June 1, 2025

The Power of Being

So, the Apostle Paul gets arrested for, well, essentially being a Jew in public.  The real reason, I suppose, is that he ruined some guy’s livelihood and everybody’s fun by disabusing a slave girl of the idea that she had the power to tell fortunes.  Anyway, he and his buddy Silas get beaten within an inch of their lives and thrown in the poky (only one among many times, by the way, that Paul spends time in the slammer).  So, let me paint this picture for you (and hear it all as if it were happening to you).  You’re arrested on trumped up charges (what we police officers used to call “aggravated existence”).  You’re beaten with rods until your back is running with blood from the open wounds.  You’re thrown in prison.  Then, in the middle of the night, there’s an earthquake and the whole place practically comes down on your head.  This is not a very good day you’re having.  And how does Paul respond to all this?  What’s he doing?  Nothing.  That’s right.  He’s perfectly fine sitting in what’s left of his prison cell, with the doors flung open, and the blood caking on his back.  The prison guard, who was apparently cold-cocked by a piece of falling debris, finally woke up and saw the place in a shambles and the doors open.  He figures he’s going to be blamed for the prisoners escaping and decides to off himself.  That’s when Paul speaks up: “Don’t harm yourself; we’re all here.”  Can you get your head around that?  The humiliation, the torture, the pain, the blood, the confinement, the earthquake, and Paul is sitting amidst the rubble of the day’s disaster, comforting his jailer with the assurance that it’s all good; they’re all just hanging out.  And I want to know, where does someone like that come from?

It’s not me.  All it takes to send me into a tizzy is for one minor plan to get disrupted, one thing to go wrong, one disappointment to come my way.  A case in point: a few years ago, I left home without my sermon.  Now, in the days of living in a parsonage next door to the church building, that sort of thing was never a problem.  I might just walk across the driveway and retrieve the sermon before worship.  But when you’re living forty-five minutes away, it’s a bit more of a problem.  I didn’t realize what had happened until I got into the office and reached into my briefcase for the sermon.  I panicked.  I told everyone to leave me the heck alone, and I went into overdrive sitting at my computer trying to piece back together whatever I could of what I had written.  I was still trying to do this when the ten o’clock hour arrived.  People sat in the sanctuary waiting.  It was like a very bad dream.  When I finally decided I had to stop writing and go with what I had, I printed it out, grabbed it and ran for the stairs.  I got to the back of the sanctuary breathless and an emotional wreck, beating myself up for being so stupid.  And before I started charging down the aisle, a dear, beloved woman of that congregation said to me, “Relax, Mike; It’s OK.”  God bless her.  I’m not sure she will ever know how important those few words were in that moment.  So, my point in telling all this?  It’s simply that the hooley I blew happened because of one silly sermon manuscript left at home.  Can you imagine how I would cope with being beaten, arrested, thrown in jail, and then surviving an earthquake?  I’d be apoplectic!

“Don’t harm yourself.  We’re all here.”  Do those words hit you as hard as they do me?  Do you find them extraordinary under the circumstances?  I’d like to take a few minutes with you to nose around in this story and try to figure out what a guy like Paul had going on, and how you and I might come by an ounce of whatever it is.

First of all, it’s worth noting that the Apostle Paul was radically and dramatically transformed.  He was the reinvention of Saul, the passionate and unrelenting persecutor of Christians.  Suddenly, he finds himself in Philippi with the shoe on the other foot.  Now, he is the persecuted Christian.  He is the one being abused and beaten by “the man.”  He knows how this drama plays out because he’s so often been the one handing out the lashes.  And it makes me wonder if it takes a transgressor to be the one to come to terms with transgression, if it takes someone who is “acquainted with grief” to be the one who gains perspective on that grief.  Maybe Paul had to recognize how he himself was wounded, damaged, by his own hostility and rage before he could accept with the proper perspective the wounds inflicted on him by the rage of others.

It makes me think of guys I have known who were gang members or who spent time in prison for assault, and then later in life, after getting kicked around by the system, beaten up by other thugs, enduring the kinds of hard knocks that only guys in that world know, they have emerged as gentle, even sensitive men, who have an amazing degree of patience and a kind of mellow humor that puts people at ease.  Obviously, it doesn’t happen to everyone, but I’ve seen it more than once.  There’s something about real hardship and trial that can make one come to terms with oneself and find a degree of wisdom.

