Edgewood United Church

United Church of Christ

May 20, 2007      Edgewood United Church UCC           Rev. Karen E. Gale

Opening the Prison Door
Acts 16:16-40

As we read in today’s text from Acts, life in prison can be pretty bad. Prisoners held in solitary confinement. Prisoners are tied and restrained. Practices exist that venture upon torture like unremitting darkness. Lack of any facilitates or contact from the outside world. Long, long waits without recourse before finally coming to trial.

Oh wait… You think I am talking about prison conditions in Paul’s time under the Romans… No, no, I’m talking about life in prison in the United States in the 21st century under the Patriot Act.

The beginning of the trial this week of Jose Padilla has brought to light the almost unbelievable perversion of our justice system under the Patriot Act. Padilla’s defense attorneys have described Padilla’s experiences in graphic terms. He was arrested in 2002 accused of plotting to set off a dirty bomb. He was held without being charged and then named an enemy combatant. He was taken to a brig in North Carolina and held in constant solitary confinement for three years.

He was given no mattress or blanket just a steel slab to sleep on. His food came through a slot in the door. There was no window. The only people he ever saw were his interrogators who sometimes held him for hours in stress positions; they blindfolded and ear muffled him any time they moved him. Sometimes they left the light on for days in his cell. And sometimes they left it dark for days. Sometimes they made the room freezing and sometimes boiling hot.

Finally Padilla’s case was scheduled to go to the Supreme Court which would have ruled that a US citizen must be charged and could not be held indefinitely. Instead Padilla was discharged into federal custody. Now he is being tried. The prosecutors say Padilla is a terrorist but they withdraw their earlier claims that he was planting a dirty bomb and almost all other charges. They now say he was working with a terrorist cell.

What is not in contention in the trial is how Padilla was treated while being held in prison. Our government officials say that the facts about Padilla’s treatment are accurate but not relevant since the prosecutors won’t be using any material gained from those interrogations.

This is the USA in 2007. In some depressing ways it is not too much different from Macedonia in 45 CE. Paul, traveling with Silas, angers a local merchant by curing a slave girl of her spirit possession. The merchant, angry that his source of income from the girl’s fortune telling is gone, trumps up charges against Paul and Silas. There is a mob scene; Paul and Silas are beaten with rods and thrown in prison. There they are put into stocks, Roman torture devices designed to keep the body in uncomfortable or “stress” positions. There they wait and wait to come to trial.

Prison was a bad place to be in Paul’s time just as it is in our time. Prisons were overcrowded, just like they are in Michigan. They were often low on funds. Ditto for Michigan. There was corruption just like the case of the Texas boys’ penitentiary where many staff are accused of sexually assaulting prisoners.

“Ancient prisons provided almost nothing for prisoners. To survive, a prisoner's family or friends had to bring him food, blankets, medicine, and other necessities. Without outside help, a prisoner could easily starve or die of illness before even coming to trial.” (Harper bible dictionary) You can understand why Jesus talks about how important it was to visit those imprisoned.

One wonders what would have happened to Padilla if Donna Newman, his court appointed lawyer, hadn’t taken up his case and fought so hard to visit him.

We have an uneasy relationship to folks in prison. In this country we often feel that the folks in US prisons had a fair trial and deserved what they got. We decry political prisoners in other countries like Iran, China, Syria, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

But do you know there are 150 documented political prisoners in the US? (Jericho project.org) Perhaps not a huge number compared to the hundreds of thousands around the world. But then again, that only includes those in US prisoners who have been tried and processed.

What about Guantanamo Bay, where men sit and wait and wait, are interrogated repeatedly and subjected to waterboarding, a simulated drowning, or chained to the floor? What of them? Prisoners of nowhere, held by us in limbo state.  We should be more than a little uncomfortable with today’s text. It is closer to our reality than we would hope in our so called civilized country.

Today’s Acts text is also clever. It challenges us to consider and reconsider who is a prisoner and who is free.  The text begins with a free Paul and Silas wandering through Philippi after meeting Lydia (we talked about her last week). They are being followed by a slave girl who is possessed by a spirit. The owners of this girl use her to tell fortunes in the agora, the market, the place where everything happens from trade to political discussions and prisoners were tried. It was the center of Roman life. 

