The senior sermon of Winifred L. Mitchell, Class of 2007 from the Diocese of Minnesota, given on September 20, 2006, in Christ Chapel

Text: Ps 72

Acts 16:16-24

John 12:20-26

May the words of our mouths and the meditations of our hearts be always acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

“These men are slaves of the most high God. They proclaim to you a way of salvation!”

“These men are slaves of the most high God. They proclaim to you a way of salvation!”

“These men are ______________________________(silence)

Why silence? As today’s reading from Acts tells us, after many days of being followed by this prophet, Paul became annoyed, turned, and exorcised her spirit of divination…. and then? And then: maybe you are thinking, “I guess I wasn’t listening…..” No, you heard nothing else about her because that’s all we know. She is just silenced. We don’t see her converted, clean sitting at the feet of Paul. What happens to her? Does she get beaten, sent to the kitchen? Sent to a brothel? Sold? What?

Now, for me, this is a problem and I’ve worried about this passage a lot (and not just since learning that it was today’s text). I obviously don’t like seeing a woman silenced, especially a woman with a gift of prophecy that enables her to recognize “ servants of the Most High God who proclaim a way of salvation.” This is because I stand before you as a woman, a gray-haired woman, who spent way too long being silenced; thirty years, in fact, hearing that voice of God call to me and thinking or more accurately, feeling, no this can’t be about me, I’m a woman, I’m unworthy. Fortunately, not everyone takes as long as I did to figure out her call, and I have no desire to blame anyone for how deeply and thoroughly I had internalized the message that women don’t belong at the altar (unless they are in the altar guild).

But I had embraced that view so profoundly in my spirit that I did not even recognize that particular demon through all my years of awakening as a feminist. And it took a man, my husband (whose name ironically is Paul) who loves and understands me sometimes better than I do myself, to say, “why haven’t you ever gone to seminary?”

That opened a floodgate of tears and discernment. So, I don’t want this slave woman, a prophet who recognizes the message of redemption, to be silenced. I’ve wanted to take this text and shake it, to rattle its words until more of this slave-woman’s story falls out from between its lines. So what message is there for us in her story that isn’t there?

First, of course it is Paul’s story too, and I don’t want to be too hard on him. He was annoyed by the woman, right? She didn’t just confront him once; she kept at it. And this woman’s “spirit of divination” was no ordinary unclean spirit, cast out as others before it in the Gospels and in Acts by the power or the name of Jesus: “I order you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her.”

In Greek this spirit was called, not an unclean spirit but the python spirit, a snake, a crafty serpent, who guarded the Delphic oracle, and this python spirit spoke through women who were the prophets of Apollo. Commentaries point out that this is the first time an apostle, a Christian missionary, triumphs over another religion, not a fake magician, not an individual unclean spirit, but a prophet of Apollo. So this is a big deal, and Paul triumphs over that prophet with her python spirit as Elijah triumphs over the priests of Baal. So, snake, woman, triumph, Elijah, I admit that the construction of the story has some power.

There is another first, according to the commentaries: this is the first time Christianity meets and clashes with Roman authority (if you don’t count the crucifixion). Because the slave’s owners get angry with Paul for spoiling their source of income! They don’t seem to mind that their Python spirit has been bested by Christ, but they file a complaint against Paul and Silas for taking away their livelihood and have them chained and thrown into prison.

So the Philippians are angry with Paul and Silas for interfering with their profitable exploitation of the slave woman, at least if we take the story at face value.

Remember, though, that it is common practice for adherents of one religion to view leaders of another as cheap hucksters, fakes, just in it for the money. We all do it, put down the radio and TV preachers who rake in the bucks via their prayer ministries. But do we really know they are fakes? I know I’m mighty quick to dismiss them with a click of the remote, like a modern media exorcism.

Whatever the slave owners’ faith or motives, Paul still triumphs over this pagan religion by exorcising the prophet’s python spirit.

But back to the woman? We don’t know that she didn’t become a Christian; she might have, but the story-teller never enlightens us. Why not? How could Luke (we’ll call him Luke) write the words of the Magnificat: “He has cast down the mighty from their thrones and has lifted up the lowly” and not care about this lowly slave, a girl/women (the greek term doesn’t even distinguish between the two because she is such a non-person). A woman, unprotected, forced to wander the streets performing for the benefit of her owners. How could Luke drop her from the story with no concern for her future? Well I’m sorry to say that this issue of the silenced may be about respectability and image even for Luke. He contrasts the wild, prophesying salve girl with Lydia, who precedes and follows her in the Acts narrative. Lydia , the dealer in purple cloth, the woman of some means, a gentile who fears God and converts to Christianity, and opens her home to the Apostles. A respectable woman, not a street-rough prophet who may have been sexually unbridled, disheveled and foaming at the mouth, as Crysostom described the Apollonian prophetesses of his day. So her conversion would be bad press for the fledgling church. Better to portray the new Christianity as a religion of respectable women and men, not the wild, unruly street woman. So the church then as now preferred and benefited from the prosperous and the respectable more than the enslaved and marginalized. Better to silence them and drop them through the cracks of the narrative. But they were there. We don’t know about this slave woman, but we know others. One 2 nd century source (Pliny) mentions two slave women who were Christian deacons that he tortured for their beliefs. And the deuterocanonical Acts of Thecla introduces us to a once respectable woman who abandons her high social position and her wealthy fiancé to follow Paul after she hears him preach.

So I ask you, who have we silenced lately to keep our Church looking more respectable?

Just this past Sunday, a man accosted me in the parking lot and asked me, “hey Lady, have you got any food. I really need to eat.” So I am into respectable charity, (and proud of it) so I gave him a dollar, and you know what he said? “Well this won’t help!” No kidding! He’s got that right, and said so more effectively than a whole sermon on the millennium goals. I’m ashamed to say that I let him walk away. And then it hit me — I ’m writing a sermon about silencing and I just tried to shut this guy up with a dollar?

Dominic Crossan says that the tension in the New Testament and throughout the ages in the church is between the radical liberating love of God on one hand and the world’s social conservatism tugging on the church on the other. So the author of Acts wanted to present a story of a respectable church, a church of ordinary God-fearers, not misfits and agitators. But whose words ring out to us through the ages? Not Lydia’s — with her purple cloth, she does not have a single line in the New Testament. It’s the wanton, wild slave-prophet whose voice still calls out “These men are slaves of the most high God. They proclaim to you the way of salvation.” Amen.