16 One day as we were going to the place of prayer, we
met a female slave who had a spirit of divination and brought her owners a
great deal of money by fortune-telling. 17 While she followed Paul and us, she
would cry out, “These men are slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim to
you[a] the way of salvation.” 18 She kept doing this for many days. But Paul,
very much annoyed, turned and said to the spirit, “I order you in the name of
Jesus Christ to come out of her.” And it came out that very hour.
19 But when her owners saw that their hope of making
money was gone, they seized Paul and Silas and dragged them into the
marketplace before the authorities. 20 When they had brought them before the
magistrates, they said, “These men, these Jews, are disturbing our city 21 and
are advocating customs that are not lawful for us, being Romans, to adopt or
observe.” 22 The crowd joined in attacking them, and the magistrates had them
stripped of their clothing and ordered them to be beaten with rods. 23 After
they had given them a severe flogging, they threw them into prison and ordered
the jailer to keep them securely. 24 Following these instructions, he put them
in the innermost cell and fastened their feet in the stocks.
25 About midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing
hymns to God, and the prisoners were listening to them. 26 Suddenly there was
an earthquake so violent that the foundations of the prison were shaken, and
immediately all the doors were opened and everyone’s chains were unfastened. 27
When the jailer woke up and saw the prison doors wide open, he drew his sword
and was about to kill himself, since he supposed that the prisoners had
escaped. 28 But Paul shouted in a loud voice, “Do not harm yourself, for we are
all here.” 29 The jailer[b] called for lights, and rushing in, he fell down
trembling before Paul and Silas. 30 Then he brought them outside and said,
“Sirs, what must I do to be saved?” 31 They answered, “Believe in the Lord
Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household.” 32 They spoke the word
of the Lord[c] to him and to all who were in his house. 33 At the same hour of
the night he took them and washed their wounds; then he and his entire family
were baptized without delay. 34 He brought them up into the house and set food
before them, and he and his entire household rejoiced that he had become a
believer in God.
Tomorrow is Memorial Day. For many of us, as Christians,
this Sunday morning before Memorial Day Monday can be uncomfortable. Last year
I read a wonderful trilogy of books—Ian Toll’s history of the naval side of
World War II in the Pacific Ocean. They were long books, detailing every major
engagement with the planning, logistical, and strategic components that went
into them. They were a sobering reminder of the human cost of warfare. What our
country did to get through WWII—even just in one arena and in one branch of the
service—was staggering. Ian Toll made me proud to be a part of my country’s
history. The costs that were involved in our story have to be remembered and
celebrated. How close that contest came—and what the consequences would have
been had it turned out differently—must be passed down.
On the other hand…I was driving back across the city last
week and my boys spotted the billboard on 490 offering prayers for the victims
of the Buffalo shooting. Julie and I hadn’t talked about it with them yet. I
tried, while driving, to explain to them what had happened and what it meant. They
had questions, and they were good questions. Why did this man think it was okay
to hate black people? Why was he able to get a gun? Why can’t the president
just make guns illegal? Why can’t we change the laws so that the president can
make guns illegal? How come people on the internet are allowed to say mean
things about people with black skin? I didn’t have answers for their questions.
And I didn’t have an answer when the Texas shooting happened this week.
There is something deeply wrong—something evil--in our
country and with our way of living together that this could happen again and
again…and part of our vocation as Christians is to challenge, to name that
evil, and to try to be a part of its healing.
It's in this tension of loving our country and
celebrating its heroes, and also calling out the deep and seemingly insoluble
problems that are tied up with our culture and its structures of power, money,
and justice, that a slave girl has a lesson for us. She’s called a paidiske.
That can be an affectionate name for a child, or a term for an enslaved person,
or a leering term for a prostitute. Whatever her actual name was, and wherever
she came from, our story is going to start with her, and as you’ll see, there
was something special about her. She had a gift.
