Radical Imagination

Acts 16:16-34

One day, as we were going to the place of prayer, we met a slave-girl who had a spirit of divination and brought her owners a great deal of money by fortune-telling. While she followed Paul and us, she would cry out, ‘These men are slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim to you a way of salvation.’ 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.

But when her owners saw that their hope of making money was gone, they seized Paul and Silas and dragged them into the market-place before the authorities. When they had brought them before the magistrates, they said, ‘These men are disturbing our city; they are Jews and are advocating customs that are not lawful for us as Romans to adopt or observe.’ The crowd joined in attacking them, and the magistrates had them stripped of their clothing and ordered them to be beaten with rods. After they had given them a severe flogging, they threw them into prison and ordered the jailer to keep them securely. Following these instructions, he put them in the innermost cell and fastened their feet in the stocks.

About midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the prisoners were listening to them. 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. 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. But Paul shouted in a loud voice, ‘Do not harm yourself, for we are all here.’ The jailer called for lights, and rushing in, he fell down trembling before Paul and Silas. Then he brought them outside and said, ‘Sirs, what must I do to be saved?’ They answered, ‘Believe on the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household.’ They spoke the word of the Lord to him and to all who were in his house. At the same hour of the night he took them and washed their wounds; then he and his entire family were baptized without delay. 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.

You know sometimes I find myself really wishing the Bible wasn’t so relevant for today’s world. I find myself thinking there is no way a thousands-year-old text should still be speaking to us today. If I’m being honest, I’m looking forward to the day when we no longer need this thing. I’m looking forward to the day when we read about millenia-old xenophobia and are no longer able to see such clear connections to today’s world. I’m looking forward to the day when the powerful, including the religiously powerful, are motivated by something other than wealth and profit.

There’s a lot going on in this story, so I want to begin by sort of laying it out in simpler terms— the story begins in a really odd way, with this slave girl, who many modern scholars believe was probably mentally ill; but her mental illness, for these Biblical times is thought to be a demon of some kind possessing her. Even more troubling than that, her mental illness, or gift of divination, fortune telling, whatever you want to call it, was apparently being used as some sort of parlor trick for her rich masters. They were making money off her fortune-telling, apparently. In what seems to be some kind of state of psychosis, or mania, or something, this poor girl is following Paul around exclaiming the same phrase over and over; then Paul, in a fit of annoyance, rids the girl of her demon, her illness, or power, whatever it may be. (Now, I personally found it troubling here that Paul rids her of her demon, but not of her bondage, but there’s just too much going on in this story, so I’ll have to save that issue for another sermon). The Romans are mad because Paul has, as they see, destroyed a great money-maker for them. He's cured this slave girl, so that her masters can’t make money of her anymore. And so even though Paul and Silas didn’t legally do anything wrong, they’re violently beaten and thrown in jail. This is where it gets just absolutely infuriating—the Romans, in order to make it seem like they’re doing the public a service by throwing these two Jesus-followers in prison, they say, “These men are disturbing our city; they are Jews and are advocating customs that are not lawful for us as Romans to adopt or observe.” First of all—this was a lie. There actually weren’t any laws against advocating for or teaching customs of other faiths or traditions. And second of all, it’s classic xenophobia. This is pretty much the Romans saying that Paul and Silas are disruptors, and they’re foreigners destroying the Roman way of life. But all they were doing was advocating for a world in which hierarchies no longer exist; a world in which these powerful men would no longer be able to own slaves, to make profit off the backs and in this case, minds of other human beings. The powerful feel threatened, and, as usual, when the powerful feel threatened, they want to make others fearful as well, manipulate people into thinking that these do-gooders are going to mess up life for them too.

Ever since that horrific racially motivated shooting in Buffalo a couple weeks back, people have been talking about the “great replacement theory” that the gunman had subscribed to. White people in this country, ever since its discovery by Europeans have had all the power here, at the expense of others. A recent Washington Post article notes that “Central to [this] theory is fear of losing power to people of color coming from other countries.” This is a horrible racist way of thinking, and in a recent poll, 34% of Americans believe it.[i] 34% believe there is some kind of conspiracy to replace white people with people of color. And one of that 34% brutally murdered eleven innocent people two weeks ago.

And here in the Bible, we have the Romans, claiming that what Paul and Silas are doing is bad for Roman society, that advocating for equality and equity is bad because it means they’re trying to destroy Roman culture. But this had nothing to do with culture or tradition—this has everything to do with power. The Romans in power were trying to maintain their chokehold on the oppressed, which is exactly what people who subscribe to the great replacement theory are doing. Like I said, I truly long for the day when the Bible isn’t so relevant for today.

And so, Paul and Silas are thrown in jail. And then you have this miraculous earthquake that frees them, and the conversion of the jailer who Paul saves from killing himself, really dramatic stuff, right? But the thing that really caught my attention was the fact that Paul and Silas were praying and singing. I don’t think it’s an accident that right after it’s mentioned that they were singing, that the miraculous earthquake comes. And it immediately brought to mind the Black spirituals that originated during the sinful era of slavery in this country—people in bondage singing as ways to keep faith, to cope, to look forward to a time of freedom.

