Reid Hamilton
Local Columnist
Here at the beginning of Pride Month, I had the opportunity to preach on the story of the slave girl with a spirit of divination, from chapter 16 of the Acts of the Apostles.
In brief, Paul and Silas and companions have come to the city of Philippi, and are staying with Lydia, a cloth merchant. On their way from her residence to their local place of prayer they meet a slave girl who has “a spirit of divination [that brings] her owners a great deal of money by fortune-telling.” (Acts ch. 16, vv. 9-16). The girl annoys Paul by following the company for several days, all the time crying out “These men are slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim to you a way of salvation.” Paul exorcises the spirit, who leaves the girl immediately. Her owners, “[seeing] that their hope of making money was gone,” seize Paul and Silas and drag them before the local magistrates, who order them flogged and thrown in prison. (vv.17-24).
The story raises a host of problems both ancient and modern. Like too many female characters in scripture, the girl is unnamed. (Lydia, a notable exception to this rule, is a wealthy head of her own household.) The slave girl is identified only by her role as a slave and her exploitation as a diviner. Her proclamation is accurate; but rather than affirming her message, Paul is annoyed with her. Is Paul determined through pride to be the principal evangelist in Philippi? Is the slave girl undermining his own preaching or authority? Is she placing his message in doubt through her disrepute?
In any event Paul’s exorcism silences the slave girl’s voice, and now her prospects are grim. She holds the lowest possible station in her culture - underaged, female, slave - and is of no more value to her owners. The story immediately returns its focus to Paul and Silas, and the girl is not mentioned again. Her fate is unknown.
Here, then, we have a picture of ancient Greco-Roman culture - a society stratified by money and station, patriarchal, and commercially oriented. Perhaps Paul and Silas, their companions, the owners of the slave girl, the magistrates, and the residents of Philippi, as well as the writer of the story and its first hearers cannot be blamed for inhabiting their own world and time, and hence for overlooking what they might consider a minor consequence of this incident. Readers of both scripture and history are well advised to avoid judging the past through contemporary lenses.
But we can nonetheless recognize that we human beings love to divide ourselves. All of our history, all of our scripture, and all of our existence to now reveals a struggle to determine who is “in” and who is “out.” The issue remains a key question for Christians: is Christianity an “ark of salvation,” limited to the believing few as a refuge and escape from a lost and doomed world; or is it an opportunity for salvation offered generously by grace to all humanity - a promise of a universal realm of mercy and justice and peace? I tend to the latter notion; but neither view permits Christians to oppress other human beings in the name of their own religion.
When contemporary Christians profess that all human beings are God’s beloved children worthy of redemption, doesn’t the story of the slave girl itself undermine our own good news? Episcopalians (for example) vow in our baptism to “seek and serve Christ in all persons,” to “strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of every human being” (The Book of Common Prayer, p. 305); yet here, our very scripture seems to fail of the promise. Paul is overlooking his own message, that “[t]here is no longer Jew or Greek; there is no longer slave or free; there is no longer male and female, for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” (Galatians, ch. 3 v. 28).
If Christians are to take seriously what our scriptures reveal about who we are in relation to God - that is, created in the image of that God who calls us to “learn to do good; seek justice; rescue the oppressed; defend the orphan; and plead for the widow” and to “welcome the stranger” (Genesis ch. 1 v. 26; Isaiah ch. 1 vv. 17-19, Leviticus ch. 19 vv. 33-34) - then perhaps the value of this story of the slave girl is to prompt us to give careful thought to who is being marginalized in our own society and why. White patriarchy, “Christian” nationalism, sex and gender oppression, and greed all blind us to the deep need of our whole culture for enlightenment and compassion. If in truth we are “slaves to the most high God,” then we should be about the work of proclaiming a way of salvation to all.