The demon inhabiting the girl keeps mocking Paul saying he is a slave of God. Ironic, the slave pronouncing another a slave. So finally an irritated Paul says “knock it off and come out of her.”

Preacher William Willimon writes, “Thanks to Paul's annoyance and the power of the name of Jesus, the slave girl who was caught in the grip of demon possession becomes free, yet no, she is not free. She is a slave, someone who is not a person but a piece of property. Are her "free" owners free enough to rejoice in her healing? No way. They respond to the slave girl's freedom by engineering a lock-up for the apostles. (Acts commentary)

So Paul and Silas end up in prison, beaten and bloodied and chained. “Locked in the innermost cell of the jail and shackled besides, they are strangely free to sing.” (Willimon) And so they sing forth praise to God. Strange indeed. Or not.

A couple weeks ago on NPR a story ran about the freedom riders during the civil rights movement. James Farmer, cofounder of the freedom rides and the Congress of Racial Equality, who in 1961was jailed with dozens of other Freedom Riders for 40 days & 40 nights in Jackson Mississippi. Those arrested decided to stay in as long as possible to make a point. Soon they crowded up the jail and started to worry the authorities. The jailers made the jail as uncomfortable as possible, putting too much salt in the food to make it inedible for instance.

Farmer said in the interview, “They tried to stop us from singing. We sang. We sang all the freedom songs we knew & we made up new ones… The jailers went wild at our singing. Because we were singing as loudly as we could and our voices were wafting out over the city of Jackson. The windows were open – they would come in and slam our windows shut and we would open them again & sing more & more & more.

“Other freedom riders -- the black women in another wing, the white men in another wing, the white women in another wing – would pick up the songs -- The jail house was rocking with freedom songs.

“The jailers were running around saying, “Stop that singing! Stop that singing! Stop it!” and we continued singing because it was good for our morale. It was good for our morale. If there was any fear left in us, that fear was dissipated by the song.

“When yelling at us didn’t work the jailers threatened to take away our mattresses – because the little thin straw mattress was the only comfort we had, everything else was cold, hard stone and steel in those tiny little cells. There was this little mattress that was a symbol of comfort, a symbol of home …and now they’re gonna take that away. That caused some people to stop singing for a while until one young man who was a Bible student reminded everybody what they were doing – "They’re trying to take your soul away—it’s not the mattress – it’s your soul!"

“And then one freedom rider yelled “Guards, Guards, Guards!" The deputy came running out into the cell block to see what was wrong. And this freedom rider shouted – “Come get my mattress—I’ll keep my soul!” and then song exploded again.” (Fresh Air, NPR)

Paul and Silas sing until the middle of the night. And then the text takes on a magical quality to it with the earthquake shuddering the foundations and unlocking everyone’s chains. Fear runs through the building and the guard who would be executed if the prisoners escape on his watch is just about to fall on his sword, saving himself an ugly death and preserving his honor when Paul calls out for him to stop. The prisoners are all still there. Why didn’t they run, rejoicing in their freedom? The life of their captor, probably the same one who beat them, who tortured them, was hanging in the balance. "Having a key to someone else's cell does not make you free" (Willimon).

And here I think is the great miracle of the story. The miracle in my mind is not so much the supernatural earthquake. It is not the breaking open of the shackles that held Paul and Silas in their cells. It is the dissolving of the shackles of oppressor and oppressed in what happens next between jailed and jailor.

Our text reads: “The jailer called for lights, and rushing in, he fell down trembling before Paul and Silas. Then he brought them outside and said, ‘Sirs, what must I do to be saved?’ They answered, ‘Believe on the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved, you and your household.’ They spoke the word of the Lord to him and to all who were in his house. At the same hour of the night he took them and washed their wounds; then he and his entire family were baptized without delay. He brought them up into the house and set food before them; and he and his entire household rejoiced that he had become a believer in God.”

Paul and Silas stayed in prison so that this man, the jailer, could preserve his life, the same man who had brutalized them. Then this man is so changed that he opens his home and family to those he had imprisoned. He bathes them and feeds them. This is the miracle. Lives changed. Prisons opened, and I don’t mean the one that Paul and Silas were jailed in.

