May 27, 2018 “Fit to Be Tied” – Acts 21:1-16

Acts 21:1-16
“Fit to Be Tied”
May 27, 2018 – Trinity Sunday

My mother tied me up. My aunt told the story at a family gathering years ago. It seems that older relatives always remember you as a child. Aunt Markie recalled for my cousins a time when I was three or four years old and my mother was absolutely worn-out running after me. So she threatened to tie me up. And she followed through.

My bonds consisted of a fragile little string about six feet long, barely a thread, which Mom looped around my wrist and then tied to the bedpost. I could have slipped it off my wrist or broken it easily. But it worked. I stayed and played quietly in my room for a little while. My cousins found the story amusing fifty years later.

Like commercials say, don’t try it at home. I’m not recommending that form of discipline. Still and all, it is true that children need and yes, want boundaries. It’s essential for a child’s emotional growth that he or she gradually discover what is and is not allowed. She needs to know just how far she can go, needs someone to place bonds of loving direction and correction around her.

We also need spiritual bonds upon us. We reflect that truth in the saying that we are “at loose ends” when we don’t know what to do or where to turn. To be at loose ends, to be untied spiritually is to flounder around helplessly and hopelessly. We turn to one spiritual idea or practice after another, never finding anything which really satisfies. The Lord would like to tie us up a little.

As his third missionary journey closes in Acts 21, Paul feels tied to his course. He is dead set on reaching Jerusalem. In the opening verses of the chapter, Luke describes their path as they sail along the southern coast of Turkey, then south of Cyprus and on to their first landing in Palestine at the city of Tyre.

There in Tyre and at their next stop we catch a little glimpse of what was happening then across the ancient world. The church was spreading. Communities of Christians were forming in each city and town. Verse 4 tells us that Paul knew about them and looked them up, so they stayed with disciples of Jesus for seven days.

As I’ve said many times, the Christian faith is not just about the salvation of individuals. Jesus did not come just to take Sam or Sally or Jose or Tanisha to heaven. He came to do just what He commissioned Paul to do, to found redeemed communities of people who have experienced God’s love in Christ and who are demonstrating that love in a true reflection of the image of God in which we were created.

That community aspect of the image of God is what we are celebrating today on Trinity Sunday. Our God is one God, but He is three persons. God’s own self is a community of love, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, bound together for all eternity. That’s the image in which we are made. That’s why we are at our best when our lives are bound together in community and thus bound together with and reflecting God’s own being as a loving community of three persons.

If you travel even a little and visit other churches, you discover a wonderful thing about the community Jesus started. You find that you are connected with all sorts of people all over the world. We have people in India praying for us while we pray for them. And like those early Christian churches sent out Paul and Priscilla and Silas and Luke, our small congregation here has sent people around the world. Last month Marlon and Kathleen just happened to be staying in the same bed and breakfast in Germany as our old friends Luke and Kayun who now live in Saudi Arabia.

Feeling bound together in Christ, the whole Christian community of Tyre, including children, came out in verses 5 and 6 to say another sad goodbye to Paul and pray with him there on the beach. From Tyre he sailed to Ptolemais where he found another Christian community and then on south down the coast to Caesarea, where they stayed with Philip, one of the original seven deacons of the church in Jerusalem as we learn in verse 9. Philip was still an evangelist but now they found him married and with four daughters who had the spiritual gift of prophecy.

Paul was connected to all those communities of Christians along his way. He was constantly reminded how much they loved him, how much his life was bound to them, especially when some of them realized what was about to happen to him.

While Paul was in Caesarea, a prophet named Agabus “came down” to him from Judea. In good Old Testament fashion, Agabus acted out a symbolic prophesy. He took Paul’s belt from around his waist and wrapped it around his own hands and feet, binding himself like a prisoner. Then in verse 11 he spoke words delivered by the Holy Spirit, “This is the way the Jews in Jerusalem will bind the man who owns this belt and will hand him over to the Gentiles.”

That warning set off Luke and the rest of Paul’s companions. Verse 12 tells how they begged him, even with tears, to turn back, not to continue to Jerusalem. It was too dangerous. Their bond to Paul couldn’t bear to see him harmed. But Paul’s answer in verse 13 was, “What are you doing, weeping and breaking my heart? For I am ready not only to be bound but even to die in Jerusalem for the name of the Lord Jesus.”

Paul was willing to be tied up literally in the way Agabus tied himself up symbolically. He was bound for Jerusalem. He was not just bound to these Christian communities. He was bound to Jesus. His Lord laid down the parameters of his course with a firm hand and Paul was prepared to live in them. Within his bonds he found his life in Christ.

In verse 14, Luke and the others gave up trying to persuade him differently. They saw how their friend was tied to Jesus. They found themselves bound by their own respect for and trust in Paul and in God. They simply said, “The Lord’s will be done.”

Paul was bound by a deep concern and love for others. We can see that in the love shown him at every stop on this last journey back to Jerusalem. But most of all he was bound by his love for Jesus who was calling him toward an even farther journey, one he would take not as a free man but as a prisoner. Paul’s freedom in Christ was freedom found within a new law, the law of Christ, a law of love. He loved Jesus and loved the people Jesus loved. Love bound him. He felt himself constrained to do all sorts of things he might not choose for himself. Love tied him up. But love also set him free.

In a way, the whole story of Acts can be seen as a demonstration of this wonderful, almost paradoxical Gospel truth. The love of God in Christ binds us more tightly than any human constraints. Yet in those bonds of love we find true freedom. That’s a fact you and I desperately need to remember.

