First
Presbyterian Church of
Acts 16 and Revelation 22
“The Ugly Roman”
The Rev. Dr. Fred G. Garry
The Book of Acts is like a mirror
with bad lighting. No matter what you
put on, you look bad.
At first glance this ought to be a place
of heroes. Paul and
Silas and their friends doing good work, preaching the gospel, and changing the
world. You could almost read that
last sentence with an announcer’s voice, “Coming to your town soon, Paul and
Silas and their band of disciples [insert action shots]: doing good work,
preaching the gospel, and changing the world.”
I can see the commercial now. How
many times have you been annoyed by a soothsaying, demon possessed slave
girl? It’s just awful. Well there is hope. Paul and Silas are hitting all the stops in
The Acts of the Apostles would be
really easy to read if it were a commercial.
But it’s not. The Acts of the
Apostles is really two things. First,
like the Gospel it is a record, truly, our only record of the early
church. We have a fair amount of letters
and descriptions and apocryphal writings, but nothing like the Luke-Acts
picture. Whether or not Luke is the best
historian or story teller is debatable; whether or not his view is skewed by
Paul . . . open for discussion. But, in
terms of just plain record, this is what we have. So first it’s a record.
Second, Acts is scripture. By that I mean the challenging place where
the Holy Spirit helps us understand the will of God for the church. Notice the word, though, challenging. This doesn’t mean hard to understand; it
means a way of speaking where the truth of the matter is found not given, seen
more in contradiction than in affirmation.
Take the moment with the slave
girl. Here is Paul heading into town for
prayer. A slave girl who is demon
possessed is following them shouting their message for all to hear. First and foremost this is a record. It tells us that Paul and Silas didn’t go to
synagogues to preach in this town but market places; it gives a sense of how
they described themselves: one who offers salvation; and, most importantly,
they went to places where no one knew them, in other words, they were taking
risks.
That’s for the record. And for all intents and purposes it could
easily be a nice story of a healing.
Here was a woman: demon possessed, a slave, and
being exploited for the gain of others.
She is in a bad way and then she is healed. Alright, good. Those apostles were sure good guys. But . . . there is this curious reference
about being annoyed. It says Paul was
terribly annoyed so he healed her.
And here is the challenge, the place
where we meet the Holy Spirit- this little piece of information. In scripture this is to make you pause and
say, “he healed her because he was annoyed?
That doesn’t seem quite right.”
This little tidbit makes you pause long enough to think this
through. A slave woman who is exploited
because of demon, all of sudden doesn’t have the demon, gains freedom from the
possession, but is she now at an even greater risk? If she cannot make money, what will happen to
her? Ohhh! And if you know a little bit about women in
this time in history, without someone to protect her and value her, she is as
good as dead. (This is the big reason
Jesus was so harsh about divorce.)
And this is the challenge of
Acts. On one level it is our best
record. This is what the church was at
its very beginning. And I think there is
something wired into us that loves the idea of the beginning, how things were
way back when. And so naturally we say,
this is the early record, how things were supposed to
be before we got off track, let’s get back to where we once began. This is probably a kind of genetic drive to
return to the Garden of Eden. No joke.
But the problem is that Acts is
written not just as a record, but as a challenge as well. So the stories, while they are accurate,
don’t always work well as a model, or at least a kind of cut and paste
model. The basis of our mission work
with
To do good
instead of harm, we needed to know who was being helped and how it was going to
happen and who would make it happen. At
every step along the way there were moments where I could have just waved my
hand and said, just do it. Take this
money, be responsible, and send pictures.
But such would have created as much harm as benefit, probably more harm.
So when we look at Paul healing
because he was annoyed, Luke is recording how this moment transpired, but he
also creating a moment for us to pause and say, oh, if we are to be about healing
and helping and providing freedom, we need to get to know people, to think
through what healing means, to ask, do you want to be healed? Jesus asked this question all the time: do
you want to be healed. Paul didn’t ask;
he was just annoyed.
And the next piece of our story is the same
way. It would be easy to say, the
apostles are being persecuted for their faith.
Oh these bad people who hurt Paul and Silas. This is true.
No argument here. That is an
accurate reading of the record.
Now not to condone the magistrates,
but they are working from a very popular, albeit unsuccessful, theory of
justice. The magistrates were in charge
of law and order and Paul and Silas obviously had made a mess of the order
side. And we need to remember that the
intent of correction here doesn’t necessarily need to find good results,
optimal results. No one knows Paul and
Silas so if they are bothering the town, well beat them senseless so they will
understand they are not welcome. Well,
maybe that did work.
We need to remember this was and is a
very popular theory of correction or justice.
