Commemoration of John Calvin and Saint Augustine of Canterbury
May 27, 2001
© 2001 Grant M. Gallup
Acts 16:16-34 We met a slave girl
or I Samuel 12:19-24 It has pleased the Lord to make you a people
Psalm 68:1-20 Exsurgat Deus, or 47 Omnes gentes, plaudite
Revelation 22:12-14, 16-17,20 Take the water of life as a gift
John 17:20-26 I made your name known to them
It happened without a fanfare, without the world reporting it, but in the first reading today we hear of it still without regard, unless it is pointed out to us: Luke, in his second volume of church history writes that "with Paul and Silas we came to Philippi of Macedonia, a Roman colony, and were met by a slave girl." What cataclysmic changes are summed up in that one sentence! What a seismic shift! What a watershed of history! What is so stupendous about it? Three things at least.
"We came to Macedonia". The place is far from Nazareth, from either Bethlehem of Galilee, or Bethlehem of Judea. It is even far from Antioch, where the disciples were first called "Christians," for Antioch is still in Asia Minor. But Macedonia is across the seas, IN EUROPE! In last week's lesson Paul and Barnabas were in Lystra, far from home indeed, but in what is now Turkey, still in the mysterious East. Gentile, indeed, but not European. Now, as if in response to the Ascension, wherein our Lord has become available to all humankind, Paul and Silas have crossed over into Western civilization with the evangel. "Go ye into all the world", the church heard the Rabbi say, and so its contagion begins, at the edge of Empire, to liberate the gospel from its confinement in a remote province on the margins. It is as if from some distant hill town in Nicaragua, Cuba, or Colombia the message of liberation had slipped out and rafted or wetbacked itself into the imperial homeland, in Florida or Texas. (Ronald Reagan feared the Latin American revolution would cross the Rio Bravo into Harlingen, Texas; George W. Bush has been wise to learn the tongue of those Cristianos that have already waded ashore on the north bank of the Rio.) The contagion began back there in Philippi, an imperial colony then, named for Philip of Macedon, the father of Alexander the Great. Octavius (later called the August one, an ascription of divinity) and Antony had conquered it in 42 B.C.E. and made it into a miniature Rome. Its citizens were proud of its Roman prerogatives, to which they appeal to have Paul arrested, in today's reading. They claim that Paul and Silas "advocate customs that it is not lawful for us Romans to accept or practice". "Us Romans," mind you, in Palestine! Like "us Gringos" in Colombia. Paul and Silas start something that day which they had no ideaa would ultimately wear out the Empire and establish a universal Church. Paul would within a decade be executed by beheading, his dubious privilege as a citizen of the Empire, instead of crucifixion, for the threat he became to that very Empire. The church itself would ironically in the coming centuries be colonized by Rome as we accepted Rome's prerogatives, its power, its symbols, its imperium. That's the further story, another chapter indeed, of the continuing need of the gospel to liberate and be liberated in the human story. In our own time, for the first time, in 1986 Desmond Tutu became the first non European, the first Xhosa, to be archbishop in Capetown. In our lection today, the gospel is liberated from Galilee into all the world.
Luke writes, "as we were going to the place of prayer, we were met by a slave girl." Philippi did not have a synagogue, for it had too few Jews to build one. Till now, wherever Paul went to preach in the Gentile world, he had gone to the Jews of the Diaspora--his countrymen scattered all over the world, living in their little "ex-pat" colonies, like us gringos in Managua or San José. The Italians would ultimately give one such colony the name "ghetto". But here in Philippi the gospel is in a way liberated from the start, by not having a place of its own, indoors, to meet. It would again of course be dragged indoors and housebroken, but here Paul and Silas are on their way to an open air enclosure on the banks of the Angista river, which the Jews had chosen as their meeting place for prayers. There will always be something about preaching that likes street corners, that finds riverbanks agreeable for baptisms, hillsides to be natural amphitheatres, that can find parables in a picnic basket. It's hard to have parades in church, although we try every Sunday to provoke one with our processional crosses.
One of the advantages of Outdoor Christianity is that we meet people. Interesting people. Prospects. And so "we met a slave girl who had a spirit of divination and brought her owners a great deal of money by fortune-telling." She follows the missionaries, and makes a nuisance of herself by serving as an unwelcome amplifier at their meetings "for many days" until Paul was much annoyed. He exorcises her on the spot, and she ceases at once to be a nuisance and a fortune-teller. The gospel here has one of its first clashes with consumerism, and the commoditizing of religion. It interrupts free trade, and stops commerce in its tracks. But her managers, agents, producers and directors are now angry, for they see "that their hope of making money was gone" and so Paul and Silas are dragged away to where? To the MARKETPLACE, which becomes now and will remain throughout the histoy of capitalism, the place where all religion will be appraised. So they will be judged, beaten with rods and jailed, with their feet fastened into the stocks. (Stocks and bonds?)
