Three friends, a Scare Crow, a Tin Woodsman, and a big lion accompany the little girl. They approach the gates of the city and ring the bell…. requesting to see the Wizard.
“I am the Guardian of the Gates, and since you demand to see the Great Oz I must take you to his Palace. But first you must put on the spectacles.”
“Why?” asked Dorothy.
“Because if you did not wear spectacles the brightness and glory of the Emerald City would blind you. Even those who live in the City must wear spectacles night and day. They are all locked on, for Oz so ordered it when the City was first built, and I have the only key that will unlock them.”
He opened the big box, and Dorothy saw that it was filled with spectacles of every size and shape. All of them had green glasses in them. The Guardian of the Gates found a pair that would just fit Dorothy and put them over her eyes. There were two golden bands fastened to them that passed around the back of her head, where they were locked together by a little key that was at the end of a chain the Guardian of the Gates wore around his neck. When they were on, Dorothy could not take them off had she wished, but of course she did not wish to be blinded by the glare of the Emerald City, so she said nothing.
Then the green man fitted spectacles for the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman and the Lion, and even on little Toto; and all were locked fast with the key.
Then the Guardian of the Gates put on his own glasses and told them he was ready to show them to the Palace. Taking a big golden key from a peg on the wall, he opened another gate, and they all followed him through the portal into the streets of the Emerald City.
If all that you have ever seen is the movie The Wizard of Oz you may not have understood that the Emerald City was not made of emeralds after all – it only looked that way. It looked that way because of the green glasses, which no one was able to take off. That’s the reality that L. Frank Baum subtly unveils in the text of the original story.
There are some who would have you believe that being baptized is like having your green glasses snapped onto your face – that Molly and Thomas are now figuratively be-speckled. The most critical of the church would say that now is when the brain-washing starts.
I would tend to agree, only in that baptism is the first in a long process of growing stages that lead to seeing the world in a new way. The job of the church is not to shove ideas into young people’s heads any more than it is to snap colored glasses on their faces. The job of the church is to model what it means to be faithful to them at each turning in their lives. Remember the greatest asset that the movement which we call Christianity had in the beginning when it was just a fledgling church was the observation that the People of the Way acted differently than other people did – treated each other differently and responded to the world differently. That was what attracted people to the new faith.
The jailer in the story we just read in Acts must have been a Roman, since running a jail was a very lucrative profession – lots of bribes and opportunities to collect from both inmates and family on the outside. It was a sought-after profession because if the walls were high enough and the guards were vigilant, there was little chance of anyone ever escaping from the hell hole of a First Century prison. All one had to do was collect the fees. When he saw that the earthquake had split open his mighty walls, however, he realized that the unthinkable had occurred and his prison population had scattered to the wind. What to do but commit suicide?
That’s when he heard the strangest thing – Silas and Paul calling to him – “We did not leave!” The jailer, sword in hand ready to do himself in is suddenly stopped - 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. These high profile prisoners had not flown the coop; they had stayed where they were. Clearly they saw the world in a different, more extraordinary way – “What must I do to be like you? What must I do to be saved?”
I would guess that most of us who call ourselves Christians are pretty proud to read of Paul and Silas way of doing things – it reflects well on what it means to be a person of faith. By association, because we wear the same green glasses, if you will, we would hope to see the world in a similar way and would hope to be as “Christian” in our reaction to the situation as Paul and Silas were. No matter how dank and dirty the prison, everything looked like emeralds to them!
The trouble is, faith is not so magical as this, is it? Whether green or pink (I think church folks are more often thought to see the world in “rose-colored glasses” than emerald) there are no glasses that get clipped on when we start the process of becoming faithful to Jesus Christ. There is no magic oath – and no matter how many times we click together the heels of our ruby slippers, things are not always going to turn out just as we would like them to.
Although this story from Acts has a final scene when the Roman jailer confesses his faith and is baptized, it has a more complex plot than that, doesn’t it? It is a story of unintended consequences and missteps taken by our heroes Paul and Silas – not a primer for how to be a good Christian at all.