First, a word about worldview and context. As a warning,
this is going to be a long walk for a short lesson, but the context about
slavery and superstition in 1st century Rome is essential to getting
into why the characters in our story act the way that they do. We are going to
put ourselves in the sandals of the first century AD, and part of that world,
as inconceivable as it is to us that this could ever be normal for any
compassionate person…is slavery. To understand the anger of the Philippian men
at Paul and Silas, remember that they grew up in a world with slaves, had never
heard of a world without slaves, and probably had no conception of a world
which wouldn’t have them. Like any piece of property, slaves had their prices—probably
about 1,000 denarii for a “used” slave, with as little as 500 denarii for a
slave in poor condition to as much as 6,000 denarii for an “unspoiled” female
slave. That context is especially important later on. Using some very back of
the envelope math, that converts to something like 5,000 modern dollars for the
lowest end to 60,000 for a highly desirable woman. Or, in other words, the
market for slaves was roughly analogous to our market for cars. And yes, we all
should feel revolt at putting a number on a human being in the same way that we
price an automobile. The only defense of that system is that anything else was
unthinkable—just as it is unthinkable to us except as a passing fancy that our
descendants might someday judge us for putting similar prices on
pollutant-emitting internal combustion engine driven vehicles.
The second element of the Roman worldview that will help
make sense of our own relationship, as Christians, to the secular state that we
live in and love, is Roman superstition. If you went up to Brittania, which was
a Roman colony by this point, you would hear stories of fairies in the woods.
Most of the druids had been driven out of France by this point, but the
assumption was that in these wild places—the colonies, the forests of Germany—there
were ghosts and spirits. In the fens of Denmark people whispered stories that
eventually were handed down and became the story of Beowulf. There were spirits
in the trees, dark gods that lingered in the caves of the mountains—and even
aside from the outright “magical” superstitions, there were mountain lions,
wolves, wild boar, and creeping snakes.
It was a dangerous, uncertain, risky world to live in.
And one of the ways that people held together and kept their sanity in this
world—a world where gods were everywhere and not necessarily friendly to human
affairs—was to engage constantly in what we would regard as superstitious
nonsense.
This looks ridiculous through the lenses of our
worldview, late Western modernity. Think about checking the weather. A
lightning strike for us just means pulling our phones out. The storm is
expected to last until 8 PM—easy, scientific knowledge. This way of ours of
separating meaning in the natural world from our own lives would have been as
unthinkable in the first century as their way of detaching humanity from slaves
is to us.
The interpretation of superstitious beliefs, events, and
(critically), the payment for those services in Ancient Rome was licensed and
controlled by the Roman state, and it was done by professional seers.
Professional seers, whatever their rank and station, were
not trying to read the future. Even though we use the word ‘fortune
tellers’ in many translations, they were trying to figure out what the will of
the gods was for a given course of action, or given a new event. Julius Caesar
is on campaign in Gaul Should we attack on enemy tomorrow? Caesar would
regularly put off battles because his augurs would make sacrifices and get
unfavorable readings. That was enough to keep the army in camp for another day.
Whether or not (and, in our scientific, late Western mindset, we know not)
these readings actually showed the will of the gods for Caesar’s battle plan,
the reading of the sacrifices was an important part, a public part—even the
center of the corporate life of the camp. So even if Caesar wanted to press
ahead, though he’d received an unfavorable omen, he couldn’t—because all of the
soldiers under his command would know that something was wrong about the liver
of the pigeon. This was an essential part of who this community was, not a
private and individual action like looking up your horoscope or getting scratch
off lottery-tickets with your phone number, but a public good, like a weather
report, or an amber alert, or a road closure sign. It was called “taking
auspices.” There were five ways that someone could take auspices:
1 Ex caelo. From heaven. This was watching the sky,
usually trying to interpret lightning strikes and unusual weather events. The
senate, for example, was not allowed to meet during lightning storms, and there
were also bits of knowledge actually approaching meteorological science rather
than bald superstition that were passed down through this method.
2 Ex avibus. From birds. Oscine birds gave augury by
singing, and alites by flight. Eagles, vultures, ravens, and owls were birds of
particular importance, and it was interpreting the meaning of unusual bird
appearances or bird behavior that the lowly haruspices had their best chance at
earning employment.