But liberation strikes again! The gospel of God takes a while to sink in to human culture, estranged as it is from good news, fond as it is of fortune-telling, far as it is from justice. Slavery ends not when the slave owner decides to end it, but when the slave is liberated from those who market her as a hot property, her insights and her gifts. Nat Turner in the south in 1831 had the spirit of being a slave expelled from him by the same good news from God, and Agosto Cesar Sandino decided that el Yanqui was an invader and needed to be expelled from Nicaragua. It all began that day when the gospel crossed into Europe and liberated a slave girl. All slavery's days are numbered from that day.
So it must be noticed that it was a GIRL who is liberated that day. Jesus had begun it all, by touching women, who were the property of other men. For a Jewish man to touch the women of other men was to make himself ritually unclean, but he moved in compassion. He accepted women disciples, some of whom were seen as sinful because of their socializing with men as equals in discipleship. For him, the image of God was feminine as well as masculine, for Ruach (the Hebrew for Spirit) is a feminine noun in Hebrew and Aramaic. Jesus knew Wisdom as Female, too. He taught Paul to deal with women through gospel, across cultures too. Paul laid the poultice of gospel on the sick psyche of the girl at Philippi, and perhaps he remembered that the gospel had begun with a young mother named Miriam, visited in her pre-marital pregnancy by an angel, and named her Son her Liberator.
In Philippi a woman was the first convert to the gospel--again, a business woman, named Lydia, a "seller of purple". That means she ran a shop where cloth was sold, and purple dyes extracted from shellfish, much used for textiles. She is symboic for us today of all the women who have held up the ministry of males in church, and supported it financially. She was prosperous, and when she was converted her household came along, and were immersed with her. A strong, independent woman, she invited the Aposle to her home, after he had been sprung from jail. She was grateful to Paul for ending the mistreatment which men had given to the young slave girl, as well. What a story is overlooked here, what fun the Bible is when we pick it up to find Liberation. The hospitality that women have shown to the gospel has not often been returned by its male captors. But Lydia's heart and home were open, and the gospel is about open-ness and openings.
The opening of Europe and its old institutions, the opening of hearts and minds, of slave-quarters, of human sexuality, of jails--when Paul and Silas are put into the "inner prison" and fastened with chains. At midnight, in the praying and singing of hymns there is an earthquake, as praying and singing will do. Malcolm Little learned it in a Michigan jail, and became Malcolm X. Martin Luther King learned it in Birmingham jail, and history writes itself from there. Nelson Mandela taught an earthquake how to happen in a continent's history in our own time. That part of Macedonia where Paul and Silas were is subject to frequent earthquakes, somewhat like Managua, where we feel them regularly several times a month, and where the city was levelled by one in 1979, that took with it as an ancillary benefit the dictatorship that stole from its victims. The gospel itself is an earthquake that opens jails and will one day destroy the U.S. prison system and its colonies of death. A fault line lies across north America, snaking its way under every "house of correction."
Liberation was on a roll in the Acts of the Apostles today. Paul does not try to escape from jail based on such "luck" nor does he see the earthquake as an Act of God on his behalf. He gives thanks because it softened the jailer's heart, and Paul preached to him not to harm himself in despair that his prisoners had escaped and he would be held accountable. "We are not going anywhere. We are all here, at your service in the gospel. We won't go until we've helped you escape, because it's you who is captive here, not us." It's all of those who lock up the good news in prison, who are captives indeed. Dr. King wrote from Birmingham Jail to the white clergy of Alabama to tell them it was they who were enslaved in the prisons of their own racism, in the penitentiary that is White America. When Ralph Waldo Emerson visited Henry David Thoreau, in jail for refusing taxes and resisting the U.S. war on Central America, he asked him "Henry, what are you doing in there?" and he shot back, "What, Ralph, are you doing out there?" It was Thoreau who was fully free in jail, and Ralph who was imprisoned in a merely academic freedom. "Jesus prayed for his students," John begins the gospel lesson today, and then he opened it up and listened to his own prayer, too, and prayed, "I do not pray for these only, but also for those who believe through their preahcing." And so the prayer of the High Priest Jesus is liberated to include all of us, and prays even now for me and you. And the gospel says that Jesus opened the way into God's heart for us: "The glory which you gave me", Jesus says to the Father, "the glory wich you gave me I have given to them, that they may be one, as we are, that the world may know." The Eastern Orthodox Church speaks not only of God becoming man--the doctrine of the Incarnation, which Anglians are so especially fond of, but of humankind becoming God. For we in the West have not yet fully grasped the meaning of the open-ness of God. Jesus has liberated us from the wall that separates us from God, so much so that he promises that we are to be "perfectly one" with him, and through him, to be perfectly one" with God. And John on Patmos, too, saw that Jesus is the A to Z of our language about God, our understanding of God, and says that the heavenly city has gates that are ALWAYS OPEN for us. "Come," says the Spirit. "Come," says the Bride. And let the one who hears say "Come."
The heart of God is open to us, the One in whom as in the womb of a mother, Paul would preach, we live and move and have our being. Liberation, open-ness, an open gospel, an open chuch, open earth and open skies, an open heaven, an open and liberated God.
GRANT GALLUP
CASA AVE MARIA
MANAGUA, NICARAGUA C.A.
gallup@tmx.com.ni
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