Lesson: Acts 16:16-34

The Kentucky Derby was this month and as they do every year, racing fans at Churchill Downs broke into a passionate rendition of Kentucky’s state song, “My Old Kentucky Home.” It’s likely that the people who sang, “Oh, the sun shines bright on my old Kentucky home” think it’s a nostalgic ode to missing the home we’ve left behind. But according to a report on NPR, Derby fans are disconnected from the song’s history. Stephen Foster wrote the song in 1852, before the Civil War. He was writing about people who were enslaved and had to leave their “happy home” in Kentucky because they’d been “sold down the river.” The phrase, “sold down the river,” has come to mean ultimate betrayal, but it comes from the slave trade. After slave importation was outlawed, people were sold from what were thought of as “slave-growing states” – yes, incredibly enough, that was a thing – like Kentucky to the cotton plantations down the Mississippi River. That was tantamount to a death sentence.

So “My Old Kentucky Home” isn’t a romantic song about home. But even Foster missed this crucial fact: There was no good place to be a slave. The sun never shines bright on slavery. Not even in Kentucky.

It’s a good reminder of how easy it is to miss something, not see something, because we don’t need to, and especially, because it might make us uncomfortable. This passage in Acts challenges us with what we might miss, what even the apostle Paul, or Luke, the author of the Book of Acts, might miss.

Paul and Silas are in Philippi where Paul is increasingly irritated by an enslaved girl who follows them everywhere. She’s possessed by “a spirit of divination,” which allowed her to tell people’s fortunes. She shows us she’s clairvoyant by shouting at Paul and Silas: “These men are slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim to you a way of salvation.” After a few days, she gets on Paul’s nerves. He puts a stop to it by curing her. You’d think that would be a happy ending, but now Paul is in hot water. The girl’s owners were making money from her fortunetelling, and she’s no longer profitable. They have Paul and Silas arrested. They don’t come right out and say that Paul interfered with their financial self-interest; they say that their nation is threatened; their culture is threatened. “These foreigners are disturbing our city,” they argue. “They’re messing with our traditional way of life.” But what’s really at stake is their business. This is about greed. The two apostles end up badly beaten and in jail.

Locked in chains, Paul and Silas hold a late-night revival meeting, praying and singing for the other prisoners. A powerful earthquake knocks the prison off its foundations and everyone’s chains fall away. The jailer decides that taking his own life would be preferable to what the Romans will do to him, so Paul calls out to him in the darkness that all the prisoners are still there. The jailer falls to the ground, asking what he must do to be saved. He and his whole family are baptized.

This story has a tidy ending with our heroes miraculously preserved. The story serves as something of a parable. Everyone in Paul’s world knows how the Roman Empire works, which is how all empires work. Empires exploit people out of greed. They discard people they don’t believe have value. Whenever possible, they scapegoat: they find some outsider, someone different, someone of another ethnicity or religion to blame for everything that’s going wrong and turn the crowds against them. When that doesn’t work to control so-called troublemakers, they turn to violence, incarceration, or deportation.

But all that’s turned upside down with the earthquake. The prison doors burst open, and the God of Paul and Silas proves to be more powerful than any political force. The purpose of this story wasn’t to convince its readers that there’s a miraculous solution to every hardship, but to give them courage and hope that God will not be overwhelmed by empire. The story has an almost vaudevillian quality. It’s supposed to delight an audience that knows the hardship of life in the Roman Empire, people who need reminding that even in the face of that, God makes other realities possible.

This is good news. But those of us who live in earthquake country know that one earthquake isn’t always the end of the story. We’ve learned to expect aftershocks. There are a couple of aftershocks in this story, and both have to do with what’s missing, what we might not notice.

Like the way the girl who was enslaved just disappeared. Once she was no longer profitable as a fortuneteller, did her owners let her go? Did she return home? If so, was she welcomed there? Was she able to return to any semblance of a normal life? Or was she forever damaged by the experience of having been sold into slavery, living as a commodity, as property, for who knows how long? Or – was she sold down the river? We don’t know. Paul merely silenced her; he didn’t convert her. What’s going on with that; wasn’t this girl worth his time and attention? We never even learn her name. Even apostles, apparently, sometimes fail to see what their culture has taught them not to see.

The other aftershock is that although the Acts passage strongly criticizes imperial abuses, it doesn’t take the next step to offer an alternative. That is just missing. But given Jesus’ clear teaching about loving our neighbors – “Go and do likewise” – I can’t believe we’re supposed to sit around and wait for an earthquake.

This passage points to at least one timely “Go and do likewise” step: Some in government are attempting to rewrite U.S. history so that we can go on singing, “My Old Kentucky Home” unaware of the tragedy behind it, and with no motivation to change the culture that produced it. Some in government would have us pretend we don’t know about – no, have us lie about – the inequity our culture has wrought. It is only in facing these injustices that we can undo them.

I am convinced that although these apostles failed to see what their culture taught them not to see, Jesus would have seen the formerly enslaved girl. And perhaps he would have said something like, “If you abide in my word,” that is, if you love your neighbor as yourself, “you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” (John 8:31-32).

Copyright © 2025 Joanne Whitt all rights reserved.

Resources:
Lakshmi Gandhi, “What Does ‘Sold Down The River’ Really Mean? The Answer Isn’t Pretty,” January 27, 2014, http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/01/27/265421504/what-does-sold-down-the-river-really-mean-the-answer-isnt-pretty.
NPR Staff, “Churchill Downer: The Forgotten Racial History Of Kentucky’s State Song,” May 6, 2016,
http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2016/05/06/476890004/churchill-downer-the-forgotten-racial-history-of-kentuckys-state-song