I think one of the greatest writers and poets in Canadian folklore and history is the great Robert W. Service. He was born in Lancashire in the United Kingdom, where I am from. I have always had a great interest in him because he came to Canada and made Canada his home. He loved it greatly. In the midst of his writings he had some really wise words.
There is one phrase that I have thought about and pondered about many times. Service wrote the following: “It isn’t the mountain ahead that wears you out. It’s the grain of sand in your shoe.”
Isn’t that good? In other words, it is often the little things, the unseen things that become the most difficult and the most challenging in our lives. Service is talking about climbing and mountaineering and walking in the beloved north, but it applies to almost any part of life. It is a metaphor for life, that the grain of sand, that irritating thing, is often the thing that can cause the biggest problems and the biggest pains in life.
In many ways, I think that sin is like that grain of sand. I think that greed and avarice and lust and obsessions and anger and fear, while they might in and of themselves only be relatively small things in our lives, can have great consequences and devastating effects. It is not the mountain, it is not often the big things that apparently seem wrong in our lives that are the problem; it is the grain of sand in our shoe that is the thing that causes the most damage.
In today’s lengthy passage, from the Book of Acts, we have the great writer, Luke, bringing together two stories that link up to one another. And the more I think about it, these two stories are about grains of sand that potentially could destroy lives: small things seemingly that could bring a person down and constrain them and make them subject to powers. The two people who are involved in these stories are fascinating.
The first of these is a slave girl. We are introduced at the beginning of this passage to the slave girl, and the fact that she is actually defined as a slave girl tells you right up front that this was a young woman who was constrained, a woman who was held back. By calling her a “slave girl” or as some versions have it, a “servant girl” they imply a level of servitude.
This slave girl had, according to Luke, something more. She had what was called in one of the versions “a spirit of divination within her.” In other words, a spirit had been given her to empower to foretell and to be able to determine and describe what peoples’ lives were like. The problem wasn’t so much the gift, as the spirit within her that gave it. It wasn’t just the spirit that she was given, it was the fact that this spirit caused her to be used by owners, owners who profited through her, who saw that she had a gift, and then as fortune tellers would require people to pay money to hear what the young girl would have to say. They exploited her.
In biblical times, slaves in particular and servants were often manipulated and used by their owners for the owners gain. The slave was simply chattel to be used for somebody else. This girl had a gift, but it was a gift that was abused spiritually.
It was so dark and it was so bad that when she encountered Paul and Silas on their way to worship, and Paul of course was the newly converted Christian leader and Silas was someone who was with him on the journey, also a believer, and they are going to a house of worship, this girl cries out to them. And, here there is a great irony! She says to them, “You are slaves of the most High God.”
Isn’t this ironic? She says to them, “You are slaves of the most High God.” Well, Paul was really annoyed. It is not because she did it once, but that every time they went past her she said this: “You are slaves of the most High God. You are trying to tell people how they are to be saved.” Of course, she is in servitude. She is oppressed. She is being used. But, she points the finger at Paul and Silas.
Paul and Silas respond with annoyance, but you will notice that they are not annoyed at her. You would think that they would take her aside and give her some counselling maybe, or that they would be angry with her for disturbing them and really humiliating them, because that is what she was doing. But no, Paul sort of goes beyond the slave girl and he talks to the spirit that had been controlling her. He says to that spirit, “Come out of her! In the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, come out of her! You possess her!”
Well, the owners were furious! He is ruining their business. He is taking away their revenue! He is destroying everything they have built up with this girl. She has been a good money-maker for them. Paul is coming along and wanting to take this spirit out of her in order that she might be freed. Paul was therefore not angry with her; he was concerned for her. His desire to set her free was born out of love and compassion for her, but he knew that this seed within her, this grain of sand as it were, that was in her life and in her soul was destroying her.
The owners got absolutely irate and they applied to the law. Their application was that Paul and Silas were not really Romans. They weren’t respecting the order of things: that people could be owned and exploited. It was because of that they were condemned and thrown into jail for being a disturbance. They were flogged and they were beaten because the owners could not stand the fact that this girl would eventually be free and they would lose their money and their power over her.
As Paul and Silas are imprisoned, we encounter a second character, who is the jailer, the guard. Here again is the irony: they are in chains, they are enslaved, they are in prison, but they are the ones who feel free. In prison they encounter the jailer. When they are there they pray that they will be set free. We are told that there is an earthquake that shakes the walls of the building and they come crumbling down, and for all of us who have watched what has happened in Philadelphia this week – not through an earthquake but how terrible it is when walls come tumbling down – you realize how dangerous it is, and how devastating it can be. For the jailer, who is guarding them and realizing that now the wall has come down the prisoners are free, he is going out of his mind! “I have been given the job of making sure these reprobates, Paul and Silas are maintained in a state of entrapment in the prison and now they are going to be free!” he thought to himself.
The jailer is terrified because he knows that under the Roman law at the time, if you are a jailer and you let those that you are overseeing go, your fate becomes their fate. You could very well lose your life if it was a capital crime. You could very well be incarcerated yourself if those that you have been guarding have been set free. His employers were terrifying him. He felt dreadful about it and he thought he was going to lose everything. So he goes up to Paul and Silas and says, “This is remarkable what has happened here. What must I do to be saved?” In other words, “Please do something!” And they did, as we shall see in a moment.
