Seventh Sunday in Easter
“One” — Rev. Brent Gundlah
First Reading (Acts 16:16-34/CEB)
Gospel Reading (John 17:20-26/CEB)
During this season of Easter — which ends next week with the celebration of Pentecost — most our first readings have been from the Acts of the Apostles, which makes sense; this is where we hear about the exploits of Jesus’s most devoted followers — including, but certainly not limited to Peter and Paul — in the aftermath of the Resurrection. These stories matter because they provide valuable insight into what was going on during the early days of the church, taking us to interesting places and introducing us to compelling characters (many of them women).
But, as Chad, Christopher, Debbie and Kerby can attest, these readings also tend to be kind of long and contain a litany of unpronounceable names, making them a liturgist’s worst nightmare. Next week’s account of Pentecost is arguably the roughest of them all (Amy, if you’re listening, you might want to consider coming down with something before Sunday). In any event, since you all took one for the team and read these challenging passages, I figure the least I could do is talk about one today.
In last week’s reading we accompanied Paul and Silas on their journey to the Macedonian city of Philippi. They were led there by Paul’s nighttime vision of a man pleading with him to, “Come over to Macedonia and help us.” Paul is convinced that God has called him to proclaim the good news to a new audience and in a new place, so he heads off to Philippi to do that.
After a few days there, Paul wanders outside the city gate and meets Lydia, a single woman with a thriving business selling purple cloth whose heart is opened by God to hear what Paul has to say. She becomes a follower of Christ, has her entire household baptized, and invites Paul and his companions to stay at her home (which they do). Having established their new Philippian headquarters at Lydia’s house, Paul and his companions then head into the city to preach and teach the gospel.
One day, as they are making their way to the place of prayer, Paul’s entourage runs into a slave woman possessed by a “spirit of divination” who had brought wealth to her owners with her knack for fortune-telling. For some unknown reason, she follows Paul and friends throughout the city shouting, “These men are slaves of the God Most High, who proclaim to you a way of salvation.”
Her statement is completely accurate but, for some reason, Paul is really annoyed by her (you think he would have appreciated the free advertising). Is it because she’s saying the same thing over and over again? Is it because she insults the disciples by calling them “slaves”? Is it because she says they offer “a” way of salvation and not “the” way of salvation? Is it because Paul is afraid that her words are going to attract unwanted attention from the Roman authorities? It’s tough to say, but Paul is so frustrated by the slave woman that he angrily orders the spirit out of her in Christ’s name. And just like that, her fortune-telling career is over.
Her masters are none too pleased by this so they drag Paul and Silas before the Roman authorities hoping to have them punished for what they’ve done. Curiously, their complaint does not focus upon the obvious issue — namely, the money Paul has cost them by taking away their slave’s powers. Instead, they choose to play both the anti-Semitism card and the “they’re not from around here” card in order to have Paul and Silas thrown in jail. Some things never change, I guess.
Why do the slaveowners do this? Once again, we don’t really know. Maybe they didn’t want to draw attention to their exploitative business scheme. Or maybe they just knew that it would work; sadly, playing to peoples’ fears and prejudices to get what you want can be a very effective strategy. Like I said, some things never change.
All of this sets up the second half of the story which begins with Paul and Silas being beaten and thrown in prison. As they are praying and singing songs in the middle of the night a violent earthquake hits, throwing open the prison’s doors.
Their jailer, wrongly assuming that everyone has escaped and fearing that he will be held responsible for this, is about to throw himself on his sword when Paul cries out and stops him because no one in the jail has actually gone anywhere. The overwhelmed jailer asks Paul and Silas, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” They respond, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household.”
Paul and Silas then go to with the jailer to his house, where their former tormenter tends to their wounds. They speak to the jailer and his family about God and about Jesus, and all of them “were baptized without delay.” There was much rejoicing that the jailer “had become a believer in God.” Put another one in the “win” column for Paul and for Christianity.
This story has something for everyone: possessions and exorcisms, a courtroom drama, a musical number, a natural disaster, a jailbreak (of sorts), and an actual “come to Jesus” moment. One a wider scale, there is also the ongoing tension between the Roman Empire and the underdog group of Jesus-believers that had only recently come to be known as “Christians.”
