When I Am the Villain--June 3, 2020

When I Am the Villain--June 3, 2020

"About that time no little disturbance broke out concerning the Way. A man named Demetrius, a silversmith who made silver shrines of Artemis, brought no little business to the artisans. These he gathered together, with the workers of the same trade, and said, 'Men, you know that we get our wealth from this business. You also see and hear that not only in Ephesus but in almost the whole of Asia this Paul has persuaded and drawn away a considerable number of people by saying that gods made with hands are not gods. And there is danger not only that this trade of ours may come into disrepute but also that the temple of the great goddess Artemis will be scorned, and she will be deprived of her majesty that brought all Asia and the world to worship her'. When they heard this, they were enraged and shouted, 'Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!'" [Acts 19:23-28]

A warning: be careful when you decide to make business your religion. The gods of profit are fragile things and easily broken... and yet they have an insatiable hunger for human sacrifice.

Look, I know that this strange little scene buried in the back-nine of the book of Acts probably seems obscure and distant from our daily life.  And I know it may seem that a story centered on people who make little silver idols of a pagan goddess will have very little to do with our day and our culture, which likes to imagine it is vaguely Christian (or at least has memories of calling itself Christian).  But in a way, this lesser-known story from the early witness of the church is just the kind of story we need to take an honest look at ourselves, and what we will and will not allow to interfere with the comfortable systems we live in... the systems that pay our paychecks and fill our bellies.

Because here's the thing: this random silversmith named Demetrius has just said out loud all the things that we are constantly tempted to live by--but that we are afraid to admit are true.  And maybe we owe him and his conniving scheme to get Paul and the Christian movement into trouble a debt of gratitude.  He forces us to take an honest look at what lengths we go to for the sake of holding onto money, power, and prestige. As the saying goes, Demetrius here "says the quiet parts loud." That is to say, he comes out and says the unsavory things that nobody else wanted to admit they thought.  And as uncomfortable as that may make me, even reading his words two thousand years later, I know I need it.  I need to be pushed beyond what is comfortable to see where I have made systems of money or privilege or comfort into my god.

The gist of this scene is actually pretty simple, and Demetrius' logic, although deplorable and amoral, is at least sound.  He is a silversmith--his job is making stuff out of silver.  In particular, their city is famous for having a temple dedicated to the Greek goddess Artemis, and part of that whole cult of Artemis is the use (and therefore the selling) of silver shrines to her.  In other words, she happens to be the goddess with a local temple in town, but the thing Demetrius is most concerned about is losing his business if something should affect the worship of Artemis.  This is not a guy who is really convinced that Artemis is a real divine being, so this is not like his deeply held piety is in crisis.  This is a guy who knows that religion is good business... and so he has made a living in the business of religion.  When he gets the other silversmiths together, he just lays it all out like that.  They have to silence this guy Paul they've heard about (this would be Saint Paul, the apostle who wrote half of the New Testament), not because he is actually disturbing the peace or violently causing an uproar to others, but because his message will be bad for business.  Demetrius sees that they have to get Paul branded as a troublemaker, a rabble-rouser, and a dangerous public enemy, because they realize that their bottom line is threatened by his message that little metal figurines aren't real gods, no matter how shiny they are.  Demetrius is mad about losing money, and so he organizes the others in his business to bad-mouth Paul and start a riot to get Paul either in trouble with the authorities or hurt him enough to get him to go away.  Like Eisenhower's famous warning about the "military-industrial complex" becoming a never-ending cycle where we "needed" to have more and more weapons, not because there were necessarily more and more enemies, but because it pumped the economy, and so we convinced ourselves that more and more weapons were needed to fight ominous enemies everywhere, Demetrius knows that there's a religious-industrial complex that will always demand to be fed and protected.  At least he's honest about what is really driving his motives, I guess.

Almost like a stereotypical action movie villain (I hear echoes of Goldfinger's big evil scheme speech while James Bond overhears) reciting his plan to his henchmen, Demetrius just puts it out there: they need to keep the system the way it is, because they have a vested interest in it.  Their comfortable lifestyles and cushy places in society come from keeping the Artemis-cult in full swing, and so they will do whatever it takes to keep that business booming.  It is a matter, not only of money, but of keeping the status of their city and keeping their influence in that city.  And boy, when money, prestige, and power are on the line, it sure is tempting to sell your soul to hold onto that unholy trinity.  

The thing that just haunts me about this snippet from Acts is that if you're Demetrius and his gang, all of this seems good and noble.  If you're part of the Silversmith Lobby of Ephesus, it seems indeed right and salutary to want to do everything in your power to stop Paul.  From their vantage point, Paul is a direct threat to everything they hold dear: the "greatness" of their city, their heritage, their prestige, their identity, and yes, their fortunes.  Being opposed to idol-worship in Ephesus would be taken as subversive, unpatriotic, and dangerous to the local economy!  Of course any red-blooded Ephesian would be willing to rough up some outsider named Paul and his religious message that was opposed to that whole system--they wanted to keep making money, and they wanted to protect their local economy, and they wanted to keep telling themselves they were "great."  And as long as they had a booming cult of a popular goddess, they could keep all the other wheels of business turning.  It would have to be pretty hard to stand up against all of that and speak up against it.  You'd be viewed as an insidious threat, even if all you ever used were your words.

