The Charge Is Always Something Else
This Sunday's lectionary is Acts 16. This week Tennessee sent a bill to the governor deputizing nearly every sheriff in the state into ICE. They are not the same gospel.
The lectionary reading for the Seventh Sunday of Easter is Acts 16:16-34. It is being read this morning in churches across the country — including in Tennessee, where the legislature has passed and Gov. Bill Lee’s signed a bill that would require nearly every county sheriff in the state to enter into a 287(g) agreement with ICE by January 1, 2027, or forfeit state funding to the sheriff’s office.
The text and the bill are not the same gospel.
Here is what Luke says happened in Philippi:
As we were going to the place of prayer, we were met by a slave-girl who had a spirit of divination and brought her owners much gain by fortune-telling. She followed Paul and us, crying, “These men are servants of the Most High God, who proclaim to you the way of salvation.” And this she kept doing for many days. Paul, having become greatly annoyed, turned and said to the spirit, “I command 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 gain was gone, they seized Paul and Silas and dragged them into the marketplace before the rulers. And when they had brought them to the magistrates, they said, “These men are Jews, and they are disturbing our city. They advocate customs that are not lawful for us as Romans to accept or practice.” The crowd joined in attacking them, and the magistrates tore the garments off them and gave orders to beat them with rods. And when they had inflicted many blows upon them, they threw them into prison, ordering the jailer to keep them safely.
— Acts 16:16-23, ESV
Read it slowly. The structure is doing the work.
A girl. Owned. Monetized. The text says it plainly — brought her owners much gain. She is property whose suffering generates revenue. Paul, finally, frees her. And then the owners, seeing that their hope of gain was gone, do not appeal to the city’s sense of justice. They go straight to the magistrates.
The complaint is not theological. The complaint is commercial.
The Acts 4 anchor
To hear Acts 16 the way a first-century reader heard it, you have to read it inside the larger story Luke is telling.
In Acts 2, just after Pentecost, Luke writes: “All who believed were together and had all things in common. And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all, as any had need.” (Acts 2:44-45)
Two chapters later, he says it again, more sharply:
Now the full number of those who believed were of one heart and soul, and no one said that any of the things that belonged to him was his own, but they had everything in common… There was not a needy person among them, for as many as were owners of lands or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what was sold and laid it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to each as any had need.
— Acts 4:32-35, ESV
Read what is actually being said. There was not a needy person among them. Not as aspiration. As reportage. The early Jerusalem community had already abolished the economic arrangement that produces slave-girls-for-profit. They had pooled what they owned, replaced extraction with distribution, and erased poverty inside the community by structural reorganization.
This is the practice Paul and Silas are carrying with them when they walk into Philippi.
This is what makes the scene at the marketplace inevitable. A man and a woman shaped by a community in which no one said that any of the things that belonged to him was his own are going to find the sight of a girl monetized by her owners unbearable. The exorcism is not a miracle dropped from heaven into a neutral civic scene. It is what happens when the Acts 4 economy walks into a Roman colony.
The owners understood this perfectly. Their hope of gain was gone. And they understood, as owners always understand, that the law is on their side. So they went to the magistrates.
What the magistrates heard
The charge filed in Philippi is one of the most clarifying sentences in the New Testament:
“These men are Jews, and they are disturbing our city. They advocate customs that are not lawful for us as Romans to accept or practice.”
Read what the owners did not say. They did not say “they cost us money.” They said: these men are foreigners. They are disturbing the peace. What they teach is incompatible with Roman law.
The economic injury is laundered into a public-order claim. The financial threat, into an ethnic one. The protection of property, into the protection of the city.
The magistrates do not investigate the divination racket. They do not ask whether the girl had been wronged. They strip Paul and Silas, beat them with rods, and throw them in prison. The system is working as designed. When Paul cost the owners their income, he became a public-order problem. The law followed.
The pattern is so contemporary it does not require translation. Interfere with an ICE arrest and the charge is obstruction of a federal officer. Publish documents exposing detention contractors and the suit is defamation, or trade secrets. Block a deportation bus and the arrest is trespass, or disorderly conduct, or interfering with federal operations.
The injury is always commercial. The charge is always something else.
The jailbreak
Now the text turns:
About midnight Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God, and the prisoners were listening to them, and suddenly there was a great earthquake, so that the foundations of the prison were shaken. And immediately all the doors were opened, and everyone’s bonds were unfastened. When the jailer woke and saw that the prison doors were open, he drew his sword and was about to kill himself, supposing that the prisoners had escaped. But Paul cried with a loud voice, “Do not harm yourself, for we are all here.”
