In one day Hurricane Katrina washed away all of it; my house the books, the spinning wheels, the piano. Everything. I’ve learned that material possessions are not important. It is the people who matter. I no longer collect books, but pass them along.
I’m now living with my son and his family many miles north of the beach. Recently we had a drought. A few of us sat on the porch last night, watching lightning in the distance, hoping for rain. But also apprehensive: people around here are afraid of even the shortest downpour.

“We need a tropical storm to blow in,” someone said, and everyone laughed. The only person who could say that is someone with nothing to lose.”

You can be retired and living on a beach somewhere and think you are a person of leisure. And then something can happen, and it can change everything about how you think of your life. You thought yourself free. And then you found out what true freedom is.

There’s freedom and there is freedom ---

Paul and Silas are on their way to church one day when they are accosted by a slave girl. This youngster has a special talent – she’s good at telling people's fortunes so those who owned her hired her out to read people's palms and provide entertainment at business conventions.

But, according to the story she is possessed by a demon. She takes an unholy interest in Paul and Silas. She begins following these felllows around, shouting at them, saying things about them.

She is the picture of enslavement. If you have ever suffered the torment of mental illness, or if someone you love falls into schizophrenia or is manic /depressive you could tell us something about bondage. These are dark uncontrollable forces that people find impossible to hold back.

Paul gets fed up with this woman's raving and in the name of Christ cures her. Hooray, she's free. But wait, she is still a slave, she is a piece of property.

Luke says, "When her owners saw that their hope of gain was gone they seized Paul and Silas and dragged them into the market place before the rulers." What will the business community say?

It reminds one of the day when Jesus healed a deranged man by casting some demons out of him and into a heard of pigs who promptly drowned themselves in a lake. For this act of charity Jesus was immediately escorted out of town by the Local Pork Dealers Association and told never to come back again.

Later in the book of Acts Paul will convert hundreds at a Greek city called Ephesus where the makers of Silver Shrines for the worship of the Goddess Artemis will be up in arms because Paul is ruining their trade.

So, to return to the story at hand, here is a woman who has been chained most of her life to the hell of demon possession. She is freed from it; there ought to be rejoicing
but her owners are not free enough themselves to do that.

They are not interested in having her good fortune compromise their high standard of living. They say, "Hey, a little religion is okay, to a point, as long as it doesn't effect my bottom line. Besides, Paul and Silas, they're foreigners you can't trust foreigners.

Besides that they're Jews and you all know about Jews,

If that's not enough, they advocate "strange and unlawful customs

So the owners of the slave girl use Nationalism, anti-Semitism, and tradition to explain why their comfortable living ought not to be threatened.

Nationalism, Racism and Tradition are usually enough to whip any crowd into a frenzy; they beat the holy heck out of Paul and Silas and then throw them into prison, and insist that the jailer keep them safe.

So Paul and Silas are put in the stocks feet and arms, chained bleeding and what do they do? What anyone would do: They decide to hold a religious rally.

"About midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the prisoners were listening to them."

What is going on here? They've hit bottom, haven’t they?

Bishop Emilio de Carvalho Methodist Bishop of Angola (Africa) was hosted by people in a church in Evanston Illinois. What is it like to be the church in a Marxist country, they wanted to know?

" Is the Marxist govt. supportive of the church?"

" No, but we don't ask it to be supportive. . . Not long ago the government decreed that we disband all women's organizations in the church, but the women kept meeting. The government is not yet strong enough to do much about it.”

"But what will you do when the government becomes stronger?"

“We shall keep meeting. The government does what it needs to. The church does what it needs to do. If we go to jail for being the church, we shall go to jail. Jail is a wonderful place for Christian evangelism. Our church made some of its most dramatic gains during the revolution when so many of us were in jail. In jail you have everyone there, in place. You have time to preach and teach. Twenty of our pastors were killed during the revolution but we came out of jail a much stronger church. “

The bishop read their silent reaction.

Then he says, “Don't worry about the church in Angola; God is doing fine by us. Frankly I would find it much more difficult to be a pastor in Evanston, Ill. Here there is so much. So many things. It must be hard to be the church here."

The earth heaves, the prison shakes, the doors open, everyone's chains come undone. The jailer wakes up quickly sizes up the situation and decides on suicide as the only honorable thing for a warder to do whose prison has been destroyed by a magnitude 6.7 earthquake.

Barbara Brown Taylor, commenting on this passage says, “Apparently, having a key to someone else's prison cell doesn't exactly make you free.”

Paul shouts, "Don't do it. We're going to finish our revival. No one is going anywhere."

The jailer says, "But now you are free to escape."

Paul: "No, you've got it wrong: we prisoners are free to stay and you, our jailer, are chained to this prison. But you can be free too."

