Eastertide
May 23, 2022
Scripture Reading: Acts 16:16-34
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. While 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.’ She 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.
But when her owners saw that their hope of making money was gone, they seized Paul and Silas and dragged them into the market-place before the authorities. When they had brought them before the magistrates, they said, ‘These men are disturbing our city; they are Jews and are advocating customs that are not lawful for us as Romans to adopt or observe.’ The crowd joined in attacking them, and the magistrates had them stripped of their clothing and ordered them to be beaten with rods. After they had given them a severe flogging, they threw them into prison and ordered the jailer to keep them securely. Following these instructions, he put them in the innermost cell and fastened their feet in the stocks. –Acts 16:16-24
Money—it is all about money. We are suffering from a pandemic of greed in our country that will be our downfall if we follow the patterns of history. When we reach some level of success as a people, we lose sight of God’s role in our progress and begin to see ourselves as the hope of our destiny. We are, indeed, responsible for how our society survives or even thrives but God is the designer of the universe. Our success is shaped by God’s creation and there is no place for greed in the Kingdom of God. I see it in the news analysis that this or that candidate will win because he or she has amassed the most campaign contributions. It pops up daily on my email, text messages, and phone calls. I receive ten to twenty calls each day from telephone numbers I do not know and do not answer because they are either spam or scams.
1 Timothy 6:10 says it best, For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, and in their eagerness to be rich some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pains. We, the people, can demand better laws to require transparency and limit contributions, but to do so we must wrestle with giving up what we perceive as the perks of greed.
Prayer: Lord, help us remove the greed from our lives to better deal with the greed that surrounds us. Amen.
All scriptures are quoted from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicized Edition, copyright 1989, 1995, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights are reserved.