On June 2nd, Jason Smith reflected on Acts 16:16-34. Jason, accountant by day, painter by night (his Clark Kent/Superman existence ), wove together the works of artist Dinh Q. Le with the accounts of the healing of a fortune-telling slave woman and Paul and Silas’ subsequent imprisonment and release.

Dinh Q. Le weaves Vietnam war cultural images from the U.S. with family images from Southeast Asia during the same era — using a traditional mat weaving technique taught to him by his aunt as a child. He reinterprets an American national story through a Vietnamese family’s story. And we are forced to rethink Rambo, Platoon and Apocalypse Now because the artist has made two images into one.

In the same way, there is a thread that runs through the three stories that we read in Acts 16. Paul, famous for being a theologian, prolific New Testament writer and globetrotting missionary — supported himself by finding work in different countries making tents. City to city, country to country, continent to continent. Maybe he used the same process as Semitic nomads, weaving camel and goat hair into large sheets of fabric.

The text that Luke writes about Paul is textile. If it was anything like the Dead Sea Scrolls, then Luke unrolled yards of papyrus mixed with animal skins to tell the story of Paul the tentmaker turned disciple maker. Just like Dinh Q. Le, the threads that run through Luke’s narrative consist of images that he has captured, cut and combined.

In the writing of Acts, Luke borrowed from his personal memories of his travels with Paul and the Apostolic generation. He interwove imagery of earlier biblical stories that still loomed large in the collective Hebrew imagination. And in doing so he juxtaposed the Biblical narrative of Salvation History with his own generation’s experience of it.

Listen in as Jason tells the stories of Acts 16 and weaves them together into a tapestry of Christ, and the Christians who follow in his ways.

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