Sunday, May 29th, 2022: "They Didn't Die So We Could Kill Ourselves"
First United Presbyterian Church
“They Didn’t Die So We Could Kill Ourselves”
Rev. Amy Morgan
May 29, 2022
Acts 16:16-34
One day, as we were going to the place of prayer, we met a slave-girl who had a spirit of divination and brought her owners a great deal of money by fortune-telling.
17 While she followed Paul and us, she would cry out, "These men are slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim to you a way of salvation."
18 She kept doing this for many days. But Paul, very much annoyed, turned and said to the spirit, "I order you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her." And it came out that very hour.
19 But when her owners saw that their hope of making money was gone, they seized Paul and Silas and dragged them into the marketplace before the authorities.
20 When they had brought them before the magistrates, they said, "These men are disturbing our city; they are Jews
21 and are advocating customs that are not lawful for us as Romans to adopt or observe."
22 The crowd joined in attacking them, and the magistrates had them stripped of their clothing and ordered them to be beaten with rods.
23 After they had given them a severe flogging, they threw them into prison and ordered the jailer to keep them securely.
24 Following these instructions, he put them in the innermost cell and fastened their feet in the stocks.
25 About midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the prisoners were listening to them.
26 Suddenly there was an earthquake, so violent that the foundations of the prison were shaken; and immediately all the doors were opened and everyone's chains were unfastened.
27 When the jailer woke up and saw the prison doors wide open, he drew his sword and was about to kill himself, since he supposed that the prisoners had escaped.
28 But Paul shouted in a loud voice, "Do not harm yourself, for we are all here."
29 The jailer called for lights, and rushing in, he fell down trembling before Paul and Silas.
30 Then he brought them outside and said, "Sirs, what must I do to be saved?"
31 They answered, "Believe on the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household."
32 They spoke the word of the Lord to him and to all who were in his house.
33 At the same hour of the night he took them and washed their wounds; then he and his entire family were baptized without delay.
34 He brought them up into the house and set food before them; and he and his entire household rejoiced that he had become a believer in God.
This past week I attended the Festival of Homiletics. Homiletics is just a nerdy word for preaching, and I spent the week with a bunch of pastors, mostly Lutherans, attending 8 worship services in addition to a bunch of lectures on preaching. It was really exciting. I’m sure you’re all sad you missed it.
But the theme of this festival was anything but festive. The week was centered around preaching in and through trauma. I was really interested in this theme because, of course, all of us have experienced trauma in many different forms throughout the last several years especially. I know that every week I am preaching in the midst of traumatized people. So this was a really important thing to explore.
But I have to admit that by the third day of this conference I was so tired of hearing about trauma. I’d heard like nine different definitions of trauma and about 90 different causes of the individual and collective trauma we’re experiencing. It was like, “Okay, I know we’re here to talk about trauma, but could we just talk about something else for a minute?”
And then again, this week, another trauma. It just keeps coming.
Our individual and collective trauma carries a weight that can’t be lifted until it is named, brought into the light, unmasked. And so a lot of last week’s conference involved naming some of those collective traumas we’ve been experiencing. The massacre in a grocery story in Buffalo and the racist motivations of the killer that haunt our black neighbors every time they step out their door. The invasion of a sovereign nation and the horrors of war. The deaths of disease and despair. The division and hatred that threatens to unravel the threads of democracy. And now, the massacre of children and teachers in an elementary school in Texas. Trauma, trauma, trauma. You can see why I got worn out on it.
At one of the worship services, Nadia Bolz-Weber preached on the text from Acts that we read today. If you don’t know who Nadia Bolz-Weber is, she’s kind of a rock star in the preaching world today. She’s like 8 feet tall, covered in tattoos, and curses like a sailor. No offense to sailors. She preaches all over the world, has written three books, and hosts a podcast and blog.
So of course, I thought, well, if Nadia can preach this text, I’m sure I can rock this, too. Actually, I thought, I wonder if I could find a copy of her sermon and just preach that. But since I couldn’t find such a copy, I went ahead and wrote my own sermon.
But my sermon comes out of what Nadia found at the center of this story. Her sermon focused in on the near-suicide of the prison guard. She talked about the lies he told himself, and the lies his culture told him, that brought him to such abrupt and lethal despair.
And as Nadia talked about these lies, and how they very nearly resulted in suicide, I started thinking about this weekend – because my mind wanders during sermons, too, even good ones. But I thought about tomorrow being Memorial Day, and how this text about a near-suicide would echo in this moment. And as much as I dislike baptizing secular holidays with topical sermons about them, I kept hearing this refrain in my head: “They didn’t die so we could kill ourselves and each other.”
And I thought, “gosh, that’s really dark, and I don’t want to preach on that.” But I couldn’t get it out of my head, and I couldn’t stop seeing all the ways this story speaks into this moment. So not only did I have to write my own sermon. I had to write I sermon I didn’t want to preach. So if you don’t like this sermon, that makes two of us – at least.
But part of why I did not want to preach this sermon is that I love sharing with you all the results of my thorough exegesis and rabbit-hole research. And this sermon shares with you my heart, and what breaks it, and hopefully, what keeps it pumping. Much as I like preaching about vulnerability, I do not love experiencing it. But since it is a holiday weekend and there aren’t that many people here, we’ll go ahead and do this thing.
