Acts 16:16-34 Sermon: Sideways Salvation
Introduction
You see, Paul never went to seminary, so he gets himself in trouble a lot.
He never took “Public Speaking 101.” Never learned to keep three points under twenty minutes and always close with something sentimental.
He didn’t take Sermon Prep 201, where you learn to think about your audience—and what to say AND what not to say.
He never got to 301, “Homiletical Approaches and the Stratification of Society,” where they warn you that if you talk about how society is rigged to tilt toward some and against others for power, profit, or politics, then your sermon might be called “too political.” It doesn’t matter if it’s true—once someone says it’s political, it’s true and wrong.
No, Paul didn’t go to seminary.
He went to another school – his favorite professor was a Rabbi from the Judean countryside. Once, his Rabbi stood up during the worship service and said, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,” not to soothe the soul but to set it on fire. To preach good news to the poor, release to the captives, recovery of sight to the blind, and freedom for the oppressed, which means the oppressor has to hear the words too.
And Paul, bless his heart, believed it enough he lived it.
And that just gets you in trouble.
He believed that when we see the poor uplifted, captives released, blind given sight, and the oppressed get freedom – he believed that was God’s favor, God’s grace, God’s salvation.
Nope, no seminary, but Paul took a 401 class called, “Looking at the world through the eyes of the Messiah.” And if you took that class, you’d start to see that salvation doesn’t always drop down clean from heaven—sometimes it comes careening to earth sideways and knocks you over while it lifts others up.
Salvation might look like a Savior on the cross, but it also might look like protest or getting in trouble. It might look like singing through your pain, washing wounds of an innocent victim, and it might even mean sharing a meal with someone your very own country has victimized. This passage has salvation written all over it.
On this earth, salvation is gritty. It’s messy. And it is magnificently difficult. Sometimes salvation takes flight like a dove, and sometimes it swings to earth like a wrecking ball.
In our Acts passage, salvation isn’t soft. It crashes through exploitative business practices, through unjust incarceration. It shows up in the darkness of bruised backs and in the darkness of midnight – the time of fear and fatigue. And it comes through a natural disaster that shakes loose the prisoners-the ones held deep inside and the jailer who was imprisoned by an Empire and an employment that dehumanizes its own people.
So let’s walk through Acts 16 and look at these three sideways snapshots of salvation.
1. Salvation Exposes Injustice (Acts 16:16-18)
The story starts with Paul and Silas who are simply trying to go to church. That’s it. On their way to church, salvation interrupts the normal flow of things. They meet a girl who’s not just possessed spiritually – she is possessed economically.
She’s being used. She’s trafficked.
Her vulnerability, her pain, is someone else’s paycheck.
And when Paul heals her, he doesn’t just free her soul, he shatters a business model. And that’s the problem – her liberation cuts into someone else’s profit margin. To them, that’s unthinkable.
Some folks in Philippi started doing the math – money-making is gone and those who went to her are upset. Her freedom didn’t look so good for them.
Church, there are systems today that depend on someone else staying trapped.
· Private prisons are one of those – turning a profit off of incarceration while lobbying for harsher sentencing laws. It’s dangerous when bodies in cells need to increase so you can make shareholders happy.
· Predatory lending in neighborhoods where people can’t get a fair loan, so they get stuck in cycles of debt and desperation.
· Worker exploitation, where companies, small businesses, construction companies, and large corporations hire undocumented workers who are trapped. And when ICE comes in, the workers are deported, sometimes to countries they’ve never been to, and the business owners go unscathed and their hiring practices remain unchanged.
The bible is not just about what happened. It’s about what happens. These are not hypotheticals—they are happening today in our economy and justice system.
And when the gospel comes through town, it doesn’t just pat you on the back and tell you to feel better. It sets people free—and when that freedom upends unjust systems, people get mad.
Sometimes we ask, “Why is the church shrinking?” And one reason may be that we’ve tried to make salvation polite—sweet, and soothing. But salvation, real salvation, topples things. The reason it topples things is so the people underneath it can be liberated.
Polite salvation asks nothing of us. Real salvation demands everything.
Remember, Jesus flipped tables and those are often tables we’d love to sit at. He calls on us to develop the eyes and ears to see it, to see the anti-God, anti-good, anti-human stuff hurts people.
2. Salvation that Sings in Suffering
So, the people haul Paul and Silas to the magistrates and mob violence ensues.
The word “fascist” shows up in this passage. The word fascist comes from the fasces, which are wooden rods that are bound together. That’s what they beat Paul and Silas with – they flogged them. They strip them naked and beat them within an inch of their lives.
They are taken to the innermost part of the prison – maximum security. They were just doing the work of God—freeing someone from spiritual and economic bondage – and now their reward is a cold, smelly cell.
Backs that are open wounds, maybe fractured ribs and vertebrae. They don’t know if they will see tomorrow. They didn’t get due process. They didn’t get a trial.
And yet, at midnight, you don’t hear cries, or moaning, or lamenting. You hear a song.
