Profits and Prophets

Profits and Prophets

The Rev’d Devin McLachlan

Acts 16.16-34

Easer 7, Year C, 1 June, 2025

St Bene’t’s, Cambridge

Exploited slaves, and slaves of the most high God.

 Prophets and profits.

 The spirit of Python, and the Spirit of the Most High God.

 Apostles losing their temper, and apostles keeping their cool.

 Prisoners set free, who stay in prison until their jailer is set free.

 Daytime exorcisms, and midnight baptisms.

 The jailer washing the prisoner’s wounds, and the prisoner washing the jailer and his family with the waters of baptism.

There is a lot packed into today’s reading from Acts; and as with much of the Acts of the Apostles we could just zip through, imagining this all as some great adventure story of heroic apostles.  But that’s not how the two-volume works of Luke-Acts goes — this isn’t Biggles in Pamphylia and Macedonia swashbuckling across the Levant,  planting churches and patting themselves on the back about what jolly good fellows they all are.

I mean you can read the Bible that way, just like you can read the bible and skip past the beatitudes and all those awkward bits about the mighty being cast down from their thrones… Instead, Luke-Acts shows us a community  of astonishingly awkward women and men who over the course of the years following Jesus are changed by the Spirit of the Most High.

The big narrative, redemptive arc here isn’t the unbridled success of  The Church, capital T, capital C.  It’s the incredible transformation of women and men following Christ over time, through hardship and grief,  disappointment and failure, imprisonment, persecution, and death.  The incredible transformation of  women and men following Christ over time, through wonder and joy, surprise and success, liberation, healing, and life.  No one remains unchanged as this new community is forged.

And here, midway through the Acts of the Apostles, Luke gives us an incredible contrast of two kinds of faith. There is the faith of the magistrates and slave-owners in the marketplace, and there is the faith of the prisoners in the dark.  Two very different approaches to faith, and Paul experiences both.  One approach is all about power, stability, showmanship. It’s a prosperity Gospel, prophets for profits, and never mind who is exploited in order to get there. And the other —  the other is Paul and Silas, their chains broken, waiting in their open jail cell until their jailer could be set free, free from unseen bonds of fear and harm.  (None of us are free, the old song goes, none of us are free if one of us is chained.)

That’s a more difficult faith.  That’s the faith that drew in Lydia, the faith that terrified the grasping slaveowners. It’s the faith I struggled against as a young man in my teens: Like a lot of adolescents, I had lost hold of contradiction and the still, small voice, and was puffed up instead with self-aggrandising images of spiritual warfare, a faith of black and whites and bluster and power-worship.

Some other Sunday I’ll tell you the story of how I lost that faith, Today, it’s enough to share that in finding my way back after years in the wilderness I learned about a God who does his work not just in the loud, chain-breaking earthquake, but in the shocked silence after, staying with the broken and calling out: “For we are all here.”

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Scripture doesn’t tell us what happened to that slave girl, the one with the ‘Spirit of Python’ as the Greek has it — the prophesying spirit of Apollo.  No longer being profitable to her owners was unlikely to have lead to manumission at the hands of people comfortable with owning another human being, exploiting her prophetic gifts for cash; abuse was far more likely than freedom. The silence in the passage is damning, and Luke makes it clear that Paul acted with power but without reflection or compassion, “very much annoyed.”

And indeed, Paul’s response to the female slave is very different to his response a few verses earlier to wealthy Lydia.  You can see the outlines of the church which Paul might have founded: Flattering to the wealthy and powerful, dismissive to the enslaved and the poor… The Good News for women as well as men, but only the ‘right’ sort of woman, preferably one with comfortable accommodation. Those sorts of churches are still around; I hope we are not one of them.

But as I said, this isn’t Biggles in Pamphylia and Macedonia. Paul is still learning. He loses his temper, does the right thing for the wrong reason, and almost immediately it all starts to fall apart: Dragged through the streets, angry crowds, antisemitic slurs, and the first of what will be a series of imprisonments.

But there, in that midnight cell, singing hymns, I think Paul was changed. Perhaps he realised he never knew the name of the slave girl; that he had rebuked the spirit because he was annoyed, not because he was trying to set a sister free.  Perhaps he recognised the old power-worshiping Saul and his violent temper; perhaps that shocked slave’s face was before his eyes when the earthquake hit,  when Paul discovered again what kind of church Jesus was calling him to build. The old Saul fell away,  and Paul stood in the darkness, the chains broken and the prison doors flung open, crying out for his jailer to be set free. 

Some proclaim Christ from envy and rivalry… Paul would write from his prison cell in Rome  to that same church in Philippi — to Lydia, and the jailer, and perhaps even the slave girl,  but others from goodwill…proclaim Christ out of love…[1] As we prepare for Pentecost, may we like Paul, like Silas, like Lydia and Mary,  freely proclaim Christ out of love, in one accord and in true humility,[2]  until every one of God’s children is set free.

[1]  Philippians 1.15. It’s worth noting too, in light of today’s Gospel on Jesus’ prayer for the unity of the church, that Paul concludes “ But what does it matter? The important thing is that in every way, whether from false motives or true, Christ is preached.”

[2]  cf Philippians 2.2-4