of divination, the one thing she has going for her.  And it wasn’t as if she was making stuff up, because she was right on when she said that Paul and Silas were proclaiming the way to salvation.  And it wasn’t as if she was just saying negative or evil things, because she recognized that Paul and Silas were servants of God.  She was speaking the truth that people needed to hear, and Paul basically shut her up.

Then later on in the passage, after Paul and Silas get flogged and thrown in jail for casting the spirit out of the girl, God sends an earthquake that shakes the prison to its very foundation.  The jailer – who’s probably not the nicest guy in the world, and is certainly doing the dirty work of the crowds who just got done beating up God’s disciples – wakes up, realizes that since the doors of the prison are open some of the prisoners have escaped, and prepares to kill himself. 

At that point I might have let him do it.  That would have made my escape easier, and it’s not like he was innocent in this whole affair.  At least that way he wouldn’t be locking up and chaining down any more followers of Christ.  And it’s not like I was killing him – I just wasn’t going beyond the call of duty to prevent him from hurting himself.

But once again Paul seems to act contrary to conventional wisdom.  He shouts out – in the loud voice he should have been condemning slavery with earlier – “Do not harm yourself, for we are all here.” Paul’s so concerned about the jailer’s well-being that he’s willing to get locked up in prison all over again – once the jailer calms down and gets the guards back in line and the doors re-locked – in order to save this one guilty man’s life.

So twice Paul ignores the obvious solution to the problem – twice he sees that the other guy has an X in a corner and an X in the center, and instead of going for the block he chooses some other random square that makes no sense. And everyone from a game show host to a seminary graduate says to him, “I wouldn’t have done that, but this may work out,” all the while thinking to themselves, “There’s no way this is going to work out.”

And what happens?  The jailer falls on his knees before Paul and Silas and asks what he has to do to be saved. Paul tells him that all he has to do is believe in the Lord Jesus, and he does, and so does his whole household, and they’re all saved.  And then the jailer who a few hours before was dutifully shackling Paul and Silas in their cells is washing out their wounds and giving them a place to stay and something to eat, him and his whole family.

And what of the slave girl?  We don’t hear about her anymore, but we do know that she was only worth something to her owners because she could tell fortunes, and when Paul took away that ability, the owners realized that she was no good to them any more.  Which means that Paul managed to set her free, in a way that simply spouting off about how bad slavery is wouldn’t have accomplished. 

In the end, it was really Paul who had the gift of divination, because he showed that he was an expert in human nature.  When dealing with the slave-owners – who were probably upstanding businessmen in the community – he realized that there was no chance of changing their hearts, so he hit them where it hurt.  He wasn’t politically correct, but he was effective.  And it didn’t matter to him how he accomplished his goal, as long as he did – as long as the girl was set free.

But when it came to the jailer, who was probably hardened and callous and not very respected, Paul was willing to give up his own freedom in order to offer him a chance at salvation.  Somehow Paul knew that this man, if he had the chance, would turn to God.  All his life the jailer had probably been ordered to do this and do that, always with the threat of punishment or even execution if he failed in his task.  And then, when confronted with the ultimate failure – of letting important prisoners escape – he’s offered a gift, a second chance, just because those prisoners cared about him, and his family.

Wealthy civic leaders who only do the right thing when their greedy ambitions are thwarted.  Rough-and-tumble jailers offered second chances by their very own prisoners.  And Paul doing exactly the opposite of the way he “should” have acted, with the only result being that slaves go free and sinners are saved and the bad guys lose out in the end.

It’s the classic story of Christianity all over again: the last shall be first, the poor shall be rich, the hungry fed and the sorrowful comforted. And the reason, I think, that it turns out this way – the reason that Paul acts the way he does – is because he knows his place in the grand scheme of things.  The fortune-telling girl says it herself:  “These men are slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim to you a way of salvation.” 

Paul and Silas were slaves of God – they had no will of their own and only sought to do God’s work; and they also knew what it meant to be slaves.  They knew what the fortune-telling girl was going through, when she didn’t have any choices or freedom or options.  They knew what it felt like to be a prisoner, which is basically what the jailer was, too – a prisoner to his bosses who held the threat of death over him every day.

That’s why Paul went against common sense and things still worked out in the end.  He wasn’t biased by political correctness. He didn’t assume that a person’s job or place in society said much of anything about their heart.  And he recognized a fellow slave when he saw one, and knew enough to act out of compassion and understanding, and not out of conventional wisdom.

That’s how all of us Christians should act, as well.  We should leave the platitudes at the door and focus on getting the job done.  We should think outside the box and worry more about the bottom line than saying the right thing, just like Paul did with the slave girl.  We should give people the benefit of the doubt, especially the folks who’ve never been given it before, like the jailer. 

And in the end, we should risk seeming like fools.  We should do things that even a game show host knows not to do, on the miraculous off-chance that someone might end up saved or set free. We should let the Spirit lead, even when it seems like it’s leading us down a dead end road or off a cliff.  And we should always remember that we are slaves of Christ, and that our main concern – our only concern – should be following Him, wherever that takes us. 

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