Dr. Ray
May 12, 2013 Easter 6
Acts 16:16-2416
One day, as we were going to the place of prayer, we met a slave girl who had a spirit of divination and brought her owners a great deal of money by fortune-telling. 17While she followed Paul and us, she would cry out, "These men are slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim to you a way of salvation." 18She kept doing this for many days. But Paul, very much annoyed, turned and said to the spirit, "I order you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her." And it came out that very hour. 19But 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. 20When they had brought them before the magistrates, they said, "These men are disturbing our city; they are Jews 21and are advocating customs that are not lawful for us as Romans to adopt or observe." 22The crowd joined in attacking them, and the magistrates had them stripped of their clothing and ordered them to be beaten with rods. 23After they had given them a severe flogging, they threw them into prison and ordered the jailer to keep them securely. 24Following these instructions, he put them in the innermost cell and fastened their feet in the stocks.
Two horrible incidents took place in Boston on April 15th when three people were killed and dozens were wounded in a bombing incident. The subsequent chase of the bombers resulted in the shooting death of a fourth victim who was a university security officer.
The second incident took place two days later in a small Texas community called West. There was an explosion in a fertilizer plant that killed 15 people and injured nearly 200. More than 150 houses and buildings where totally blown apart or destroyed.
Two events in one week in April: What do you know about the Boston bombers? You know the names of the two brothers (djoh-khar tsahr-ny-ef, ta-mər-lahn) Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev. Immediately after they were identified, reporters were sent to Russia and hounded their mother and father for details of their lives.
Tamerlan was killed in a gun battle with the police. Dzhokhar was injured and hospitalized under arrest. Reporters filled hours of broadcast time with very few details to give us. We know that they used two pressure cookers to make the bombs. We know that they put nails and metal balls into the pressure cookers. We have seen dozens of photos of them walking through the streets of Boston carrying the bombs in back packs wearing ball caps and appearing satisfied with the mayhem they created.
We have gone through hours of hand wringing about which Mosques they attended. What websites they visited. We have heard interviews with their college roommates, we know about Tamerlan's ex wife and Dzhokhar's penchant for smoking pot. And we have all listened to debates about whether this was domestic or foreign terrorism, or if it was just two crazy people creating mayhem and we've heard endless speculation about how they were radicalized. Should Dzhokhar get the death penalty? What help did they get from other family members or friends?
It was a horrible event and it was indisputably newsworthy. But if what these two deranged young men wanted was to cause disruption and draw attention to themselves then they have received their desired reward many times over.
Now, you know where I am going with this...... what do you know about the explosion in West, Texas where five times as many people were injured or killed and many more homes and businesses were destroyed? Who owned that fertilizer plant? Where did he or she go to church? What chemicals exploded and why?
Now, some of you are thinking, "Boston was intentional murder and West, Texas was an accident," and you are right. However, let me tell you about the accident.
The fertilizer plant was operating in a residential area which is dangerous on the face of it so you would expect some extra precautions, right? However, this plant had not had a safety inspection since 1985.... Nearly 30 years ago. At the time of that inspection, they were fined $30 for improperly storing anhydrous ammonia, which is a key ingredient in the manufacture of methamphetamine.
The plant was licensed to store no more than 24 tons of anhydrous ammonia but at the time of the explosion they had more than twice that amount. They also had ammonia nitrate, which is very explosive. So much so that if you have as much as one ton if it you have to register its location with the Department of Homeland Securities. But the plant didn't have a ton of ammonia nitrate, they had 270 tons and had not reported that fact nor had they installed security cameras, guards or even filed an emergency fire plan.
The people who died in that blast were volunteer firemen who went running into what amounted to being a bomb factory without the owners saying a word of warning about what was likely to happen if a fire broke out around 300 tons of ammonia.
Yes, the Boston bombers were crazy, murdering psychopaths whose profile and motivations are endlessly interesting as we try to understand that horrible event. But why is the media silent about the West, Texas tragedy? Was it really an "accident"? Why do the owners of that plant get a pass in our collective awareness?