Stop.
The doors are open. Every door. Every prisoner’s chains are off. The earthquake has done what an organized escape could never do — opened the entire facility, simultaneously, without anyone having to take the risk of moving first. Under Roman discipline, the jailer is now dead. If a prisoner escapes, the guard pays with his life. He knows this. He draws his sword.
And Paul shouts: we are all here.
Read what just happened. The prisoners did not flee. Not one of them. Everyone’s bonds were unfastened — and yet we are all here. They chose to stay inside a prison whose doors were open, because the jailer’s life was in their hands. To leave was to leave him to fall on his sword. To stay was to convert the open prison into a refuge for the man who had been their guard.
This is the second sermon move; the sermon for the captives; the sermon for the meek.
The first sermon — the imperial sermon, the chaplain’s sermon — reads this passage as a story about God’s miraculous power to deliver his servants. God shakes the earth, God opens the doors, God demonstrates that he is greater than Rome. The lesson is about divine power.
The second sermon reads it differently. The earthquake is the easy part. The earthquake is what God does. We are all here is what the church does. The miracle is not the open door. The miracle is that the freed chose not to flee, because the guard would have died if they had.
The jailer is then converted, baptized, his entire household with him. The text says he washed their wounds. The man who, hours before, had thrown them into the inner cell and fastened their feet in the stocks now washes the blood off their backs. The economic-criminal of Acts 16 — the man whose job is to enforce property relations against escapees — is folded into the community whose practice, back in the Jerusalem of Acts 4, was no one said that any of the things that belonged to him was his own.
The Acts 4 anchor and the Acts 16 jailbreak are the same story. The community that has no needy person at the beginning is the community that, by the end, has no jailers either — because the jailers have joined it.
How the institution domesticated this text
Walk into a typical American sanctuary on this Sunday and you may hear Acts 16 preached as a story about personal evangelism. Paul and Silas sang hymns and the jailer was saved. The lesson: be a witness even in hard times, and God will use it.
This reading is not exactly wrong. Paul and Silas did sing. The jailer was converted. But the reading is decapitated. It removes the slave-girl. It removes her owners. It removes the magistrates. It removes the open doors and the choice to stay. What is left is a story that can be preached on a deportation flight, with a chaplain in attendance, without anyone in the cabin asking who the slave-girl is in this scene, or whose hope of gain is at stake.
The institutional sermon makes Acts 16 about the prison. The second sermon makes it about the marketplace, the magistrates, the owners, and what the church carried into Philippi from Jerusalem.
The same pattern, this week
Tennessee’s legislature passed the law and Gov. Bill Lee has signed. So, by January 1, 2027, every POST-certified county sheriff in the state would be required to enter a 287(g) agreement with ICE or forfeit state funding to the sheriff’s office. The local jailer, statewide, deputized into the federal apparatus by funding-withholding. The Acts 16 architecture, only this time the jailers do not get to choose which side of the door they stand on.
Eighteen people have died in ICE custody in the first four months of this year. CoreCivic has reopened its 2,160-bed Diamondback facility in Watonga, Oklahoma, as an ICE detention center. The Supreme Court has gutted Voting Rights Act Section 2 protection for majority-minority districts — and ordered the ruling immediately effective so Louisiana can redraw before its 2026 primaries. None of these stories arrived alone. They arrived inside a coalition that has organized, for years, to make sure the pulpits are ready when the sheriffs are.
That coalition has names. Charlie Kirk’s TPUSA Faith is mobilizing evangelical pastors in swing states; its partnership with Sean Feucht’s “Kingdom to the Capitol” tour has been staging revivals at statehouses since its U.S. Capitol rotunda kickoff in March 2023. Lance Wallnau — the New Apostolic Reformation’s leading voice on the Seven Mountains Mandate — has publicly cheered Kirk on, telling Rolling Stone he calls Kirk regularly “because he’s attacked as the face of Christian nationalism.” Kirk announced what he called “Project 81” in a February 2024 interview with Wallnau, setting the operational target plainly: “If we can get above 81 percent, there’s almost no way Donald Trump loses.” Eighty-one percent of white evangelical voters. That was the goal. That is still the goal.
This is the first-sermon coalition’s mobilization apparatus. Its message to the pastors it trains is, in essence, a single proposition: that the current ordering of American life is godly, that those who profit from that ordering are blessed, and that those who disturb it are advocating customs incompatible with our way of life. The text varies. The sermon is consistent.
