From Exploitation to Exponential Liberation: A Woman's Gospel Story
The bible text for this week’s sermon is available at https://bible.oremus.org/?ql=519111821
Photo by Aditya Saxena
If we had any notions that following Christ and proclaiming the Easter News of resurrection would lead to a life of plenty and ease…I think we can set those aside now.
The Saul who once thought hunting down and condemning those who didn’t believe what he did was the most faithful thing to do…
who used religion as a weapon of control…
whose life was completely disrupted and upended by an encounter with a living God…
who was invited to live into his true identity as Paul the apostle…
whose eyes were opened to an expansive divine embrace…
This man’s life has both been ruined entirely and wholly refreshed.
A few years ago I got to visit the streets of ancient Phillipi where this story takes place. It’s just up the coast from the city of Delphi with its temple to Apollo, made famous by the women who were kept there as religious slaves, drugged, marketed and revered as future-telling oracles for nearly a thousand years. Touching the stones engraved with their words and walking through the ruins of marketplace stalls, it made clear that what Paul and the apostles were saying and doing…wasn’t happening in a vacuum. Their words and actions don’t take place in an abstract fantasy world, or a kind of biblical movie set. Paul was rubbing elbows with actual local business owners in the public market and speaking to the crowds on the steps of city hall. The message they carried about the Gospel, the Good News that God has saved the whole world, flies directly in the face of the empire which proclaims that Augustus Caesar (and the socio-political-economic-military system that empires create) has saved the whole world. This is the imperial power that Paul is up against. This is why followers of the Way, what we would eventually call Christians, keep ending up in jail.This is a living faith, a resurrection life that causes us to join Jesus in the work of “setting the prisoners free.” People need freedom from all kinds of things.
In today’s sacred story we see the Gospel moving this unnamed woman from a life of exploitation to liberation. Perhaps her wisdom, her voice, and the gifts of what her body can create was once a source of joy, but when she is reduced to being valued only for one particular corner of her being, it becomes a curse. Her expansive identity and her autonomy are taken away. She is no longer treated as a beautiful child of God, but only as an object to control. They don’t care about her or her message, only what her body can produce for their benefit. This way of being has no place in a world being transformed from death to life. The people of God break the rules where they stand in the way of people’s whole-hearted being and liberation. In the name of the resurrected Christ, Paul disrupts an unjust reality - not just because it’s an ethical response, but because as someone following in the way of a living Christ, it’s an inevitable expression of complete liberation. Doing so has real consequences for Paul and Silas, but even those can not ultimately hinder what Christ unfurls.
Anyone who insists the Gospel isn’t political should count the number of times Paul gets arrested. It isn’t partisan, but it will always be political and the reaction by those defending the status quo is often one of rejection and violence. I wish Christianity WAS seen as dangerous - not for the way Christians abuse divine power OVER others, but for how we would disabuse those in power of the notion that we will allow the indignity of others to persist.The first followers of Christ did not proclaim Good News by what they would restrict, but rather what restrictions must fall away in the wake of resurrection.
The very jail that would try to hold Paul and Silas and their disruptive message of liberation bound, is split open. Freedom and dignity are restored to the woman, to Paul and Silas, to all those locked up beside them, and even to the jailers. Within the system he has served, the only outcome of this “failure” must be destruction. Within that system, they are slated for death but beyond it they are blessed into life, life that extends and is shared. This liberation includes both the oppressed and the oppressor. We see salvation in body and soul.
The promise of liberation is not just for noble freedom fighters. It is also for thieves like the ones Jesus found himself hanging beside on the cross. It is for those imprisoned mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and physically. The gospel means that liberation is also for the jailers, those complicit in injustice. It is a grace for the jailers AND all their people – their families, their culture, their society.
Our text ends, but the story does not. The culmination of this unraveling is not a circle of kumbaya.This is still more to set aright. In the verses following, Paul does not excuse those who abused and restrained him. Rather, he insists on accountability. He uses his societal status to demand an apology, a PUBLIC apology to match the public disgrace, and ultimately a departure. The men are escorted out of town so that they may not return to the mechanisms they used to hurt others.
There are a lot of people fearful tonight that the mechanisms of this American Empire will soon restrain them and those they love, much like this woman and/or those who would defend her. I will not downplay how much this stands to truly endanger and harm all of us, and particularly those who already face so many hurdles in our society. This world needs to hear our song of ultimate body and soul soaring freedom. It has the power to shake the walls that keep us separated and trapped. It transforms those who have guarded those walls, thinking they were the best way to keep things good and safe. This Gospel song absolutely ruins us, but simultaneously restores us to a new way forward. Amen.