Readings

Acts 16: 16-34

Our Acts reading follows on from last week’s reading where the reader met Lydia, the dealer in purple cloth, who worshiped God and whose whole household became believers.

This week’s reading has two incidents of liberation—one a slave girl through exorcism which creates hostility from her owner and then there is the liberation of Paul and his companion that results in the jailer and all his household being baptised.

John 17: 20-26

This reading is part of Jesus’ farewell speech from John’s Gospel.  In this section the theme of love fades, and incarnational theology takes over.

I suspect that, like so much of John’s gospel, this has much more to do with the theology of the Christian community where the Gospel was written than what Jesus might have believed or said.  That does not minimise its importance to us but rather increases its importance because it is about how the Jesus event affects the lives and understanding of Christians like us.

This part of the speech is clearly Trinitarian, or rather biniterian. (Two persons of God rather than the full three) It connects Jesus and the Father or creator with no mention of the Spirit, but it also connects us, the followers of Jesus, to the creator as well and Jesus is the active agent in that connection.

The interpretation of the theological language is that this passage is saying that God is not out beyond the galaxies but here within the human condition.  We understand that and relate to God, not through temple sacrifices and a priestly class who speak the divine language or have the divine email address.

God can be accessed from the cloud simply by entering the correct password.

Sermon

The Lectionary readings last week focused on the liberation from an in-groups and outgroups mentality and the benefit to the church and the Divine Realm of acceptance of all into companionship with Christ.

Our two readings this morning highlight the accessibility of God through the Risen Christ and shows how that accessibility can impower people marginalised by their community.  The two Apostles being wrongfully imprisoned remind us of examples of miscarriages of justice in our world and the efforts people make to free such people.  However, the escapades of Paul and Silas should also challenge us to liberate people in our communities who are bound in poverty, homelessness and toxic relationships and dysfunctional families.

Many of us give to food banks and donate blankets for homeless people but we need to consider if that is simply passing gifts through the bars of the prison when those bars need to be blasted away.

School lunches have been in the news for some time now and there is a certain reluctance in the community to supply a free lunch to children when it is the responsibility of the parents to feed their children.  However, children learn better with a healthy lunch and a good education can free children from whatever intergenerational disfunction that makes providing a lunch impossible.  So shouldn’t a caring community be casting off the chains that bind a child and free them into a future that education can guide them to.

When two people with two jobs each don’t provide enough income to pay the rent and feed the family shouldn’t caring Christians ‘stand up and shout out’ for better wages and more community housing.

As well as all those challenges our Acts reading triggers a memory of a song that was a favourite of mine in my folksong period.  In fact, I still have an LP that has Pete Seeger singing that very song

Paul and Silas bound in Jail,

had no money for to go their bail.

According to Wikipedia those lines come from ‘Keep Your Eyes on the Prize’ which is a folk song that became influential during the American Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. It is based on the traditional song, ‘Gospel Plow,’ also known as ‘Hold On,’ ‘Keep Your Hand on the Plow,’ and various permutations.  Significantly for us those lines are based on our Acts reading and relate to people wrongfully imprisoned in the Civil Rights movement in the United States.

However, we also have high profile instances where the justice system has been over zealous and later appeals have seen convictions overturned and large sums of compensation paid out.  Such reversals are not universally accepted and at least one journalist still maintains that David Bain was guilty.  Such  sagas need to remind us of the fallibility of our justice system and the fallibility of the human community.

In the wake of an horrendous and high-profile crime there is often such community hysteria and desire for retribution that is likely to tempt those charged with administering justice to settle for a scapegoat if the perpetrator cannot be quickly found.

There was a recent documentary about a young woman in England who claimed she was groomed and raped by members of a particular ethnic community.

The police quickly determined she was making false accusations but even when she was convicted people preferred to believe the accusations on social media rather than the decision of the court.  As a result some people who had been born and grown up in the town could no longer run their businesses and had to move somewhere else.

People wrongfully accused is a frequent theme in John Grisham’s novels.  Grisham is a lawyer by profession but is quite cynical of some of the practices of his profession. and rightly so, when the advent of DNA freed people imprisoned on death row simply because they were vulnerable to being used as scapegoats. Often their only crimes were poverty and their race. Like those first century Jews Paul and Silas they had no money to go their bail but also lacked the resources for an adequate defence.

In our own nation Lynley Hood’s meticulous research in her book, A City Possessed details the difficulties faced in proving innocence for such a scapegoat whose main crime was behaving differently in a time when people were hysterical about satanic abuse of children.  Hood outlined legal procedure that is structured to protect the process at least as much it is designed to detect any miscarriage of justice.