So, yeah... we don't have silver-smithing as a major economic power these days.  And by and large the First Church of Artemis doesn't have the sway it once had, maybe.  But without a doubt there are the same pressures, the same competing impulses, and the same wicked logic around us all the time.  So often, we get swept up in preserving "the system"--the way things are, all around us--because we build our jobs, and our families, and our livelihoods, and our pride on those systems.  And when anything--even the Gospel of Jesus Christ--seems to threaten that system, we find ways to stifle it, discredit it, silence it, or to ignore it.  Once we decide we are committed to keeping things "the way they are," we will start getting defensive about anything that rocks that boat or threatens the way the system works--even if the system is terrible for some people.

Let's stop kidding ourselves--what we believe about the God revealed in Jesus Christ is going to upset a lot of the systems we have all built our lives on.  In the first century, it was the way Paul's message threatened the local economy of idol-manufacturers.  Eight hundred years before Paul it was the way the prophets called out the business-owners of Israel who didn't want to give time off for sabbath because it would cut into their profits.  And in this moment, it is quite possible we don't want to consider the way my comfortable way of life comes at the expense of other people who aren't able to get by.  We have gotten used to systems that told (and still tell) black people they were worth less than white people's lives--from the original Three-Fifths Compromise written into our Constitution, to the segregation of schools and businesses, to the way black bodies seem to be more easily regarded as collateral damage in the course of doing business than other bodies.  And for whatever ways we have made progress as a society over the centuries, they have come only because folks were willing, like Paul in Ephesus, to speak in ways that challenged "the way things were," even when Demetrius and his gang were waiting for them and pounding their fists.  It has been much the same in the ways women are regarded in our society, or the way people with disabilities are regarded, or any of a number of other challenges to "the way things are" over time.  It is always terrifyingly easy to assume "the way things are" is the same as "the way they have always been and always should be, forever and ever, Amen." But Paul's example shows us it just ain't so.

Sometimes I think we assume that Christianity only ever enters those conversations as a voice of "let's keep things the way they are," and that's because often Respectable Religious folk have used the trappings of Christianity in only that way.  But if we take this story from Acts seriously, it seems that from the beginning, Christians with credentials as solid as Paul himself understood that sometime the Gospel will run counter to "what's good for business," or "what's comfortable for me," or "what lets me stay insulated from the troubles of others."  And when Paul's message ran into people whose livelihoods and sense of "greatness" depended on keeping the system the way it was, Paul knew he was headed into trouble, even though he was never one to cause destruction or violence or harm to others.  

Look, I'm not asking any of us to become martyrs here, and I'm not trying to excuse any of the destruction happening across the country we live in where peaceful protests curdle into opportunistic looting and violence.  But I do see in myself the temptation to want to ignore the sincere voices of protest because it is uncomfortable to have to look at the ways I am Demetrius, which is to say, when I am the villain--the ways I am entangled in all kinds of systems and patterns in my own life that come at the cost of others.  I want to imagine, as a religious professional, that I am always on the side of goodness and truth and light... and yet, so did Demetrius.  We all want to imagine that whatever is good for business, or for boosting community pride or national greatness, must be perfectly consistent with the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  And yet the witness of the actual Scriptures testifies otherwise--that there are an awful lot of ways each of us has gotten entangled in patterns and habits and systems that benefit "us" but harm others, and when that happens, we get defensive, rather than letting the Gospel rearrange our priorities and disentangle us from those systems.

The hope I hear in this passage, as odd as it may seem to call this hope, is that despite all the attempts of the Ephesian Gang of Silversmiths, the Gospel came to town and compelled people to re-examine their allegiances.  As uncomfortable as it may have been for them, some people did let the Spirit of God rearrange their lives, even if it meant they made less money or their city's "greatness" (rooted in literal idolatry) was tarnished.  And that gives me hope that God won't give up on me when I am the defensive one, clutching onto "the way things are" because I'm afraid the Gospel will make me squirm.  

God doesn't give up on us, even when that means God has to keep sending truth-telling "troublemakers" like Paul, who force us to see where our lives our out of sync with the way of Jesus.  For all the ways I am still stuck in systems I want to pretend aren't even there, that is good news to my stubborn ears.  God won't give up on me.  God hasn't yet.

Lord Jesus, make us to see the ways we are stuck and don't want to admit it, and help us to hear your Gospel as the way of freedom from all that we are entangled in... so that all can be free.