Guest Speaker Delivers Powerful Sermon

                      Carol Rutz-Guest Speaker

Earthquakes as Praise

First UCC Northfield, 16 May 2010

Carol Rutz

Texts for the 7^th Sunday of Easter: Psalm 97 and Acts 16:16-34

I’m here this morning because of hubris. Apparently I said once too often something to the effect that “everyone has ONE sermon in him or her.” That bit of cockiness has caught up with me—and you. I assume you will endure this amateur effort with your customary generosity and good will. And as the deacons scout for additional lay preachers this summer, you may count on me to cheer you on. Meanwhile, here’s my one, single, only sermon.

I should also mention that I draw upon New Testament scholars I encountered as an undergraduate at Gustavus (back in the latter half of the previous century), particularly Bruce Metzger and Jack Clark. Any errors of interpretation I commit belong to me, not to them.

To begin, I want to be clear that my title, “Earthquakes as Praise,” is not intended to slight the human suffering caused by earthquakes. We have way too much recent experience, however indirectly, with the devastation caused by earthquakes in places such as Haiti, Chile, Mexico, and China. I grieve with you and the rest of the world about those disasters and celebrate the efforts of many of you as well as volunteers and governments around the world who are responding. I will come back to earthquakes in a moment, using the texts that Scott just read for a particular approach to them.

Let’s start with the text from Acts. If you were here a few weeks ago, when Mary McNamara of United Theological Seminary was with us, you will remember that she reminded us that scholars assign the authorship of Acts to the same writer responsible for the Gospel of Luke, a tradition that dates from the second century of the common era. While I gather that there is some debate about the details, there is general agreement that the writer we know as Luke was an educated person, likely a physician, who wrote in the second half of the first century. Think of him as writing about 60 years after Jesus and maybe 30 years after Paul’s death.

Writing in Greek, Luke demonstrates an historical bent. He writes from sources, written and oral, to document Jesus’ life and ministry in the book of Luke, and he goes on in The Acts of the Apostles to report on the spread of the early church in detail, offering the names of 32 countries, 54 cities, and 9 Mediterranean islands, not to mention dozens of individual names, ranging from principals such as Peter, John, Paul, Silas, Barnabas, and Timothy to local citizens, officials, religious leaders, and ordinary folks. Throughout the book of Acts, Luke makes an argument for the successful dispersal of the Gospel as inspired by the Holy Spirit and reflected in narratives featuring Peter, Paul, and others as the main characters.

This morning, I would like to call our attention to two startling features of today’s text. If you were listening closely to Scott, you heard the beginning of today’s passage: “One day, as WE were going to the place of prayer…¹⁶” Chapter 16’s use of the first person plural pronoun is the first of four such passages in Acts where Luke appears to be reporting from first person experience. So what’s the big deal? We are accustomed to first person narrative in the New Testament, especially in the letters authored by the apostle Paul and others. But here in Acts, Luke is the first to write himself into the story—whether by claiming status as a witness or employing a narrative device is still debated by scholars. Nevertheless, as I studied this passage in preparation for today, that “WE” popped off the page in a way that I had never noticed—another hubristic moment, since I flatter myself as being reasonably familiar with the Bible.

Second, Luke writes in Greek because he himself is Greek. To our knowledge, he is the only writer represented in the canonical Scriptures who is not a Jew. Therefore, Luke not only chronicles the early Gospel’s diaspora, he does so as a Gentile, providing a direct link to us. As an educated Greek of his time, Luke operated out of literary traditions ranging from Plato and Aristotle (and their precursors) to historians such as Thucydides. If you read Luke and Acts straight through, you will find that, even in translation, Luke is a literary talent, skilled in both Semitic and Greek rhetorical traditions. His way of telling history employs drama and compelling set speeches to advance the Gospel message. Throughout the book of Acts, dramatic moments such as Paul’s conversion (told at least three times, using typically Jewish stylistics); confrontations by Peter, John, Paul, and others with religious or lay leaders; imprisonment; dangerous sea voyages ending in shipwrecks; earthquakes—all of these dramatic episodes characterize Luke’s version of early church history. Luke has a genius for setting the stage for a predictable scene and surprising readers with developments that change the outcome he has led them to expect. If you are familiar with dramatic principles outlined in Aristotle’s Poetics, you know one source of Luke’s training as a writer.