The slave-girl is in the cell. Her owners are in the magistrates’ office. The pastors are in their pulpits being told that the magistrate is righteous.
The lectionary, this morning, in the same churches where many of those pastors will preach, reads Acts 16.
The Second Sermon
The Christianity that resists empire has always known how to read this passage.
When the Confessing Church stood against the German Christian movement — Barmen in 1934, and what followed — they were doing the Acts 16 move. The German Christian movement had organized to align the church with the Reich’s authority. Barmen named the lie. It was a statement made by people who could see the magistrates clearly and refused to be impressed by them.
When Martin Luther King wrote from the Birmingham jail, he was writing a second-sermon document addressed to the first-sermon clergy who had asked him to be more patient. He named the laundering — the way the owners’ interests had become the city’s order, the way the church had blessed the order, the way patience had become collaboration. He had no earthquake. He stayed anyway.
Óscar Romero preached against the death squads in the last weeks of his life. He had begun his ministry as a first-sermon priest, but the murders of his peers had radicalized him into the second. He was killed at the altar in 1980, mid-Eucharist, because he could no longer be persuaded to read Acts 16 as a story about personal piety.
When the Sanctuary Movement of the 1980s sheltered Central American refugees in Tucson and Chicago, they were Acts 16 churches. When Father Roy Bourgeois kept walking back into Fort Benning to witness against the School of the Americas, knowing he would be arrested again, he was an Acts 16 priest. We are all here.
And on Sunday morning, January 18 of this year, in Saint Paul, Minnesota, the Rev. Nekima Levy Armstrong did the Acts 16 thing in front of news cameras.
Armstrong is an ordained minister, a civil rights attorney, the founder of the Racial Justice Network, and a former president of the Minneapolis NAACP. On the morning of January 18, she and roughly thirty to forty others entered Cities Church at 1524 Summit Avenue during Sunday worship. They came because one of the church’s lay pastors and elders, David Easterwood, was simultaneously the acting field office director of ICE’s St. Paul field office — the office whose operations had killed Renée Nicole Good eleven days earlier. Armstrong’s question to the congregation was the Acts 16 question, asked in plain English: how is a man who runs the apparatus that drags people from their homes also a pastor in your house?
Four days later, on January 22, federal agents arrested her. The charge was conspiracy against rights under 18 U.S.C. § 241 — a Reconstruction-era civil rights statute that the Justice Department turned upside down to use against her. Attorney General Pamela Bondi announced the arrest herself, on X. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem amplified the arrest on X, writing: “Religious freedom is the bedrock of the United States — there is no first amendment right to obstruct someone from practicing their religion.” The White House released a photograph of Armstrong’s arrest that had been digitally altered to depict her sobbing — when video of the arrest shows she remained calm — and rendered darker and harsher, an alteration outlets including CBC and MS NOW noted made her appear, in MS NOW’s words, to have darker skin.
Read the structure. A woman freed a question. Their hope of gain was gone. The owners went to the magistrates. The charge laundered itself through the language of the law: not you embarrassed our pastor, but you interfered with our congregants’ First Amendment right to worship. The magistrates stripped her image and beat her with the rod the modern administrative state actually uses — the press release, the doctored photograph, the prosecution under a statute meant to protect the very people the prosecution now targeted.
That is Acts 16. That is this year. That is one drive from where many of the readers of this newsletter live.
And on the same day Armstrong was arrested, on January 22, Westminster Presbyterian Church at 1200 Marquette Avenue in downtown Minneapolis was filling up with clergy. The Multifaith Antiracism, Change & Healing network — MARCH — had put out a call for a clergy gathering one week earlier and had expected two hundred registrants. More than a thousand registered before they closed the door. Westminster, a 169-year-old congregation eight days into a Session statement that had already committed the church to “courageous love,” took the hosting role nobody else could absorb. The pulpit on January 22 displayed a sign reading Do justice. Love kindness. Abolish ICE.
That is the Acts 4 community improvising itself in real time. They had everything in common turned, in Minneapolis, into we have a sanctuary and we will let it be used. Clergy flew in from across the country — most within seventy-two hours of learning the conference existed — because the building was open and the call had gone out. Approximately a hundred rabbis. Approximately a hundred Unitarian Universalist ministers. Catholics, Protestants, Buddhists, Muslims, Indigenous practitioners. And no one said that any of the things that belonged to him was his own.
This is the tradition. It has never been the dominant one. The first sermon has always had the larger congregation, the wealthier patrons, the magistrates’ favor. But the second sermon has always been the one the text is actually telling.
