Narrative Lectionary Key Verse for Today
“But when her owners saw that their hope of making money was gone, they seized Paul and Silas and dragged them into the marketplace before the authorities.”
NL Daily Devotion for Saturday, August 14, 2021
by R. M. Fergus, Clergy Stuff
Despite talk of divination and casting out spirits, Paul’s crime was timeless. He prevented business owners from profiting off of slave labor. He upset the acceptable Roman business-as-usual and people were furious. When the United States government wanted to do this in the 1800s, slave states screamed “oppression!” and seceded from the union and went to war to keep the right to enslave human beings for their own profit.
After the Civil War, all across the south they developed a system in which Black people were jailed for ridiculous offenses (looking at a white woman, for example) and then forced to work in coal mines or other places, thus continuing slavery but under a different name. When those practices were outlawed, we moved to the school-to-prison pipeline in order to strip Black folks of their rights and force them to labor for free in a whole new form of slavery.
And any time someone stands up and calls out the injustice in the system and tries to change it, the people in power get furious.
Paul and Silas got into what John Lewis called “good trouble” for upsetting the unjust system. We are called to do the same thing.
Where is God calling me to take a stand against oppressive systems?
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