We have a kind of funny story before us from the Book of Acts today in which Paul and Silas are on a preaching tour and they are being bothered by a young slave girl whom the text says was possessed by a demon. The narrative doesn't read in a very complimentary way to Paul because it doesn't say that he took sympathy on the slave girl and did her a favor. It says that the girl was annoying him and so he cast out the demon.
What interests me about this story is not the demon part but the fact that Paul and Silas were unmolested as long as they were just preaching about believing in Jesus. But, the text explains, this girl was owned by some men who used her in a profit making scam and when Paul somehow took away this girl's unique ability to speak under the influence of a spirit, then the owner's lost profit.
Religion is one thing, but when it interferes with business then that is something else altogether. In fact, when Paul disturbed the marketplace.... When he cut into their despicable money making scheme, they dragged them into court, stripped them and beat them. Then, by court order they were flogged and thrown in prison.
Trying to convert people is not interesting. Religion for religion's sake..... not all that interesting. But what is really sacred is not ideology, it is money. They were willing to flog the hide off of Paul and Silas for getting in the way of making money because profit can cover a multitude of sins.
You have all heard the saying about the media that, "if it bleeds, it leads." We tend to follow news in the way that people stare at a car wreck. So why did the media obsess about a story in which four people died and nearly ignored a story about an explosion where 15 people died? Part of it is, undoubtedly, the deference shown to east coast events over southern events. But it is more than that..... one was ideological and the other was an accident that happened in the midst of the process of making money..... now, it was making money in a way that the people involved knew was extremely dangerous for the people who lived around the plant, the people who worked there and even for the meth heads who came in every night to steal enough anhydrous ammonia to make a batch of meth.
But our corporate owned media doesn't like to talk about the casualty count that comes from greed, from capitalism run amok. The American public has been given so little information about this incident that most of us don't even have an opinion about it.
And our government is seriously discussing not giving student visas to students coming here from Muslim countries but they are not discussing how their deregulation and cut backs of industrial safety inspectors made this disaster in Texas possible.
It is sadly true that in our present day, most terrorists are Muslims, unless, of course, you count what is done by formal armies against civilian populations as terrorism ..... if killing innocent civilians through military force counts as terrorism then the focus shifts from Muslim fundamentalists in the direction of Israel and the United States..... so we are not likely to call that terrorism anytime soon..... and you can't ask the victims of drone strikes what they think because, well, no one at the morgue is giving interviews.
The media ought to be talking about what happened in the Exxon oil spill in Arkansas. The media ought to be talking about this absurd Monsanto protection bill that President Obama signed to absolve Monstanto in advance for any injuries caused by their Frankenfoods. And the media ought to be talking about how deregulation has left even the businesses that handle the stuff that dangerous drugs and bombs are made of completely out of any accountability at all..... flooding our southern states with cheap methamphetamine and sometimes blowing up small towns. The corporate media won't touch those stories because they are a part of the same profit chain as the abusive corporations.
For what it is worth, I learned more about the Texas explosion from Russian media than I did from American media. But more importantly is that the mainstream church is no different than the corporate media. The church, that has hidden pedophiles and embezzlers to protect their income stream does not take on the issues that affect the marketplace because they are all part of the same fabric of money based ethics.
And if we don't want to be just like them, then we have to be willing to keep casting demons out of the marketplace knowing all the while that doing that will keep us in a certain amount of trouble.
I don't have a convenient passage of scripture to quote about that but I will quote that great American philosopher, Mark Twain, who said that "Sometimes the highest compliment a man can be paid is by being hated by the right people."
If the institutions that create poverty, endanger their workers and the people around them and try to make people disposable and profits sacred want to drag us into the public square and flog us then I am willing to suffer the compliment of being despised by their ilk because I sure don't want them to think that they can buy my silence or count me as being one of their friends.
We have decided to follow Jesus rather than the church and we will always be found among the poor, the powerless and the people who generally die in silence.
