Acts 16:16-23
I once took part in a week-long seminar with a Northwestern University professor named John McKnight. He told the story of a Chicago hospital that had fallen on hard times. The neighborhood and the building were both old and run down. Morale was low. Employees kept to themselves; when anything went wrong, they were quick to shift blame to people in some other department. Turnover was high.
One day the Human Resources department hired a young man to deliver the mail around the building. The young man had Down’s Syndrome and was limited in what he could do. But he could smile like nobody’s business. HR developed a system for him with color symbols; every department had a different symbol on its door, and when the mail was sorted by department, each batch was marked with the appropriate symbol. All the young man had to do was push a cart around the hospital, matching the symbols to deliver the mail to the right place. He could do that pretty well, most of the time.
His effect on the hospital was extraordinary. He smiled at everyone, no matter what. And before long, people started smiling back. That young man changed the entire atmosphere of that large inner-city hospital. Before, when mail got delivered to the wrong department, people got angry and just threw it in their outbox for someone else to worry about.
But now, when the young man misdelivered the mail on occasion, people didn’t get angry. People saw it as an opportunity to run the mail over to the right department in person and find out how Mary’s grandchild was doing or how Sam’s chemo was coming along. People started talking to each other. Morale improved dramatically. And it all traced back to the that guy delivering the mail with a great smile.
The moral of the story is that everyone has gifts. Everyone has worth. And it takes a neighbor to appreciate that fact. When we build on each other’s gifts rather than their deficiencies, we build a far stronger community. Formal systems tend to sort people according to their weaknesses. They use titles like Doctor So And So, or Ms. Smith. But neighbors look at abilities more than deficits. Neighbors most often use each other’s first names rather than their titles. Systems and neighborhoods are both necessary, but they operate according to different rules.
Our passage from Acts today is a good example of this contrast between two different ways of approaching life. We might call them two different kingdoms. We see one kingdom in the owners of the slave girl. We see the other kingdom in the behavior of Paul and Silas. They weren’t official government systems, but rather two different ways of looking out at the world and inward at ourselves.
Roman law allowed some people to own other people and put them to work for their owners’ benefit. Today we would call this system either by its old name of ‘slavery’ or the more modern term of ‘human trafficking.’ Neither is legal in most of the world, but unfortunately, both are still very much around.
Luke, the author of Acts, tells us that the slave girl made money for her owners through telling fortunes. But on this occasion, the slave girl had followed Paul and Silas around the streets of Philippi, crying out that they were “slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim to you a way of salvation.” She apparently did this in a mocking way, because people thought of the Greek God Zeus when they heard the phrase “Most High God.” Paul let her go on at first, but finally the girl seems to have gotten on his last nerve. He turned around and commanded the “spirit of divination” to come out of her.
The girl stopped her annoying behavior. She was either no longer able to tell fortunes, or she was no longer willing to. In any case, her owners weren’t making a profit from her any more.
That’s when we see the kingdom that Paul was up against. It wasn’t official Rome; Paul was a Roman citizen himself and proud of it. The kingdom Paul fought against was universal. It can be found in all kinds of political and economic systems. It goes by many names, but Jesus called it Mammon, as in “You cannot serve both God and mammon” (Matt 6:24, Luke 16:13).
The word “mammon” doesn’t get used often. Unless you grew up with the KJV, you probably won’t recognize it. It’s actually an ancient Aramaic word, the language that Jesus spoke. When the gospels were written, the writers wrote them in Greek since that was the common language of the day, and they translated most Aramaic words into Greek so that more people could read them. However, they left the Aramaic “mammon” as it was. The translators of the KJV did the same, slightly changing the old Aramaic word into the English word, “mammon.” In more modern versions it’s usually translated as “money” or “wealth.”
I would argue that simply translating “mammon” into “money” or “wealth” would not convey all that Jesus meant. Matthew and Luke could easily have translated the Aramaic “mammon” into the Greek word for “money.” But for some reason they chose to hang onto the old word that Jesus had used.
I suspect it was because Jesus had something much larger in mind than just money. True, Jesus warned that money was a dangerous source of temptation, but he didn’t condemn the use of money per se. Some of the early church leaders after Jesus picked up on this. They were convinced that “mammon” referred to the fixation on money that can dominate not only an individual but an entire culture. Mammon is what one recent writer called “a demonic power” (Andy Crouch in Christianity Today, May/June issue of 2022, pp. 68-74: “As for Me and My Household, We’ll Resist Mammon”).
In other words, Jesus warned people against the kingdom of Mammon. Today we might call it the Consumer Kingdom. The consumer kingdom is all about money and things. People are assets to be consumed or used to enhance the bottom line of the company financial report. This slave girl’s owners in Acts 16 cared only about how much money she could make for them. There’s no hint that they cared about her as a person or had any use for her once that use came to an end. They were so angry at their loss of income that they incited a riot against Paul and his friends.
