So let's pray.
God, we are so grateful for
how your spirit works through us and through others to slowly chip away at these larger systems
that
following and embodying your love in this world is so profoundly impactful that others may join in
along the way.
So may your spirit be with us in our time together.
and help us to hold on to the wisdom passed on from generation to generation of your people.
Amen.
So, since the message for all ages kind of skips a big chunk of the story today,
it only focuses on the being set free and the conversion afterwards.
I'm going to flip the focus and mostly focus on the inciting incident that leads to their arrest.
So it is worth naming that this past month has been particularly rough for any survivors of abuse
who have been chronically online. And if you don't know what I'm talking about,
awesome.
You've managed to stay away from some pretty big headlines. And if you do, I'm not trying to re
-traumatize any survivors that are with us. But I do think it's important as a spiritual practice
to name evil as evil. And I think that the evil in this circumstance directly ties to the actions
of Paul in our scripture today. So let me just briefly describe what happened.
So a month ago... online chat and website of men teaching other men how best to take advantage of
others without their consent or consideration of their bodily autonomy, was exposed as having over
60 million monthly viewers.
The way that this is described in the media is a little more aggressive in its language and in
order to tend to others here, I'm trying to be gentle.
But at the very least, this is evil.
Pure evil embodied and should not exist in our world.
And yet I'm left wondering how a disregard for consent can be so easily normalized in our society.
Going back to last week's scripture, we encountered the story of Saul's conversion, and now that he
has been traveling outside of Jewish spaces, he's using his Greek name, Paul, more often.
He's already advocated for more lenient guidelines for the inclusion of Gentiles at the Jerusalem
Council, where Gentiles are just everyone that's not Jewish.
During our passage this morning, he's somewhere along his second missionary journey, so about 15
years after his conversion.
So, so far in Philippi, Paul and his crew have been striking out. For the first three days,
not a single man in town would host them, because as a group, the man of the house should be the
one hosting them. And then he encounters Lydia, who is a religious.
a political and ethnic stranger to these Jewish men who are followers of Jesus.
And in her encounter with them, her entire household is also converted.
Lydia then puts the men to task and forces them to accept her as her host when they expected only
men to host them and likely were expecting it to be a Jewish man since they were specifically
trying to target the synagogues in these areas for the Jewish diaspora.
So our reading picks up right after Paul's recent win and partial defeat.
And it's so complex that Amy Robertson and Robert Williamson Jr.
named their recent Bible worm episode about this passage, the best and worst of Paul.
And that definitely rings true to me, even though I think like the worst worst of Paul would be
when he was killing people. But that's a different story. So Paul and his crew are followed by an
enslaved girl, a child, who has a spirit of divination which her enslavers were using to make huge
profits off of her.
The girl then follows the disciples, Paul and Silas and others, for days,
saying, these men are slaves of the Most High God who proclaim to you a way of salvation.
The text is clear to tell us that Paul then reacts not out of compassion or love,
but because he was annoyed. He then sends the spirit out of her,
which leads to the enslavers getting Paul and Silas arrested.
So let's pause right here, because already the text has not told us much,
but we can see that Paul is acting completely out of impulse and anger. which stands in comparison
to the healings that the author of Acts, Luke, documents in Luke the Gospel,
where Jesus typically has a conversation with the person getting healed, sometimes even asking,
what is it that you actually need? Jesus was very person-centered before he did pretty much
anything. I think Luke might have the cursing of the fig tree, and that's the most impulsive
lashing out that Jesus does.
Because I don't think the temple tantrums in Luke.
So Paul,
in encountering this girl,
doesn't request what she needs, doesn't care about what she wants or what her desires are.
He asks absolutely no questions about her situation. Paul does not care about getting consent from
the young enslaved girl, even though the spirit is what's compelling her to proclaim the truth
about Paul and his companions. Instead, he finds her proclamation annoying and has her and her
truth silenced. And while at the same time, I have a little bit of compassion towards Paul in this
moment, because if someone was following me around town, shouting things as I walked around,
I would get annoyed after a couple of hours, not a couple of days. Paul lasted a little longer than
I would.
But clearly in the story, we have bits of this pre-conversion Paul making impulsive decisions
because of his access to power. We saw him doing that previously when he would use his power to get
the permission to again arrest anyone who was a follower of Jesus and bring them back.
And he was... There at the martyr of Stephen, like he just was ready to, he thought he was right,
and so when Paul thinks he's right, he just does what he thinks is right.
The text does not say whether what Paul did was right or wrong,
which was the complexities that our Bible study tried to sit with for a while, because the text
doesn't judge this either way.
So I read a handful of commentaries to try to prep for this morning to kind of see what's the
trend.
And nearly all of the men writing these commentaries sought out excuses for the girl's treatment by
Paul. Most of these men made their argument by adding to the text, saying that it was really a
demon that was possessing her and she needed a healing to be set free. Which is weird because Luke
never avoided saying when people were demon-possessed in the past. So it's odd that they would say
that Luke really meant that it was a demon when... Luke calls a spade a spade previously,
so why would he use different language now?
One of the men even goes far enough to claim that by casting out the spirit, they also set the
young girl free from enslavement, which is just completely untrue for that era.
Now, when I read commentaries written by women,
they pointed out that the men were just wrong,
at least contextually.