There’s a beautiful article from last year about the history and the theology of Spirituals. The author of the article, Kaitlyn Greenidge, writes,

Spirituals are meditations on the triumph of the metaphysical over the physical realities of slavery. They attempt to answer profound questions: What happens to an enslaved person when she dies? What does it mean if her life has been so denigrated on earth? What does freedom feel like if your only access to it is in your imagination? What miracles of God are needed to get free?”  

What miracles of God are needed to get free?

Greenidge, who is Black herself, goes on to say,

And we have been making [these leaps] ever since, in every freedom struggle, including the one that’s played out this past year, as some of us ask the world to imagine what justice would look like, what a community would look like, without a reliance on the carceral to keep “order.” We are champion imaginers, usually thinking of things ten, twenty, one hundred years beyond what our masters, captors, police and jailers ever could.[ii]

Greenidge, like her ancestors before, uses her imagination to look forward to a world where there is no more mass incarceration; where this new Jim Crow of prison labor is no more. I truly believe this kind of radical imagination is what Paul and Silas were using when they were singing their hymns and praises at the top of their lungs while sitting bruised and cut and broken in jail. They sang about what “miracles of God are needed to get free.”

We can learn something from this. We live in such a broken world. It often feels broken beyond repair—especially at a time like this, when, as we come upon the 10-year-anniversary of the Newtown elementary school shootings, we are grieving yet another one in Texas—thanks to a lack of action coming the powers the be, by way of a claim, not dissimilar from the Romans— a claim that anyone attempting to pass any kind of gun legislation is attempting to destroy some sacred aspect of American life… at the expense of the lives of innocents. It’s hard to imagine anything changing at this point, isn’t it? It’s hard to imagine a world in which the deaths of innocent children matter.

But Church, imagination is what it’s all about. Or at least that’s how it starts. I love what Kaitlyn Greenidge writes about the Black imagination, about these people in bondage, men and women, entire families, coping with songs about a life of freedom that only existed in their imaginations. Men and women who were born and lived and died in slavery who still managed to hope and to dream and to sing of a better world. And has Greenidge says, these folks were ahead of their time—imagining a world without slavery decades, even a century before it actually happened.

Let’s imagine a world in which we no longer need active shooter drills in schools. Let’s imagine a world in which we’re no longer numb to the mass shootings that happen almost daily in this country. Let’s imagine a world in which our leaders actually care, actually do the work they profess to do, actually work for the people they supposedly represent, actually protect the vulnerable.

Now, after this earthquake that breaks the chains and crumbles the walls of the prison, the jailer who was keeping guard is about to kill himself, as this was apparently expected of him if he supposedly failed at keeping his prisoners imprisoned. But Paul stops him, and the jailer asks what he must do to be saved. I wonder what he wanted saving from—I wonder what heinous acts he may have committed as a jailer, what horrible orders he was forced to follow. I wonder if it was simple this radical act of compassion from Paul that moved him. After everything he has done, after imprisoning innocent people, following the orders of an oppressive and cruel regime, Paul could have just let him do what he was going to do. But I wonder what he saw in this jailer. I wonder if his radical imagination intuited something about the jailer, intuited that his heart was as open as Lydia’s, that he was someone who was searching for a better way of life. Paul could imagine a world in which this jailer saw the error of his ways, saw how broken the world was and decided to change. And what Paul imagined came true.

It's Memorial Day weekend, and so there’s a lot of language about protecting our way of life, about protecting freedom, about people who have died for the values of this country. I think we need to look long and hard at what those values are—what values did these brave folks die to protect? The way things are going right now, I worry that those deaths were in vain.

There’s another point that Greenidge makes in her article about spirituals. She makes not of the fact that by and large, the Black population doesn’t use the word “died.” They say “passes” or “transitioned,” or some other related euphemism. Because for many “died” is so final. And after a life of degradation or pain or fear, to have it all just end with death is tragic. And so this radical imagination comes into play again— the afterlife that we pass onto is imagined as the paradise, the freedom, the post-racial world, the peaceful world that tragically just hasn’t come to fruition yet.

And so on this Memorial Day weekend, as we’re asked to think about those who have sacrificed their lives for this country, I want us all to think about what they passed on for— I hate to think that this senseless violence is it.

But this can’t be it. There’s too much finality in that. Today, we’re wrapping up the season of Easter, the season the revolves around the destruction of violence and death and the radical imagination of new life and resurrection. A new and better world is possible—a world where money and profit no longer determine who is in charge, determines who gets to live a good life and who is oppressed; a world where there is no more bondage, no more prisons, no more perpetual war machine. The best thing we can do on this Memorial Day is imagine a world where no one will be called to war ever again, where those who have passed on can look down from paradise and know it all meant something.

I don’t care how Pollyanna or corny or unbelievable it sounds right now—if we can imagine an earth as it is in heaven, we can work together to make it happen. Amen.

[i] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/24/great-replacement-theory-polling-whiteness/

[ii] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/05/t-magazine/black-spirituals-poetry-resistance.html