Slaves of the Most High
God The Rev. Fred G. Garry - May 27, 2001
Texts: Jonah 3 - 4:1 and Acts 16 I walked the neighborhoods this last
week. As part of the hope to form a community development corporation
Summit hosted a neighborhood meeting on Thursday night and to
get the word out invitations were delivered by hand, walking
all the streets.
More than 1000 invitations were distributed.
Most were left on doorsteps or other such places, and some were
offered in person. The result of the effort was exciting. There
were about forty people in all; people from one-to-eighty years
of age came out. Each one of them expressed their hopes for the
future, for the city, for their community, for their neighborhood.
The mayor was here, the city planner, and many representatives
from helping agencies, especially those who work on housing issues.
it was a great meeting, a good start, and much to our surprise,
the work and dialogue that took place will be considered the
first step toward introducing a new section in the city's comprehensive
plan.
The meeting took place, primarily because a
few people walked the streets from here to National and as far
as West Park. The response of neighbors to the hand delivered
invitations was exciting and informative. I learned a lot about
our city and our neighborhoods this week as I walked. One greeting
though stood out above all the rest. It came as I reached National,
having covered one of the side streets South of the school. I
found that the closer you came to National, the more dilapidated
and quite frankly dicey the houses became. Even the dogs were
meaner.
As I came to one such corner, I saw a
group of four people exit a dilapidated house. This was a pretty
rough crowd. Long hair, tattoos, earrings, biker clothes, and
so on. At first I was a bit set back. I was alone and certainly
out numbered. But I pressed ahead and asked the question I had
of all the neighbors I met. "Can I give you an invitation
to a neighborhood meeting?" I said. The man in closest to
me took the flyer saying, "Sure." I stood next to him
as he read it and then he said, "cool," as he handed
it to the lone woman in the group. I stood while she read it
and there was a kind of tense pause as if her opinion was decisive.
And then she looked me dead in the eye and said, "does this
mean you are going to get die blankety blank druggies out of
the neighborhood?"
I was stunned by the question and my
mind raced for a response. The best I could come up with was,
"if that is what you want, then, yes." Walking away
I was stung and humbled by my misdeed. I had stereotyped these
people. I had assumed that they were the blankety blank druggies.
I had rushed to some pretty quick assessments, and they proved
to be untrue. I had misidentified them.
It is hard to tell just who is who today.
Or, let me amend that, it is difficult to tell by how people
dress who they are. It would seem the old adage, don't judge
a book by its cover, has come home to roost in spades. Stereotypes
and quick assessments are not very useful in a culture where
personal identity is much more important than social identity.
Yet still it is hard to go with out impressions or notions, even
assumptions.
We have impressions, notions, assumptions
about who people are. Despite the challenge of fashion we have
titles, ranks, status and in certain situations these are very
important. Just the other day I was working with my son Ethan
on this very issue. He is going to be five on Tuesday so I told
him it was time he knew the truth of his status and rank. "He
was a space baby," I explained. "Aliens left him for
us to raise." Now much to Ethan's credit he didn't fully
buy this story. But he does now respond to the name, "space
boy."
Identity, being identified, is important.
In our passage today we have a classic misidentification. Paul
and Silas are walking through a town preaching and teaching and
they are being followed by a slave, a woman who has the power
of divination; she was a psychic, much like a tarot card reader.
This woman the story goes followed behind them and kept calling
them "slaves." "These men are slaves of the most
high God." Now, this was simply not true. For Paul in particular
was as far as you could get from. being a slave. Not only was
he a free man (there were at this time only two levels to society:
slave or free), Paul was also a Roman citizen, educated, cultured,
connected, and well bred. Hence, everything a slave could never
be, Paul was.
And this title "slave" it would
seem bothered Paul a great deal. The Bible says it annoyed him.
In point of fact annoyance is most likely a polite way of describing
his feelings. This would be close to calling a general a private,
an admiral a swaby and so on. Paul lived in a world of rank and
he was a man of great rank in society. So to be called the lowest
rank, a slave, must have insulted him to no end. He was being
misidentified.
If I were to venture a guess here I don't
believe our world is as cast in stone as Paul's was. There is
a greater sense of equality; we don't have a level of society
we would call slave and another we would call free. We Eve in
a country that seeks to identify all people as free. Yet, in
some ways in spite of this equality, we still have titles, ranks,
and levels.
I experienced this after being ordained
as a pastor. It was quite a shock the first few times I was identified.
