What can we say May 29? Easter 7

    Acts 16:16-34. I'll preach on this - and am pondering a structure in which I'll begin at the end: at midnight, with singing in jail. Then backtracking: how did they get there? The slave girl's liberation. And then back to Lydia (last week’s lection!) - and the fact that God had called them to come there, and ask what challenges God's call entails, but then how the joy and peace come.

   How humorous: Paul encounters a possessed woman, evidently traipsing around after him, and he gets annoyed! Like the demons who recognize who Jesus is, this possessed slave girl knows who Paul is! Was Paul annoyed by her bellowing? Or by the system that puts a girl in such a predicament – a slave for the profit of others? Yes?

   Background: for centuries, people had travelled to Delphi (a stunningly picturesque place!) to consult the Oracle there - which was a temple where the priest would lead you to speak with the Pythia, the "pythoness," a woman who would breathe subterranean hallucinogenic fumes, and utter (allegedly) the words of Apollo. A famous case: Croesus, king of Lydia (fitting for Acts 16!) asked the oracle if he should cross the Halys and attack Cyrus's army. The response, "You will destroy a great empire," excited him. Then he asked if he would rule long. Her reply, "Your foe is but a mule." He crossed the river and was thrashed by Cyrus. Yes, he did destroy an empire - his own. And Croesus didn't parse that a mule is a mongrel, and so was Cyrus (his mother a Mede, his father a Persian). Delphi was so profitable that they set up branch establishments in cities around the empire - including Philippi.

   Once this enslaved pythoness was healed, the reaction of the citizens in Phillipi – a “little Italy” of relocated Roman veterans – tells us about early Christianity and raises a question about our purpose today as Christians: “These men are disturbing our city… They are advocating customs that are not lawful.” Light years from us blessing America and the status quo. Shouldn’t this top the job description for today’s pastors? “Disturbing our city”? “Advocating customs not lawful for us”? Paul clearly didn’t get the memo about keeping politics and religion separate… And so they are imprisoned in what must have been a cold, hard, dark stone cavern with zero amenities.

   “About midnight.” This could serve as a lovely cadence for the sermon! Paul and Silas, “about midnight,” instead of whining, they sing. In The Children, David Halberstam tells about the night in 1961 in a Jackson, Mississippi jail. A young civil rights protester with a stunning voice began to sing.  The cells grew quiet, enthralled by James Bevel’s solo.  The white prison guard demanded quiet.  But Bevel sang on.  The guard arrived at the door and asked for the radio:  “No radios allowed in here – you niggers ought to know that.”  Bevel replied, “You ain’t getting the radio – not this one.”  And then he continued singing “The Lord is my Shepherd.”  The guard, uncertain if he felt anger or faith, walked away.

   God opens the prison. Can’t verse 26 be a sermon? “The foundations of the prison were shaken.” Not just Paul and Silas, but all the prisoners! Willie Jennings, in his wise and provocative commentary on Acts, suggests that “the disciples of Jesus cannot escape our necessary confrontation with prisons.” Our society labors under the illusions that prisons make us safe, that prisons are and enforce morality. God overturns all this. Acts 16 questions all systems that overly imprison those who need not be there – like ours. Jesus shows us how people come to be treated as criminals. We serve a God who was unjustly arrested, charged, sentenced and executed.

   The jailer asks, “What must I do to be saved?” He’s kin to the guards at Jesus’ tomb! The door’s open. Did Jesus’ guards get to ask? Paul exits, but he doesn’t scramble away. Jennings: “Paul will not go quietly into freedom.” It’s a matter of justice. Paul demands redress as a Roman citizen. Jennings alludes to Nelson Mandela’s release from decades in jail. F.W. de Klerk informed him suddenly and quietly he’d be taken to Johannesburg and released – a matter of government/PR expediency. Mandela objected. He wanted his release to be public. He sought public dignity. Instead of being taken to Johannesburg, his preference was, “Once I am free, I will look after myself.”

   Ponder the Philippian church. Meeting in the home of relatively wealthy Lydia, we have her, a slave girl, and a middling government official, the jailer – and his wife and children. The Jesus movement fashions churches that cross social boundaries – and then there is a unity in Jesus that the world thinks impossible, which comes into play in our Gospel lection!

   John 17:20-26. Jesus prays for those who have not yet believed! How hopeful. Including… us! Of course, we are thus also the object of his prayer when he asks God his Father the we be one. Denominations cockily divide, sure they are God’s holy guardians of truth – rather Gnostic-like. Jesus-style unity isn’t uniformity. It’s togetherness in difference. God made us different, and delights in difference. Division is on our side, not God’s. Check out my blog on Jesus’ prayer for unity and things Methodist in particular forget when they get ready to split, including great wisdom from Peter Leithart, Francis Schaeffer, Christina Cleveland, “Hillbilly Elegy,” Ephraim Radner, Hans Urs von Balthasar and more!

   Why does unity matter? You can make the case that divided, very different churches offer more open doors for the wide variety of people God seems to have created. Pentecostals for the bodily emotional, Catholics for lovers of order, Greek Orthodox for multi-sensory folks, and so forth. Jesus pinpoints why it matters: “so that the world may know.” Boom. The world won’t know the oneness of God and the intimacy between God and Jesus and thus with us because we are divided, we are the anti-answer to Jesus’ own prayer.

   No use going on a rant about all this – except to name the embarrassing sin that division, and our lean toward sides in church life, and invite all of us into a season of confession and repentance, not celebrating our side won or pouting that our side lost, nothing but a mirror image of how it goes with our culture’s idolatry, political ideology.

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  Check out my non-leadership leadership book, Weak Enough to Lead.