It is popular perhaps because it justifies itself with circular logic:
if I beat them they will behave better; I beat them; they behave better, until
they don’t. And then the circle of
violence begins again.
I digress. It would be very easy to say, the Apostles
are right, but then again, when Paul healed because he was annoyed, it opens
the door to reexamine the whole story. I
am not going to suggest that Paul and Silas should have been beat. But I will suggest that what they did
disturbed the order of things and this is a big deal. And they were not interested in the
aftermath. Soon and very soon Paul and
Silas would hit the road and say, ain’t going back
there. And the magistrates will be left,
most likely, with the aftermath. My only
hope here is that someone like
I omitted a piece of the story here
in our reading, but I can’t resist. The
next part of this story is the miracle in the jail. You know the one where the walls come
down. And I am one of those
miracle-believing people so I say, Luke’s was a
faithful record. But is there a
challenge even here? If you look at the scenario,
well, maybe. The scenario is that Paul
is in prison and God destroys the jail.
If that is a kind of blue print for what happens to him, then why does
he spend the last part of his life in a jail cell and die as a prisoner?
The Book of Acts, being parabolic,
is supposed to teach us, challenge us, show sometimes
how not to do things more than how to do them.
Well, is God learning too? This
certainly happens in the Old Testament.
Is God part of the steep learning curve here in the New Testament as
well? I know this doesn’t sit well with
God as perfect with all the omnipotent possibilities. But remember, when God works with us he gives
up the freedom of heaven and enters our limitations. Could it be God looked at the broken jail and
said, alright, don’t do that again? (Because he didn’t.)
I bring this up because of the final
part of our story. Paul and Silas are
being freed, quietly. Well, this doesn’t
sit well with Paul. It doesn’t say, but
I believe it is safe to infer, that Paul was annoyed again. You’re not sneaking me out of town. I am a Roman citizen. You need to apologize.
Again, the record is accurate. But the record begs so many issues. If you are a citizen and the magistrates now
are in a vulnerable place, why not use that to your advantage and stay. Find the slave girl and see if her freedom
has cost her life; go back to
When Stephen was stoned by the crowd
in
I want to take just a moment and
catalogue the record of mistakes in our story.
Annoyed Paul puts someone at risk; losing their ill begotten gain, slave
owners lie; seeking a quick answer to strangers, magistrates beat Paul and
Silas; rather than change the heart of the leaders, God destroys the jail only
to see Paul and Silas stay put; safe to go and given the possibility of grace,
Paul demands an apology. All of this is
predicated on the fact that they are running from town to town stirring up
people and then leaving.
It’s a rather harsh image, a mirror
of the church in bad lighting. Paul
looks like the Ugly Roman and we need to pause for just a moment and wonder how
in the world the church ever came to be.
Well, part of the answer is
Yet, the real question with all
these mistakes and blunders is not how in the world did the church come to be? That question was answered in a Roman jail cell
where Paul found freedom. The answer
came in towns where apostles stayed and discovered this is not a drive by
shooting gospel, but something built on friendship and relationships and
partnerships. That is how the church
came to be. Today, though, our question
is not how it came to be, but how in the world is God bringing the church to be
with us?
Because all the lessons Paul learned
I’ve had to learn for myself and continue to learn. All the foibles and mistakes of leaders and
politicians and merchants seem to still be in play. We still beat up what is
strange believing it will go away.
And unfortunately we still put on airs all the time.
What if God is still learning
too? God figured it out with Paul. Yet, what if that had to start all over again
with the next generation? We are still
trying to figure out what it means to be a church. Is it worship and waiting for the community
to come? Is it sending people in
mission, hoping it will help? Is it
coffee hour and a couple of potlucks?
The Book of Acts is like a mirror
with bad lighting. To each one of these
questions we can record successes and with each success there is a parable
percolating underneath.
We are a church. Sometimes I want to cry out like John of Patmos, come quickly Jesus.
Our mistakes are many, our confusion often, and well I will stop
there. Until Jesus comes quickly,
though, we are the church. We are the
body of Christ to the world, freed and forgiven.
Mistakes will be made; foibles and
offences- there will be many. The good
news of Acts, the challenging record of the church, is that God kept up with
Paul and Silas and their blazing path of blunders. God didn’t abandon the project, but is with
us to the end.
We are the church and as such we are
the light to the nations shining in the darkness, a city set high on a hill to
draw the pilgrim. We will draw the
nations unto Christ; we will be the presence of the risen Lord for all to see.
Along the way as we stumble and fall,
there will be grace. There will be grace
as we are not alone. We are in the midst
of a miraculous light- the light of God transforming the world. Amen.