The highest ideal of Rome was the Pax Romana. The peace of Rome was the goal of the empire’s military conquests, laws and taxation, customs and social structures. The world was a barbaric and frightening place, but so long as you paid your taxes and worshipped the emperor and followed the rules, all would be safe and well. Roman soldiers died for the peace of Rome, just as American soldiers have died for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
But in this story, we do not see Roman citizens living in peace and security. We see them attempting to kill themselves and each other. Because Paul dares to prioritize people over profit, to liberate a person from slavery to demonic possession and exploitative enslavement, he is accused of being anti-Roman. Remember, Paul boasts of his Roman citizenship, his civil pedigree. He’s attempting to bring peace to this slave girl, and peace to himself because she is, at Nadia Bolz-Weber put it, “tap-dancing on his last nerve.” But now he’s being accused by other Roman citizens of disturbing the Pax Romana, the peace of Rome, of unsettling the fragile security of the empire. Not because he’s preaching about the love and grace of Jesus Christ. But because he prioritized people over profit. Paul and Silas are tortured and thrown into the deepest, darkest dungeon to await death by execution or death by neglect.
Those Romans who died for the Pax Romana did not die so Roman citizens could kill each other.
And then, when God literally moves heaven and earth to set Paul and Silas free, the prison guard moves to suicide as soon as he sees he failed at his job. He believes the peace of Rome requires the instant death of anyone who fails to protect it. He believes the peace of Rome depends on his flawless execution of duty. He assumes the peace of Rome is of more worth than his individual life.
Those Romans who died for the Pax Romana did not die so Roman citizens could kill themselves.
They did not die so we could kill ourselves and each other.
Those who have died serving our country did so to defend the highest ideals of our nation – life, LIFE, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. They died so we could live. They died so we could be free. They died so we could follow our dreams.
And instead, we kill ourselves and each other. This part gets ugly, friends. In the last 20 years, about 5,500 American soldiers died in combat. Those are lives given in love of our country, and the ideals of our nation. Those are lives we should honor tomorrow with deep gratitude.
But friends, in that same 20-year period, more than 800,000 people died by suicide, half of them with the use of a firearm. More than 400,000 people died from homicides, three-quarters of them with the use of a firearm. More children have been killed with a gun in this country this year than in Ukraine this year. Our children are at greater risk of being shot and killed than children who live in a WAR ZONE. And those numbers checked out before this week’s massacre in Uvalde, TX.
Hundreds of police officers are killed in the line of duty each year, and police kill hundreds of citizens in the course of attempting to keep the peace.
They did not die so we could kill ourselves and each other.
Lest we think our only problem is gun violence, we should know that The American Institute of Stress reports 120,000 people die every year as a direct result of work-related stress. And Dr. Carolyn Chen, a co-director of the Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion, wrote this week that more and more Americans are substituting work for religion when it comes to our “social and spiritual needs for identity, belonging, meaning, purpose and transcendence.” On average, 95,000 people die each year from alcohol-related deaths, and in 2021, more than 100,000 people died from drug overdose. People who are unhoused have a life expectancy that is almost 30 years less than the national average.
They did not die so we could kill ourselves and each other.
I carried this burden with me all week, the drumbeat of these words. This was echoing in my head as news broke about another school shooting. And it was awful. This is awful stuff. This is our collective trauma.
But there’s more to the story. In this story from Acts, this story from the Bible, nobody actually dies.
God miraculously intervenes to save Paul and Silas. But instead of bolting out of the prison, they wait. They stay put until the guard arrives. And then, when he is about to kill himself, Paul says, “Do not harm yourself, for we are all here.”
We are all here. We aren’t going anywhere. Paul saves the life of the guard who would have taken him to his death with those words. He saves him with his presence. By staying put even when he was free to go. By caring more about what would happen to the man holding him captive than what might happen to himself.
And Paul did that, not because he was a Roman citizen, not because he knew soldiers had died for the peace of Rome. He did that because he followed the one who died knowing we would kill ourselves and each other.
Jesus died because we kill ourselves and each other. That is what sin does, in a multitude of forms. But Jesus died to show us another way. And he died knowing we probably wouldn’t follow that way all that often. And he died anyway.
But there’s more to the story. Jesus was resurrected so that we could know, in our moments of despair, in those times when the lies we tell ourselves win, in those moments when all we can see is how we are killing ourselves and each other, that Jesus is still here. He isn’t going anywhere. We are saved by his presence. We are saved by the one who cared more about what would happen to all of us who kill ourselves and each other than what might happen to himself.
The God who could move heaven and earth chose to die. Jesus chose to die, not for our highest human ideals, but for our deepest human shame. It was a death without honor or glory, the cruel death of a criminal.
And that is the death that ultimately saves us. That is the death that set a slave girl free, that saved Paul and Silas, and the prison guard, and his whole family.
And naming that death has power. When we stand up and name our collective traumas, bringing them into the light, we also name the death of Jesus. Because we remember that Jesus did not remain in the grave. He was resurrected so that he could stay with us through our traumas and grief, through our killing and dying. He stays with us, saying, “Do not harm yourself, for I am here.”
Jesus is here, in this community, in this Body of Christ. We are the ones who can say to those who are despairing, “We are all here.” To those who mourn, to those who are angry, to those who are afraid, we say, “We are all here.” To those who defend our highest ideals and to those who undermine them, we say, “We are all here.” To those willing to die for our nation and those who will instead kill themselves or each other, we say, “We are all here.”
We don’t get to choose who we show up for, because Jesus wasn’t picky. We are all here for the person sleeping at the Ritz and the person sleeping on the street. We are all here for the people carrying the guns and the people dying from them. We are all here for the CEOs and for the people losing their religion on 80-hour-a-week jobs. We are all here for the police officers who feel like we hate them and for the black lives who don’t feel like they matter. We are all here for all the people because Jesus is still here for all the people.
To God be all glory forever and ever. Amen.
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