The story in today’s text shows Luke at his dramatic best at establishing reader expectations that will be reversed in the end. Earlier in chapter 16, we are told that “we,” that is, Paul, Silas, and others, possibly including Luke himself, have sailed from Troas and, after some intervening stops, landed at Phillipi. Paul and Silas preach, baptize, and go about their evangelistic business. One morning, they encounter a slave girl, who has “a spirit of divination” that causes her to be a fortune-teller and therefore a money-maker for her masters. She apprehends Paul and Silas and announces that they are “slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim to you a way of salvation ¹⁷.” She keeps this up for days. Paul is so annoyed by this that he calls the spirit out of her; it obeys him and leaves her. Consequently, her owners are furious at the loss of this girl’s fortune-telling ability and their profit, and after a lot of nasty public mauling and accusing and beating and flogging, unnamed authorities fling Paul and Silas into jail, and not just in the holding cell, but “in the innermost cell and fastened their feet in the stocks²⁴.”

Let’s pause a moment. We have heard other stories of demons and unclean spirits cast out by Jesus and his followers. Typically, these spirits do harm to their hosts, who, when delivered of the demons or spirits, express relief and bless their rescuers. This time, however, the spirit’s power differs—it causes the slave girl to speak the truth. What is the problem with that? It’s conceivable that the spirit’s words could advance Paul and Silas’ message. Certainly a clever rhetorician like Paul could put those words to work for the Gospel—pointing to them as yet another proof of God’s power and humankind’s best hope for salvation. Why was Paul so angry? My guess is that Luke wants us to understand that Paul could not countenance the slave girl’s manipulation by a pagan spirit. Given Luke’s focus on the Holy Spirit as inspiration for Paul’s ministry, this demonic manifestation is intolerable. So even though this impulsive calling the spirit out of the girl causes enough trouble to land him and Silas in jail, Paul acts. And as we soon see, a stint in the pokey serves Paul’s evangelical purpose.

Once they are in jail, Paul and Silas spend their time in prayer and singing, well aware of an audience of other prisoners. Suddenly, there is an earthquake that opens all of the prison doors and unfastens everyone’s chains. The terrified jailer prepares to kill himself, because he knows that everyone will flee and he will be responsible. But no one leaves. Stunned, the jailer is immediately converted; he takes Paul and Silas home, he has his whole family baptized in the middle of the night, then feeds his guests and cleans them up. As is the case in many of Luke’s dramatic stories, we see a surprise reversal of circumstances that changes the expected outcome.

And what about that earthquake? Let us return to Psalm 97, which begins with language describing the Lord’s power and the way that earth itself responds: it “trembles. The mountains melt like wax ^4-5.” It would make a tidy story indeed if Paul and Silas were singing that psalm as the earthquake shook their jail’s doors and unfastened their chains. But that detail is not in the story. You now see that this is where my title comes from: the tradition from hundreds of years before Jesus that the Lord cares for all of creation, which is compelled to praise. Therefore, the earth itself is not just a convenient environment for living beings, but an organism that is responsive to God.

Scholars note that throughout the books of Luke-Acts, Luke shifts his vocabulary and imagery from his Greek traditions to Semitic ones at certain times, most notably the speeches spoken by Peter and other prominent Jews. The written sources for his accounts clearly include traditional Jewish texts. One can read the earthquake in Acts 16 as Luke’s using imagery from Jewish praise literature for dramatic effect: the planet participates in the praise lifted by Paul and Silas in their dire circumstances. Luke makes the vivid point that even the earth acts to advance Paul and Silas’ evangelistic work.

In my day job, I teach writing to college students, mostly freshmen. I ask them to conduct research, writing from recorded sources (written, digital, whatever) as well as from oral history, reasoning that knowledge is in people before it is written or otherwise recorded. When it is appropriate, I urge them to include personal experience, to offer themselves as filters of the knowledge they acquire and assemble for their audiences. I urge them to seek models, writers who manage their sources and their ideas successfully. It occurs to me that Luke would be a good choice for a model. From what we can tell, Luke mastered the techniques I am trying to teach, including, perhaps, his own experience, writing compelling accounts that matter to readers and hearers. My students, regardless of their religious upbringing—and these days, my students come from all over the world—are inheritors of rhetorical and historical traditions that long preceded Luke and live on in contemporary Western discourse.

Luke is an exemplar, an historian whose work endures and reminds us of the persistence of the Gospel. We owe much to this long-dead Greek whose commitment to the Good News was indeed earth-shaking.

Amen.