Acts 16:16-34

I am very fond of chicharron. I thought that I left this in my childhood 45 years ago and then I moved to New York and rediscovered chicharron. Now, my grandmother cut it thinner and didn’t use that word. Instead, she called it frying down salt pork. And its one of those food that you either love or hate because it is basically browned fat.

 But what is more interesting is that there is no food that is universally loved or hated. Eric Asimov is a food critic for the New York Times. He says that our tastes for food are trained into us by our cultural and also our emotional needs. In Western Kentucky, people consider squirrel brains a delicacy and churches feature them at dinners. It would be hard to raise much money that way in Jackson Heights.

 Many Asians consider Americans too fond of the cheese and the smell that it leaves. Asimov himself enjoys crisp salmon eyes, snake by the inch, and roasted guinea pig from Ecuador. Americans generally will not eat insects or any meat that is squishy.

 It turns out that our views on sin are a lot like our views about food. Each of us has some sins that we rather like the taste of and those are temptations for us and we have other sins that completely turn us off and we can’t understand how anyone else could like them either.

 The passage of scripture today is on our feelings about evil. This passage is about evils great and small, both the great issues like war and the evils of stealing and gossip. Many people are confused and feel like the world is out of control. Today we are going to see how God’s views make it easier to understand.

 In this Bible account, Paul doesn’t hate the evil that much. I’ve never liked a bitter taste. And there is a vegetable in Cambodia that looks like glass noodles and you boil it with small pieces of beef for a soup. The first time I ate it, I was sure that someone had accidentally picked a poisonous vegetable and that I was going to die. I stopped eating to wait for a Cambodian to make the same discovery and then we would all go to the hospital and try to save ourselves. But of course, everyone ate with gusto. It was supposed to taste like that.

Here we have an incredible story where Paul is beaten, certainly wounded, stripped of his clothes and then the jailer throws him into the middle of the prison with no windows and puts his feet in heaven wooden bars to hold them apart. I know you are all looking at this with heavenly understanding and I'm the only one looking at it without that faith, but OUCH! Paul and Silas are victims of oppression.

 So we regroup after a couple of hours and figure that the Lord will get us out of this. After all, Paul came to Philippi because of a vision so we can trust God’s plan. They start to sing some Christian songs, you know, the Te Deum and Laudate Omnes. And sure enough, an earthquake soon rocks the prison and opens all the cells. This is obviously God’s miraculous rescue. But Paul sees the jailer about to commit suicide, stops him, the jailer becomes a Christian and they all go off to eat supper together.

 I’m not sure I could do that. I have some sins that I rather like the taste of and so they tempt me. And there are some others that I don’t understand but I don’t have strong feelings. And then there are some that I just – hate. I have had three chances to watch one of the most downloaded videos in America, the beheading of Nicholas Berg. Americans have been swamping sites that link to that video. I haven’t watched and I hate the thought of it.  I think I am different than Paul. He was able to let it happen to him personally and not get that upset. I can tell you why Paul did it. In God’s economy there are not good sins and bad sins. In that creative tension of God’s character that I like to mention, God hates all sin equally and is determined to save people. So God is not more horrified by Paul’s abuse than … gossip or failure to give. Paul is able to accept Jesus’ vision as his own. When the jailer repents, Paul lives out what God is feeling – acceptance and love.

 So if we should not be horrified by some evil, does that mean that God is just sort of a feel good, shake hands more often type of message? No, because God requires judgment for all sin, the ones you like the taste of as well as terrorists and dictators. The payment for sin is blood, the essence of life, but sacrificing the blood of the guilty in war and reprisal does not satisfy the law’s demands and leads to a greater cycle of revenge and more blood. The payment is the blood of Christ.

 People, we celebrate communion every month and some people have called it a gruesome ritual, the body and blood of Christ. The reason it is central to our worship is that the world is on fire and only the payment Christ made lets us all start again, gossips and adulterers and dictators, and cheats, and liars, and all the list of sins for which different ones of us have a particular taste.