They are on their way to a place of prayer, we don’t know exactly where that was – it might have been a synagogue or it might just have been a nice hillside on the seashore. On the way this slave girl who starts shouting at them confronts them with these words: “These men are slaves of the most high God!” It says this went on for days, so presumably Paul and Silas were having trouble shaking her. It is with these feelings of annoyance that Paul heals her in the name of Jesus Christ.
It may have been in the name of Jesus, but it certainly was not in the mode of Jesus. Jesus acted, according to the Gospel writers, out of feelings of compassion, not annoyance. Jesus healed because of mercy not because it was expedient.
Then, there is the response of the crowd – totally unexpected. This was a slave girl who brought in quite a good income from her sooth-saying. Her demon was one that gave her a talent that was sought after and her owners apparently exploited it and made good money. These were the days, remember, when people consulted oracles – they did not have psychiatrists or Dr. Phil or radio talk show hosts to tell them what was going on with their lives or in the world.
The owners were not pleased when Paul took away their income and they roused a crowd to surround Paul and Silas and hustle them off to press charges of disturbing the peace.
One thing to note here; no mention is made of the slave girl after this – she is not freed as far as we know, nor did Paul make any effort to do so. This is not the story of St. Paul doing all the right things…it is the story of a fallible follower of Jesus finding the strength of be faithful even through the moments of anger, fear, and imprisonment. The life of faith is a life just like any other, with choices to make and mistakes to be made. It is not a panacea that turns all things beautiful…it is a process.
In his book, The Heart of Christianity, Marcus Borg says, that when he asks his unchurched university students to write a short essay about their impressions of Christianity, “they consistently use five adjectives: they think Christians are literalistic, anti-intellectual, self-righteous, judgmental, and bigoted.”
Clearly Christians have a branding problem. Just as the crowd whipped up by the owners of the slave girl who could tell fortunes – people who are not part of the community of the church in some way or another, come to think of Christians as monolithic in their world view and as trouble makers who all wear the same green glasses. Whether we like it or not, we have been branded in these ways by a culture that for the most part sees the church primarily “outside of the mainstream of current life.”[1]
Of course these branders rarely see the ways in which people of faith touch hearts – by visiting in the sick, loaded down with plates of food and words of caring and compassion. By mucking out houses or standing long hours in the lobby of the hospital with the red shirt of a volunteer and a smile of helpful welcome to those who come in that door fraught with the anxiety and fear that illness always offers. We Christians are not one of a kind – we are just folks trying to be faithful not only to God in Christ but also to each other. Teachers struggling with oversized classrooms that hang in even when the system does not seem to care. Attorneys taking cases that do not pay and will bring no rewards of fame and fortune. Doctors who personally call the day after a treatment to see how it’s going…or a neighbor who says simply, “I feel for you. You are in my prayers.”
It was not their status as “disturbers of the peace” or even as faith healers that attracted the Roman jailer to Paul and Silas, was it? It was their decision to “stay put” in the cell in spite of being freed by an earthquake which caused the jailer to put down his sword and fall down on his hands and knees before Silas and Paul. He was moved by their willingness to remain. “What must I do to be saved?” he asks in the aftermath and without even thinking about it, begins to be a new person himself as he invites the prisoners to his home and bathes and binds their wounds.
As one writer has put it, “That is the answer that saves us as well, for instead of coming down from the cross and saving himself Jesus stayed put so that like the jailer we might be brought back from the brink. In this we know we are saved, not by confessing a creed or adherence to tradition or allegiance to denomination or ritual, but when believing in Jesus means staying put with and for the other when walking away would be much easier. And so whether we can carry a tune or not we sing the mercy of God in the aftershock of whatever life throws at us for we know as slaves of the Most High God we are truly free.”[2]
Those who see faith as some kind of monolithic self-hypnosis need to look at the stories of our heroes – they were neither monolithic nor heroic most of the time. Paul, in fact, was Saul, a reactionary defender of the old ways whose heart was touched by a vision of Jesus on the road. His heart was touched, but he was still the same man – who acted from annoyance sometimes and arrogance at others, who risked his life sometimes and snuck away in the fog at others. There is no one road – yellow brick or otherwise. There are no green glasses. There is only a willingness to stay on the journey and look for the signs of Jesus’ presence that come to us unexpectedly with the hope that we will know how to respond to show the love of the neighbor – to touch a heart. Amen.
