Belonging*

The first time I went to Crete, to Heraklion, was my first experience of both Greek society and what could be described as New Testament ambience. That is, learning a little bit of Greek and a little bit of Greek ways of being turned out to be really helpful in understanding stories like the one we heard today. On one trip, as usual I flew in from Amsterdam. That means I got up at 3:30 to catch a flight at 6:30 that arrived in Crete about 11:30am. I went directly to sleep for several hours. Then I needed coffee. So I wandered out of the hotel and found (no kidding) a Starbucks— tucked into a corner of a narrow street. It was sunny and warm and I sat outside sipping my coffee and watching people go by. Pretty soon I became aware of two small boys who were playing nearby. They were laughing merrily, so I started to watch and I noticed they had a shiny red top and they were twirling it rapidly so it would spin. Then they would follow it along and when it fell, they would laugh and pick it up and move a little bit and start over. It took me awhile to become aware of the adult a few meters away who was directing them about where to play. And it took me awhile longer still to realize it was all about entertaining people like me in the hopes of getting thrown a few euro coins. About the time I figured it out the manager of the Starbucks came out and shooed them away.

I remembered this when I was pondering that young woman in the story from Acts, who it says had a spirit of divination. My trusty commentary supplied the information that what she was doing was what we would call ventriloquism—throwing her voice—so, you see, it sounded like her prophecy was coming from the sky or even from Paul and Silas, the missionaries. This got me to thinking about how things often are not what they seem, which is another way of saying things often are more complicated than we want to know. Like the two little boys with the top, this young woman was earning money— a great deal of money it says— telling fortunes and throwing her voice.

So an obvious question is, why would Paul mess that up by ruining her gift?

This great story is actually full of drama and interesting, umm, characters. For instance, Paul is our hero, we know he is an apostle of Christ. But we forget that he was an itinerant preacher, homeless and penniless, dependent on living ‘ in the homes of his converts. We forget that he spent his days preaching in the marketplace. Imagine how you would react if you went to the supermarket to buy some lettuce and in the produce section there was a homeless guy preaching loudly at you? That is about how Paul looked to the people of this town. And one more thing, we also forget that Paul had had a stroke—his conversion experience on the road to Damascus, his near death in which Jesus Christ spoke to him directly and set him on the course that would see him create the church we know today, that experience also left him disfigured and unable to speak clearly. We also have the character identified as the jailer, probably a Roman official. He had the tough job of roughing up criminals and responding to the mob scenes in the city. We forget he would have been a soldier representing the occupying authority. He would have been torn constantly between his job and allegience to the Roman government who had control of his life, and the people over whom he had authority.

“That we all may be one.” This is Jesus’ prayer in the garden in that long night of the soul before his Crucifixion. It is his prayer to God for his disciples and for us— for all who have heard his word. In this moment of utter despair, Jesus prays to God that you and Jesus and God and me might always all be one. The hard part for us is to understand that God has already made it so. We all already are one. Whether we like it or not, we are all one, because each one of us and every one of us is created in God’s own image. And there is the key to this puzzle. God’s image is the image of diversity. God’s image is the image of all of us and each of us different as we are and yet together too. So, nice gay and lesbian people like you and me and other “characters” all are one. Jesus said: “As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us …” And so it is.

But why did Paul exorcise that demon and cause the young woman to lose her gift and her job? The reason was, she prayed for deliverance, constantly. The story tells us she “kept doing this.” The story tells us she knew Paul and Silas had the news of the Most High God, of a way of salvation. For her, salvation meant “healing.” In the New Testament healing means becoming one with the community. Salvation is belonging forever. This young woman, an outcast her entire life, just wanted to belong. Don’t we all, just want to belong? Paul, who knew the spirit of Jesus Christ, made it happen. He made it possible for her to belong.

This is the Gospel in simple terms. That God already has made us all belong. Our salvation is, that we all, already, belong.

©2016 The Rev. Dr. Richard P. Smiraglia. All rights reserved.

7 Easter (Acts 16:16-34; Psalm 97; Revelation 22:12-14, 16-17, 20-21; John 17:20-26)