The Seventh Sunday of Easter, 1 June 2025, Eldroth, Clapham
Today’s amazing episode from the Acts of the Apostles, I call the story of the Three Spirits of Philippi.
You can visit Philippi today – the ruins of the once-great Macedonian city are a UNESCO World Heritage site, on a hill near the river Angista, overlooking a plain that leads down to the Ægean coast. In the time of the visit of Paul and Silas, Philippi had become a colony of the Roman empire, a ‘miniature Rome’, under Roman municipal law, and governed by two military officers appointed directly from Rome. Today’s tourists walk through the remains of the city’s exceptional Roman architecture, its streets having being modelled on Rome itself. [1]
Who were the Three Spirits of Philippi? I call them the spirits of the enslaver, the enslaved, and the saved.
The saved were Paul and Silas and their companions, including Luke the writer of the Acts of the Apostles, who by today’s account was clearly an eyewitness to the events of that day. They had given themselves completely over to the spirit of the living, resurrected and ascended Christ – God’s Holy Spirit – to guide them on their missionary tour of the Mediterranean, to empower them to preach the good news of Jesus in the public places of this Roman-occupied world, to challenge the pre-eminence of the Roman gods with the gospel of the salvation of Christ.
On this occasion they encounter a woman who was, in body, mind and spirit, enslaved. The spirit which possessed her was a familiar spirit in the Greco-Roman world. It was known as a python spirit, emanating from The Oracle at Delphi, the most trusted pagan oracle on earth. So the woman was a ‘reputable’ psychic, as it were, no mere circus palm reader. This dark power which possessed her, this occult power, which knew that the missionaries were sent from the ‘Most High God’, was more often used to make predictions which could help people set the course of their lives, and their livelihoods; it served the ruling system, and was thus in popular demand. [2]
Which brings us to the third Spirit of Philippi: the spirit of the enslaver. The enslavers were those who took this woman into forced labour, exploiting her prophetic powers for their own financial gain. The enslaving spirit extended its influence over all the ruling powers of the region, so that when the slave woman’s ‘owners’ saw that Paul’s exorcism removed their means of making money from her, they got the authorities, the magistrates, and the crowd involved, all combining to have the missionaries flogged and thrown into jail. The enslaving spirit extended its influence even into the bowels of this prison, where the jailer clearly feared the magistrates so much that he would rather have taken his own life than face their punishment had the prisoners escaped.
So, spirits abound in Philippi, the same spirits which still abound today, the spirits of the enslaver, the enslaved, and the saved.
We might think that slavery is a thing of the past. But right now, almost 50 million people are trapped in slavery worldwide. It’s a problem that affects every country on earth – including ours. Modern slavery is all around us, often hidden in plain sight. People can become enslaved making our clothes, serving our food, picking our crops, working in factories, or working in houses as cooks, cleaners or nannies. Victims of modern slavery might face violence or threats, be forced into inescapable debt, or have their passport taken away and face being threatened with deportation. 49.6 million people live in modern slavery – in forced labour and forced marriage; and roughly a quarter of all victims of modern slavery are children. [3]
On that fateful day in Philippi Paul and Silas freed the enslaved woman from the spirit which bound her; and in the aftermath of the remarkable prison earthquake – a powerful sign of God’s liberating spirit – they freed the jailer from his fears, to rejoice that he had become a believer in God.
It’s a given that, with those first missionaries, and with the great Christian social reformers of old, we must share with people of goodwill the mission ‘to stop slavery, to secure freedom for everyone, everywhere, always’. [4]
But when the spirit of the enslaver persists, as it does today, we have to ask: can the enslaved still be saved? After all, from what we can tell in the story, the woman exorcised from the power of the python spirit nevertheless remained enslaved by her masters; and the jailer, whilst now spiritually liberated through his new-found faith and baptism, nevertheless remained a jailer, continuing to serve the enslaving powers-that-be.
Even in their enslavement, can the enslaved still be saved? Grappling with this question, Howard Thurman, the influential theologian of the black civil rights movement, often thought of his grandmother, who would occasionally talk about her life as a slave on a plantation in north Florida.
“Two of her stories I never tired of,” he wrote. “The first: sometimes the plantation owner’s minister would be permitted to hold a religious service for the slaves, and he always preached from the same text: ‘Slaves, be obedient to your masters, for this is right in the Lord.’ My grandmother said that she made up her mind then and there that if she ever learned to read or if freedom ever came she would never read that part of the Bible.”
His grandmother’s second story was even more important to Thurman, he said, “but in a different way. She would talk about the times when a slave preacher was permitted to hold services for the slaves of her master’s and all the neighbouring plantations. She would say: ‘It didn’t matter what the text was, the minister always ended up at the same place.’ He always ended up at Calvary. ‘He would stand up, start very quietly and then look around to all of us in the room and then he would say, ‘You are not slaves, you are not niggers – you are God’s children.’” And you know,” Thurman continues, “when my grandmother said that, she would unconsciously straighten up, head high and chest out, and a faraway look would come on her face.
“Now that transmitted an idiom to me,” he said. “And there was nothing that could happen in my environment that could ever touch this. It gave me my identity, so I didn’t have to wait for the revolution.” [5]
Ephesus was another Greek city colonised by Rome in Paul’s time, and in his letter to the Ephesian believers he wrote that “our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” [6]
Sadly, the spirit of enslavement persists in our world. But what we can learn from the woman with the python spirit and the jailer, as affirmed by Howard Thurman and his grandmother, is that those who are enslaved may nevertheless encounter, and be liberated by, the spirit of salvation.
Notes
[1] Wikipedia: Philippi; Delphi.
[2] RDG Stout, The girl with the python spirit. Grimly Optimistic blog, 5 May 2016.
[3] What is modern slavery? Anti-Slavery International, accessed 28 May 2025; quoting statistics sourced from Global Estimates of Modern Slavery: Forced Labour and Forced Marriage, International Labour Organisation, Geneva, September 2022.
[4] What is modern slavery? Anti-Slavery International, accessed 28 May 2025.
[5] Mary E. Goodwin, Racial Roots and Religion: An Interview with Howard Thurman. Genius.com, accessed 28 May 2025.
[6] Ephesians 6.12.
