Sermons from St
Faith's
Earthquakes
Fred Nye, Sunday, 8th May, 2016
‘Suddenly there was an earthquake…..and everyone’s chains
were unfastened’.
Cecil B de
Mille, when asked how he managed to produce so many
blockbuster epic movies, said ‘You begin with an
earthquake, and then build up to a climax’!
In this morning’s reading from Acts we have not one, but
two, earthquakes. There’s the geological earthquake that
conveniently releases Paul and Silas from prison, but
before that we have the story of another very different
sort of earthquake. Paul’s exorcism of the Roman slave
girl was in it’s own way just as earth-shattering: it so
angered the crowd and the Roman authorities that Paul and
Silas found themselves stripped naked, severely beaten up,
and then shackled and banged up in jail.
So what’s going on in this extraordinary exorcism, that
almost brought Paul’s mission and ministry to a premature
end? To understand it we need to know a little more about
the status of slaves in the first century Roman Empire. If
you visit Pompei you can still see in the basements of the
villas the cramped, cold and almost pitch black cubicles
where the slaves slept. So in a way that says it all. The
riches of the wealthy were built upon the oppression of
the poor. For many domestic slaves life was indeed nasty
brutish and short: the fate of those employed in
agriculture or industry was probably even worse. And
yet in a society where there was no welfare state, not
even a ‘poor law’, when times were hard slaves would still
be fed and have a roof over their heads: they had a degree
of precarious security not shared by those living in
poverty around them. So the life of a slave was an uneasy
mix of exploitation and dependency.
And some slaves were particularly valuable. The girl in
the story had a peculiar gift that was very useful to her
Roman owners. We are told that she had a ‘spirit of
divination’ which in Greek translates as the ‘Python’
spirit. The name comes from the snake associated in legend
with the oracle at Delphi, where the priestess, inspired
by the same spirit, had the power to speak in riddles and
foretell the future. So to own a young woman with such
amazing magical powers, which could readily be turned into
hard cash, was to put it mildly a stroke of luck for her
masters.
And then Paul comes along and kills the goose that lay the
golden eggs. It’s hard to say exactly what he found
disturbing about the slave girl. She certainly kept
following him and pestering him, using the same sort of
language that the unclean spirits in the gospel stories
had used to address Jesus the Messiah. And so Paul uses
Jesus’s name, that’s to say Our Lord’s power and
authority, to rid her of her demon. But I wonder if Paul
was also moved by her enslavement. Not only did her
masters own her, body and soul, they were also abusing and
exploiting her, using whatever it was that was tormenting
this poor young woman as a means of filling their own
pockets. Whether we call it a demon or a mental illness -
a psychosis - which troubled her, once she was healed she
was of no value to her owners. I wonder how they reacted?
I guess they probably dumped her, abandoned her
completely.
Tantalisingly, we are not told what happened to the slave
girl afterwards, as the focus of the story shifts to the
revenge that her owners took on Paul and Silas. Perhaps
like many Gentile slaves she became a Christian, and found
acceptance and security within a new family, the family of
the early church that Paul had founded in Phillipi. But
she probably had some mixed feelings about her new way of
life. As a walking oracle, speaking in riddles, she had
been something of a celebrity, the centre of attention –
now, all that was over: she had been stripped of any sort
of false glamour, and had to re-discover her own real
self-worth.
So, where is all this going? We don’t believe in demons
any more, and we like to think that slavery is a thing of
the past. But deep down this is a story that is all about
the power of money.
We live in a global society where increasingly human
values are measured in pounds, or dollars or euros. The
modern mantra has it that competition rather than
co-operation is the way to human prosperity and happiness,
that what gives citizens value and worth is our purchasing
power as consumers, and that riches have some sort of
intrinsic merit, while poverty is just another name for
failure. Inequality has been re-labelled as virtuous,
because the free market ensures that everyone gets exactly
what they deserve. Everything is weighed in the currency
of economic growth. It is Mammon who is now the master,
and the whole planet – it’s natural and its human
resources – are in danger of becoming slaves to money, of
being exploited for the sake of money. It’s the economy,
stupid!
But we confess the faith of Christ crucified, we proclaim
a risen Lord, the reign of God on earth, and the love of
neighbour as ourselves. And with Paul, we believe that
‘there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave
or free, there is no longer male or female, for all of us
are one in Christ’. So let’s never miss the opportunity to
proclaim that gospel, to challenge money as a measure of
human worth, to do what we can to remove the chains of
inequality, and to exchange them for the bonds of peace
and justice. We need to re-discover the true value of
human beings as children of God.
We will need some help and courage, the strengthening of
the Holy Spirit, to fight this battle, because like Paul
and Silas we risk the wrath of those whose self-interest
lies in maintaining the status quo. And like the slave
girl when she was removed from her abusive masters, we too
will have something to lose. Here in the comfortable West
we are also trapped in an economic system that partly
exploits and partly protects us. The chains of
self-interest and destructiveness which are such a denial
of Christ’s Lordship bind us too.
So as a Christian community we need to start a debate on
how we can de-value some of the worth that we all of us
attach to comfort, money and possessions. There are so
many chains to be unfastened, so many habits to be
challenged: our unthinking dependence on climate-damaging
energy to heat our homes or use the car, or to go on
foreign holidays; perhaps our attitudes to taxation and
migration, certainly our reluctance to lobby for global
justice. But above all we need to lose our fear of
generosity. How many of us should be tithing our incomes,
and of those who do, how many should be giving a little
more? Would that, for me at least, be one earthquake too
far? Perhaps like the slave girl when she was freed from
her previous way of life we may be reluctant to let go. In
re-discovering our true value as children of God, we stand
to lose something that we had begun to enjoy.