Jailer: "What must I do to be saved? What must I do to be really free?"

So he's baptized along with his entire family.

So what IS freedom, anyway?? By the end of the story everyone who at first appeared to be free (the girl's owners, the crowd, the jailer are slaves, and everyone who first appeared to be a slave (the girl, Paul, Silas) is free."

Doesn't that beat everything? Apparently there's freedom, and then there is freedom.

There’s a debate going on today in this country about whether we’re delivering freedom to Iraq by way of the current war, or whether our troops are merely caught in the middle of a sectarian civil war.

What is freedom? Is it about getting 50% of people out to the polls? Or is it about knowing what a precious right it is we have to vote at all.

Jesus promised his dear ones: "You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.” (John 8:31-32)

The seeming mundane decision of whether or not to buy a cellular phone is a decision about freedom. ??? I bought one this year - - - finally.

Maybe I was reticent because I remember seeing a man 3 piece business suit at the golf course practice putting green with a phone up to his ear. What is that about?

I had a friend in Portland who was married 5 times. Every time she jumped out of a marriage she said she did it because she felt stifled. Said she wanted to have her freedom back.

By the end of marriage number 5 she said that she began to see that a trend was developing in her life. She determined that it was time for her to think seriously about what freedom really was for her.

Rudolph Wurlitzer , in his book --Hard Travel To Sacred Places, writes about the freedom he found in the depth of his grieving for his 21 year old step son who died tragically In the post trauma haze of the loss he has this to say --

“I feel compelled to push toward the margins of my ‘aloneness,’ to give in to the alienation, exhaustion, and grief, not to mention the odd, unexpected moment of wonder, because grief, as I have been learning, along with everything else it brings, can sometimes shatter ordinary self-absorption and vanity with such force that , for a moment, it seems to set one free.”

St Augustine wrote about this in the 4th Century: he speaks there of libertas minor and libertas major. Llbertas minor is the freedom to choose. Libertas major is the freedom to choose rightly, the freedom to be who you were created to be.

That's the kind of freedom Paul and Silas know about and treasure. It's that kind of freedom that gives them room to sing and celebrate in prison at the top of their lungs.

Victor Frankl: (survivor of the Nazi death camps)wrote -- "We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a person but one thing: the last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given circumstances, to choose one's own way." Man's Search For Meaning 1959

Writing about the Exodus – how God freed the Jews who were slaves in Egypt through Moses, Rabbi Harold Kushner says --

I know many Jews who see Judaism as nothing more than a lot of rules telling them what not to eat, when not to work , and whom not to marry, and at least as many Christians who see Christian morality as essentially condemning all sorts of normal behavior as sinful. That may be why God, before He utters a single commandment, identifies himself as a liberator, telling people, I’m not forbidding murder, theft and adultery, in order to restrict your behavior and deny you pleasure. You may have left Egypt, but you will never really be free until you learn to control your anger, your lust and your greed.

Freedom.

Susan Morris tells this story –

At 52 my mother was diagnosed with Altzheimer’s disease. My father cared for her at home for 10 years, but she eventually needed round the clock attention. We put her in a nursing home, thinking it wouldn’t be long before she died. She lived another 17 years.. I stopped believing in God during that time, since no deity could be that cruel.

It is believed by some that early onset Altzheimer’s tends to run in families, and I became convinced that I’d contract the disease by age 50. I decided to live only for the present – no need to plan for retirement or anything long term. I took expensive vacations and sought primarily to feel good, no matter what the cost. What did I have to lose? I expected to be struck down anyway.

Thirty years later, I still have not developed the disease. Instead I’ve had to face the consequences of my self-centered lifestyle. I’ve struggled with bankruptcy, alcoholism, gambling addiction, job losses, and clinical depression.

A few years ago I decided I had done a miserable job of directing my life. I also decided that maybe God does exist after all. I turned the responsibility for my life over to a higher power. There was nothing to lose.

Freedom.

At the end of his life Paul will be in another prison. The Christians at that little church in Phillippi (where the jail was that rattled and fell) will look all over the Mediterranean world for Paul. A young man of their church, Epaphroditus, will show up at his cell door with a gift.

Paul will respond with these words -- I rejoice in the Lord greatly that now at last you have revived your concern for me; indeed, you were concerned for me, but had no opportunity to show it. 11 Not that I am referring to being in need; for I have learned to be content with whatever I have. 12 I know what it is to have little, and I know what it is to have plenty. In any and all circumstances I have learned the secret of being well-fed and of going hungry, of having plenty and of being in need. 13 I can do all things through [the one] who strengthens me. (Phil 4:10).

Paul lives beyond circumstance; beyond blessing, beyond curse. God has given him the power to be himself in any and all circumstances. That is Freedom with a capital F.

Amen.