There are so many things going on here, in fact, that our attention can very easily be drawn away from other less obvious aspects of the story. This is a shame, because, as the saying goes, the devil’s often in the details. It is in this spirit that I want to consider the slave woman.
She stands in sharp contrast to Lydia, whom we met last week. She is not a wealthy, independent merchant with her own household; she’s someone else’s property. And unlike Lydia, she doesn’t even get a name. The one thing she does seem to have going for her is a “spirit of divination,” an ability to tell peoples’ fortunes, and by all indications, she’s really good at what she does.
In the New Testament’s original Greek, this spirit she has is described a pneuma pythona, which literally translates as snake spirit. I tell you this because it’s a clue as to what’s going on here.
You see, the first readers of Acts would have recognized the snake as a symbol for the Greek god, Apollo. And they also would have known that Apollo was the patron god of Delphi, the place where people went to have their fortunes told by women with the same gift as the slave woman — in return for a small monetary donation, of course.
All of this is important because there are two things that really seem to get under Paul’s skin throughout Acts: anything connected to Rome and it’s worship of many gods (like Apollo) instead of the one God, and people who use their powers to turn a profit like sideshow hucksters. Unfortunately, this poor slave woman checks both boxes.
And so Paul’s reaction to her is kinda mean-spirited. Now, I’m not thrilled to have to criticize Paul here, but I’ve gotta call them like I see them; this is not his finest moment, but even apostles have bad days. The slave woman follows Paul and Silas around for a while shouting out nothing more than the truth. For this Paul becomes so “annoyed” at her that he casts the spirit out of her in the name of Jesus Christ.
And then she disappears, which isn’t all that surprising because she’s served her purposes. She made a bunch of money for her masters, but now that she’s been stripped of her psychic powers by Paul, she’s useless to them.
She provides Paul with an opportunity to demonstrate the power he’s been granted by the Risen Christ, and to prove that his God is better than Roman gods, but once that’s happened he doesn’t need her any longer either.
She’s enabled Luke to advance his story to the point where all the really cool stuff — Paul’s imprisonment, the hymn sing, the earthquake, the jailbreak, and the jailer’s dramatic conversion — can now take center stage, making her much irrelevant for Luke now too. And so just like that, she’s gone.
I’ve read a whole lot of commentary on this story that’s focused on the slave woman’s “liberation” — both from her captors and from the spirit of divination that possessed her. And I find this kind of disturbing.
For starters, there is absolutely nothing in the text to support the idea that her masters chose to set her free. And I shudder to think what this so-called “freedom” might have meant for her. She was property to them, and property that no longer serves a purpose for its owner is generally not very well cared for. If they kept her, what could she possibly have done in order to justify her room and board? I can’t imagine it would have been anything that anyone would really want to do.
And if they did happen to “free” her, it was probably more like putting her out by the side of the road like trash than it was liberation. I mean I doubt that her masters would have given her a severance package before sending her on her way. How would this slave woman with absolutely nothing to her name (though, to be clear, she doesn’t even have a name), who’s been stripped of the only gift we know that she had, support herself after being thrown out into the world? Some freedom that is.
And Paul’s motives here aren’t so pure either. He doesn’t cast out the slave woman’s spirit in order to help her; he does so because he’s annoyed by her. By ridding her of her spirit, Paul manages to increase his own stature as a healer and prophet in Christ’s name, and to gain a toehold in a new territory. This is great for Paul and for the church, but at what price? What benefit does the slave woman reap from all of this?
And this is bothersome because none of this is her fault and because she has no say in any of it. She doesn’t ask for this spirit of divination, and she’s definitely not the one making money from it. She also doesn’t ask Paul to “liberate” her in the way that she is “liberated”. But powerless people often become collateral damage when more powerful people collide.
Maybe this story is, among other things, a cautionary tale, reminding us that we (even the greatest apostles among us) can sometimes do really lousy things when we’re focused on doing what we see as other good things;
that we can get angry and act in ways that do harm, either intentionally or unintentionally;
that we tend to lose our focus on what really matters — like the well-being of the people right in there front of our faces — when we view the world only through the lens of our own priorities and ambitions;
that we mustn’t ever lose sight of the people that we might think of as annoying or irrelevant or inconvenient or useless, because they matter;
that we should never just drop them from our story, because they’re God’s beloved children too.