I felt misidentified. This created quite an internal struggle
every time I was asked how I should be addressed. Most of the
time I answered, "Fred works best for me." But that
didn't work all the time and in every situation. And as I was
soon to find out, this was something I needed to answer myself.
No where was this more clear to me than
in my monthly chats with a friend from seminary. We graduated
together and were ordained at the same time into similar charges.
There was no promise to do this, but through the last seven years
we have checked in with each other, listened and helped as we
were ever facing similar challenges. Yet from the very beginning
of these phone calls we developed a strange habit. When calling,
inevitably we would get the office person or secretary and they
would query, "may I ask who is calling?" Our responses
to this question ranged from the Pope to Billy Graham, your conscience,
to Elijah himself.
Now on any given day, the thought of
having his secretary go into his office and say, "the Pope
is on line two," was enough to overcome any momentary lull.
Yet, I am not certain when, but I think it was a couple of years
ago, we stopped doing this. It could just be the joke got old.
But I think there is something more. I think the identity issues
we faced, taking on the tides of pastor, reverend, general religious
guy, they had been worked out. But it took some time. It took
some time.
The most intriguing thing about our passage
today is the effect it had on Paul over time. He was misidentified
that was true. He was not a slave. Nor would he ever truly be
capable of being a slave. He was a free man, a Roman citizen
of rank and privilege. Yet, yet in years to come Paul would take
to calling himself a slave, even he wasn't. In the opening of
his letters to the Romans, to the Galatians, and to Titus Paul
calls himself a slave, writing, "Paul, a slave of Jesus
Christ."
Now modem translators have tried to temper
this title by saying "servant." This mistranslation
has spawned a whole series of misunderstandings, such as servant
ministries, and even servant theology. It is a mistranslation,
for the Greek word Paul uses means slave with all the connotations
and stereotypes. Slaves can serve, but they are not servants.
Recently I read a good example of this misunderstanding when
a young man was being charged into ministry. The man giving the
charge called him to be a servant. His hope was to suggest that
being a servant was a humble path that would help the would-be
pastor navigate the challenging waters of ministry. But he was
wrong, for good pastors, as Paul was to find out, are not servants,
they are slaves.
Slaves. Servants are hirelings; they
are day laborers. A servant has a choice to serve, to stay; they
are independent. But slaves are not. It would seem the words
spoke by the divining slave woman stuck with Paul, maybe even
haunted him, until he finally began to address himself as such.
Paul, a slave of Jesus Christ. I believe these words haunted
Paul because of what he did. He healed the woman out of annoyance
and for no other reason he essentially put her life in jeopardy.
Whatever benefit or comforts (in terms of life's goods) were
lost when the divining spirit left her. And a careful reading
of this passage has to wonder what would become of this woman
without her moneymaking skill?
I think Paul asked this question and
probably kept asking this question. It is a classic example of
quick decisions that lead to guilt-ridden nights. So it could
be argued he called himself a slave out of guilt. But I don't
believe that was the reason. I believe the reason Paul called
himself a slave is that he realized in point of fact he was.
That the title spoken by the divining slave was the truth: Paul,
a slave of the most high God. This notion would become a crucial
part of Paul's beliefs and theology. Perhaps the most clear and
provocative was when he said, you and I we were bought with a
price, we are not our own.
Paul was an apostle. He was a teacher,
preacher, and missionary. His charge and ministry is the basis
for just about all pastoral ministry. Hence the would-be pastor
received the wrong charge when he was called to be a servant
pastor. Good pastors aren't servants; they are slaves. Good pastors
are slaves because that is what it means to be a Christian, one
who has been bought with the price of Christ, one whose life
was ransomed on the cross.
This is something though that needs far
more time than a Presbyterian sermon to digest. But let me leave
you something to chew on. Tomorrow is Memorial Day. The day we
remember the sacrifice of those who died for their country. Tomorrow
is a day we should stop and reflect, and weep, for those gave
up their life, who laid down their lives for their friends. Let
your mind wander to the fox holes where young boys clutched pictures
of their sweethearts, let your mind find nurses taking fire in
hospitals, remember those who paid the price of freedom for us.
It was not a service-, it was a sacrifice. Like the line from
the Battle Hymn, Christ died to make men holy, let us die to
make them free.
The cross was not an act of service.
It was a sacrifice, an act of love, paying the cost, buying us
from the slavery of sin. Hence Paul, even though there was nothing
in life that could have made him a slave, could say, I am a slave
of the most high God. He could say this for he came to see the
truth, that his life was not his own, it was made and remade
at a great price, a price paid not out of service, but sacrifice,
the cross. Amen.
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