They don’t sing because they feel good. They sing because they know who God is. They lift up their voices in the dark. Their songs aren’t a denial of pain or the injustice of their punishment—their song is an act of protest and defiance. It’s a refusal to let Rome have the last word.
Here, in this snapshot, salvation doesn’t mean rescue. Salvation may mean a song despite the pain, sorrow, and sadness. Sometimes salvation shows up as a song.
And here’s the kicker: the other prisoners were listening to them.
These other men—guilty or not—are used to hearing the sounds of groaning, cursing, or resignation. But on this night, they hear something they’ve never heard before: praise. Not a song after you’ve gotten freedom, but a song when you are still captive and you don’t know what tomorrow holds.
And sometimes the most powerful witness you can give isn’t a theological statement—it’s a song in your darkest time. A song from the shadows.
· In the hospital and testifying, “Even now, God is with me.”
· It’s the worried parent who whispers prayers outside the bedroom door.
· It’s the person in recovery who sings “Amazing Grace” like it’s the only thing keeping them going.
· It’s the person grieving who shows up at church, swallowing their tears, and stands and sings, “Yes, praise God from whom all blessings flow.”
A song of protest and promise and perseverance.
It’s hard to sing when you’re hurting. And when the raindrops of pain and disappointment cut a canyon across the surface of your life, it is hard to sing. But there is something sacred in that song, because it says, “I’m still here. God is still here. God is still good. Even now.”
Your midnight praise is holy defiance. Despair will not get the last word – not yet. You can lock up a person, illness may hamper your body, but nothing can chain worship.
And who knows, maybe someone else who is also in the darkness is listening. And maybe your song will be the first verse of their deliverance.
Salvation wrecks us, but it also shakes us.
3. Salvation is Radical Repair
You might think the story would end with the earthquake and the doors flying open, and Paul and Silas make a break for it. Hey, the preacher who runs away lives to preach another day, but in this story, that’s not how salvation works.
As a preacher, I’d love to be triumphant, “And do you see this remarkable event? God saw the injustice and vindicated them. And these men stayed because they knew the jailer needed the gospel.”
You know, it could actually be a little bit more sideways than that. Maybe they can’t walk. Maybe they have broken bones. They were put in stocks, and they weren’t for just holding feet – stocks were designed to torture prisoners by spreading the legs to painful angles. Maybe they can’t walk.
Or, you know, maybe they don’t want to go out and meet that angry mob again that beat them just a few hours ago.
Or maybe they know that if the jailer kills himself, then THEY will be accused of taking advantage of the earthquake, killing the jailer, and setting themselves free.
No matter the reason, they stayed.
Yet, even so, the jailer signed the dotted line with Rome that said, “If you lose a prisoner, you lose your life.” He knows how the Empire works – that’s the worth of your life: your life only has worth if you serve the machine. If you fail, you are discarded. So in despair, the jailer prepares to take his life.
The jailer’s residence was often attached, above or beside the prison. He’s heard the singing. He’s close by. He’s scared. Maybe Paul and Silar heard the jailer talking to his family – “Honey, you know what this means. They will torture me and make me an example. I’ll do it myself.”
“Do not harm yourself, for we are all here.”
And something breaks open in this hardened man – the earthquake broke the walls and grace tore down the walls inside of him. He rushes in to see and with a touch of the poetic, this man asks for the light and says, “What must I do to be saved?”
He’s not asking about heaven. He’s asking about now – how do I live as if God is a reality in my life? Maybe a life spent close to violence in a system that turns humans into tools and neighbors into enemies, got to him – as it should.
“Believe, trust in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household.”
And that very night, the jailer washes the wounds his world helped inflict. And then they share a meal.
See the humanity in someone else is also part of salvation. Being willing to talk about your faith and invite someone else into is also.
Conclusion: When Salvation Goes Sideways
Salvation isn’t always vertical. It doesn’t always come straight down, golden and glorious, like we want. Sometimes it crashes in from the side – in the demented, disgusting, hurtful ways we tolerate.
This is the salvation the world needs, because the world is still bound and it still binds—locking people up, grinding people down, seeing them as a commodity, as disposable.
And the Christian worship service is an act of defiance. We come to the Rabbi to hear his words, to learn to see the world. To learn to see the exploited and endangered, so learn to see a better way.
We hear about the truth that we are all bound- sometimes we are bound by pain, suffering, or comfort. Sometimes we are bound by fear. And we all need to hear about the liberation God gives us.
And we sing songs that protest the ways of the kingdom of the earth, and we pray that the better way, the way of God will be a reality.
And, we come, having our wounds and sins washed in the waters of baptism, so we come, one and all, to the table, so share in the grace that forgives us and frees us to be one body, one community, one new humanity under Christ.
May we see and love salvation even when it comes sideways—
in protest and praise,
in midnight songs,
in broken walls and broken hearts,
in staying when you could run,
and in washing the wounds you didn’t cause.
That’s where Jesus walks.
