May 16, 2010

 

Scripture:         Acts 16:16-34

 

Sermon:           “Stepping on Toes”

 

            Turning our hearts and minds now to the word of God, let us read together the scripture lesson for the day.  Turn with me to the Acts of the Apostles, chapter 16 where we will read together verses 16 through 24.  You can find that easily on page 182 of the New Testament in the pew Bible.

            Now, good Jewish folks didn’t have much if anything to do with things like magic, or fortune-telling, or casting spells and whatnot.  They were strictly forbidden, actually.  And generally Jewish folks looked down upon such things.  At the very least, Jewish folks probably found it all hokey.  Nonsense.  Like praying to gods that didn’t exist.  At the very worst, Jewish folks in the ancient world viewed sorcery, and witchcraft, and divining the future to be a pathway to believing in and worshiping other gods.

            “No one shall be found among you…who practices divination, or is a soothsayer.”  That’s the law according to Deuteronomy 18:10.

            But, this gospel of Jesus Christ was spreading throughout the Roman Empire, which is what the book of Acts is all about.  These good Jewish folks were trying to bring a message of salvation by way of a Jewish Messiah to people who, really, had no background at all for understanding what that was all about.  How do you tell people that their sins against God have been forgiven when they don’t know much, if anything, about the God of which you speak?

            So, we get stories like this one today.  Paul and Silas are confronted by a woman that is able to tell people what their future holds.  That’s what the word “divination” is all about.  Fortune-telling.  I don’t know.  Maybe it was like reading palms, or gazing into a crystal ball, reading tea leaves.  It would all be very strange for Jews from Judea or Galilee.

            I kind of get the picture that people like Paul and Silas and Peter and others were just wide-eyed and constantly amazed by the big, strange world beyond the borders of where they had always lived.  To me it would be like watching a small group of devout Amish men arrive on the streets of New York City for the very first time in their lives.  They’d come across things they’d only heard rumors about.  And, even then, nothing would ever prepare them for the things they would see with their own eyes.

            Maybe that’s a good image as we read today’s scripture.  Paul and Silas are walking the streets of a strange city that is filled with people who do the strangest things.  This is the word of the Lord…

 

            One day, as we were going to the place of prayer, we met a slave-girl who had a spirit of divination and brought her owners a great deal of money by fortune-telling.  While she followed Paul and us, she would cry out, “These men are slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim to you a way of salvation.”  She kept doing this for many days.  But Paul, very much annoyed, turned and said to the spirit, “I order you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her.”  And it came out that very hour.

            But when her owners saw that their hope of making money was gone, they seized Paul and Silas and dragged them into the marketplace before the authorities.  When they had brought them before the magistrates, they said, “These men are disturbing our city; they are Jews and are advocating customs that are not lawful for us as Romans to adopt or observe.”  The crowd joined in attacking them, and the magistrates had them stripped of their clothing and ordered them to be beaten with rods.  After they had given them a severe flogging, they threw them into prison and ordered the jailer to keep them securely.  Following these instructions, he put them in the innermost cell and fastened their feet in the stocks.

 

            Had them locked up in stocks way down in the innermost cell of the prison.

            There’s an awful lot of anger in this story.  Isn’t there?  Paul and Silas were dragged into the marketplace.  You can kind of hear this ancient distaste for Jewish people in the way people talked about them.  “They are Jews, you know.  They’re Jews.  And they’re trying to turn the rest of us into Jews.  That’s against the law!”

            The crowd joined in attacking them.  The judges had them stripped and beaten.  A severe flogging.  “Lock ‘em up in the jail.  Throw away the key.”  I mean these folks are bent out of shape.

            It ought to be a good reminder that folks don’t usually take too kindly to having their toes stepped on.  They don’t like very much to be judged by outsiders.  And they especially do not take too kindly to people who have a negative impact on their finances.  And that’s what happened to stir up this crowd of people against Paul and Silas.  They’d gone and caused a ruckus with the locals by introducing the gospel in such a way that somebody lost a whole lot of money because of it.

            She was a slave-girl, you know.  Makes you wonder how she ended up there.  She was a slave girl so she was the human property of a couple of men that used her to make money.

            Do you know how this works?  Awful things, really.  This is the world of human trafficking, slave labor, abuse of young women in the sex trade.  The ways that people use the lives of other human beings in order to make a buck are astounding.  Some forms of this are as old as history itslef, especially for young girls.  You don’t want to know much more.  It’s unspeakable.

            But, that’s who this girl was.  She was doing her owner’s bidding, going to this client and that one in order to please their desires and fetch a price that she would never gain anything from.  Given the alternatives for how people do this, this slave girl was probably fortunate to have a gift for being able to tell fortunes.  Goodness knows what some girls in slavery have to endure.

            Mostly, in any kind of slavery, the human commodity is just disposable.  That’s what a researcher into modern forms of slavery calls it.  “Disposable People.”  Kevin Bales is his name. There are people for whom life becomes nothing more than a set of decisions made by others in order to extract maximum profit out of all kinds of labor.  All kinds of labor.  Children working in sweatshops.  Men and women working for wages that cannot sustain a family, let alone provide for a future.  People manufacturing products that you and I buy every day that they will never afford.  Young girls kidnapped or sold into a world of sex, violence, and money.  They don’t have faces to the rest of the world.  They have names that you and I will never know.  They become disposable.  They lose the ability to make money for others and they can just be discarded like an empty milk carton.  And what they absolutely do not have is any sort of power to change the situation they were born into.

