Acts
16:16-24
16 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. 17 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." 18 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. 19 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. 20 When they had brought them before the
magistrates, they said, "These men are disturbing our city; they are Jews
21 and are advocating customs that are not lawful for us as Romans to adopt or
observe." 22 The crowd joined in attacking them, and the magistrates had
them stripped of their clothing and ordered them to be beaten with rods. 23
After they had given them a severe flogging, they threw them into prison and
ordered the jailer to keep them securely. 24 Following these instructions, he
put them in the innermost cell and fastened their feet in the stocks.
On May 13, 1963, Governor George C. Wallace sent a telegram
to Washington D.C. addressed to the Alabama delegation of senators and
congressman, outlining what the governor believed to be the root cause of
recent unrest in the state, specifically the bombings that took place in
Birmingham just two days prior in an attempt to assassinate leaders of the
Birmingham campaign of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). In
that telegram, Governor Wallace says, “During the past several weeks the city
of Birmingham has been set upon by outside agitators who have done everything
within their power to create internal strife and turmoil…Particularly
questionable was the bombing activity of Saturday night, May 11.”[1] It was one case of many,
where Governor Wallace would place the blame for the violence and unrest that
took place here in Alabama in those days on “outside agitators,” those he
believed were coming from other places outside of Alabama, those who held
contrary views (as Governor Wallace saw it) to those in Alabama, those whom he
believed were simply troublemakers seeking to cause problems where (as he would
claim) none previously existed.
It was an attempt to shift the source of the strife of
those days away from the sinful practices of segregation and the unjust Jim
Crow laws to an imagined group of antagonists, an attempt to misdirect the
attention of the masses in order to uphold the status quo and turn their anger
and frustration towards those who were “outside,” those who were different,
those who were striving to bring about change and a real difference in their
communities and in the broader society. That phrase, “outside agitators,” was a
political work of linguistic ingenuity; it allowed for blame to be placed on a
group of those who were utterly “other,” while simultaneously avoiding addressing
the actual issues at hand. It was a verbal finger pointing that created a
scapegoat for the unrest and irritation found in those whose ways of living
were being disrupted by the in-breaking of justice. It was an attempt to
redirect attention away from the actual maleficence of societal norms towards
those who sought to correct them. “Outside agitators” were labeled as such
because it was a convenient attempt at marking those who stood to cause change
and bring justice as “the bad guys,” the ones who were really causing all the
trouble.
With that in
mind, I don’t doubt that if George C. Wallace had been a resident of Philippi
in the first century, he would have labeled Paul and Silas as “outside
agitators.” I mean, in the passage we’ve read this morning, Paul and Silas are
simply on their way “to the place of prayer,” the
makeshift synagogue outside the city, by the river, the place where (as we saw
last week) Lydia listened to the Good News, was baptized, and welcomed Paul and
his company into her home. That ought to remind us that Paul and Silas are
indeed “outsiders,” folks who “weren’t from around here.” As they’re walking to
this place of prayer, they “met a slave-girl who had a spirit of
divination and brought her owners a great deal of money by fortune-telling.” She
followed
Paul and [his crew, and] she would cry out, ‘These men are slaves of the Most
High God, who proclaim to you a way of salvation.’" Now,
(according to Luke) they weren’t preaching in the city; Paul and his companions
weren’t passing out tracts on the way to this place of prayer, nor were they
carrying signs or shouting from bullhorns as they went on their way. Apparently
they didn’t need to do any of that, because this slave-girl ironically
proclaims to all of those within earshot that Paul and the believers with him
were there to “proclaim… a way of salvation.”
