Sermon — May 29, 2022
The Rev. Greg Johnston
“Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” (Acts 16:30)
The English bishop and New Testament scholar Tom Wright tells the story of an older English bishop and scholar, Stephen Neill, who taught him how translate this verse. They’d both grown up with the classic King James Version translation of the verse, which was so iconic that it hasn’t changed in English-language translations for the last five hundred years: “’Sirs, what must I do to be saved?’… ‘Believe on the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household.’” (Acts 16:30-31) It’s a simple question, and simple answer, and it’s a profoundly important one. This back and forth basically sums up the whole Protestant Reformation. Imagine reading this five hundred years ago, with the whole medieval Catholic penitential system in mind. You would’ve been taught your whole life that you stood under the judgment of a just but exacting God, who kept meticulous accounts of right and wrong, of good and evil deeds, with consequences that could be measured and quantified and compared with one another in units of years in purgatory.
“Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” How many prayers must I say? How many Fridays must I fast? How many offerings must I make to repair the church roof? And if you’d grown up with a legalistic kind of Christianity, as many still do—if this then that, if you are good enough then God will love you—the answer brings incredible relief. “Believe on the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved.” The Church’s whole monopolistic economy of salvation is a sham. Don’t be afraid of your priest. Don’t be anxious for salvation. Your salvation is not the result of your good works, of your striving and straining and working to repent. Salvation is the free gift of God, who asks only that you believe in his beloved Son. You should try to be good, to be clear, and you fail again and again, and God will save you still.
All of which is true, by the way. You can understand why the translation was so powerful that it stood the test of time. But it makes the sermon rather short. And there’s an inconvenient truth: This is not really what the jailer’s question means.
He is, we can assume, a moderately pious Roman pagan. Okay, maybe he’s been skimping on his votive offerings, maybe he doesn’t sacrifice a chicken to Jupiter as often as he should, but, hey, life’s busy, the kids have chariot practice, and you know, he’s always good to offer a few sprinkles of incense before the image of the emperor on his way into work. He was a solid Roman guy. And Roman religion had almost no anxiety about things like eternal punishment and eternal reward. There was no notion of a heaven or a hell like ours. The gods were vengeful, yes, but they took their vengeance here, on earth, and you know what? Your boss could be pretty vengeful, too, especially when you were a jailer, and you’d lost everyone in jail. When he asks this famous question, the jailer is not worried about his eternal salvation. He’s worried about how to save his skin, right here and now.
So Stephen Neill offered a rather different translation of the verse. Not “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” but this: “Gentlemen, will you please tell me how I can get out of this mess?”[1]
The foundations have been shaken. The gates have crumbled. The chains have unraveled. And the jailer looks around, and asks the miracle men calmly sitting in their cells: “How can I get out of this mess?” And then, startlingly, the answer to this very different question is the same: “‘Believe in the Lord Jesus,’ they replied.” (Acts 16:31) And you will be saved.
How can we get out of this mess? Twenty people, mostly children, shot and killed in an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. Ten Black grocery shoppers murdered in Buffalo. Two thousand Americans dead of Covid this week alone, and countless lives upended and overturned by our ongoing attempts to manage it, and we call that a pretty good week, and statistically, sadly, it is. A politics charged with anger and hate and fear, a culture of exhaustion and despair. And that’s not to mention the world’s largest conventional war in seventy years.
It’s hard to see what “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved” could possibly mean to this terrified and exhausted jailer in the middle of the night, let alone to any of us.
And nobody else in this story has it any easier.
The young woman with whom we begin is doubly oppressed, possessed by a fortune-telling spirit that speaks through her lips but without her control and “possessed,” in a very different sense, by the men who enslave her, keeping her under their control so they can profit off her talents. She speaks the truth—these men really are the servants of the Most High God, proclaiming a way of salvation—but she does it so incessantly that in a fit of frustration Paul breaks the spirit’s power over her, rendering her useless to the ones who claim to own her. She is free from the spirit’s power, and now that the magic’s gone there’s no reason to keep her enslaved, so she may well simply be free, soon enough; but to be rendered useless to the ones who enslave you without being protected by the one who’s freed you is a dangerous and precarious situation.
And indeed, we get a taste of her enslavers’, as they seize Paul and Silas and drag them into court. The two men barely escape the mob’s violence, and the magistrates aren’t much better, beating them and throwing them into jail on trumped-up anti-Jewish charges of disturbing the peace and inciting rebellion and lawlessness among the people.
The jailer is a mere functionary. Assigned the impossible task of keeping these miracle men in chains, holding all the responsibility and none of the power, he fails. And he’s so overcome with fear and shame that he’s at the very end of his rope, until a brief moment of hope when it turns out that the men he’d imprisoned had not in fact escaped, but are there, right there, sitting in their cells. Ironically, it’s not the miracle that allows Paul and Silas to escape. It’s the relationship they build with the jailer by forgiving and embracing him, by saving his life.
“Gentlemen,” the jailer asks, “How can I get out of this mess?” the jailer asks. And you could put the same question on the lips of anyone else and it would make just as much sense. “Gentlemen,” the young woman might ask. “You got me into this mess; how am I supposed to get it out of it?” “God,” Paul and Silas might ask, “You got us into this mess; how are we supposed to get out of it?”
And their answer is not quite, “Believe in the Lord Jesus and everything will be just fine.” We know that’s not how the world works. Paul knows, or at least he’ll know soon enough. His escape from jail isn’t the end of the story. From now on, everywhere he goes will be a kind of trial. He’ll travel from city to city, and in nearly every one he’ll be arrested, or mobbed, or escape by the skin of his teeth, until he begins his final journey to Rome, where he’ll die. Faith doesn’t ensure an easy life. It never has.
This is not exactly the joyful kind of hope we’re used to hearing in Easter.
But there is hope in those last verses of the reading from Acts. It’s not an Easter hope, per se. It’s a “Sunday after the Ascension” kind of hope. Jesus has gone away and left us in charge. He’ll send the Holy Spirit, to be sure, but he is gone. And yet through us he continues to do remarkable things. He’s chosen to work through us; not by miracles, but through our quotidian humanity, through our relationships with one another.
The jailer asks them how to get out of his mess, and the easy answer is not such an easy answer. But they tell him to believe, and he does, and he enters into a community of believers. He and his whole family are baptized, without delay! And he brings the men he’d locked up in jail into his own home and feeds them. And together, they rejoice.
It’s not really an answer to his question, or to any of their questions. The enslaved young woman still has to deal with her angry enslavers. The jailer still has to deal with his angry boss. Paul and Silas will still be persecuted and run out of town after town. We know this is the way of the world. You don’t need me to tell you things are hard. But built on top of that, there are those moments—these moments—when we bear witness to another way, an Easter way, a way of peace, and hope, and joy. And we bear witness to that joy, we cherishing and tend the light of Christ, in the midst of everything that is sad and strange and broken in this world.
[1] N. T. Wright, Acts for Everyone Part 2 Chapters 13–28, vol. 8 of Accordance electronic ed. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011), 67.