Seventh Sunday of Easter
Acts 16:16-34
One day as we were going to the place of prayer, we met a female slave who had a spirit of divination and brought her owners a great deal of money by fortune-telling. While she followed Paul and us, she would cry out, “These men are slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim to you the way of salvation.” 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.
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. When they had brought them before the magistrates, they said, “These men, these Jews, are disturbing our city and are advocating customs that are not lawful for us, being Romans, to adopt or observe.”
The crowd joined in attacking them, and the magistrates had them stripped of their clothing and ordered them to be beaten with rods. After they had given them a severe flogging, they threw them into prison and ordered the jailer to keep them securely. Following these instructions, he put them in the innermost cell and fastened their feet in the stocks.
About midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the prisoners were listening to them. 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. 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.
But Paul shouted in a loud voice, “Do not harm yourself, for we are all here.” The jailer called for lights, and rushing in, he fell down trembling before Paul and Silas. Then he brought them outside and said, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?”
They answered, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household.” They spoke the word of the Lord to him and to all who were in his house.
At the same hour of the night he took them and washed their wounds; then he and his entire family were baptized without delay. 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.
The Power of a Song
The Book of the Acts of the Apostles provides an intriguing record of the early church as the followers of Jesus spread out through the world around them with the good news of a good God, made real in the person of Jesus Christ. They carried his teaching and healing, his word of peace with them all over the place. They put into practice his passion for justice and his word of love. Today’s little story is a perfect example of that.
First we find Paul and Silas, and the author of the book (Did you notice the use of the personal plural pronoun, “we?”) teaching in the Roman colony of Philippi, in Macedonia. This was their first foray into Europe. After several days meeting with a small group of people, including a woman named Lydia, they met a slave girl known for unusual insight, who figured out that they were also slaves, not to another human, but to the Highest God (This in a Roman colony where people worshipped a panoply of gods and goddesses). She kept trailing them, was fixated on them, appointed herself to announce them all over town. It got downright annoying and Paul finally put a stop to it by healing her of apparent mental illness.
Paul disrupted an unjust economic system that was profiting by exploiting a vulnerable person. But setting her free from her obsessive behavior did not set well with her owners. She had been their reliable source of income. Like a circus sideshow. Dragged before the magistrates, Paul and Silas were attacked by a mob, stripped, beaten and thrown into prison with no trial, though as a Roman citizen himself, Paul was entitled to one.
To the local Roman population, they were foreigners, Jews, not to be trusted. The jailer was instructed to throw them into the deepest, darkest chambers of the prison and stick their feet in stocks. (I could not help but think of the men stripped and shaved bald and shipped to the deepest, darkest dungeons of El Salvador).
But Paul and Silas were not overcome by hopelessness. They knew, as Paul would later write in his letter to the Romans, that no one and no situation could separate us from the love of Christ. Not hardship or distress, nor persecution or famine, nor nakedness nor peril or sword…. Paul was convinced that neither death nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, not powers, not height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation would be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
And so in the middle of the night, they sang. They sang hymns to God. The Book of Psalms was their hymnal. We don’t know the tunes, but the words are the same. Maybe they sang Psalm 97, which we used this morning, remembering the greatness of God’s creation and justice.
“God is the ruler of all! Let the earth rejoice!
Our God guards the lives of the faithful and rescues them from the hand of the wicked!” They sang Halleluia anyway.
Their singing was so loud it called up an earthquake. I’ve heard of high sopranos shattering glass, so maybe it worked with rocks, too. Walls crumbled. Stocks were shattered. They could have made a massive jailbreak, headed to the hills with all the other prisoners and saved their skins. But here’s the most amazing thing. They didn’t. Though they had been unjustly shamed, beaten and imprisoned in the deepest hell hole, they stayed.
Paul knew the harshness of Roman law. He knew that if they fled, the jailer would surely have been killed for dereliction of duty. His wife and children would have been killed too, or sold into slavery. So Paul and Silas chose a different way, and they stayed. The jailer was not their enemy, he was caught in a system beyond his control. By their staying, he was also freed, and so was his family. They were saved from the cycle of violence. And the song of God’s everlasting love flowed into more hearts.
When you read the book of Philippians, think of the jailer and his family. They became charter members of the first congregation of Europe.
Paul and Silas were surely not the last people to be saved by singing. United Methodists in Montana like to share stories about Pastor William Van Orsdel, better known as “Brother Van,” who was one of the earliest Methodist pastors here. This congregation has a connection to him, as you met in the Van Orsdel Hall when you were organizing as the U.C.C. Brother Van loved to sing with gusto and one of his favorites was a hymn called “Harvest Time.” He travelled all over the state, sharing the gospel and starting churches.
When he rode his big black horse into Raidersberg, he sensed something was amiss. People were hiding behind doors, peeping from windows. Then a couple of men accosted him, tied him up and readied the hanging rope. It seems his black suit and big black horse matched the description of a feared outlaw.
“Wait, wait! I’m a preacher. I’m Brother Van!” “Prove it!” He started to belt out Harvest Time. They believed him. Forever after he told of how he had saved a life by his singing: his OWN!
