Prisoner
Ephesians 4:1-16

August 3, 2003

A bunch of years back, I was able to audit a university course in Byzantine History, that nebulous era sometimes dated between 325-1453, centred around the ancient and glorious capital of Constantinople. The professor was young, a very good lecturer, and he made the course a lot of fun.

One day we had to do a lot of reading about how isolated towns and villages would deal with crime and social deviance. All that horrible stuff about medieval punishments: if you stole something important you would have your hands cut off; lie and slander against other people and they would cut your tongue out. Better behave back then! After going through more than enough of these gruesome and cruel punishments, the professor asked why they had to do such terrible things. These were totally Christian societies by the way.

Everyone was scratching their head, so finally he explained, “Because in these towns living at best at a subsistence level, there were no jails. They could not provide or maintain them. This is the only way they could deal with offenders and criminals.”

I guess Paul was pretty lucky that the Romans had jails back then. Not that prisons were bright, clean places. It may have been more of a house arrest in his case, and he had to provide for his own food and living necessities. If you wanted to live in prison, you had to be rich. Too dangerous an analogy for our situation.

Paul was not free, but the lack of physical freedom did not bother him. He was a prisoner for the Lord, an honour most definitely. He had talked and preached about Christ in Jerusalem and so many were outraged by his blasphemous words that a near riot occurred. The Roman police intervened and arrested the supposed instigator Paul. The religious authorities wanted him executed, but Paul, born a Roman citizen in Tarsus in present day Turkey, asked for his rights and was sent for trial to Rome. Eventually, he would be executed, perhaps in the wake of the anti-Christian response to Nero’s burning of Rome in 64 A.D. He was a prisoner, on trial for what mattered most to him, so as he wrote to encourage others, he could barely be happier.

When Martin Luther King, Jr., was imprisoned in the jail of Birmingham, Alabama, following a demonstration against the racist and segregationist policies of one of the bastions of Jim Crow, he was severely criticized in a public letter by a number of white clergymen. They believed he was wrong coming in from the outside to advocate breaking the law and to use public demonstrations to embarrass and push the local authorities into revoking their laws. Dr. King felt he had to respond to this rebuke.

“I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. Just as the prophets of the eighth century B.C. left their villages and carried their ‘thus saith the Lord’ far beyond the boundaries of their home towns, and just as the Apostle Paul left his village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to the far corners of the Greco-Roman world, so I am compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my own home town. Like Paul, I must respond to the Macedonian call for aid.”

Nevertheless, I do not believe there are many here who feel comfortable being in a prison under any circumstances. The world is different sitting behind the walls of a prison; it colours your world in an unflattering shade.

After King and his chief leaders were incarcerated a non-violent pilgrimage was planned to march to just below the windows where King was and hold a prayer service with lots of singing. Sheriff Bull Connor was determined that no more of this nonsense would go on. The several hundred marchers got within a long block of the prison when they were stopped by a police barricade, replete with snarling police dogs and fire trucks with those high pressure hoses that can rip the clothing right off you. All these had been used before on the freedom marchers, so they were not idle threats.

“Nobody is going any further,” Connor yelled at them, “turn around and go back to where you came from.” The marchers knew they were up against a wall. One of the leaders called out what one always does in times of desperate dilemma, “Let us pray.” And the hundreds knelt down on the street to pray for what seemed an eternity, praying for God to some kind of guidance. Forget about guidance; what do we do now?

Finally, an older woman got to her feet and looked at the police and firemen. “Why are you doing this to us? We are not hurting you, we just want to pray. Go ahead, let your dogs loose on us, turn on your hoses. I don’t care. We’re coming through.”

As she started forward and the other marchers got up and headed for the barricades, Bull Connors nearly split a gut. “Turn on the hoses!” he screamed at the top of his lungs. I won’t repeat the kind of language that followed in his desperate rage, but you can imagine.

As the marchers reached the barricades, they looked up and saw the police standing there with their vicious dogs pulling at the reins and the firemen holding the pressure hoses, standing there paralyzed with tears running down their cheeks. With Connor screaming so much that it was amazing he didn’t have a heart attack, the firemen and police parted way and the marchers went through and had their prayer service.

One woman was heard exclaiming as they walked through the gauntlet, “the Lord done roll the Red Sea back again!” Who are the prisoners now?

Paul, writing from prison, reminded his audience that they were not imprisoned.

“There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope that belongs to your call, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of us all. But grace was given to each of us according to the measure of Christ’s gift.” The gifts we have been given are many. Some of us are still apostles, sent out to serve the suffering. Some are prophets are speak up against injustice and travel wherever there is injustice. Some are preachers of the good news, as much with their lives as their words. Some are teachers of knowledge and the right way, some are healers and nurses, some are visitors to the imprisoned, some are those who welcome, some are those who build and mend and make our building accessible. No one who belongs to the body of Christ is a real prisoner, no matter where he or she is sitting.

We have to keep preaching the Gospel to remember that no matter how imprisoned our bodies may be, we have been given the grace to enable ourselves and others to be free in the spirit now, and with God’s grace, to enable all God’s children to be free in the body tomorrow.

Preached by Robert Kitchen
Knox-Metropolitan United Church
Regina, Saskatchewan