Dean Penny Bridges
Alleluia, Christ is risen. The Lord is risen indeed, Alleluia.
In this last week of the Easter season, the story of faith is building to Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit will descend upon the disciples. But the Holy Spirit is already very much in evidence, as we see in our story from Acts.
Paul and Silas (and Luke) are in Philippi in Macedonia, bringing the good news of the Gospel to Europe for the first time. We heard last week about how they came to be there, and how they fell in with Lydia’s prayer group. Today’s episode immediately follows that story, and in fact the missionaries are on their way back to the riverside place of prayer where they had first met Lydia when Paul runs out of patience with the young woman who has been stalking them.
As accurate as her description is – they are indeed servants of the most high God, proclaiming the way of salvation – Paul has had enough, and he expels the spirit that has been driving her to make this statement. Healing her of the spirit also ends her ability to be an oracle, which was a lucrative business for those who called themselves her owners. The girl has been freed of her burden; but the ending of her exploitation leads to the arrest of the missionaries.
Paul heals the girl out of annoyance, but even done with a questionable motive, he is clearly acting under the direction of the Holy Spirit. Exploiting someone’s misfortunes or flaws for profit is despicable. The girl was seen only as a source of income for her abusers, and it is right for Paul to heal her so that she can live a fuller and freer life. However, he and Silas pay a steep price for doing the right thing, as they are accused of disturbing the peace.
The church knows something about the price of doing the right thing. You might have read in the news recently about how Christ Episcopal Church in Tom’s River, NJ, has been planning to build a shelter for homeless people on the land adjacent to the church. A worthy task for a church, obviously.
“Coincidentally,” the mayor of the town has now decided that the church’s land is ideal for a community pickleball park, and he is trying to take the entire church property by eminent domain – not just the undeveloped land but the land on which the church itself stands. It is surely no coincidence that the wealthy neighbors of the church are opposed to the shelter plan. Like Paul and Silas before them, the good people of Christ Church are threatening to disturb the peace and comfort of the well-off by taking care of the less privileged. Hmm, sounds like the Holy Spirit is stirring things up in New Jersey.
Paul and Silas are arrested, flogged, jailed, and shackled to the stocks in the innermost cell of the city jail. They were likely sitting on the floor with their legs and perhaps their arms and necks too restrained by the stocks, sitting in puddles of filth, their own and others’, overrun by vermin. It’s an image that hardly bears thinking about. Ancient jails were horrific. But we have our own contemporary image to consider, with the footage we are seeing of the prison in El Salvador where men are being treated like objects, stripped, heads shaved, packed together like sardines in a can; children of God incarcerated and abused for profit and political points. Some things never change.
You might have noticed that the word “we” has crept into the Acts narrative: the story-teller has entered the story. This voice is traditionally identified as Luke the evangelist, who evidently joined Paul for part of his missionary journey. Somehow Luke avoided being arrested with his friends, but he was able to record the arrest and all that followed.
It must have been a low point for the missionaries, a stunning reversal after their success with the wealthy businesswoman Lydia, not to mention an earlier episode when they were mistaken for gods.
So here we have Paul and Silas, bruised, bloodied, trapped in the stinking darkness of the prison, far from home, victims of a gratuitous brutality that is still alive and well in human hearts today. It is a dark moment for the Gospel; and the missionaries must be steeling themselves for possible martyrdom. What to do in this desperate situation?
What would you do? Would you pray? Would you sing? What might you sing under these conditions? I love the mental image of these two men in the midst of this evil, praying out loud and singing a hymn of praise to God. It puts me in mind of the spirituals that enslaved people used to sing to keep hope alive when all seemed to be lost. I can imagine the men in the El Salvador prison singing hymns to build solidarity and encouragement. I think of the warriors of the civil rights era singing We Shall Overcome.
There are Episcopal congregations who have long incorporated that song into their Eucharistic worship. When they get to the memorial acclamation in Eucharistic Prayer A, they join together singing,
“Jesus Christ has died; Jesus Christ has risen; Jesus Christ will come again; Oh deep in my heart, I do believe, Jesus Christ will come again.”
What a profound expression of faith and solidarity; a call to liberation from all that enslaves us, a reminder that you can imprison and abuse a body, but you cannot hold a soul captive.
Paul and Silas were arrested for disturbing the peace. What peace would that be? As followers of Jesus, we know that the peace of God is unlike any peace on earth, in fact it’s beyond anything that we can understand. The peace that the Holy Spirit brings may not feel like peace to us. It was the Holy Spirit, acting through Paul and Silas, that caused the disturbance in the market place at Philippi. The Holy Spirit was with them as they were cast into prison. And the Holy Spirit filled their hearts with prayer and praise in a situation where they might be filled with despair and terror.
In that moment Paul and Silas had nowhere to turn but to God. Where they might have given up, they instead turned to praise. Paul had a gift for this: years later, when he wrote to the Christian community in Philippi from another jail cell, this time in Rome, he wrote, “Rejoice in the Lord always, and again I say, rejoice.” Surely, when they read that letter, the Philippian congregation would remember the night when Paul and Silas brought the town’s prison walls tumbling down.
If the Holy Spirit was a disturbance before, now it becomes a cataclysm. The earth shakes, the building splits apart, the stocks and chains fly asunder. Where before there was fear and captivity, now there is disorder, chaos – and freedom.
Locked into his own cruel world, the jailer was going to kill himself rather than face the punishment for allowing prisoners to escape. But no: “We are all here”. The prisoners have been freed by the power of God but they refrain out of compassion from taking advantage of that freedom. Who is captive and who is free now? The jailer has been imprisoned by the prison industrial complex’s values, even to the point of believing his own life to be worthless. But now he gets to be freed too. This is the power of God’s love. The jailer hears the words of life, “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ; trust in Jesus’ power to save”.
The prisoners’ wounds are washed, the family is washed in baptism, and they break bread together amidst much rejoicing.
In the next passage of this chapter, Paul and Silas return to the prison in the morning to face the magistrates. Paul turns the tables on them with the announcement that he and Silas are Roman citizens; and now it’s the magistrates who will be afraid, knowing that (Roman) citizens are entitled to due process.
Throughout this story Paul is focused on justice: economic justice for the slave girl; God’s merciful justice for the jailer, judicial justice for himself and Silas. By insisting on justice, we see abuse, violence and captivity transformed into liberation, grace, and hospitality.
This is the message of Scripture: when we act for justice, over and over again God’s love is made manifest through the disruptive action of the Holy Spirit. As we prepare for Pentecost we should also prepare for God to disturb our peace, to rattle our cages, to free us from the shackles that hold us down. The last words of the Bible in the Revelation to John extend the invitation: “The Spirit and the Bride say Come; and let everyone who hears say Come, and let everyone who is thirsty come, let anyone who wishes take the water of life as a gift.”
Alleluia, Christ is risen. The Lord is risen indeed, Alleluia.
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