What is significant about these two stories is that in many ways both the slave girl and the jailer did not really believe in God. Yet they still believed in something. For the slave girl, what she believed in was the order of things, and that the spirit that was dominating her life was the thing that she needed to turn to. For the jailer, it was trust really in a system that had hired him and employers that had given him power. I always like what the great G. K. Chesterton said: “It is often supposed that when people stop believing in God they believe in nothing. Alas, it is even worse than that! When they stop believing in God, they believe in anything.”
These two believed in something, but what they believed in was holding them back.
If we read this story in a modern context, we say, “What is the personal application for this in our lives? It seems so remote and so distant. Slave girls being used as fortune tellers; jailers who would die if they lost the people that they were guarding. It seems so far-fetched from our world.” But is it? I would suggest to you that in both of these individuals there was a grain of sand that was destroying their lives, a grain of sand that was wearing them down, and that grain of sand in both these cases was fear. What was holding them back, what was constraining them, was fear.
In my theological divinity days, there was a very good friend of mine and colleague from Newfoundland who had studied law, and he came into divinity school simply to learn divinity, but he was already an admitted Member of the Bar. He was the sort of guy who would stay up really late at night and would read some esoteric works at Tim Horton’s on Robbie Street in Halifax. It would be nothing to see him at midnight reading a copy of The Justinian Code – really exciting, right?
He would be there reading, and he would meet all the night people in the city. He would stay there for a couple of hours sipping many cups of coffee. One of the things that he found was that the night life was very different from the day life of the city. He would be running into security guards, firemen, ambulance workers, cab drivers, policemen, night workers, guards, prostitutes. He would run into a whole gamut of people who would come into Tim Horton’s at one and two o’clock in the morning.
There was one particular person with whom he struck up quite a conversation, for my friend was – shall we use the word? – “loquacious”. He liked to talk a lot! He was a fascinating character. That is why we were such good friends, I think. He met a delightful young woman and struck up a conversation about life and faith and the things that were always on his mind, only to find that the woman he had been conversing for about five different weeks was actually herself a prostitute in Halifax.
After the conversation rolled around and turned to many different things, he said that he was a Christian and that he was a person of faith. She was getting particularly concerned about the conversations. As he talked more about the faith, she became more uncomfortable. But it wasn’t as though what he was saying was judgemental. It wasn’t as if he was condemning her. He just simply talked to her about his faith.
One night he phoned me up around one o’clock in the morning. He said, “Andrew, I can’t sleep. I am worried and chilled to my bone. I have a terrible feeling that something dreadful is going to happen to this young woman.” He knew where she had set up in the city. We got in the car and drove around looking for her. You can imagine how that might appear to some, can’t you? We did it anyway, knowing that if we were picked up, he was a lawyer and I was a minister – maybe we might be okay!
Finally we saw her. She was holding on to a park bench. Her face was turned towards the ground. She looked terrified. She’d been given what they called a “preliminary beating” not to disfigure you, but to make sure that you keep serving your owner and your master. I have hardly ever seen more fear in someone’s eyes. Finally, we encouraged her to get in the car with us, and we looked around in every corner that we could to make sure we were okay and we took her to a shelter.
The shelter took care of her. In the ensuing days, we had many conversations with her, and it was obvious that her whole life had been gripped with fear. She had been frightened of her parents, who were actually hyper-religious but would abuse her. She was frightened of being a failure. She was frightened of those with whom she got into association on the street. She was frightened of the people who “owned” her. She was frightened of those who abused her. She lived in constant fear. My friend had the sensitivity of Jesus Christ to see that fear that day in her eyes and it was the reason why we were there.
I think Paul and Silas saw that grain of sand of fear in that young woman when she mocked them and said, “You are slaves of the most high God.” I think they saw the fear in the eyes of the jailer, who knew that his future and his career were at stake, because he hadn’t done his job properly. Yet in all of these cases there is this overwhelming sense that they saw the grace of Jesus Christ, redeeming and saving and empowering these two people. “In the name of Jesus Christ,” they said to the evil spirit, “come out.” “In the name of Jesus Christ,” they said to the jailer “believe!”
We don’t know what happens to the young slave girl: we can only assume that she was set free. But, the jailer we do know. The jailer, having experienced the new freedom in Christ, brought his entire family to Paul and Silas and had them baptize them as we have baptized today. He brought the entire family into it: the whole household had bread, they had a meal, and they had a celebration. The fear was gone! The jailer was convinced that Paul and Silas and the new faith that they had would be able to help him and guide him and keep him. What happened to the jailer beyond that we do not know, but we know that he was in the Lord’s hands.
So if you face things in your life that frighten you, if there are those grains of sand that weigh you down, there is a place and a person that you can go to. There is the grace of Jesus Christ. Or if you know people who are subjugated and oppressed, if you know people who are exploited or abused, if you see in the eye of another fear, embrace them as Paul embraced these two and bring to them the Good News of Jesus Christ.
I think along with a lot of the world today, I woke up this morning praying for Nelson Mandela. From my sources, he is really not well. There is fear in that country at the moment: fear of the future without him. Often, there is fear in our lives of losing things that we hold on to, losing things that have been a solid rock in our lives. Paul and Silas knew that there was one thing and one person who would never go away, one source of strength that would always be there for them, one who would see them even after the grain of sand had worn them down, and that is the living presence of Jesus Christ, our Lord. May it b