Just because the young girl no longer had a spirit of divination doesn't mean that she was no
longer enslaved. It's actually the opposite. The young enslaved girl whose voice was used to make
her enslavers rich is forced to become a young enslaved girl whose body is used to make her
enslavers rich.
And from here we can only use our imagination as to what trade that could possibly look like.
It's pretty easy to see that Paul's actions leave the young girl in a much worse state than she was
before.
But he isn't bothered by that, because he's just happy that she stopped talking.
And so I'm convinced that Paul is very much in the wrong here, and it's exceptionally concerning
that he did all of this harm by invoking the name of Jesus.
Which in a way doesn't feel unfamiliar for us, and it's not necessarily surprising, given the
number of powerful men in the modern church who wield their power and influence with no regard
about how women, LGBTQIA folks, immigrants, and other marginalized communities are treated.
And I wonder how many of them feel empowered to do so because of the past that is granted to Paul
here. in his wrongdoings.
And perhaps problematically or just complexly, the story doesn't end with just they're in prison.
Paul and Silas have violated Roman laws and customs, hindering the flow of capital and an
oppressive system, and are severely beaten and thrown into prison.
We at least know that they mean well. when they did the things, and at least in a way reduces the
flow of wealth that's happening in the taking advantage of this young girl.
The scripture explicitly says young slave girl. It doesn't say it's a woman.
So we really have to name this as harm being done to children.
And so at the very least, they did a little bit of good. My biggest concerns are about the...
They did some good, but then didn't have a long-term plan for how can they try to reduce harm in
the after. So Paul and Silas,
after they're beaten and thrown into prison in their pain and suffering, they find a connection to
the pain and suffering of Jesus and sing hymns and pray from their jail cell.
And then they get an earthquake, which is interesting because the text just says there was an
earthquake, and this makes it so that they're set free. But they don't actually run. I am grateful
that the author of Luke also might have had a wrestle with this story,
because as he documents it, he doesn't tell us if what they did was right or wrong, and he also
doesn't say that the earthquake is sent by God. We just assume that that's what's happening here,
that it's divine intervention. So even Luke's having a hard time describing the situation
theologically.
So the jailer arrives ready to end his own life, likely because of his fear of either the revenge
of the prisoners or punishment coming from Rome for setting the prisoners free. In the dark
unknown, Paul assures the jailer that he has nothing to worry about. And somehow this experience
leads to the conversion of the jailer, whose first action of repentance is to bring them into his
own home and tend to the wounds that he had previously and intentionally neglected,
and maybe even inflicted. The whole household goes on to get baptized.
When the Roman officials try to set Paul and Silas free, Paul refuses to allow their abuses be
hidden. He replies, they have beaten us in public, uncondemned men who are Romans,
and thrown us into prison, and now they're going to discharge us in secret?
Certainly not. Let them come and take us out themselves.
He's willing to use his power now to
actually face the system that is doing so much harm.
And in the spirit of the men weren't completely wrong about this, let's look at what Willie James
Jennings points out. He says, Paul will not keep silent.
An injustice has been done against him and Silas, and they will not go quietly into freedom.
Relieved that their ordeal is over, more is at stake than their freedom. This is a matter of
justice. Paul and Silas are acting as disciples precisely in this moment of invoking their Roman
citizenship and precisely in claiming their rights as citizens. Disciples are positioned against
this political power of the secret. The power seeks to isolate and individuate injustices done,
turning them into singular, episodic events that do not point to systemic, structural,
and serial realities of oppression and the misuse of power. These disciples call out such
operations and they will use whatever resources of the nation-state to do so.
We see even though Paul was wrong in the way he treated the young enslaved girl, his treatment
afterward was used to expose the injustice of the larger system. Paul's pursuit of justice for
himself and others harmed by the Roman Empire reminds us of the sacredness of our work when we
advocate for others against larger oppressive systems. And even though Paul acted in complete
disregard for the young girl,
at least through the act of an earthquake which led to the redemption of a jailer, an oppressor,
and others caught up in the system of violence. And while Paul ignored the young girl's needs,
I trust that God remained present with her somehow,
just like how I am confident that God remained with, mourned with,
and remains angry alongside the women still subjugated to abuse and harm today across our globe.
And any work to call out and dismantle these harmful systems is also holy,
continuing in the work that Paul did when he confronted the Roman system.
And so often we feel like we're just one person, but we can see through Paul and Silas that we can
use our rights to the demand for better treatment for others in some capacity,
in various different ways.
a whole community to pull it off. Some might be the ones who need to take care of the wounds that
others have, and others may be using their voice to speak to larger systems. Some might be talking
to the jailers and helping them see new ways of being that can be possible. All of these are
faithful to the way of Jesus and faithful to the way that the disciples embodied Jesus' love
throughout. the rest of the New Testament, and much of church history.
And so the spirit that was with all of the disciples,
with Paul and Silas, with the young girl,
and with all of our Christian ancestors, remains with us and guides us as we move through the
world. So let us pray.
God, you are a just God and a God who is unafraid to mourn alongside us.
May your spirit continue to be with us and guide us as we hold the pain and suffering of the world
and
find ways to transform our experiences and our circumstances that
can pivot towards more people understanding their belovedness and how you truly love them and want
all things. to be restored and renewed.
May your spirit go with us as we continue to seek to be your people in this place,
wrestling with all the ways that we can love boldly, serve joyfully,
and lead courageously.
Amen.