Acts 16:16-34
Laura Collins
May 23, 2004
Today’s text from Acts is really two different stories, so let me preach on them one at a time. First, there is the story of an exorcism. Now, such a story is common in the New Testament. A person appears who is possessed of a spirit and Jesus or one of the Apostles tells the spirit to leave the person alone and immediately the person is restored to their right mind.
But today’s story has a few special twists. First of all, this spirit that the young girl has is apparently not a harmful spirit. Unlike those spirits that cause people to have seizures or fall in the fire or run around crazed, this spirit has a kind of sweetness about it. The girl, we’re told, has the gift of divination. She can see into the spiritual world, she can tell fortunes. This is not that unusual, then or now. You don’t have to walk far from this church to find people who will tell your fortune or read your energy or help you regress to past lives. It is a spiritual gift. Nothing in this Biblical text suggests that this spirit is not a genuine gift. In fact, her attraction to the Apostles Paul and Silas seems to prove her charisma. She recognizes at once that they are telling a spiritual truth. And so she begins to tag along everywhere they go and announce: “These men are slaves of the most high God, who proclaim to you a way of salvation.”
You’d think maybe they would enjoy the free publicity. But instead, after a few days we find that Paul is very much annoyed and so exorcizes this spirit from the girl. Poof! Gone is the spirit, gone is her gift of divination, and gone are her abilities to tell the future. Now we can’t be sure why Paul was annoyed. Maybe she was stealing his lime-light. Maybe he didn’t want to be associated with her ilk. Maybe she wasn’t clear enough on her Christology. Maybe he just got tired of her monotonous message. Who knows? But Paul got annoyed and so he ordered the spirit out of her.
As in other New Testament exorcisms, the spirit obeys and leaves the girl. That might be the end of it, but we find that this young woman was not self-employed. She was, in fact, a slave. And her owners, who made good money from her spiritual gifts are not a bit happy about Paul’s helpful little exorcism. They’re furious and they drag him and Silas into court and have them thrown in jail. Which is the next story ... but before we go there, what has just happened?
Or let’s keep it even simpler: the price of gasoline is rising. People everywhere are complaining. I got an email this week asking every American to refrain from buying gas on Thursday to express our outrage at the price of gas. I was bummed that I had just filled up my tank and would not be able to go against the flow that day. I was even at a Mission Committee meeting of our Presbytery where people were complaining about gas prices.
Now, hold on folks. Besides the fact that the real price of gas now is equivalent to what we were paying in the early 80s and besides the fact that we still have the cheapest gas in the world by far, let’s be honest. Aren’t we the same ones who were holding our banners as we protested the war in Iraq, “No Blood For Oil!”? We don’t pay for our gas at the pumps, we pay for it in our defense budget. As one letter-writer to the Post recently noted, it seems Americans will do anything to keep down the price of gas ... except stop driving our SUVs.
Maybe Paul knew what he was doing after all. Maybe that sweet little fortune-teller needed to be released from her slavery to the money-making gig she had, as well as from her owners. Without her “gift” (or maybe her curse) she had no value in that market and so could be discarded. What happened next? Did Paul and Silas take her in, help her out, make sure she found care in the home of one of the Christian families in the region? Let’s hope so. But maybe they didn’t have time, because next thing you know, they’re in court.
Not for stealing the income of the slave-owners, of course. We are rarely that blatant about the mercenary nature of our offense. We find other ways to blame those who threaten our prosperity. The accusers decried the way that Paul and Silas were going against the customs of the Empire; they were disturbing the peace. And for that infraction they are not only jailed, but flogged, stripped naked, beaten with rods and put into stocks. I don’t know if anyone took any pictures that day.
Well, the comparisons to our own news stories are too obvious to name. It would be tempting to go on at length about torture of prisoners. But you are a bright congregation, so I’ll allow you to connect the dots yourself.
So, flogged, humiliated, isolated, beaten, Paul and Silas are imprisoned. What do they have at that moment but their faith? And so that is where they turn. They spend the night praying and singing hymns.
Then the miraculous happens. An earthquake that shakes open the prison doors and breaks the chains holding the captives in. They are free! They can run, escape, get out of dodge! It also wakes up the prison guard, who in his confusion and fear decides to commit suicide rather than face the humiliation he would surely face from his superiors. But Paul stops him and tells him that nobody has escaped. Now, that Paul and Silas didn’t leave I might expect, but how in the world did they convince the other prisoners to stay as well? Those folks, we are told, who had been listening to the prayers?
The guard is shaken to the core and realizes that he is in the presence of something more powerful than the prison chains. So he asks Paul and Silas – “What is it? What is it that you have that I don’t have? How can I get the peace I see in you? How can I find the freedom you have even when you are in chains? The health you have even when you’ve been beaten down? What is it?”
They respond simply. “It is Jesus.”
The compassion Paul and Silas show to the prison guard, he then shows to them, taking them home, washing their wounds. I assume, given the guard’s initial fearful reaction, that this act not only cost him his job, but perhaps much, much more. But compared to what he gained that night, what was such a loss?
This tenuous relationship, between prison guard and prisoner, is fraught with dehumanizing tension. If we’ve seen anything from Abu Ghraib, we have seen this. Everyone is dehumanized. Abused and abuser. The milk of human kindness sours. I suspect, that at some desperate primal level, the humiliation and torture done to the prisoners is a survival mechanism for the guards. Some way to distance themselves from their feelings of compassion so that they can do the job they’ve been given. If the people under their care are demonized, then they need feel no shame at the role they play. It is an ugly, horrid moment for our species when it happens, but it is not really surprising, is it? We’ve said from the beginning that this war was against thugs, terrorists, less than human beings. How can we be shocked then, that this is how they are treated?
But in the Biblical story of prisoner and guard, there is a difference. Paul and Silas believed that the guard was a child of God. A brother in Christ. And the guard believed that his prisoners were children of God, bearers of good news, carriers of spiritual wisdom that he himself needed. And in this moment of seeing each other as Spirit-bearers, as equals in both their honor and their humility before God, the entire power of the empire collapsed. The empire these men served in that moment of truth was no longer Rome.
Perhaps we have not been thrown in prison, though maybe some of us have. Perhaps we’ve never served as a prison guard, thought maybe some of us have. But everyday, we choose which empire we will serve. And whichever one we choose is the one that has the power. The choice is ours, every day.
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