            It’s not much different than slavery as we have concocted over the centuries.  It’s just got different trappings.  It still exists.  The United Nations estimates that 27 million people live in conditions of slavery of one kind or another.  27 million people.

            This girl was probably lucky to have a unique ability for telling people their fortunes.  It likely saved her from having to earn money for her owners in much more unsavory ways.  At the same time, her unique gift made her impossible to replace.  Didn’t it?  You can’t find people with spirits of divination growing on trees.  So, unlike the countless people without names and without faces, this poor girl was not quite disposable.  Not as far as her owners were concerned.  She was indispensible to them.  She wasn’t valuable, mind you.  She was indispensible.

            Some folks would prefer that religion stick to such things as forgiveness of sins and beautiful depictions of what lies beyond this life.  Start getting involved in the things that make a real economic or political impact and suddenly there are a great deal of people who say that the church has overstepped its bounds.  That’s something of what happened to Paul and Silas.  Isn’t it?  Nobody cared a lick that they were Jews who believed in a Messiah until that business had an impact on their ability to make money by exploiting somebody else.  They walked down that street every day for a week without so much as a peep from anyone.

            But, the day came when Paul got so fed up and annoyed at this slave-girl, who just kept yelling out after them, “These men are slaves of the Most High God.  They’re telling us a way of salvation.”  He was annoyed.  I’m not really sure that Paul cared about her all that much.  He was annoyed.  So, he shouted back at her, “Get out of that girl’s body, you evil spirit.  In the name of Jesus, get out of her.”

            Maybe Paul didn’t even realize the power of his own words.  But, suddenly, that slave girl was free of the spirit that controlled her entire life.  And those sleazy men that controlled her life were suddenly left without their prized possession—a girl that could earn a whole lot of money for them telling fortunes.

            Only then did anybody get anxious about the religion of Paul and Silas.  Start getting mixed up in changing the world as it is, well, they’ll beat you and throw you in prison.  Or, they’ll try their very best to keep you quiet.

            I don’t watch a great deal of this stuff on TV.  Don’t care for it, really.  Rachel Maddow, Keith Olberman, Bill O'Reilly, Glenn Beck--it all just adds more anxiety to my life than I really need.  But, recently there was one of these talk-show personalities that got rather upset at how some churches were starting to talk about the importance of compassion for the poor.  You know, you can’t talk about compassion for the poor without challenging the world as it is.  Not everybody is poor because they’re lazy and just choose to be that way.  For some that is true.  But, for the vast majority of poor folks in the world it is not.  And that means that these churches were challenging the ways that many poor folks are exploited for a profit and not cared for in their basic human needs.  You know, churches like the Roman Catholic Church, the United Methodist Church.  Radicals if ever there were any, right?

            This fellow on TV said, “I beg you, look for the words ‘social justice’ or ‘economic justice’ on your church’s website.  If you find it, run as fast as you can.  Social justice and economic justice, they are code words.  Now, am I advising people to leave their church?  Yes!  If I’m going to Jeremiah Wright’s church?  Yes!  Leave your church.  Social justice and economic justice.  They are code words.  If you have a priest that is pushing social justice, go find another parish.  Go alert your bishop and tell them, ‘Excuse me are you down with this whole social justice thing?’  I don’t care what the church is.  If it’s my church, I’m alerting the church authorities:  ‘Excuse me, what’s this social justice thing?’  And if they say, ‘Yeah, we’re all in that social justice thing,’ I’m in the wrong place.”

            Folks get upset when the gospel starts to challenge the status quo of things.  Might make some folks uneasy.  Might cause some folks who are taking advantage of others to lose out on a way to make easy money.  It seems to me that the church has a problem.  The Bible on which it bases its faith and practice and authority is chocked full of demands for justice.  But, folks don’t much care for that part of the story.  Just stick to forgiving sins and talking about heaven.  Leave the rest alone.

            But, here’s the thing.  And it’s as true for you as it was for that slave girl in Acts.  Once you get the picture that God cares so much for you that Jesus would die upon a cross for you in order to purchase you for heaven…once you really get your heart around that, nobody can ever really convince you that your not just as good and just as precious as anyone or anything else that God has ever created.  You can’t talk about forgiveness of sins and heaven without folks getting the idea that they are worth a whole lot more than they’ve ever realized.

It’s the reason slaves used to sing “Deep river.  My home is over Jordan.”  My home is over Jordan.  Doesn’t matter what anybody else says or does.  My home is over Jordan.  And these are the words of slaves in the American South.  “I’m gonna eat at the welcome table.”  Do you know that one?  What does it mean that slaves wrote and sang such a thing?  I’m gonna eat at the welcome table.  Suddenly, it’s pretty clear that this world doesn’t look much like the heaven we’re talking about.  And it’s clear that some things ought to change because of that.

            We may indeed start living and acting, finally, like the people God intended us to be.  We’ve been set free, you know.  And we might just start getting the idea that we can help others do the same thing.  Just know this—not everybody’s going to be happy about it.  Whatever the gospel frees somebody from in order to live abundantly, there are people who are not going to like it at all.

            The other side of that is that this good news we’re talking about absolutely can lift people out of the absolute worst things imaginable.  It can set people free.  And it can have the power to utterly change the way the world operates.  After all, it was Jesus that used to pray “on earth as it is in heaven.”  Amen.

 

 

 

Rev. David James Brown

Park Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)