Broken Chains

Acts 16:16-34

Last week, I made the comment after reading the passage from Acts, that perhaps this book should be known as “The Adventures of the Apostles” rather than “Acts of the Apostles.”   Today’s reading bears that out once again.  Maybe even moreso.  Where else are you going to get an exorcism, crime and punishment, hard time in the stir, a natural disaster in the nick of time, and a conversion all wrapped up in one beautiful narrative?

We begin this week’s passage though a bit differently from last week’s.  Last week, some of you will remember, we were introduced to Lydia, a woman whose name was actually put into the account, something that doesn’t always happen in scripture.  Well, this week we go back to the usual manner of reporting by meeting a slave girl whose name is not given.  In fact, we aren’t given any names of the actors in this account: the slave girl, her owners, the magistrates, the jailer.  We only know about Paul and Silas in this story.

So, to recap, Paul and his companions are in Philippi, planting the seeds that will become the first church in Europe.  He’s already converted and baptized Lydia and her household and is no doubt still enjoying the fruits of that positive event.  But there’s one problem: a slave girl and her constant haranguing of Paul and the others with her yelling.

No, she wasn’t just any slave girl.  She was what was called a mantic, which meant that she had special powers of divination.  People would come to mantics for advice from their trance-like state...and, in her case, would pay her owners for the privilege, of course.  It sounds quite exotic to us, but according to scholars she would not really have been that unusual in that time and place.

So we have this mantic, following Paul and the others around town and proclaiming that they are “Slaves of the Most High God who proclaim … a way of salvation.”  It sounds odd to us, doesn’t it?  First off, she uses the word “slave” to describe Paul and the others, which, considering she herself is a slave, seems jangling.  (Is it a case of “it takes one to know one?”)  Then she says that they serve “the Most High God,” which seems unusual again since that God wouldn’t have been her God.  There is some evidence though that that term, “Most High God” was used by Gentiles when referring to the Jewish God. 

Then what happens gives us some insight into Paul’s personality, I think.  Paul has had it with this slave girl’s heckling.  He reacts and does so peevishly, in fact.  We can see him turning and, flying off the handle, casting the demon out of the slave girl which has given her those powers of divination. 

Now we don’t really need it spelled out what happens next.  Talk about peeved… I doubt that begins to describe how the slave girl’s owners felt when they found out that their source of income had been forcibly dried up.  Who are these Jewish strangers who drive out the  cash cow that has kept them comfortable for who knows how long?  How dare they interfere? 

So they do what can only be expected:  they complain to the authorities, having them arrested, publicly beaten, and thrown in jail.  Everyone thinks that the end of the story.  Everyone except God that is; well, and probably Paul and Silas who always knew they’d be going at it again soon enough.

One does have to wonder why at midnight Paul and Silas were singing and praying so loudly while in prison.  But that’s exactly what they were doing when of course an earthquake struck; an earthquake which opened all the doors of the jail and broke the chains shackled on their legs.  It sounds a little too miraculous, doesn’t it?  I mean, if this was a movie, wouldn’t you think that Hollywood got it a little too convenient?  But that’s exactly what happened, according to the narrator who wrote all this down.

The jailer, thinking his career is over because all the prisoners have escaped, is ready to do himself in when Paul calls out that if he’d just check, he’d find that they’re all there.  This throws the jailer, so much so, that he starts to talk with his charges about salvation and the next thing you know he and his household are baptized on the spot, becoming converts to this new way of being in the world.

As I said before, it’s a story with everything you could ask for, including a happy ending… well, except for the owners of the slave girl and perhaps for her as well.  We’ll never know what happened to her.

Well, where does it leave us though?  Sure, it’s a good story, but what does it mean to us almost 2,000 years later?  This tale, along with the passage that immediately precedes about the purple cloth dealer Lydia, reminds us of the wide scope that God’s grace covers.  It’s an inclusive gospel that Paul preaches, which he’ll write about in the third chapter of Galatians.  As the commentator Paul Walaskay writes in Feasting on the Word, “Our narrator has skillfully expanded Paul's groundbreaking statement in Galatians 3:28 into an elegant story. ‘There is no longer Jew [Paul and Silas] or Greek [Lydia, the mantic, the jailer], there is no longer slave [the mantic] or free [Lydia, Paul], there is no longer male [Paul, Silas, the jailer], or female [Lydia, the mantic]; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.’”

Paul and Silas weren’t the only ones who were liberated in these stories.  There is freedom enough for all and the good news is that we are all found in them as we seek to break free from those things which hold us chained and imprisoned.  We may not realize that we are chained down at times by the evils of our age:  classism, and racism, and greed, and egotism, and heterosexism, and idolatry of money, and, xenophobia, and, and…and the list goes on…you can fill in the remainder of the list yourselves with your own particular chains that keep you from living fully and freely.

This story reminds us that we need not be imprisoned.  We can be like Lydia and the jailer and their households and fully accept the gospel we hear and fully give of ourselves.  If we don’t break the chains that hold us down though, we certainly cannot respond fully to the call to ministry that is certainly given to each of us.  Our calls to healing, to caring, to responding to sorrow and sadness, our calls to gospel ministry cannot be carried out completely, no matter how hard we try, if we remain enchained and imprisoned.

Don’t wait for an earthquake, a metaphor all too real in our part of the world, to free you.  You have the power to break the chains which bind you.