Hood’s book goes as far as suggesting that, in Peter Ellis’ case, there was more hysteria than crime and so Ellis was used as a scapegoat to cleanse a community of an evil constructed within the corporate imagination.  Wikipedia also noted that the Ellis case was one of several similar high-profile child abuse cases around the world in the 1980s and early 1990s as part of the Satanic panic.  Sadly, Ellis died during his final appeal and there are members of the caring profession who still maintain he was guilty.  Nevertheless, we also have hi profile cases where people have ben irrefutably proved to be innocent.  Where this connects with our Acts reading is the mob hysteria that demand that Paul and Silas be beaten and imprisoned.

They are freed by a miracle that combined a natural event with their own compassion and caring for their jailer.

The exorcism of the slave girl was undoubtedly beneficial to her, but her liberation meant loss of income to her owners who found it relatively easy to whip up antagonism against the outsiders and protest to the authorities.

Even in a non-slave society like ours, economic considerations easily override the rights of the marginalised.  People get agitated about a formula for determining equal pay for women.  We allow immigration of people who will work in low paid jobs and cancel their visas if they protest about their conditions.

Contemporary wisdom tells us that ‘justice must not only be done but is seen to be done’ and the temptation of political expediency twists that wisdom to suggests that, if justice can’t be delivered, at least it must seem to be delivered.  So a person or persons is subconsciously made scapegoat to heal a frightened and fractured community.

It is therefore not surprising that, faced with an agitated community focused on two vulnerable outsiders, the authorities seek to heal that community by beating and imprisoning Paul and Silas and our communities may well be capable of similar action.

John’s gospel records Caiaphas expressing the same concept of apparent justice using the words, ‘It is better for you to have one man die for the people than to have the nation destroyed’ (John 11:50b).  As Christians we remember that one man was Jesus, and his execution turned the word crucifixion into a metaphor for injustice and the use of the innocent as a scapegoat to heal a community’s ills.

In our own world Lynley Hood’s analysis of our appeal process exposes a strong desire to protect the legal system for the good of the community.  That desire to protect the system can even be at the expense of the vulnerable accused.  Teina Pora was wrongfully convicted of murdering a woman he had never met, named Susan Burdett, when he was aged 17.  He served 20 years in Paremoremo prison.  It was later stated that at the time of arrest he had a mental age of nine or ten due to foetal alcohol syndrome.  Malcolm Rewa was subsequently found irrefutably guilty of the murder and Pora received $3,509,048 compensation and a government apology for being wrongfully convicted.  The only thing Pora was guilty of was being easy to convict.

Paul and Silas’ reaction to the unjust imprisonment reflected their Lord’s total surrender and focus on others.  Even when they were given the opportunity to escape, they chose to stay and redeem their gaoler. Eventually they not only received their own release, but also an apology.

We need to let this episode remind us that people are wrongfully convicted.  Sometimes that is simply because they don’t fit into their community, sometimes because they don’t have the resources to defend themselves and sometimes because of community pressure on the justice system.  But if Christians are truly the body of Christ then we must take seriously Jesus’ claim that he was sent to proclaim release to the captives (Luke 4:18).

This reading from Acts reminds us through the exorcism of the slave girl that we must not only seek to release people from the diseases of mind and body that enslave them, but also to seek release for those that we as a community exploit.

The imprisonment of Paul and Silas and events in our own world remind us that a community can, for its own reasons, imprison people unjustly and we are clearly called to confront that injustice.  Furthermore, as we take seriously the warning in the parable that ‘just as you did to the least of my family you did to me.’ (Matt25:40) So we must also be concerned for those we would see as justly imprisoned.  And be prepared to travel along the difficult road of restorative justice and rehabilitation, despite the costs and in spite of the risks.  There is also a calling to care for the families of those imprisoned and open better opportunities to them.

To be part of the body of Christ involves the challenge of being Christ to those around us.  Certainly we must be concerned that people who are wronged receive justice.  But justice must be fair and not just punishing someone because they are different or new to the community.  Furthermore, whatever sentence is handed down to the guilty should be directed towards rehabilitation rather than revenge.

Being part of the body of Christ also means being mindful of the prisons of poverty and disfunction that so easily form within our communities.  Being Christ to others calls us to tear those gates apart and free poverty’s prisoners to the future Christ calls them to.

Paul and Silas were bound in jail and Jesus was crucified.  But:

Dungeon shook and the chains come off

Keep your eyes on the prize, hold on.