Being Right

Rev. Ben Dueholm

May 16, 2010 (Easter 7C)

Wicker Park Lutheran Church

Sisters and brothers, grace to you and peace from God our Father and the risen Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

Over the years I’ve heard a lot of stories from people who grew up in Chicago. Specifically, in parts of Chicago that are very different from my own hometown. I, of course, come from the mean streets of Madison, Wisconsin. What I’ve learned about my own upbringing from the people I’ve met in Chicago is that people who grew up, like me, on the west side of Madison think that being innocent--that being right--will protect us in life. People who grew up on the west side of Chicago don’t seem to make that assumption. It would never have occurred to me or my friends that we might be arrested or even shot in a case of mistaken identity. Or if you got pulled over and one of your friends was holding a substance they shouldn’t have--not that any of us ever did!--that a quick-thinking arresting officer might think to divide the stash among the group and make a car full of arrests instead of just one. And whenever an authority figure at school or anywhere else took liberties with our rights, we reacted with disbelief and indignation.

I grew up assuming that being in the right would protect me in this life. This attitude springs from privilege. For a white person in a country still marked by racial inequality--or for a person from a rich society in a world still beset with poverty--this privilege is usually unconscious. Often, it takes sad and difficult experience to learn otherwise.

Today’s story from the Acts of the Apostles offers one lesson after another in the uselessness of being right.

First, we hear about a slave girl possessed by a python spirit--a soothsayer who apparently earned a lot of money for her owners from gullible travelers. She follows Paul and Silas around town loudly identifying them as slaves of the Most High God, teaching a way of salvation. We have no indication of what made her do this. Perhaps she was trying to gain their attention and help. Perhaps she was mocking them. Maybe she was mentally ill and obsessed with the newcomers and their message. But whatever she was doing, she was not lying. She was giving the apostles free publicity!

Just as we don’t know why the slave girl was speaking so assertively, we don’t know why Paul lost patience with her. Maybe he didn’t care for that kind of attention. Paul refers to himself as a slave in his writings, but it’s another matter to be called a slave by someone else. Perhaps he didn’t appreciate that kind of humility. In any event, an irritable Paul casts the spirit out of the girl.

The story abandons the nameless slave girl then and there. Whatever else happened to her, we know that she lost her value for her owners--a dangerous fate for a slave. She did nothing wrong and told no lie, but her innocence did not protect her from whatever fate her masters chose for her.

The masters are then upset with Paul and Silas for ruining their slave. But Paul and Silas were not guilty of breaking any laws. So the girl’s owners gin up accusations that the missionaries are undermining Roman authority. Since Philippi was a Roman colony, heavily settled by ex-soldiers and their descendants, and strongly committed to the worship of the emperor, these accusations were well-chosen to rile up the crowds. Jews were considered suspicious anyway, so it was not hard for people to imagine sinister activities taking place in the city’s tiny Jewish community.

So Paul and Silas, though blameless, are accused by greed and found guilty by prejudice. They are even beaten by the magistrates, although as Roman citizens the law supposedly prevented them from being beaten. They are in the right, but the right offers no protection.

And so Paul and Silas are imprisoned. But an earthquake breaks down the prison doors. The warden, assuming that the inmates have escaped, fears the shame and punishment that will fall on him. He has done nothing wrong. But he will be blamed. So he decides to take his own life.

Three injustices against the innocent--a possessed slave girl, Jewish citizens of Rome, and a Gentile civil servant--and yet there is no particular sense of shock in this story. We should be offended at miscarriages of justice, but not surprised. Truth, after all, cannot defend herself, much less any of us. We might be in the right. We might imagine that we prevail because we are in the right. But when you look at it closely, more often than not it was some other power or privilege that was in fact prevailing for us. Consider our own fair city. If you were trying to get something done, would you rather be right, or be owed a favor by your alderman? Would you rather have a good case or a good lawyer?

Not that the truth doesn’t matter. All other things being equal, it’s better to be right than wrong. But all other things are not often equal. There is power and greed and prejudice all weighing on the scales. That’s just the way the world works.

But it is not the way God’s kingdom works. Throughout this story in Acts we see God’s saving actions contrasting with the shabby injustice of the world. Paul and Silas sing hymns and prayers in prison, warming their own hearts and those of the other prisoners. Even in chains, the truth has a home and a voice. When the miraculous earthquake breaks down the walls, Paul and Silas do not take advantage but stay behind and encourage the terrified warden and save him from suicide. And so this warden asks what he must do to be saved--to be saved from death at the hands of his superiors, to be saved from a world where right and wrong matter so little. So Paul and Silas preach the gospel to this man who had so recently bound their feet in chains on false charges. This man and his household are baptized. He feeds the missionaries and washes their wounds and despite all that happens, he and Paul and Silas and the whole household rejoice that he had come to know a new and liberating God.

There is more to life than being right. There is more to life than being protected by being right. There is generosity and courage and hope and prayer and song and rejoicing. These are the ways God gives us to triumph over the little failures of justice in this life. These things are the first installment of God’s final triumph over all injustice. From the jail of Philippi to the west side of Madison and the west side of Chicago, there is something greater than being right: the power of God to break down walls where even the right is imprisoned. Amen.