 Once you have grasped why Christ died, then it changes your view of evil. I so appreciate the Eisenhower and Nixon administrations on this point. They looked for ways to contain the Soviet Union without violence. I leave out Truman and Kennedy because they were much more confrontational and ready to try to eradicate evil. President Bush is wrong in his attempt to remake the Middle East through war. You can contain evil, but peace is based on negotiating another nation towards God’s character of love and justice and then ultimately in people in a society having an encounter with Christ.

 Friends, look at your own tastes today. You know which tastes for evil you like and you know that you should avoid these things. But look at the ones you really hate. Why are your feelings so strong? If God can accept someone, is there a chance that you still could not because you have trained yourself to hate some evil so much? I know that we say hate the sin and love the sinner but in practice, if you hate the sin too much, you are never going to love the sinner.

In our homes, school, and workplace, this helps us. I just was writing to someone recently who is a Christian teenager in England and his father is cruel. These things can hurt for years. There are many adults whose parents are long dead and the scars of emotional abuse remain. But Jesus has paid for those sins, so even if the other person doesn’t change, you can go to the risen Christ and ask for healing for yourself. Isaiah writes in chapter 53:5 ‘By his bruises, we are healed.’

 There is a second taste going on here where what tastes good at first turns out to taste differently later. In this Bible account, it would seem clear that it would be better to be the owners of the slave girl, or to be the jailer, or to be the judges. The owners are people of wealth and influence as they are able to get the courts to do their will. The jailer controls a city institution in Philippi. And the judges were able to lock up Paul and Silas without any real trial so they are some of most powerful people in Philippi. And Paul and Silas are Jews in Greek society.

 But there are some tastes that are good to the tongue and bad for the stomach. Community Church rented the Social Room for a dinner a while ago. Some of the food was not refrigerated and bacteria had invisibly set in. The food still was great to the taste until people suddenly started to become violently ill. Police came and four of them immediately were sick. A line of ambulances formed outside. The pastor at that time was just home from the hospital and no one wanted to call and upset him, but the Mets game was interrupted by a news flash of a wall of emergency vehicles surrounding Community Church.

 The slave girl who was possessed is set free. The owners lost their valuable talent. The jailer who is in charge of locking people decides to take his own life which is the most extreme case of slavery. Paul and Silas who are in maximum security are set free by the earthquake and then housed in honor by the jailer. And the judges who made the rules had to travel to the jail and apologize before Paul was willing to leave.

 God desires to set captives free. Luke 4:18 makes clear that this idea is one of the four pillars on which Jesus rests his mission. “I came to set the prisoner free.’ Many people feel trapped.

 Many you have made some unwise decision in life that now gives you the feeling of being trapped. Roseanne Barr used to say, ‘I want a man who can take 3 kids and a 30 year mortgage’ Maybe you feel trapped because you have seen someone else’s family positioned better than your own and so they had advantages that you can never copy. Perhaps you gave up a chance at college and now you can see that it limited what you should have achieved. All of us either have legal papers to live in the United States or not by an accident of birth. The people who have the papers are not better, or smarter, or even richer. You cannot control the physical spot on the planet where you are born.

 What you have is Jesus determination to pull down all jails whether they are physical or these other limitations placed upon us. You are just a miracle away from where you need to be. Don’t get bitter. Don’t stay bitter. Ask for God to bring deliverance to your heart.

 So don’t hate a taste so much that you can’t reconcile with anyone who ever did that sin. And if your life doesn’t taste good right now, pray for deliverance. And all of this made me wonder what the Bible considers a good taste. And there are several Biblical foods that are good, but honey appears 64 times. And it tastes sweet because it is about the plan of God for our lives. In Psalm 19 and also in Psalm 119 ‘I will not turn from your plan, for you have taught me. How sweet are your words to my taste, sweeter than honey to my mouth!’