She was like Paul’s personal hype-man (or in this case,
hype-woman), getting the crowd pumped up and ready for what’s about to go down,
telling everyone what they’re about to experience—except, in this case, Paul
doesn’t really want that kind of attention. In fact, Luke tells us that “She
kept doing this for many days,” and Paul became “very much annoyed,” so
he
“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.” This isn’t a typical
exorcism: Paul doesn’t expel the demon from this girl because it was having an
adverse effect on her, because she was ill or behaving in a self-destructive
manner. No, Paul orders the spirit to come out of the woman because, well, he is annoyed! He’s tired of being followed by
a girl who keeps shouting his business to everyone. Maybe he was annoyed
because of her persistence—the way she was always there, like that guy who’s
always working the register when you
need to check out, and he wants to talk your head off about everything from the
weather to the latest installment of some video game you know nothing about.
He’s always there, and it’s always the same thing. Perhaps Paul was annoyed by
the fact that it was this possessed, fortune-teller who actually understood
what he was doing, that the wrong person seemed to be getting the point, that
the wrong kind of person was at least acknowledging what Paul was saying, or
maybe Paul was annoyed because when she said “These men are slaves of the Most
High God…” she didn’t mean the God of Israel (YHWH) but the chief god
of the Roman pantheon, Zeus, or at least it could have been interpreted that
way. Paul may have been annoyed because of the confusion she was causing. Either way, Paul had enough, so he ordered the
spirit to come out of her, and it did, without a whole lot of show either.
Now, this would
be a perfectly acceptable place to leave this story, and we could chalk it up
as another tale of the apostles’ ability to exorcise demons, of their
miraculous abilities that served as evidence and justification for the message
they proclaimed, but there’s more to this story than just Paul’s ordering a
spirit out of a nameless slave-girl. There’s more to this story than Paul’s
annoyance that leads to an exorcism. You see, the events that follow Paul’s denouncing
of the spirit in the slave-girl are quite exemplary when it comes to what it’s
truly like to be a bearer of the gospel of Christ. What happens after Paul’s
expulsion of the girl’s divining spirit isn’t necessarily what some of us might
think would happen after such an event.
Luke tells us: “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.” Now, perhaps I’m a bit naïve; maybe I’m a bit too hopeful for the good
nature of humankind, but I would have thought these people would have been glad
to see a girl returned to health, put back in her right mind, freed from a
spirit that caused her to be anything besides “normal,” an included part of the
community. My hopes for the better marks of humankind, however, are too often
proven wrong—especially when money is involved! It’s at the realization that “their
hope of making money was gone” that the owners of this slave-girl (who
otherwise disappears from the narrative) are agitated. Their greed, their
freedom to exploit a vulnerable, young woman, is now gone, and rather than
simply saying goodbye to their apparent free ride, they go on the attack; they
catch up with Paul and Silas and drag them into the marketplace in order to put
them on trial in the court of public opinion.
Now, it’s
interesting what happens next: the owners of this girl bring their charges
against Paul and Silas (Right here, I want to say something: can we just
acknowledge here how awful it is that they are referred to here as the girl’s
“owners” and there seems to be no direct revelation as to exactly how many
“owners” she has? Perhaps the more daring among us might refer to these people
for what they are—pimps for paranormal profit!). The folks bring their charges
against Paul and Silas, but notice—they don’t charge them with relieving the
girl of the spirit, nor do they make the case against them as economic enemies
threating to rob the community of valuable tax revenue or financial stimulus.
No, these are their charges: "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.” They called Paul and Silas (in a sense) “outside
agitators,” foreign folks who’ve come into their city to stir up trouble, to
push their agendas, to stir up otherwise peaceful folks who’ve gotten along
just fine before they got there. Paul and Silas are called out for their
difference, the ways they’re not like the “good folks of Philippi.” Rather than
charge Paul and Silas with the offenses they have committed against these slave
owner, they’d rather point out the immigrant status of these two men; they’d
rather point out they ways they’re behaving differently, because, you know,
being different is quite often a more severe offense than actually breaking the
law, especially if such differences force me to give up something, whether it’s
comfort, wealth, power, or privilege.
