The Apostle Paul had an attitude. No doubt about that. He wanted everyone to listen to him, because he had some important things to say about Jesus Christ. So when a slave girl followed him, day after day, yelling at people to pay attention because he was a slave of the Most High God and knew a way of salvation, Paul finally blew up. He ordered the spirit of prophecy to come right out of her, and it did. After that she wasn’t of much use to her owners, so they angrily dragged Paul and his friend Silas off to jail. We aren’t told what happened to the slave girl.
It was a bad night for Paul and Silas, hurting from a beating and their feet spread apart in stocks. They kept their spirits up by singing hymns, maybe even including this week’s psalm. They must have had powerful singing voices, for the earth shook and the shackles fell and the jail doors opened. Wakened by the commotion, the jailer was sure everyone had fled and that he’d have to pay for it in the morning, so he decided to save the executioner some work. Paul stopped him just in time from doing himself in. Still shaking, he asked Paul what he needed to do to be saved. Like any good street evangelist, Paul gave him a simple answer: “Believe on the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved.” And so everybody in his house was baptized without delay.
The jailer’s conversion was dramatic. Conversions often are in the Bible; that’s what made them memorable. Yet quiet conversions are just as important, because everyone is called. Everyone is invited. “Let everyone who is thirsty come,” we hear at the end of the book of Revelation. “Let anyone who wishes take the water of life as a gift.” Take the water of life as a gift that God gives freely, abundantly, extravagantly.
“Give” appears nearly twenty times in the seventeenth chapter of John’s Gospel. Often it is in the perfect tense, “has given,” implying that what was given in the past continues to affect the present – the “gift that keeps on giving,” as the old Victrola ads used to say. That gift is love, given to us by God through Jesus Christ, love that is the very Being of God. God’s love is beyond comprehension, more beautiful and wonderful than we dare imagine, and it is given freely. “The love with which you loved me,” Jesus prays to God, “may be in them, and I in them.”
Dwelling in that love, Jesus also prays that all may be one. That may be hardest for us to accept or imagine. But if God is willing to take in apostles with an attitude and fearful jailers, then God will certainly take in you and me and everyone who thirsts. Yet the gift comes with a catch. Having received it, we are then sent to take it to others. It is not for us to hoard; we must also freely give it. Who do you know who is thirsty? Who needs the love of God found in Jesus Christ? Who desires to be within the unity of God?
Let everyone who is thirsty, come. Let anyone who wishes, take the water of life as a gift.
Easter 7: Acts 16:16-34; Psalm 97; Revelation 22:12-14, 16-17, 20-21; John 17:20-26.
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For you shall go out in joy, and be led forth in peace;
the mountains and the hills before you shall break forth into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.
Isaiah 55:12
the mountains and the hills before you shall break forth into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.
Isaiah 55:12
About Me
- Trees of the Field
- This blog was written when I was the rector (that's church-speak for priest-in-charge) of Christ Episcopal Church in Burlington, Iowa.
1 comment:
We have some good hymns for these lessons, besides all the Ascensiontide hymns. I wish we could sing about a dozen of them this Sunday.
First, by Thomas Troeger, with excellent tune by Carol Doran (from "New Hymns for the Life of the Church")
Make your prayer and music one!
Lift your songs of faith as signs
That this world has not undone
Heaven's wonderful designs.
Alleluia.
(additional stanzas tell the story of Paul and Silas, singing in prison at midnight)
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And from another tradition:
Paul and Silas bound in jail,
Got nobody for to go their bail.
Keep yo' hand on-a the plow, hold on.
(refrain)
Hold on, hold on.
Keep yo' hand on-a the plow, hold on.
Paul and Silas began to shout,
Jail door opened and they walked out.
Keep yo' hand on-a the plow, hold on.
(refrain)
(African-American spiritual)
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One of the many things I love about the Spirituals is how thoroughly their creators internalized the Story. They freely blend different scriptural passages, as in this one, in ways that perhaps had never occurred to anyone before them. They bring the scriptural stories into their contemporary life, as here and in all the songs about crossing over Jordan, or coming out from Egypt land. These people knew their Bibles, inside and out. May we all do the same.
The refrain "Keep your hand on the plow, hold on" comes back to me when I need it; it has done so for decades. The opening stanza, and especially the opening line, of Troeger's hymn does the same.
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John 17 has grown on me over the years.
"That they may be one, even as we are." That we, the company of the faithful, might have unity as thorough, blissful, and perfect as the Holy and Undivided Trinity? There it is, in black and white; it is the prayer of our great High Priest on our behalf. This surpasses even the astonishing prayers of St. Paul in the Epistles for the congregations he is addressing (e.g., Eph. 3:14-21), both because it is asking a greater thing, and because, by infinite degree, Jesus of Nazareth is greater than St. Paul.
And, as you observe, this love which Christ gives us, as great as that which the Father bears for the Son, the Son for the Father, and the Holy Ghost for and with both, is no more inward-focused than that love which dwells within the Trinity, but became incarnate of the Virgin Mary in order to embrace us all. "Freely have ye received, freely give."
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