You and I could learn from that.  What if we took the real struggles of our lives not simply as obstacles to our dreams or disasters to be endured, but as opportunities to see ourselves more clearly, to knock off some of the rough edges, and to gain some valuable perspective?

The second thing that jumps out at me from this story is the prison guard, who has a kind of stunning turnaround himself.  He is at his post, dutifully guarding his prisoners.  And he’s more than a functionary earning his daily wage; he is so dedicated to his duty that when it appears his prisoners have escaped, he is ready to take his own life.  In the very next moment, he pleads with Paul and Silas, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?”  How do we account for this amazing about-face?  We know that before the earthquake Paul and Silas were spending their night in prison praying and singing hymns, and that other prisoners were moved by this.  Maybe the jailer was as well.  But that doesn’t account for his flip-flop.  He was still a loyal soldier right up until the moment he discovered that the prisoners were still in their cells.  Here’s what I think: I think he was blown out of his socks by the spirit and presence of Paul, this man who could endure all he had and with the blood crusted on his back, sitting in the rubble of his cell, calmly telling him to take it easy; they were all still there.  I think he simply had the same response I have in reading the story: I want a piece of that, whatever it is.  The prison guard is me, and he is you.

We find ourselves devoted to our routines and obligations, pulling on the oars of whatever vessel is driving us through the rough waters of our days, dedicated to the values and norms that define us.  But there is a secret part of our hearts that yearns to be more, to see more deeply into the essence of life, and to be motivated and sustained by higher principles that give us the grace of a certain peace and power.  I think that’s what this jailer saw when he looked into the eyes of Paul, and I think he was prepared to do anything to gain some of that for himself.

Which brings us to the question of just what it was that kept Paul in that prison cell and inspired that guard.  I think Paul was one of those rare individuals who not only had visions, but who had a vision.  He had a clear sense of what the gospel was calling him to do and be, and he had a dogged determination to live into that awareness.  Such vision gives one a sense of what matters and what does not, and it affords an assurance in one’s soul that can’t be swayed by the tides of trauma and trial.  It is a special sort of power.  For want of a better term, I choose to call it the power of being.  For Paul, the stripes of running blood on his back, the prison bars, the earthquake, all were incidental to his central mission, and to the bedrock foundation of his faith.  It didn’t really matter to him whether the prison doors were open or locked shut.  He was where he was, and he was there for a reason.  More than anything, perhaps, he was gifted with the ability to see himself and his world clearly, and to see the divine wonder that lived in every opportunity, even an opportunity born of adversity.

I read some time ago the old classic by Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop.  In the very last scene, the Bishop Jean Marie Latour, is speaking to his friend, Father Joseph Vaillant about miracles.  “One might almost say that an apparition is human vision corrected by divine love,” he says.  “I do not see you as you really are, Joseph; I see you through my affection for you.  The Miracles of the Church seem to me to rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from far off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eye can see and our ears can hear what is there about us always.”¹

The good Bishop says what I believe is at the heart of Paul’s power, a power that led him to convert other prisoners, a power that allowed him to endure suffering with grace, a power that his jailer wanted for himself, a power that ultimately cowed the magistrate who had jailed him.  It was the power of seeing, with perception heightened by the love and grace of the Lord, “what is there about us always.”  It is the power of being fully in the place and time that one finds oneself, but with the perspective of a motivating vision.

So, if I leave my sermon at home next week, will I blow a hooley again?  Probably.  But I think, like you, I’m trying to find a better way through life.  I’d like to use the struggles and misfortunes I’ve endured, and those to come, as opportunities for self-discovery.  I’d like to wake up to a deeper reality than the routines, tasks, and worries that fill most of my days.  I’d like to have my life touched by Divine grace and love in a way that allows me to see what’s there around us all the time.  I’d like to expand my vision and embody some of the power that takes whatever circumstance I find myself in and affords me the peace and presence to see it as part of a larger and more profound truth.  I’d like to harness the power of being.

     ¹      Willa Cather, Death Comes to the Archbishop, Vintage, 1990, p. 49.