They point out
Paul and Silas as Jews (though later on it will come back to bite them that
Paul is actually a Roman citizen), claim they’re agitating folks with their
“outsider” ways of thinking and doing (even though there is no evidence in the
text that suggests they did anything inside the city, restricting their
ministry to the “place of prayer” outside the city), but perhaps the most
disturbing thing about their prejudiced prosecution is what Luke tells us in
the final three verses of our text this morning: “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.”
Why are Paul and
Silas imprisoned? Is it because they broke the law? Is it because they were
deemed as dangerous to the welfare of the broader community? No! They were stripped
of their clothing and beaten with rods because their actions as agents of God’s
kingdom liberated a girl from a life of exploitation and abuse. They were
severely flogged because the status quo was thrown out of whack by their very
presence as ones empowered by the Holy Spirit to break the chains of oppression
and a societal system that allows for advantage to be taken of the
disadvantaged. They were thrown in the innermost cell with their feet in the
stocks because the masses can quickly turn on those who are different, those
who are foreign, those who speak a word that is different from “the way we’ve
always done it.”
You see, Paul
and Silas are beaten and imprisoned not because they “preached the gospel” (Luke
never gives us any indication they preached at all in the city up to this
point). No, they were beaten and imprisoned because they were easily singled
out as different, and the gospel they believed, the salvation they proclaimed
and brought to reality (if even in an act spurred by annoyance!), is one that
cannot help but upset the status quo.
All of us who
act as agents of the Kingdom of God carry with us the subversive label of
“outside agitator,” for that is what we ought to be! We ought to be living our
lives in such a way as to upset the status quo—not long to be a part of it! And
just so you don’t misunderstand me, I don’t mean we are called to be some moral
watchdog, poised on the outskirts of society pointing our fingers at those
individuals who step a toe out of line with our conviction. No, I mean we are
called to be agents of liberation, women and men who see the sin inherit in the
social structures of civil religion and the evil evident in economic systems
meant to make the rich richer and the poor poorer. Rather than allowing
ourselves to be distracted by what some in places of influence and power may
label as “immediate moral issues,” we are called to be people who bring about real change in the world: to
bring the good news of God’s love to those who have been told they are not
loved (either directly or indirectly by a system and culture that devalues
them), to welcome the foreigner, to care for the widow and orphan, to eat with
the reprobate, to feed the hungry, to heal the sick, to talk to the stranger,
to throw the doors open wide and go out into the highways and hedges and tell
them all they’re invited to the Lord’s feast! We are called to be the selfless
people of God in a world which worships and honors selfishness!
Let me tell you,
if you begin to live the words of Jesus, if by your actions you (like Paul and
Silas) begin to shift the foundations of society, if you begin to bring about
such change as to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable” there
will be those who will point their fingers at you and call you an “outside
agitator.” They will find what makes you different: they’ll point out that
you’re too young, too old, too dumb, too educated, too rich, too poor. They’ll
say you’re a woman doing a man’s job, a man who worries too much about
so-called “women’s issues.” They’ll say you’re not being faithful to tradition,
that you’re too stuck on tradition, that you’re too liberal, too conservative,
too stuck in the middle. They’ll call you crazy, naïve. They’ll say you’re just
causing trouble, and they’ll try to shut you up, to gather folks against you by
pointing at how different you from everybody else—even if it’s not true. They’ll
try to do that, and when they do know this, that means the Spirit of God is
moving. That’s when you know God’s kingdom work is being done, because the
rough places are being made smooth, the crooked places made straight, the
mountains are being brought low, and the valleys are being exalted—all of which
take time and the steady power of God’s unyielding Spirit of love and the
courage to be different, the courage to stand up in the face of those who abuse
the systems put in place to put others in their place, the courage to be an
“outside agitator.” Amen.
[1]
You can find a .pdf copy of this telegram at the Alabama archives website here:
http://digital.archives.alabama.gov/cdm/singleitem/collection/voices/id/2957/rec/1
(accessed 5/6/2016)
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