Life Saving

Acts 16:16-34

Every true conversion story – every authentic life of Christian faith – is rooted in the truth that Jesus saves our lives.

Literally, sometimes. Metaphorically, more often.

But deeply true: when we follow Jesus – if we follow Jesus – it’s because Jesus saves our lives.

Some of you can remember exactly when and how that happened for you. Others may be a little worried that I’m taking you off the evangelical deep end.

But don’t worry if you don’t recall Jesus rescuing you from death or saving your life in any other way. It may be that your own conversion hasn’t happened yet. Sometimes the conversion of our hearts happens years, often decades after baptism. Or it might have happened and you didn’t notice it as a matter of life and death. Sometimes the saving of our lives is slow and subtle and metaphorical instead of clear and literal.

That’s fine. Conversions and Christian lives without drama are just as faithful, deep and true, as the kind of story we heard this morning – the melodramatic story of the conversion of the Philippian jailer.

His conversion story comes with a big set up that involves spiritual possession, an angry, poorly timed deliverance miracle, lawsuits and political accusations, a justice system turned into a mob scene, and the kind of ridiculous overreaction that would fit right in to a bad TV drama or a popular sitcom.

All of that to set Paul and Silas up in jail in time for a remarkably well-managed earthquake that somehow tidily and precisely unlocks every chain and opens every door without bringing the ceiling down on anybody’s head.

All of that so that the jailer’s life can be saved.

As soon as he wakes up from the earthquake and sees the prison door standing open, the jailer of Philippi whips out his sword and prepares to die of failure.

A failure he didn’t cause or control, you may have noticed. That door-opening earthquake was hardly the jailer’s fault, and nothing he could have done would have stopped it.

And a failure that didn’t actually happen. He’s ready to kill himself before he even checks to see if a single one of the prisoners has left his jail. Or, for that matter, if any of them got hurt in the earthquake!

You and I can read this story and know the jailer hasn’t failed at all. But as far as he’s concerned, in that dark, shaken, scary moment, his failure is complete, devastating, and absolutely enough to kill him.

Until Paul stops him.
Until Jesus stops him, actually.

It’s dark. Midnight, pre-electricity dark, and Paul and Silas are in the furthest, innermost cell. There’s no way Paul sees what the jailer is doing with his sword pointed at his own heart. So it may be Paul’s voice, but it’s God who speaks in that moment, announcing to the jailer that he hasn’t failed after all, and shouldn’t harm himself.

Maybe you remember a time when a friend said that to you, when you were about to die of the feeling of failure.

And that is a life-saving miracle.

It’s the kind you or I might not notice as a miracle when you wake up the morning after you didn’t, actually, die of embarrassment and failure.

Because you already know embarrassment doesn’t really kill you, even when you wish it would.

But it’s a fact that just as he is about to die of failure, Jesus saves this jailer’s life.

And in that dark and shaken moment, the jailer recognizes the life-saving gift, and responds. He throws himself at the feet of Paul and Silas and demands to know how he can be saved. How he can deserve the saving of his life that just happened; achieve the saving of the rest of his life.

He can’t earn it, of course. You know that. I know that.

At least, we know this when we know we’re talking about God, and especially if we’re talking about someone else, or talking in the abstract.

But I bet that deep in our not-so-logical minds and hearts, many of us have believed at some time, or believe right now, that we do, in fact, have to earn our own lives.
That we have to live and act and achieve right in order to deserve salvation from whatever most hurts or threatens us.
We may believe – not necessarily with our heads, but with our habits and attitudes; by the way we act without thinking, the things we fear and the things we can’t say no to – that we have to eat or parent or work or rest or recycle or whatever exactly right – better than we do now – to save ourselves and our families and our world from failure or disease or loss or just not being enough.

Or we believe that our current happiness or success or security or even the state of our relationship with God, for better or worse, is due mostly to how hard we have ourselves worked for it.

After all, that’s the story about success and failure, value and merit, that every one of us is told in our present culture every single day.

It’s the story that Philippian jailer believed as truth. A story that almost killed him.

But it’s a lie.

And here in church, here on Sunday morning, temporarily sheltered from the story the world keeps telling us, we can hear what Paul and Silas try to tell that jailer, when they tell him to believe in Jesus and be saved.

Not that salvation depends on how much he agrees that a particular man was actually God, or how successfully he can absorb the illogic and impossibility of Jesus being raised from the dead.

When Silas and Paul utter that classic conversion line, “Believe in the Lord Jesus and be saved,” I believe they are trying to tell this jailer that being saved is not – is never – a matter of earning it, but of accepting it.  Accepting from God what we cannot earn with our own effort; letting go of the anxiety and strain of trying to achieve it for ourselves and the embarrassment of not “deserving” it as a gift.

That’s how Jesus saves our lives – yours and mine – still today. Not, usually, with a miraculous rescue from a natural disaster, traffic accident, or deadly illness, but rather by saving us day by day from the life-draining, life-limiting belief that we actually have to earn our way to heaven, or success, or love, or any other form of salvation.

It can feel safer, sometimes, or more virtuous, to rely on myself, or maybe a few others, than to rely on Jesus for security, loveableness, daily necessities, healthy relationships, virtuous behavior, and all the other things that are supposed to make us right and righteous and “okay” in this world, or any other.

It can feel better to rely on ourselves right up to the point when we’ve failed.
The point where, sometimes, failing our selves or our loved ones feels like dying.

But when we can accept that gift of unearned healing, when we trust Jesus to protect our hearts and souls every single time we fail, that will literally save our lives – both from the smothering weight of not measuring up, and from the sword in our own hands.

And then that gift pours out of us again, like it pours out of that jailer in generosity and care for Paul and Silas: not with a list of more things to do or achieve on our own responsibility, but a gift easy to share.

That gift – un-earnable, un-winnable – is called grace when you get theological about it. Other times, it just feels like love. Like loving and being loved beyond anything you or I can deserve or imagine. Like love you can fall into – even fail into – with overwhelming trust and joy.

It isn’t always easy to fall – to fail – into grace. I know.

So the church gives us rituals to practice with, like baptism and the water that washes us with new life, even before we’ve spent the first one. Like communion, when we practice opening our hands to receive something that looks nothing like a meal, but somehow feeds our souls. Like the prayers we sing and say together that remind us that so much of what we can’t do for ourselves and our world is actually God’s responsibility and delight anyway.

In doing this, we remind ourselves that however long ago or recently your story started, however dramatic or slow or powerful or unfinished the process of your own conversion to God’s gift of trust and grace, you and I and all of us together are rooted in the truth that Jesus saves our lives, once and always.