There’s something about singing together that reaches way down into our hearts and minds, deeper than just words, that can really strengthen our spirits.
I watched a fun little you tube of Kermit the Frog riding an elevator alone and randomly humming a bit of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, then joined by another rider, then by two more grumps, who picked it up and by the time they got off they had four part harmony rolling with “Glory, glory, halleluiah”
I saw Harry Bellefonte live in concert in Cheyenne years ago, and he got us all singing “Day-O,” including my usually straight faced husband. Magic.
My mother-in-law was a second grade school teacher, a Sunday school teacher and church pianist in Lincoln. She was sadly imprisoned by dementia in her final years. She could not remember her own name or mine or the day of the week, but she could remember those songs, and singing with her freed her for a few lucid moments.
I asked my musical granddaughter if she had found strength in music. She said that the songs I taught her from her great-great grandfather, goofy ones about the hole in the donut and the nickel, came to mind when she was feeling really depressed and lifted her spirit. (I sang it)
Music has a way of reaching far deeper into our hearts and minds than words alone. It brings people together and gives strength. Ivan Doig’s book about Butte, Work Song, tells of miners finding a song that drew them together without resorting to violence. The Wailing Jennys sing of one voice that make a choice, of voices two, me singing with you, of voices three, singing together in harmony, surrendering to the mystery; of all of us, singing of love and the will to trust, and of one voice, one people, one voice, leave the rest behind, it will turn to dust.
It has been 80 years since the liberation day of Auschwitz.
Ilse Weber was a Jewish woman born in Czechoslovakia. As a young woman of deep faith and many talents, she was known for her poetry, retelling of folk tales, and musical abilities. She composed and sang played the lute, guitar, mandolin and balalaika. Following the annexation of her town to the Third Reich in 1939, Weber and her family were deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp; she worked as a nurse in the children’s infirmary, composing poetry and songs to keep the younger prisoners comforted and entertained. (medicine was forbidden). She composed about 60 songs in the camp, utilizing “deceptively simple” tunes and imagery to describe the horrors she and her fellow inmates witnessed, the primitive nature of their everyday surroundings, and the importance of keeping music alive in spite of everything as an act of spiritual resistance.
She also encouraged her young patients to write their own songs and poems, and formed a choir. Ruth Elias, whose space in the camp was next to Weber’s remembered her friend: “It may sound paradoxical, but we spent unforgettable hours…during which she sang songs with the lute. I found it incomprehensible how she managed during this terrible time to see so much ugliness, but sometimes also beauty, and describe it so expressively in her verses.”
At the beginning of 1944, when the population of the children’s infirmary were to be sent East, Weber refused to abandon them and voluntarily joined the transport to Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. She asked what was about to happen to her and the children from the infirmary – would they be taking a shower? She was told, “It is a gas chamber, and I will give you a piece of advice now. I have often heard you singing in the infirmary. Go as quickly as possible into the chamber. Sit with the children on the floor and start singing. Sing what you always sing with them”.
Her husband Wilhelm survived the war, and managed to hide his wife’s poems and songs in a garden shed in Theresienstadt from which he retrieved them in late 1945. Through the voice of Ilse Weber, preserved in her songs and recovered writings, we are reminded of the tragic loss of young talent, the contributions of female Jewish artists more broadly, and of the importance of creativity as a form of spiritual resistance in the face of human suffering and depravity.
Therefore, Weber’s songs and secret performances can be understood as a form of spiritual resistance. In the narrative of Musica Prohibita, Weber reflects: “In this place, we are all condemned, a shamed, despairing crowd. All Instruments are contraband, no music is allowed. […] Music lights up a poet’s words, brings release from our plight, even the sparest songs of birds bear moments of blessed peace”. For Weber, salvation could be found in music that provided the children in her care with a sense of joy, normality, and relief.
Children who had memorized her music survived. Her songs are performed by musicians today. Music can provide light, even in the darkest of times. Her memory and legacy lives on, and many attributed their spiritual strength and resistance to her music.
It seems that music may be foundational to the nature of the universe. The Chandra X Ray Center is operated for NASA by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, observing deep space from a high elliptical orbit.
Data about light images gets translated into sound in a process called sonification. Elements of the image, like brightness and position, are assigned pitches and volumes. No sound can travel in space, but sonifications provide a new way of experiencing and conceptualizing data. Sonifications allow the audience, including blind and visually impaired communities, to “listen” to astronomical images and explore their data.
The lowest note detected so far in the universe is a profoundly low B flat, Jazz musicians rejoice…It emanates from a super massive black hole in the center of the Perseus Galaxy 300 million light years away …way too low for mere mortals to hear. 57 octaves below middle C, (different black holes have different sounds)
The music of the spheres, and even of supermassive black holes, provides insights into the fundamental nature of our universe. Though no living thing on Earth can hear the music of outer space, the cosmos continues its orchestral display. (Scientific American Oct. 18, 2007)
Was it just a Big Bang, or the sound of God singing that birthed creation?
~ Rev. Su DeBree