3 Ex tripudiis. By dances. This is my favorite type of
augury, because it involves the sacred chickens. In this practice the will of
the gods was determined by feeding the sacred chickens and watching them to see
if they ate greedily or not. The emperor Tiberius once (to the scandal of all
who were present) threw the sacred chickens overboard after they refused to eat
while waiting for a favorable auspice on his home in Capri. The tripudium was
especially important on military expeditions, and probably (this isn’t too much
of a stretch to imagine) because chickens always eat greedily. One of the games
that my brothers and I would play growing up—we always had a couple dozen
chickens—was to throw a single cherry tomato into the coop and provide color
commentary to the cherry tomato football game that followed. Chickens ALWAYS
eat greedily.
4 Ex quadripedibus. By four-footed animals This method
was unsanctioned for official state augury, but regarded as even more reliable
because it was unofficial. Crossing paths with an animal in ancient times meant
something, and the bigger and/or snakier, and/or more unusual the animal, the
more important the auspice was. Our superstition of black cats crossing our
paths is a fossil of this practice.
5 Ex diris or ex signis. By signs or marvels. Sneezing,
stumbling, flames, funny noises. St. Elmo’s fire. Anything not readily
classified above.
We are most concerned next with WHO could take these
auspices, and we start with the lowest and most unreliable class of auspice
takers—the haruspex, or the haruspices in the plural. Again, their job was
discerning the will of the gods, not predicting what was actually going to
happen. Haruspices had a professional union, but no official status with the Roman
state. They were like mall security—reassuring to know that they were there,
but if there was a problem you would definitely assume that the real police
were going to be called right away, and that the guy in the mall security
office was going to hand the situation over as soon as possible. As easy as it
is to make fun of them, Roman society couldn’t function without haruspices,
because you needed to take auspices for practically everything—from naming
babies to taking boat trips to throwing parties—and to do it without a cheap,
everyday option would be prohibitively expensive.
Official Roman state augurs, however, were trained,
sanctioned, and better-trusted. Though not particularly well-paid or of exalted
standing in Roman society, augurs were necessary for every public transaction. The
historian Livy says that “by auspices this city was founded, with war and peace
led by auspices, all military and private affairs conducted by auspices…”
Critically here, there is a tension in the balance of power, because the professional
augurs were needed to validate auspices, but they were actually taken by
magistrates—that’s a military term, and the same word that we heard in the
passage—and it was the magistrates themselves who were needed to the actual
spectio (or watching) and nuntiatio (interpretation.) Our word “inauguration,”
literally means the bringing in of an augur—you would never swear in a public
official or start an academic term or a sporting event without first taking
auspices.
So we have haruspices trying to read these signs, and
then we have a whole college of augurs reading these signs. At this point I’m
summarizing Cicero’s summary of the “science” of augury from On Divination, and
here’s what he says next:
"Speaking now of natural divination, everybody knows
the oracular responses which the Pythian Apollo gave to Croesus, to the
Athenians, Spartans, Tegeans, Argives, and Corinthians. Chrysippus has
collected a vast number of these responses, attested in every instance by
abundant proof. But I pass them by as you know them well. I will urge only this
much, however, in defense: the oracle at Delphi never would have been so much
frequented, so famous, and so crowded with offerings from peoples and kings of
every land, if all ages had not tested the truth of its prophecies.”
Cicero is describing the most famous and most prestigious
form of divination in the ancient world—the Oracle at Delphi, the incarnate
spirits of Apollo called the Pythians.
He’s actually defending the Pythians against the charge
that they may have declined slightly in recent times, but it is clear that even
in a slump the Pythia remains the “Harvard” of professional seers. There’s the
Pythians, and then there’s everyone else that competes for 2nd place.
There were a number of “pythian” women at any time living
at Delphi. They were famous for giving their answers in verse, and for crafting
them very cleverly in terms that could be interpreted several different ways.
(Even though this wasn’t helpful for discerning the will of the gods, this was
generally regarded as being inspired and impressive.) A pythia was bold and did
actually predict the future. A pythia was trusted because she regularly got
those predictions right. A pythia was frightening because she foamed at the
mouth and looked possessed as she spoke. Coming face to face with the spirit of
the pythia (generally regarded as the god Apollo speaking through someone’s
voice) was an unsettling experience, but as valuable as a whispered stock
market tip from Warren Buffett.
