A sermon for the Seventh Sunday of Easter, June 1, 2025. The scripture readings are Acts 16:16-34, Revelation 22:12-14,16-17,20-21, John 17:20-26, and Psalm 97.
During the Season of Easter, we’ve followed the old church custom of having our first reading on Sundays be from the Book of the Acts of the Apostle, instead of a reading from the Old Testament. The Book of Acts shows us some of the energy, excitement, and confusion that fueled the spread of the Way of Jesus. We’ve heard stories of healings and conversions, and today’s reading is no different.
Typically, when this scripture passage is preached, the focus is on the conversion of the jailor. Paul and Silas are imprisoned, there’s an earthquake that is so strong, it shakes the foundations of the jail and the doors spring open. But Paul and Silas don’t escape. They stay right there, presumably because they suspected there was something of God’s hand in this, so they waited to see what might unfold. Sure enough, the jailor is so relieved that they didn’t run away and get him in trouble, and perhaps noticing their calm and being curious, the jailor asks about their God. Paul and Silas tell the jailor about God’s love in sending Jesus, and the power of Jesus to bring us through life and even through death, and the jailor and his whole family are baptized. They have a feast, and give us a great story of faith and joy.
But let’s back up. Let’s notice why Paul and Silas were put into jail in the first place. It wasn’t their preaching and healing that got them in trouble—but the WAY in which they did ministry.
The story begins with the slave girl whose name we don’t know. She had a talent for seeing the future and she seems confident enough to follow Paul and Silas and make fun of them. She seems to delight in the fact that while she IS a slave, they use language of slavery to refer to their relationship with God. I wonder if a part of her “trolling” them and proclaiming “These men are slaves of the most high God,” isn’t also a way asking the question: “is slavery” an appropriate image for one’s following a loving, freeing God? Are they really “slaves” in that as male Roman citizens, they seem to have quite a bit of agency and privilege.
Paul has enough of this, and so, out of annoyance, he prays over the slave girl and makes the spirit leave her alone. But that puts the slave girl into unemployment and robs her employers of their income. There’s nothing in the text that suggests the slave girl asked to be healed of the spirit, or even wanted to be healed. Her employers certainly didn’t want her to be healed. I’m not even sure Paul cared about her being healed. We read simply that “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.”
There are other places in scripture where annoyance translates into faithfulness, sometimes doing the right thing for the wrong reasons. Jesus tells a parable of a desperate widow and an unjust judge, a judge “who neither feared God nor had respect for people.” But the widow kept demanding justice until finally, the judge says to himself, “because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.”
A similar thing happens even with Jesus, when a Canaanite woman, a non-Jew and foreigner, asks Jesus to heal her daughter. Jesus ignores her. The disciples are bothered by the woman’s persistence and complain about her to Jesus, so he says very clearly, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” When she gets inside the house and kneels, Jesus replies with that nasty-sounding phrase that probably was based on a saying in his day, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” But the woman brilliantly responds, “Yes, Lord, but even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the table.” Jesus praises the woman’s faith, and realizes his own calling is bigger than he thought, and heals the woman’s daughter.
I like these passages of scripture where someone’s annoyance is turned into faithful action. It gives me hope for the times and places when I might reluctantly manage to do the right thing, but I do it for less-than-holy reasons.
But I also take a warning from the Acts reading about Paul. How often do we do what Paul is trying to do? Whether it’s out of annoyance, or perhaps just a strong desire to DO something, we act, we manage, we control, we manipulate, but we don’t take into consideration the opinions or agency of the people involved.
Paul healed the slave girl out of annoyance, but he might have even justified his action by saying that she had been possessed of a Spirit and would be much better off without that spirit. But what will she do for a living? How has Paul’s intervention made things worse between the slave girl and the owners or employers? Did he even notice that, rather than help the situation, he had made it much worse for everyone but himself.
This is a classic mistake made by leaders who go to great effort to what they believe is the “best or just” thing, but sometimes they consider the people who are affected most. I can’t help but think this is a part of what explains the backlash against progressive politics in our country. Sometimes, programs and leaders have acted on behalf of individuals and communities for noble goals, but have not always considered the day-to-day ramifications of those policies. And so, they voted for people who don’t worry at all about the larger good or the greater goal and only talk about what affects the individual or the individual family. As people gradually realize the extent to which they have been lied to and used by the current regime, there will be space for new leaders and for all of us to listen to what others actually need, and partner with them for change.
Certainly politicians and policy makers sometimes decide what people need before really asking them, and Christian missionaries have this all over the world. But also, there have places where another approach was taken.
In 19th century England, a number of religious orders, especially the Anglican nuns in the Community of St. John Baptist, ran what were called Houses of Mercy. While the men in government passed increasingly restrictive laws around what they perceived as criminal activity, the Anglican nuns welcomed women who were prostitutes into their convents, educated them and gave them skills to get jobs in the world. The sisters took these women seriously and treated each one as a child of God, not as a problem to be solved.
It takes practice and prayer to resist the “urge to fix” and instead, actually listen to people.
It’s hard to put aside our own expectations, hopes, ideas, and suggestions. As a result, we can sometimes do dumb things for good reasons with our colleagues at work, with friends, and with family members. Sometimes we see so clearly how they can fix their lives, or how they can solve a particular problem—”if they would just do this”…. And we can sometimes feel like it’s our duty or calling to get into he middle, to act, to fix, and to manage—just like Saint Paul in Philippi.
Even though the grace of God works with and sometimes in spite of our annoyance or our need to control and manage, the ideal put forth by Jesus is one of union and communion.
In the Gospel today, Jesus is praying with and for his disciples and it is a prayer for unity. He prays that each one of them—each one of us—might be so connected to God through the Spirit, that we are able to act like Jesus in our world. This is an ideal, but it’s a worthy ideal for us to reclaim and pray for, along with Jesus.
To pray for unity, to live for unity, in our day is itself a radical stance. From almost every direction, we’re told to take care of ourselves, put ourselves and our family first. That instruction of the flight attendance to put your own face mask on first to obtain oxygen before helping a child, is taken to a crazy extreme to apologize for self-centeredness and fear of the other. But this is heresy. This individualism is of the devil, who is always about dividing, breaking apart, and tearing down.
Just before his death, Pope Francis wrote a Letter to the United States Bishop underscoring and clarifying the direction of Christian love. Especially as it relates to immigration, but to all issues, Pope Francis reminded people of all faith:
Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups. In other words: the human person is not a mere individual, relatively expansive, with some philanthropic feelings! The human person is a subject with dignity who, through the constitutive relationship with all, especially with the poorest, can gradually mature in his identity and vocation. The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the “Good Samaritan” (cf. Lk 10:25-37), that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception . . . But worrying about personal, community or national identity, apart from these considerations, easily introduces an ideological criterion that distorts social life and imposes the will of the strongest as the criterion of truth. (Pope Francis’s Letter to US Bishops, February 11, 2025)
God’s work is of building, bringing together, reconciling, and making union. Every day, we have choices to make about which way we follow. May we resist the temptation to act before asking, to “do unto” without “inviting into,” and may we remember Francis’s encouragement to pray and act for unity, for sisterhood and brotherhood with all.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.