Easter 7
Sermon preached by the Revd Anna Matthews
Paul and Silas are in Philippi. In last week’s reading from Acts we heard how they arrived there, and how a woman named Lydia, a dealer in purple cloth – a successful businesswoman – had heard and received the gospel and opened her home to the apostles.
The book of Acts is the story of the Holy Spirit in the life of the early church. From the giving of the Spirit at Pentecost, we see the Spirit constantly going ahead of the apostles, leading them to places and people that are being drawn into the body of Christ. Again and again the Spirit acts, and the apostles are faced with the reality that God’s love extends far beyond the boundaries they’d traditionally understood.
First, the Spirit draws them into Gentile territory, breaking down the long-held distinction between Jew and Gentile. There are arguments among the apostles about whether this is right, or should be something they support, but the testimony of the Spirit is incontrovertible: God has chosen to include the Gentiles: the apostles need only to catch up.
Lydia, Paul and Silas’s host, is a Gentile. She’s also a rich woman who appears to be head of her household – a further transgression of traditional boundaries by the Spirit, who is leading the nascent church to understand that, as Paul writes to the Galatians, ‘there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus’ (3.28).
And we see this further enacted in today’s reading from Acts. At the opposite end of the social scale from Lydia is the slave girl who follows Paul and Silas around crying out that ‘These men are slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim to you a way of salvation.’ We don’t know her name – she’s a slave, and is treated as a commodity rather than a person. She makes her owners a lot of money, we’re told, by fortune-telling – and we see something of this power at work in her in her cries about Paul and Silas. Her words are true, but they are words that issue from her enslavement, to her owners and to the spirit that possesses her.
After many days of this, Paul turns and orders the spirit to come out from her. He speaks into her double oppression to free her.
He does it because he’s annoyed. He and Silas are going about, trying to proclaim the good news, and everywhere they go this girl with her cries follows them. There they are, trying to do God’s work, and all the while this girl is distracting and hindering them. But the Spirit who keeps on going ahead of the apostles can turn even annoyance to good ends. The work of God, as Jesus shows, is to proclaim release to the captives and to let the oppressed go free, and here this is what the Holy Spirit does, through the command of Paul.
It's a chastening reminder to me that religious piety that shuts out the cries of the oppressed is not faithful at all. It reminds me of the times I’ve been at Evening Prayer and have been annoyed by interruptions from people who come in being persistent and demanding, wanting money or conversation or to use the loo or simply wanting to be heard. And the part of me that is still struggling to keep up with the Spirit just wants to get on with saying my prayers. But the God I am addressing is often speaking to me through the person interrupting, asking for engagement, relationship, rather than annoyance. To be genuinely open to the work of the Spirit will bring disruption to our established patterns of piety, to our settled boundaries, to the ways our faith has become too comfortable.
Paul’s action in commanding the spirit possessing the slave girl to come out from her has immediate consequences. Her freedom means his imprisonment. Paul and Silas were free to go about Philippi proclaiming the gospel just as long as vested interests weren’t challenged. In freeing the slave girl, Paul interferes in the economic life of the city and the market swings straight into action.
The girl’s owners seize Paul and Silas and drag them into the market-place before the authorities. The gospel work of letting the oppressed go free incurs the wrath of the oppressors – as the life of Jesus shows us all too clearly. In the market-place we hear those chilling words: ‘these men are disturbing the city; they are Jews’. Echoing down the ages this is the accusation that gives rise to pogroms, concentration camps, conspiracy theories and white supremacist terrorism. Anti-semitism, nationalism, xenophobia swing into action to defend capital, doing the opposite of the work of the Spirit in building up walls and boundaries, setting people against people, and stoking fear and prejudice.
Paul and Silas are beaten and thrown into prison. The liberators become the captives – but even here the Spirit is at work subverting old categories. For at midnight, as Paul and Silas are praying and singing, an earthquake shakes the foundations of the prison, leaving doors opened and prisoners unchained. Isaiah had proclaimed that the Spirit would bring out prisoners from the prison-house and here we see that enacted. And this means freedom not just for those held in chains, but even for their jailer. The Spirit works to reconcile – to join into one body the slave and the free, the captive and the captor – but not by simply reproducing in the church the divisions and hierarchies of the world.
At least, that’s what happens when the Spirit is unopposed. The question posed to us by today’s reading is what it means to be free – or to put it another way, where are we held captive? By the end of the story all of those who looked free at the start are shown not to be – the owners, the judges, the jailer. And those who were enslaved – the girl, Paul, and Silas – are free. And because the same Spirit at work in the Acts of the Apostles is the same Spirit at work in us through our baptism and incorporation into the body of Christ, we’re drawn into the story. Who are the people to whom God is asking us to pay attention, even if they are people whose presence disturbs us? How are we joining in with the Spirit’s work of proclaiming release to the captive and letting the oppressed go free? How, in our life together, are we embodying Paul’s declaration of the Spirit’s work that in Christ there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female? These are questions not just for today but for the weeks and months and years ahead of us, as we seek to respond to the Spirit’s leading and disturbing, and so become more fully the body of Christ.