The slave girl in this passage, having the spirit of
divination? Echoun pneuma puthona. She was a pythia. We talked earlier about
the economic realities of slavery in the ancient world, and how slaves were
similar in value to cars in the modern world. When Paul cast out the pythia
spirit, he didn’t just wreck somebody’s car. This was like losing ownership of
an NFL franchise. A pythia was the GOLD standard of augury in a world that required
augury for everything. Their “hope of making money” wasn’t reading horoscopes
for pennies—it was of making a life-changing fortune. Paul publicly made the
pythia spirit go away—it was an unthinkable amount lost, for both her owners,
and (keep in mind, the magistrates are needed to interpret the prophecies) the
magistrates.
Now, note what happens when real money gets involved,
because this is where we suddenly pivot back to something recognizable in the
modern world. Those that stand to lose big strike back immediately, by stirring
up resentment against Paul and Silas because they are of a different religion.
A different race. A culture not our own—traditions we Romans are not allowed to
practice. They circle the wagons of their own religious and political
traditions and use fear-mongering to play on the worst instincts of the crowd.
The owners of the slave-girl have Paul and Silas thrown in jail by the
magistrates (who, keep in mind, are needed to interpret and announce any augury
that happens in Philippi) and they are locked away.
And here is the lesson for us--they don’t resist, and
when the doors to the jail burst open, they don’t walk out. When we challenge
something that big, we stand in the abuse of our oppressors and we don’t resort
to our own legal rights, but we take their hatred until they have spent their
hate and we have saved them. This passage ends with the jailer bathing Paul and
Silas in his home, in the waters of hospitality, and Paul and Silas bathe his
household in the waters of baptism. This is a new kind of living, one that has
never been seen in the world of the 1st century. It is a way of
living that needs to be seen in the 21st century—Paul and Silas did
not take a legal case to the Supreme Court to insist on their religious rights,
and they did not publicly defy the authorities or form a political action
committee. Now, Paul is shrewd, and he does do something like this at other
times—even challenging the Philippian magistrates in the next chapter. But when
it comes down to his own rights in setting things right for this slave girl, he
is not a baker arguing for his religious rights to avoid making cakes for gay
couples—he goes to prison, and loves his jailer until they are washing each
other in the waters of forgiveness and healing.
This has always been a part of the Christian vocation,
and as much as we’ve struggled in this country and in this time to find a
nuanced and appropriate way of being proud children of our country and also
honest critics of our country, there are examples that show us how to be
citizens of Jesus’ Kingdom. In fact, there are modern Christians who have
challenged institutions as massive, as unthinkably embedded, and as profitable
as the office of the Delphic Pythia.
In 2012 Megan Rice, a Catholic nun, entered the Y-12
National Security Complex in Oak Ridge Tennesee illegally to advocate for
nuclear disarmament along with two fellow activists. She went to prison for
this. She was 82 years old. She went to federal prison. It wasn’t her first time. She also served two
six month prison sentences for protesting at the US Army School of the Americas
in Fort Benning Georgia, where she was arrested for demonstrating against the
US Military torture instruction which had taken place there.
In 1917, a 20 year old woman was arrested for picketing
the White House on behalf of women’s suffrage. She went to jail, and would be
imprisoned four more times for protesting against nuclear proliferation. Her
name was Dorothy Day.
But perhaps the best known story, my favorite, and the
one that we’re going to sing about momentarily, is the story of John Newton.
The captain of a slave ship, Newton became a Christian aboard the HMS Greyhound
in a severe storm. He read the Bible and decided to swear off profanity,
gambling, and drinking. No one minded that. He also decided to devote the rest
of his life to bringing down an institution that was massively profitable, and
without which the world seemed unable to function properly. He became an abolitionist
and took on the slave trade. He never went to prison. But he did both love his
country and challenge his country’s deepest flaws.
May God give us the amazing grace to suffer on behalf of
the slave girls, and on behalf of our country, until its deepest, most
embedded, and unthinkably cruel faults have been cast out in the name of Jesus’
kingship, and we are being washed by and washing those who fought us the
hardest. Alleluia, Amen.
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