“The Prisoner Friendship Society reconciliation team grew out of the personal experience of Mrs. Adelaide Zwane in Swaziland. Adelaide’s husband was a pastor who ministered to prisoners in many ways. With his death after a carjacking and beating in 1995, Adelaide chose to go into prison and minister to the men who were grieving the death of her husband. As a part of her ministry, she and another PFS volunteer felt compelled to help one young prisoner and his grandmother. The young man had been his grandmother’s caretaker prior to his incarceration and was concerned about her welfare. After providing the young man with clothing, Adelaide and the other volunteer used their own money to buy groceries for his grandmother.

“Yet, before they could deliver the groceries, Adelaide discovered that the young man she was helping had been responsible for her husband’s death. Although very angry and hurt, Adelaide felt called to visit the grandmother. In this emotionally charged meeting, the young man’s family – grandmother and aunts – expressed their remorse and Adelaide offered her forgiveness to the young man and his entire family. Upon leaving the family, Adelaide went to see the young man responsible for her husband’s death and offered him her personal forgiveness and adopted him into her family. From this personal experience of meeting her offender, Adelaide reaches out to other victims and offenders in the ministry of reconciliation.” (Centre for Justice and Reconciliation)

Prison doors opening. Miracles.

Paul and Silas were prisoners of conscience, jailed for their beliefs in Jesus Christ and proclaiming the good news. But they were also in more ways, economic prisoners, thrown in jail for challenging the economic system that exploited a young girl’s illness for personal gain.

That too is not all that different now. The gap between rich and poor is the highest in the US over all other developed nations. The incarceration rate in the US is by far the highest in all the developed nations. Not a coincidence.

Wealth buys you good legal representation. Wealth buys you better accommodations. In California there is a program where folks can pay for upgraded jail cells. For $80-100 a day, they get separated from the general prison population, the use of cell phones and Ipods and catering from the outside. “Many of the self-pay jails operate like secret velvet-roped nightclubs of the corrections world. You have to be in the know to even apply for entry, and even if the court approves your sentence there, jail administrators can operate like bouncers, rejecting anyone they wish.” (New York Times, April 29, 07)

Economics plays a huge role in our prison system. Just this week I learned of a program going before the legislature in South Carolina. Prisoners will be offered 180 days off their prison sentence if they donate an organ or bone marrow. They can sell body parts to get a reduced sentence. I can’t imagine that wealthy prisoners with good access to appeals and excellent representation are lining up to barter away organs. I imagine it is the poor, those serving extended sentences, those without many options. Your organs or your freedom. One commentator noted that “everything in America is for sale or barter. If I have a needed commodity, why not?” (News and Notes Roundtable) It sounds like exploitation to me.

Paul and Silas preach a new economics where the enslaved are set free. How does this fall on our ears, in this country, at this point in our history, in our prisons?

In a postscript to our text we learn that the local magistrates hear that Paul and Silas are Roman citizens. “The law, i.e. Lex Porcia de provatione, protected Roman citizens from flogging and entitled them to appeal charges made against them.” (Chris Haslam) 

“Punishment without a fair hearing and punishment that is degrading, is expressly forbidden. Naturally, protecting their backs, the magistrates quickly apologize. Realizing the impossibility of protecting Paul and Silas, the magistrates ask them to leave quietly.”
(Wes Howard Brook, sojo.net)

They are free. Free from prison. Free from hatred having reconciled with their jailer. Free. Are we?

We believe in Jesus who calls us to set prisoners free: political prisoners, economic prisoners, those trapped in prisons of hate and reprisal.

We live in a time when the threat of prison, the threat of torture, the threat of human rights violations is real and present and current. We risk when we speak out. We risk when we advocate for change and demand accountability.

But we risk losing some of our humanity if we do not speak out for and reach out those imprisoned by our government and held without charges, are not allowed legal counsel, are tortured and abused, are kept in solitary confinement or in interment camps for years without end.

The miracle we seek is not a magical earthquake or a crack homeland securities team that will protect us no matter what. The miracle we seek is the courage to demand human dignity and respect and justice for all, even those who seek to do us harm. The miracle is Paul and Silas and the jailer sitting down together. God grant us the voices to seek to bring justice to the prisoner. That they might be free. And we may be free as well. Amen.