Dissonance and Resolution
June 1, 2025 – Easter 7C
Acts 16:16-34; Revelation 22:12-14, 16-17, 20-21; John 17:20-26
Over and over, as she walked behind Paul and Silas through the streets of Phillipi, a slave girl cried out, “These men are slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim to you a way of salvation.” Day after day, this girl, whose name we are never told, followed the apostles everywhere they went, relentlessly yelling to any who would listen who it was that had come into their city. You might think that the apostles would be glad to get this sort of publicity, but her cries had the opposite effect. Eventually, Paul couldn’t take it anymore. He was exhausted, annoyed, labored through and through by her incessant cries, so he turned and said to the ungodly spirit within her, “I order you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her!” And it came out that very hour.
Who are the people that annoy you like that? Whose incessant cries drive you to the point of emotional exhaustion—to the point where the only thing you can do is turn around and yell at them to stop?
Lots of people have the ability to bother us, but not everyone can get under our skin like that. I don’t like telemarketers, speed traps, or people who leave their shopping cart in the middle of the parking lot at the grocery store, but, after a moment of frustration, I am usually able to leave them behind. The people who really bother me are the ones who know just what buttons to push—the buttons that force me to confront not only what I do not like about the world but also what I do not like about myself. It is those individuals who instinctively identify that dissonance between the person I am supposed to be and the one who I really am and then hammer upon my inability to reconcile the two that awaken within me true rage.
The spirit of divination within that slave girl could see who Paul and Silas really were, and it knew even better than they did what was amiss within them. We cannot know exactly what brought this girl into the presence of the two apostles, but we can imagine that there was something about them—something about their identity as slaves of the Most High God—that drew this slave girl toward them. Maybe she knew that the God they served had the power to set her free. Or maybe she yearned for the companionship of some co-slaves. Whatever it was, as soon as she came near them, the spirit within her recognized a vulnerability within these two men. It could see the dissonance between the freedom that Paul and Silas proclaimed and the bondage that this girl endured. So the spirit began to shout until Paul couldn’t stand it anymore.
The Bible wants us to recognize and respond to the tension between our faithfulness and the world’s brokenness. The text makes a point of mentioning that it was on their way to the place of prayer that this slave girl found Paul and Silas. As Willie James Jennings writes, “As the disciples journeyed toward prayer, they gained a co-traveler who haunted their prayer walk. Such haunting is necessary and of the Spirit, as the tormented cries of the enslaved must always encumber the pious actions of the faithful.” [1] Even if the spirit within her was not of God, the Holy Spirit had the power to use its haunting voice to bring about God’s will.
But Paul was not a completely willing participant, was he? The author of the Acts of the Apostles makes no attempt to redeem Paul’s impetuous decision to exorcise the demon spirit from the slave girl. There is no language about freedom or salvation here—only the language of annoyance. And that’s the point. When we are confronted by the dissonant collision between what we know to be right and our own failure to achieve it, our embarrassment masked as annoyance must grow into true pain and hardship before we can accept what God is trying to do within us.
What do you think Paul expected to happen when he cast that spirit out of the slave girl? I don’t get the impression that Paul thought a lot about it before he acted, but it wouldn’t take a fortune teller to know that, by eliminating her owners’ income stream, Paul was stepping into a world of trouble. To them, this nameless girl was nothing but property—an investment opportunity—and, now that the money had dried up, those owners wanted someone to pay. They dragged Paul and Silas into the marketplace—the center of commerce—and denounced them as Jews whose unfamiliar ways were threatening the peace and security promised by the empire. The sympathetic crowd was inflamed by their rhetoric, and they seized Paul and Silas, beating them and throwing them into prison.
It was in that moment that Paul finally knew that he had done something right. After being stripped naked, beaten with rods, thrown in jail, and bound in stocks, Paul and Silas began to sing. The hymns of praise they sang to God must have surprised the jailer. Surely he would have expected songs of lament and prayers of desperation, but these followers of Jesus were celebrating because they were wearing the marks of their savior. Regardless of his motives, Paul had managed to put upon himself the suffering of Jesus, which to him was a sign not of God’s abandonment but of his own faithfulness to the one whose reign stood in opposition to those who had imprisoned him. “If you can’t bear the cross,” the old gospel hymn declares, “then you can’t wear the crown.”
At midnight, while they were still singing, the ground began to tremble. An earthquake shook the prison to its foundations. The walls began to crack. The prisoners’ chains fell off. The cell doors swung open. All the prisoners had been set free—not just Paul and Silas but all who had been incarcerated. Fearing what would happen to him now that the criminals were let loose, the jailer drew his sword to kill himself, but Paul intervened. “Do not harm yourself,” he cried out in a loud voice, “for we are all here.” When God looses the chains and opens the doors and sets the prisoners free, the result is life, not death, and we must remember that.
Freedom in Christ means freedom for all. You cannot partake in the saving love of Jesus Christ and withhold that saving love from someone else without experiencing an unbearable dissonance. When you know that you are the underserved recipient of God’s unconditional love and are confronted by those to whom you would deny that same love, the experience is frustrating, emotionally exhausting, and spiritually draining. Often, when someone points out the inconsistency of our faith, our reaction is to use anger and self-righteousness to deflect our embarrassment and shame. Sometimes it just feels easier to retreat behind a wall of bluster and annoyance than to face the truth that, if God loves sinners like you and me, then God loves everyone—even and especially the people who get under our skin.
Who are the people that annoy you to the point of emotional exhaustion, and what is it about them that God is inviting you to love the way that God loves them? In the end, it’s not really the people themselves who bother us. It’s the fact that they represent something about ourselves that we don’t like—something that we wish God would make disappear. But the only way that part of us will ever disappear is if we allow God to love it too—if we are willing to believe that even the least lovable part of ourselves is also loved by God—even that part of us which fails to love others the way that we have been loved.
Confronting that dissonance within us is costly. It usually leads to suffering and hardship. But Jesus has shown us that the way of the cross is the way that leads to everlasting life. “For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen.”
1. Jennings, Willie James. Acts: A Theological Commentary on the Bible. Westminster John Knox Press; Louisville: 2017, 159.
© 2025 Evan D. Garner