The Kitchen Sink
An occasional piece of paper
May 20, 2007
Vol. 10 no. 20

Everything But...
           With attacks upon religious faith mounting, referring to a Bible story is not guaranteed to gain you a respectable audience. Skeptics place Bible stories in the same fold with fairy tales, unbelievable stories about how we believe other people should live. Paul’s escape from prison is definitely a Biblical story which is hard to believe. Nevertheless, it has more realism in it than most political documents would ever dare to reveal.
           The narrative in Acts is like a column taken from yesterday’s paper. Paul and Silas and others were staying a while in Philippi and while on their way to worship they kept being verbally accosted by a slave girl who was possessed by a spirit of divination, very handy for financial profit to her owners. After a number of days, Paul was just plain annoyed and exorcised the spirit out of her.
           What we hear is slave, owners, money and abuse, something we hear about almost every day. Weren’t Bible days a kinder, gentler time, or is that what we wish they had been? They were big on violent and brutal warfare, but surely none of this prostitution and bondage of young girls was really prevalent? The saddest debate concerning the quality of human existence is whether we have been more creative being evil or being good?
           The skeptics are skeptical about exorcisms, yet they cannot be about Paul and Silas being arrested, beaten and tossed into a grim jail for freeing that young girl and ruining the local economy. Disturbing our city? Always the best of reasons to suppress good. The two prisoners are singing hymns at midnight and somehow the other prisoners want to listen. Is it getting weird enough yet? Just wait, because God is going to be involved.