What must I do to be saved?

Written by Alissa Bender

Associate Pastor Alissa Bender
Calgary First Mennonite Church
June 6, 2010

What must I do to be saved?
Acts 16:25-34, Acts 16:11-15, Acts 9:1-19
The Philippian Jailer, Lydia, and Paul

 “What must I do to be saved?”  Not a question we tend to hear in those exact words.  In fact, if we were asked, we might be a little flustered as to how to answer this question as Mennonites, since we don’t tend to use language like this.  We don’t go around asking people: “Have you been saved?” like some of our Christian brothers and sisters do.  It may be just a difference in language to which we’re accustomed.  Or it may also be that we understand an encounter with Jesus’ saving love less as a single life event and more as an entire life experience.  We speak of telling each other our faith journeys, recognizing that there are many miles on the path of faith and that God is at work all our lives, healing (or saving) us (can be the same Greek word) from our pains and mistakes and confusions.

 So, as Christians, we have different ways of talking about how we come to faith in God.  And, of course, there are many different ways that people do come to faith.  You’ve heard one story from Acts and I’m going to share two more with you that show us that God works in different ways in different people to bring us to understand who Jesus is.  As we hear these three stories, I encourage you to think about which story you find yourself in.  Which one speaks to you about your journey of faith?  And tell someone about it over lunch today.

What must I do to be saved?

 The story we already heard happened in the town of Philippi, which is the same place as one of the other stories I’ll tell you shortly.  At Camp Valaqua a few weeks ago, at theological studies days with CMU prof Gordon Zerbe, a group of us learned quite a lot about Philippi through Paul’s letter to the Philippian church.  Philippi is in the region of Macedonia, where Paul went with Silas after having a dream of a man pleading with him and saying, “Come over to Macedonia and help us” (Acts 16:9).

 This prison story in Philippi is the first recorded time when Paul gets into trouble with the Roman authorities.  It was illegal on Roman soil to preach new divinities and to make converts, so it was fairly easy for two greedy slave-owners who were annoyed at Paul to get him and his companion thrown into prison for preaching in the name of Jesus.  But in the middle of the night, the same thing happens to Paul and Silas as what happened once to Peter, if you remember his story from a few weeks ago.  An earthquake shakes the prison and unfastens the prison doors and all of the prisoner’s chains.

It may have also been the earthquake that woke the jailer up from his night’s sleep, possibly in his house above the prison.  He knew that if a guard let a prisoner escape, he would have to take that person’s punishment.  So this jailer was about to take his own life when Paul yelled out and stopped him, showing him that they had had the chance to escape but hadn’t taken it.

The jailer is completely floored by this.  First, who is this God that the prisoners believe in who is powerful enough to use an earthquake to free them from prison?  And if their God is this powerful, why didn’t they leave immediately?  In wonder at the perfectly placed natural disaster and the fact that his prisoners have saved his life, he takes them outside and asks them: “What must I do to be saved?”

As far as we know, the jailer was an average resident of Philippi, either having or hoping for Roman citizenship, and living life as a good Roman should, which meant having nothing to do with foreign religions like Judaism or The Way (Christianity).  But then he has this encounter with Jesus’ followers, and he witnesses both the strength of the God they are preaching and the strength of their ethics in their hesitation to escape.  And the Philippian jailer wants to be part of the life that they’re talking about.

If we think about faith as a journey, then this is a story about someone just starting out.  Before this incident, the Philippian jailer probably hadn’t had anything to do with the God of Israel, one God who made heaven and earth, but he was open to seeing God in what happened before him, and ready to take a first step into something absolutely new.

Judged to be faithful

 Our second story shows us the very beginning of the Philippian church, perhaps a glimpse of the group that the Philippian jailer would soon join.  This is earlier in chapter 16, right after Paul has his dream about the Macedonian man.  Luke writes:

“11 We set sail from Troas and took a straight course to Samothrace, the following day to Neapolis, 12 and from there to Philippi, which is a leading city of the district of Macedonia and a Roman colony. We remained in this city for some days. 13 On the sabbath day we went outside the gate by the river, where we supposed there was a place of prayer; and we sat down and spoke to the women who had gathered there. 14 A certain woman named Lydia, a worshiper of God, was listening to us; she was from the city of Thyatira and a dealer in purple cloth. The Lord opened her heart to listen eagerly to what was said by Paul. 15 When she and her household were baptized, she urged us, saying, "If you have judged me to be faithful to the Lord, come and stay at my home." And she prevailed upon us.” (Acts 16:11-15)

Lydia is a different sort of character from the Philippian jailer.  She is a wealthy woman with a business in expensive fabrics.  In this area of the Greek-speaking world, it was more common to see women in positions of leadership in general society, so Lydia was quite possibly a businessperson with status.  But her wealth and profession do not give her her only position of authority.  She also seems to be an important leader of the group of women that is gathered in the place of prayer outside the gate of Philippi. 

Luke tells us that Lydia is a worshiper of God.  She may be one of the God-fearing Gentiles like Cornelius (whose story is earlier in Acts) who was not born into the Jewish faith but who has come to believe in YHWH, I AM that I AM, the God worshipped by the Jewish people.  Like Cornelius, Lydia appears to have influence over an entire household, since we see them all baptized at once after hearing from Paul.

But, whereas the Philippian jailer was baptized at the beginning of his journey after experiencing something completely unfamiliar and new, Lydia’s baptism fits into a journey that was already taking place, perhaps like many others who have grown up and been formed in the Church. 

