Recently, a famous Associated Press photo from the Vietnam era has been back in the news. 

Known familiarly as “Napalm Girl,” it is an image of a young girl running down a road naked after suffering third degree burns from an air attack.  Her family had been among a group misidentified as enemy soldiers and then engaged by a South Vietnamese pilot. 

It is an unforgettable photograph.

I know many of us can still picture it. 

More joyously, another unforgettable photograph we may well see somewhere on Memorial Day Weekend is Albert Eisenstadt’s iconic Life magazine image of a US Navy sailor kissing a total stranger in Times Square at the news of Japan’s surrender. 

Either photo could be a sermon in itself, I think. 

But this morning, what I want to name is simply that both photos seem to capture moments when history touches down in ordinary lives. 

There is something astonishing and revelatory in that. 

Going about our day to day lives, the stage upon which we do most of our strutting and fretting is not particularly grand, at least most of the time. 

What, with all the laundry and email, we might forget that we are actors in history.

As Will Rogers once said, “We can’t all be heroes because somebody has to sit on the curb and clap as they go by.”

That’s true enough, except that we forget that history doesn’t just happen to heroes, and heroes aren’t the only ones who create history. 

Or: we forget until, somehow, history touches down in ordinary lives—maybe even ours—and we are suddenly aware of the greater questions and grander forces shaping us, and our own role in that shaping. 

II.

It’s too bad that Nick Ut or Alfred Eisenstadt weren’t in Philippi, hovering in the marketplace or following the local women headed down to the river to pray, on the particular morning we just heard about from the Book of Acts. 

If they had been, they might have recorded another moment when history touches down in the lives of ordinary people.

As you’ve heard, Paul and Silas seem to put a much larger story in motion almost by accident.

Up to this point, the church has seemed reasonably successful in its attempts to fly below Rome’s radar. 

Its arguments, if any, have been more with the Temple authorities back in Jerusalem.

But now Paul blunders into something much bigger. 

On one level, the story is a kind of garden variety exorcism. 

A slave girl, possessed by a demon, seems to latch onto Paul and Silas whenever she sees them wandering through the city of Philippi. 

She calls attention to them.  Talks loudly about their foreign god. 

This happens several times, until finally, Paul, who apparently hasn’t had his coffee yet, gets annoyed and calls out the demon from the girl. 

She’s healed.

Unfortunately, though, in doing it, Paul has ended up crossing a line.   

Because it turns out that someone’s making money off this particular girl, parlaying her demonic possession into fortune-telling, which seems particularly callous, sort of like making a street person on crutches dance for a dollar and then taking the dollar. 

So: Paul heals her.  And the girl’s owner raises holy hell. 

The arrest and the trial follow.  Those aren’t great. 

The more immediate issue before that part, though, is the mob that the girl’s owner gathers by shouting his lungs out in the market square, ratcheting everyone up by talking about foreigners among them and their sacred traditions under threat and Roman pride and all the rest.

I know I’m essentially going over a story you just heard. 

My point is just that a lot is happening with this little healing…Paul’s quick flick of the wrist. 

History is touching down.    

Greater questions and grander forces are being revealed.

For a while the whole situation escalates and it gets scary, and yet, oddly enough, the threats don’t seem to project much actual strength. 

If this is what Roman power looks like in practice, it seems strangely hysterical and pathetically desperate.

If this is Roman justice, then it’s no justice at all. 

The whole thing – the mob, the court, the jail – it all gets triggered in order to defend someone’s rights over a particularly vulnerable person who didn’t happen to enjoy the luxury of mattering to anyone but God.  

And when a stranger appears and does something that might make her matter even just a little bit more, or bring her just a little more peace, the response is to throw the book at them. 

To have witnessed it would have been to see a whole broken system laid bare in a way that you could never unsee.

This was no world to want to live in. 

This was no kind of success to aspire to. 

To be there, to see this laid bare would have been the end of something for any clear-eyed person. 

But to the church, it was a new beginning.    

That hole in your heart was like the hole in God’s heart. 

To the church, odd as it may sound, this was cause for rejoicing.

History has touched down. 

God has touched down. 

And now we’re part of it. 

III.

O.k., so it’s a good story, and it provides a little window into the history of the ancient church, but what does it offer us today?

I think it reminds us that we can’t stand outside the larger currents of our own time.

We’re a part of them.

We may prefer to imagine ourselves as sitting on the curb and clapping while the parade goes by, but that’s not actually correct. 

Wherever we might find ourselves, whatever role it seems we have been cast to play…eventually, something happens that we can’t unsee.

It’s like looking at a truly great photograph—an image that doesn’t just show you what happened but rather lifts the veil and offers a fundamental insight into who we are and what we are making of God’s world.

Good or bad.

So there are moments in any life when suddenly, we know that who we are, what we stand for, and what we do have consequences, not just for us, but for everyone. 

We recognize that we are all constantly setting things in motion and responding to how we have been set in motion. 

We are a part of this now.

And what this means is that who we are matters, and that an openness to how God might use us matters. 

History doesn’t just happen to heroes, and heroes aren’t the only ones who create history. 

God touches down in ordinary lives—maybe even ours—making us suddenly aware of the greater questions and grander forces shaping us, and our own role in that shaping. 

May this new beginning fill our hearts with gratitude as it guides our steps into a new creation. 

Amen.