God is on the side of the people who do not even know there are sides

Easter 7-C May 16, 2010
Acts 16:16-34
Psalm 97
Revelation 22:12-14, 16-17, 20-21
John 17:20-26

On this Sunday after the Ascension of Jesus into heaven, we proclaim that God is truly Lord over the earth. This great Lion of justice reigns. Evil – this dragon – is defeated, wrapped in chains, trampled underfoot.

Let us not be naïve; there are many things that trouble us in this world. If Jesus is born, risen from the dead, ascended into heaven, why do things still go wrong? Evils unpunished, feelings still hurt, injustice still perpetrated?

Paul and Silas, fresh from their dazzling conversion of the wealthy Lydia and her household, encounter this slave girl who is very much out of whack. She is a diviner for hire – kind of a spiritual prostitute, working for some men who exploit her gifts. She is very annoying to Paul and Silas, with her proclaiming boldly that they come from “the Most High God.” She is very loud. That is one of the names of the Emperor. Paul and Silas know that such unwanted publicity could get them in a lot of trouble – and she is confusing their message. Why can’t all converts be like Lydia? Rich, thoughtful, quiet, obedient, generous? Who is this annoying girl who speaks the truth in a most inconvenient way, even though it will cost her her meager livelihood?

The world is a troubled place, even here in the Acts of the Apostles, the early years after Christ’s Ascension. In this passage alone we read of slavery, sexual exploitation, imprisonment on trumped up charges, cruel punishment like beatings and shackles and underground cells. The money men, and the power men, and the military men – they are all still in charge. The Acts of the Apostles tells a disturbing story of a world like ours – a world into which, nonetheless, the powerful spirit of God breaks through disturbing, destabilizing, and freeing.

Spirits are a powerful force in human nature. We may give them different names at different times of our lives or in different cultures. They inhabit our childhood dreams. Even as adults we may fear what lurks around the corner. Are not cruel and evil people caught up in spirits that take them away from their true nature? How else could anyone even imagine torture or murder, unless they were no longer in their right mind?

We may learn from the wisdom of some African cultures who give names to these spirits, and by so doing bring them out of the darkness where we fear them and into the light where we can see these powerful forces in perspective. In the Central African Republic, I recently read, witchcraft is outlawed. There are lawyers in that country who want to get rid of that law as outdated, as unjust – there is no proof for witchcraft. There can be no due process without proof; the accused often confess to this crime which they did not commit, just to get a lighter sentence. But there is some logic to this seemingly unjust law: the belief in witchcraft is so powerful that if there were not the possibility of criminal prosecution, people could just grab any one they considered to be witches, “bring them to a pit and bury them alive.1”

We have much to learn also from the wisdom of our new friend Moses, who brings to us his experience working with women who are disempowered, neglected, abused. They turn to witchcraft, he says, because they feel they have no power against a husband who beats them, against a system that exploits their down-at-the-bottom status. Would not the key to their liberation be to break the cycle of abuse by their oppressors? To convince these men that they too are imprisoned by this system of domination and exploitation?

It was almost an afterthought for Paul to exorcise the spirit that imprisoned the slave girl. But later, after his own experience of powerful and evil spirits, shackled in an underground jail cell, he frees his own jailer of his imprisonment. The earthquake caused the jailer to fear for his life – not because the quake was an act of God, but because the prisoners might go free, and then he, who had had the power to beat and imprison, was in danger of receiving the same treatment if his charges escaped. When Paul and Silas acted generously toward their jailer – stayed put when they could have run free – it was the jailer they freed, freed him from the domination system in which he was only one cog in the wheel, one more lackey to be punished if the powerful spirits at the top did not get their way.

We, too, live in troubled times. But God-with-us is also with us in the troubled times. God is on the side of the people who do not even know there are sides, people who only know what it means to be pushed around and told what to do and taken advantage of. The power of God can break through it all, and bind us together instead with love and friendship and compassion and hope.

1 “Hex Appeal” by Graeme Wood, The Atlantic, June 2010, p. 20.