I would guess that you almost daily find yourself all tied up doing what you would rather not do. Law and circumstances and financial necessity and the expectations of others all constrain you in uncomfortable ways. We chafe against those bonds and wish we could get rid of them. Yet in the love of Jesus Christ we find that even as we are tied up, our Lord is setting us free. You know He can. He Himself was tied to the Cross. He accepted His own cruel bonds so that God the Father could set us free.

Our denomination arose in a country, in a time, when there was death and dryness everywhere. Sweden in the 1840s was not like it is now, a prosperous nation with nearly no poverty or hunger. Instead, one of our Covenant historians says,

What was it like in the world of our parents? To live with a family of five or seven on what would be produced from eleven acres of stony, rocky land, with a short growing season, with bad seed, with all the nutrition that almost pure sand can supply, plenty of water but not enough substance? What was it like to live where your children were perpetually hungry? What was it like to live where you live in a caste from which you have no real hope of escape because education is reserved for the nobility and the upper-middle class? … What was it like to live in that kind of land when suddenly you feel that you and your children, your spouse, your parents, and your hope for the future is surplus? There is no place for you, there is no need for you. You are, in fact, an embarrassment.

In that time, in a little village called Vall, lived a woman named Maria. Some of you heard her story in Sunday School a few weeks ago. Maria married a dashing young ironworker, but like most everyone else in their town, he was poor. He was also an alcoholic, with a mean disposition. She had six young children to feed and little from him in the way of love. She felt trapped and hopeless. She turned more and more to her Christian faith, to her pastor’s teaching. Her grandson tells how her husband at one point tethered her by a rope to the stovepipe in their kitchen, so she could not go off to talk with the pastor, but had to stay and cook and clean.

But Maria did go talk with the pastor. She took her friend Birgitta. These two tired, distraught, married women in their thirties went to see a brand new young pastor 25 years of age. They told him of their lives, their physical and spiritual bondage, their hopelessness. And that young man looked at them and counseled them to read. Once a week, more often if they could, sit down together and read the Bible. That was his answer to their poverty, to their bad marriages, to all the dryness and deadness of their lives. Read.

You can imagine various reasons why the young pastor said that. In his inexperience he may have had nothing more to offer those poor women. He may have simply wanted to brush them off so he could polish his sermons and move on to a better parish. He may have just acted like most 19^th century men, silencing unruly women and sending them home to their duties. Who knows why he gave them that counsel? But he told them to read and they took it as God’s word to them. Read the Word.

Maria and Birgitta began to read together and did so for years. They read the Bible, they read Luther’s sermons, they read a new magazine coming out of Stockholm called Pietistin, “The Pietist.” They read and others began to join them. The read and talked about the Word and people got excited. They came alive. Others in the town grew suspicious and spread ugly rumors about these “Readers.”

It was not too long and Maria’s husband died. She was left a poor widow with six children in a town where a number of people were already dubious about her character. Yet reading sparked a new kind of life in Maria, a life of compassion. She began to visit the poorest homes in the village, those with even less than she had. She saw children left alone while parents went off to work.

So Maria tied herself up in a new way. She “bought” two children whose parents couldn’t feed them and were auctioning them off for labor. But instead of forcing those children to work, she started a school for them, a tiny affair in a room above her own kitchen. Then she took in more and more neglected children and began to teach them. Others in her reading group caught her spirit and began to help. They built a new building where children were housed and taught and fed.

Soon the whole town was drawn into Maria’s bonds of love. She became an activist in Vall, caring not just for the needs of children but for the social ills of everyone. By the end of her life she was known as “Mor i Vall,” “the Mother of Vall,” a beloved and respected figure in her community. Because she read God’s Word and was not afraid to let herself be bound like Paul would let himself be bound.

As I began, it’s human nature to need boundaries, to actually be happier and freer sometimes when we are bound. Many years ago our daughter Joanna and I took a trip to our cabin in Arizona to meet her aunt and cousins there. The day we flew there a heavy thunderstorm washed a tide of rocks and mud over the road to our place from Sedona. My cousins called to let us know we would have to come around the long way, going many extra miles north and then back down the canyon from Flagstaff.

We made it. We got to our cabin, but the road south did not open for another three days. They had to bulldoze tons of mud away to let cars through. So we were more or less trapped at our cabin. We could go back up the hill to Flagstaff 25 miles way, but the short five-mile trip to Sedona was blocked. We were stuck.

We were stuck together as a family and it was marvelous. For the first time in decades, there was no drone of cars full of tourists passing by from morning to night on the highway just above our cabin. All we heard was the creek and the crickets outside. Joanna talked and played with her cousins. My uncle cooked his famous scrambled eggs and chilies. My aunt told the story about me I started this sermon with and we had blessed and happy family time for hours every day of it.

Father, Son and Holy Spirit have been stuck together with each other for eternity in blessed happiness and joy. They made us in that image, in their image. We were designed to be tied to others in faithful bonds of love and service. That’s how Paul lived and enjoyed freedom even when he was tied up in prison. That’s how you and I find freedom now.

Of course not all human relationships are good. Paul ended up bound by his enemies. Maria’s marriage was a tragedy. We may ask God to break bondage like that. But if we remain tied to our Lord and to His true people, then we have the same hope Paul and Maria did, that we will be free in God, free in His bonds of love.

God made us fit to be tied, tied to Him and to each other. Tied up in genuine love, we are set free. In marriage vows, in church membership, in simple commitments of friendship, God is calling us to be how He made us, people tied to one another and flourishing because of it. May God lead us gently into good relationships like those and more. May God keep us together as Father, Son and Holy Spirit are together, loving and sharing our lives.

Being tied to Jesus and His people energized Paul. May it energize you and me. When the world and the ways of others close in around us, may the love of Jesus circle us even closer, tying us up, tying us to Him forever. Jesus holds us tight. And in Him we are free.

Amen.