Of course, the owners couldn’t go to the public and complain that they weren’t making any more money. The consumer kingdom is driven by the desire for more, so citizens of the consumer kingdom have no sympathy for people who have no money. The owners trumped up inflammatory accusations and incited a riot.
Paul and Silas were beaten with rods and thrown into prison without a trial. The main concern of the authorities was to calm down the crowd, to maintain order, and it worked: the crowd calmed down when they saw that the officials gave them what they wanted. Justice gets forgotten when mob mentality takes over.
Up to this point, we’ve seen the consumer kingdom at work. There’s never a time when people who live by the consumer kingdom say, “I have enough.”
The consumer kingdom operates differently in some ways today, but is still very much around. People who can’t make it in that system are a problem that leaders may or may not care about. That’s the consumer kingdom talking.
But there’s another kingdom besides the kingdom of the consumer. I like to call it the neighborly kingdom, though Jesus called it the kingdom of heaven. We see it at work between Paul and the jailer. Paul and Silas are thrown into prison, chained and with their feet in stocks. Are they plotting escape or revenge? That was what the jailer expected, but no. They’re singing hymns and praising God in the middle of the night. When a miraculous earthquake comes and the chains fall off and the jail is opened, Paul’s first concern isn’t escape; it’s concern for the jailer’s safety. He calls out for the jailer not to harm himself, knowing that Rome was not kind to jailers who lose their prisoners, and the jailer is undoubtedly terrified.
Paul and Silas don’t take the opportunity to escape. They show compassion for the jailer, though they’ve never met him before that day. The jailer can see that Paul and Silas operate according to some other system than the one he knows, and he wants to learn more about it. He and his entire household decide to live according to God’s neighborly kingdom. They’ve experienced firsthand that it’s a better way to live than the kingdom they know.
The neighborly kingdom is driven by covenant and characterized by trust. Trust can’t be enforced; it has to be earned. When Paul and Silas took the first step of caring about the jailer’s wellbeing, the jailer responded with gratitude and trust. He dressed their wounds and even brought them into his home for dinner with his family. That’s trust. The entire city had been about to lynch Paul and Silas just a few hours before, but this jailer risked the anger of the mob and his superiors because he sensed that Paul and Silas lived according to a better way that he hadn’t known was possible.
Covenants are different from legal contracts. A covenant is a simple vow between people to care for each other. It’s not predictable because people’s lives are not predictable. A good neighbor is someone who honors an unspoken covenant to care for other neighbors. Neighbors respond to each other as life develops, because that’s what good neighbors do.
It’s common to assume that the most important battle for the church today is between religious people and non-religious people. Some people assume that any preacher on TV is at least preaching religion, and any religion is better than no religion at all.
I want to challenge that assumption in the strongest possible terms, because not all religion is healthy. Jesus didn’t have his biggest debates with non-religious people, though there were plenty in his day. Jesus had his most heated debates with religious people who cared more about their systems and their self-interest than about their neighbors’ wellbeing. Jesus’ only violence took place when moneychangers had invaded the temple and changed its atmosphere from worship to rates of exchange. Too often today, churches aren’t actually preaching the neighborly kingdom because the consumer kingdom has invaded the church like a virus and taken it over. Church trappings just provide camouflage so that the rest of us won’t notice.
When the church attacks or criticizes the poor, that’s the consumer kingdom talking in church clothing. When preachers tell you that God wants you to be rich and successful, that’s the siren song of the market. It sounds good, but it doesn’t lead to abundant life. Only the genuine gospel of the neighborly kingdom can do that.
There’s a real need in our world for people who live out the neighborly kingdom. Yes, there’s a place for the consumer kingdom; large systems have to run on contracts and rules and be predictable. When I fly on an airplane, I want the pilots and mechanics to be highly trained and qualified by an official system. I wouldn’t want to fly at the hands of a bunch of guys from down the street who thought they’d like to play around with jet engines today.
But if we’re not very careful, the consumer kingdom can edge out the neighborly kingdom and leave us wondering who we are. Community and human relationships depend on neighbors who care about and trust each other. There’s give and take between neighbors; relationships are two-way and reciprocal.
Jesus once characterized his message in a parable about the neighborly kingdom. He told the story of a Samaritan who unexpectedly helped a crime victim, though the victim came from a different culture at odds with his own. He told his listeners to do the same, to get out there and be neighbors. He didn’t let them off the hook because the neighbors might be different or difficult. He just said, “Go. Be a neighbor.”
Jesus preached the neighborly kingdom, and he calls us to live it out in a world obsessed with consumerism. The great paradox is that although the consumer kingdom is obsessed with building wealth, it leaves us poor in things that matter. The neighborly kingdom calls us to leave our egos behind, but that’s the road that leads to a truly rich life.
Let’s pray.
Lord, we live between two kingdoms. You called us into this world, but you call us to embody your kingdom in its midst. Forgive us for the times when we linger too long in the world of systems and contracts and forget to be human as you created us to be. Help us to be open to our neighbors, wherever they might live. Help us to respond so that they sense the love and acceptance that you have shown to us. In Christ’s name we pray, amen.
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