16th Wednesday after Pentecost (9.19.2012): In the Name of Jesus...Come Out!

Psalm 72; Job 42; Acts 16:16-24; John 12:20-26

From Psalm 72:
4 He shall defend the needy among the people; he shall rescue the poor and crush the oppressor.
13 He shall have pity on the lowly and poor; he shall preserve the lives of the needy.
17 May his Name remain for ever and be established as long as the sun endures; may all the nations bless themselves in him and call him blessed.

 In today's lesson from the Acts of the Apostles, Paul and Silas cause trouble in the Name of Jesus: they ruin some people's "hope of making money" (16.19).

 The problem is, the people making money are owners of a girl who is possessed with a spirit of divination. She brings "her owners a great deal of money by fortune-telling" (16.16). Their money-making, or as Aristotle calls it in The Politics, χρηματιστική (chrematistics) was a far cry from an exchange of goods for an appropriate price towards the end of supporting the activities necessary to living. They were masters of the art of accumulating coinage...for the sake of accumulating coinage (see The Politics, I.ix-x).

 From the lesson from the Acts, their motives in making money are not what causes Paul to pray in the Name of Jesus, casting the spirit of divination out of the girl, rather it is her constant, annoying cries: "These men [Paul and Silas] are slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim to you a way of salvation" (16.17). After days of her screaming, Paul gets annoyed, turns around, and says: "I order you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her." And it came out. Along with the owners' chance to accumulate coinage.

 Paul and Silas are accused of disturbing the peace, and thrown into prison.

 
The Word of the Lord.
Thanks be to God.

 
The Gospel reading from St John gives us some perspective: "unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also. Whoever serves me, the Father will honor" (12.24-26). Jesus is on his way to die. Jesus is calling us to make hard sacrifices, ultimate sacrifices.

 Pardon my back-tracking into the Hebrew Bible: Job has learned this lesson a very hard way, but he too has learned that the way to abundant living is the way of suffering and sometimes requires standing our ground against those who would speak “counsel without knowledge” (Job 42.3).



 My questions are: whose profitable economic opportunities are we willing to ruin? And, will it take us getting annoyed before we speak, in the Name of Jesus, against spirits that seem to be speaking truthfully about God but that ultimately allow for harmful, unnatural chrematistics--accumulating wealth for its own sake--to keep persons made in the image of God under the yoke of unethical economic practice? Or maybe a more probing question is: does our way of life take as a given the unethical treatment of human beings? Does our way of life assume that accumulating currency is at least one of the goals of life? Aristotle explains that this lifestyle is a marker of someone who views bodily pleasure as the goal of life, and so they order their whole life around earning excess currency in order to be able to afford luxuries (The Politics, I.ix.1257b40 and following).

 In the Letter to the Ephesians, St. Paul exhorts us to labor and work honestly with our own hands, so as to have something to share with the needy (4.28). Our excess is to be shared.

Something about the spirit of divination and fortune-telling is unnatural and ungodly, just like the art of accumulating wealth. I’m not quite sure of the correlation yet, but I think they are put side by side in the Acts story for a reason. Could what passes for politics in our country be labeled divination, or fortune-telling? Just like the girl in the story, our politicians scream (sometimes literally) what is true, all the while encouraging practices—like fortune telling—that rely on humans manipulating natural resources in order to achieve what is unnatural: an unlimited accumulation of wealth, an unrealistic progressivism. (The Politics, I.ix.1257b25)  Then they engage in actual fortune-telling: if you vote for me, our nation will prosper. I will create jobs. I will create a stable economy. I will create a Utopic State. If claiming to be able to create jobs isn’t equivalent to claiming to be able to work magic, I don’t know what is. What they could say is: If you vote for me, I will perpetuate our culture of accumulating wealth for wealth’s sake. I will work against nature to manipulate into existence various “hopes of making money” (Acts 16.19) that are a far cry from honestly working with your hands to secure the basic necessities for living and some extra to share with those who are needy (Ephesians 4.28).

Let us look at our culture in America. The cries of "and may God bless America!” ring in our ears, day after day, especially in these last months before our national election. But they are crying for the wrong reasons. Maybe it's time we turn around and exorcise the spirit that has her in bondage. It will cause trouble. It will disturb the peace. And we will most certainly ruin someone's "hope of making money" (Acts 16.19) in our unsustainable culture, maybe even our own.


Let us go forth in the Name of Christ.
Thanks be to God!