Lydia was already following God in the way that she knew how, meeting on the Sabbath to pray, leading her household in faith.  She was on the path.  But then, in her regular practice of making herself open to God, she hears something that expands her understanding of and relationship with God.  And she listens eagerly.  She believes that God will continue to reveal God’s self, so she is ready to hear what Paul has to say about Jesus.  Lydia shows us that on any point of our faith journey, we may experience God in a new way if we are open to it.  And then we, like Lydia, may be judged to be faithful.

Why do you persecute me?

 Story #3 from the book of Acts:  If Lydia was already on a journey of faith and the Philippian jailer had his feet set in motion by an encounter with God, Saul was going in the completely wrong direction.  Saul, who becomes Paul and the main character in most of the book of Acts, starts off by going the absolutely opposite direction, wreaking violence on those who claim to follow Jesus.  His story starts in chapter 9, and it goes like this:

“1 Meanwhile Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest 2 and asked him for letters to the synagogues at Damascus, so that if he found any who belonged to the Way, men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem. 3 Now as he was going along and approaching Damascus, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. 4 He fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, "Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?" 5 He asked, "Who are you, Lord?" The reply came, "I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. 6 But get up and enter the city, and you will be told what you are to do."
7 The men who were traveling with him stood speechless because they heard the voice but saw no one. 8 Saul got up from the ground, and though his eyes were open, he could see nothing; so they led him by the hand and brought him into Damascus. 9 For three days he was without sight, and neither ate nor drank.
10 Now there was a disciple in Damascus named Ananias. The Lord said to him in a vision, "Ananias." He answered, "Here I am, Lord."
11 The Lord said to him, "Get up and go to the street called Straight, and at the house of Judas look for a man of Tarsus named Saul. At this moment he is praying, 12 and he has seen in a vision a man named Ananias come in and lay his hands on him so that he might regain his sight."
13 But Ananias answered, "Lord, I have heard from many about this man, how much evil he has done to your saints in Jerusalem; 14 and here he has authority from the chief priests to bind all who invoke your name."
15 But the Lord said to him, "Go, for he is an instrument whom I have chosen to bring my name before Gentiles and kings and before the people of Israel; 16 I myself will show him how much he must suffer for the sake of my name."
17 So Ananias went and entered the house. He laid his hands on Saul and said, "Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus, who appeared to you on your way here, has sent me so that you may regain your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit." 18 And immediately something like scales fell from his eyes, and his sight was restored. Then he got up and was baptized, 19 and after taking some food, he regained his strength. For several days he was with the disciples in Damascus, 20 and immediately he began to proclaim Jesus in the synagogues, saying, "He is the Son of God."” (Acts 9:1-20)

 If you’re looking for a dramatic conversion story, this is the one.  Saul(Paul) gets to learn first-hand that sometimes God goes to drastic measures to stop someone in their tracks and to completely turn them around.

Stories of Faith

 So there we have three stories of people coming to faith in Jesus in the early Church.  Each story is different from the next, and yet all three characters likely found themselves for at least a brief time all gathering to worship God in the same place.  I wonder if this ever caused challenges in the early church.  Roman society was extremely status conscious. 

When Paul writes to the church at Philippi later, he uses a lot of language about humility and the need to let go of status as members of the Church.  But the society was used to knowing how to place people in order, so that would have taken a lot of practice.  And I wonder if it would have been tempting to give people certain status according to the way they came into the Church.

 I talked with a friend about this sermon this week and he commented on his experience of spending time in three different denominations in his lifetime.  In his first church, there was a lot of importance placed on the moment of one’s conversion, and the more dramatic, the better!  If you couldn’t say “this is when I was saved”, then they weren’t sure you really were. 

The second denomination he was part of was almost suspicious of such single moment experiences, maybe fearing that it was all emotion and wanting to see new faith lived out more sustainably.  Dramatic conversions to Christian faith weren’t always comfortable stories to hear, and not always welcomed.

The third church that my friend is now part of hasn’t seemed to be concerned with sharing each person’s story, as long as they get baptized!  It almost seemed like this church’s understanding of baptism had shifted so that this action was a saving moment.

So, one held up the experience, one the lifestyle, and one the result.  And as we hear other Christians speak about how they have come to faith, I think many of us can fall into this trap of being suspicious of a story that is unlike our own.  And yet just as these 3 Christians may have prayed together at the gates of Philippi, we’re in the worldwide Church with people who can teach us something through their stories of coming to faith. 

Maybe it’s a story of a dramatic healing or miraculous event.  Maybe it’s one of scholarly study and logical reasoning.  Maybe it’s about growing up in and being formed by the church and always finding life in Christian community.  Maybe it’s an encounter with others who demonstrate what it is to follow in the footsteps of Christ.
These stories are all the stories of the Church, and so in a way, they’re all our stories too. 

Even the three varied stories of Lydia, Paul, and the Philippian jailer can each be part of our individual stories.

God transforms in many different ways.  How are we (like Lydia) putting ourselves in the right place to be open to God's continued revelation?  What in our lives (like in Paul's) needs to be spun completely around, or shed like scales?  Do we believe (like the jailer) that God can surprise us and show us something completely new?

Let us listen to each other’s stories, notice what they can teach us, and discover how our stories can, in fact, mirror one another’s when we are authentically sharing about that which is most important to us.