This Sunday morning, somewhere in your city, a church is reading Acts 16. It may be the church that hosts a TPUSA Faith pastor. It may be the church that pickets the detention facility. It may be both within the same denomination. The text is the same.
The question is who is hearing the slave-girl, and who is hearing the magistrates, and who is hearing the jailer at the moment the doors come open and the prisoners decide whether to stay.
The Acts 4 community had already answered that question for itself.
There was not a needy person among them.
That is the church the magistrates will always file charges against. That is the church the owners will always lose money to. That is the church whose doors, when they open, do not empty out — because the people inside know that the guard is part of the household too, if the household is brave enough to claim him.
The earthquake is the easy part. We are all here is the church.
The RAMM documents the connections that beat reporting can’t see:
4,776+ sourced events at capturecascade.org.
1,988 Counties with signals of potential detention center expansion (Federal contracts, 287(g), real estate traces, etc) at detention-pipeline.transparencycascade.org my site that tracks signals of potential cooperation with ICE and Border Patrol.
129 Community fights over detention capacity built out tracked.
All of this is self-funded, and paid subscriptions are the only way I can continue to do this long term.
Sources
Scripture: Acts 2:44-45, Acts 4:32-35, Acts 16:16-34 (English Standard Version).
Tennessee HB2219 / SB2223 (sheriffs and 287(g)):
Bill text and history: Tennessee General Assembly, HB2219
Fiscal memo with funding-withholding provisions: TN Capitol fiscal memo FM3224
“Every Tennessee sheriff required to work with ICE in legislation headed to the governor’s desk,” Tennessee Lookout, April 23, 2026.
“Nashville’s sheriff says he’s exempt from bill lawmakers passed mandating agreements with ICE,” Tennessee Lookout, May 13, 2026.
“Tennessee law enforcement will be required to partner with ICE,” WPLN News, April 23, 2026.
Louisiana v. Callais (Voting Rights Act Section 2):
“Court gives immediate effect to Voting Rights Act decision,” SCOTUSblog, May 2026.
Cities Church protest and arrests of Rev. Nekima Levy Armstrong, Chauntyll Allen, and William Kelly:
“Minnesota church protest leader Nekima Levy Armstrong arrested, say federal officials,” Religion News Service, January 22, 2026.
“DHS arrests 3 ringleaders of St. Paul church riot for federal crimes,” Department of Homeland Security press release, January 23, 2026.
Sec. Kristi Noem (@Sec_Noem), X post, January 22, 2026.
Attorney General Pamela Bondi (@AGPamBondi), X post, January 22, 2026.
Doctored-photograph analysis: CBC News and MS NOW coverage, late January 2026.
David Easterwood’s ICE role: City of Saint Paul cease-and-desist letter, December 19, 2025; “Who Is David Easterwood?”, Newsweek.
Killing of Renée Nicole Good (January 7, 2026): NBC News reporting.
TPUSA Faith, Project 81, Kingdom to the Capitol tour, Lance Wallnau:
Charlie Kirk on Project 81: NBC News, “Charlie Kirk, Turning Point USA pivots to Christian Nationalism,” 2024 (Kirk in interview with Wallnau).
Sean Feucht “Kingdom to the Capitol” tour and TPUSA Faith partnership, U.S. Capitol rotunda kickoff March 9, 2023: People For the American Way / Right Wing Watch.
Lance Wallnau on Kirk and the “face of Christian nationalism” label: Rolling Stone, January 2024.
ICE custody deaths and detention infrastructure:
18 ICE detainee deaths in the first four months of 2026: CBS News.
CoreCivic Diamondback Correctional Facility (Watonga, Oklahoma) reactivation as ICE detention center: Oklahoma Voice, News9, KOSU.
Westminster Presbyterian Church and MARCH (Multifaith Antiracism, Change & Healing) clergy convergence, January 22-23, 2026:
Religion News Service exclusive coverage of the Westminster gathering, January 2026.
Westminster Presbyterian Church Session statement, January 15, 2026.
Theological and historical:
Walter Wink, Walter Brueggemann, Richard Horsley, John Dominic Crossan, James Cone, Sharon Ringe on Jubilee economics, the prophetic tradition, and empire-critical readings of Jesus (see ongoing references throughout The Second Sermon series).
The Barmen Declaration (1934); Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship; Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from Birmingham Jail” (1963); Óscar Romero homilies (1979-1980).
Mark Ramm writes The Second Sermon and The RAMM at theramm.substack.com.