2024.04.21 | Freed
“Freed”
Rev. Brenda Loreman
Designated Term Associate Minister
Eden United Church of Christ, Hayward, California
Fourth Sunday of Easter,
April 21, 2024
Acts 16:16-34
In Chapter 4 of the Gospel according to Luke, Jesus gives his inaugural sermon in his home synagogue in Nazareth, right at the beginning of his Galilean ministry. He unrolls the scroll, finds his place and reads the following passage from Isaiah:
“The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because [God] has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. [God] has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
Now if you open the book of Isaiah, you won’t find this exact passage because Luke has taken a few liberties with the translation. But it is a pretty close paraphrase of Isaiah Chapter 61, verse 1-2. Jesus tells his congregation that “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing,” and at first the congregation is pleased with his words. But as he continues to preach, the congregation gets increasingly more agitated and filled with rage. Finally, they decide they dislike what he says so much that they run him out of town and even try to throw him over a cliff. I appreciate that my sermons are generally more well-received here in my home congregation.
I begin with this passage from Luke Gospel for a couple of reasons. One is that, for Luke’s gospel at least, it sets out the purpose of the ministry of Jesus– to bring good news to the poor, release to the captives, healing of people’s blindness, and freedom to the oppressed. The other reason I start with this passage is that it also sets the tone for the book of Acts.
It’s important to remember that the author of Luke’s Gospel is, according to most biblical scholars, the same person who penned the book of Acts. In fact, most biblical scholars call these two books Luke-Acts like they are two parts of one text. They were meant to be read together. For whatever reason, the folks who established the order of the New Testament when final contents of it were set sometime in the late fourth century decided to separate Luke and Acts and put the four gospels together and put Acts after all the gospels. It makes sense in a general chronological sort of way, with the life of Jesus first, followed by the events of the early church. But we miss something by not reading these two texts side-by-side.
One of the things we might miss is the fact that releasing captives is an important theme in the Acts of the Apostles. The story here with Paul and Silas being freed from captivity is not the first instance that this happens in Acts.
The first prison escape miracle happens in Acts, Chapter 5, when the apostles are arrested because they have been performing healings in the temple. An angel of the Lord opens the prison doors for them, and sends them back to the temple to preach, “The whole message about this life.”
Again, in Acts Chapter 12, Herod has arrested Peter, but again, the angel of the Lord causes the chains to fall off Peter’s wrists and then the angel leads him out of the prison, even though he had been sleeping between two guards.
And then, finally here in Chapter 16, we find Paul and Silas thrown in prison for disturbing the peace of the community. Not only are they locked up in the innermost cell of the jail, but their feet are shackled in the stocks. And an earthquake opens not only their prison door, but all the prison doors and all the chains on all the prisoners, all while Paul and Silas are praying and singing hymns.
We could argue that the best interpretation of this passage, both the Isaiah passage in Luke and today’s text from Acts is that they are to be read metaphorically. That is, in order to best understand freedom from captivity and imprisonment, we should apply this text to our modern context.. We must look at all the things in our contemporary lives that keep us in chains, whether they be physical, emotional, social, or spiritual. These days, we can be held captive by our addictions, whether to substances or mindless entertainment, or social media. We can be shackled by all of the “isms” that our culture has concocted—workaholism, alcoholism, sexism, racism.
All of these are very real and can be very powerful. But they do not have the ultimate word over our lives. That is one of the messages from Isaiah, from Luke, and from Acts. The God to whom we pray, and whom we sing both in good times, and in bad, the God revealed to us in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, the God that sends us angels and the power of the Holy Spirit, the God who speaks to us like an earthquake— this is who has the ultimate word over our lives, not the people or things that keep us chained up in captivity, whether we are imprisoned physically or imprisoned in an emotional state. This is a powerful message of good news. And we could leave it there, but I can’t help but think that there’s something more to this story. The fact that Luke opens with freeing the captives, and then three times in Acts shows God literally freeing the captives, is powerful and deserves a little more our attention.
If we read the New Testament carefully, from the Book of Acts through the letters of Paul, one thing you’ll notice is that this is not the only time Paul is in prison. In fact, Paul was imprisoned a lot. Clement of Rome, one of the early church fathers, said that Paul was in prison seven different times. Paul never tells us how many different times he was behind bars, but he does say in 2 Corinthians that it was “far more imprisonments” than his rival apostles. At least two of the seven letters considered authentically written by him—Philemon and Philippians—were composed in prison.
In his book from a couple of years ago called Abject Joy: Paul, Prison, and the Art of Making Do, New Testament professor Ryan Schellenberg ponders these questions: Why was Paul in prison so much, and what type of person must he have been to have found himself so often incarcerated?
Historically, the Christian tradition has imagined that Paul is a heroic type of prisoner, envisioned as, “Paul the philosopher, Paul the political prisoner, Paul the wrongfully accused, Paul the Roman citizen demanding trial, and Paul the martyr.” (1) But Schellenberg suggests that these are not the best tropes for understanding Paul and his prison experiences. Using ancient Greek and Roman sources, Schellenberg reveals that in the first century world of Paul and the other Apostles:
Poor, itinerant people considered to be a public nuisance bore the brunt of “casual administrative violence” as well as short-term imprisonments under local magistrates as a means of “keeping the peace.” [...] Schellenberg suggests that to take the biblical witness seriously, we must accept that Paul inhabited a “whippable body,” one that could be hit or locked up by local authorities with impunity for something like what we would call disorderly conduct. Paul’s was one among many bodies treated this way in the ancient Roman world: poor, homeless, and of an ethnicity that marked him as part of an occupied people. Which is to say, Paul looked a lot like those who get overpoliced and thrown in jail today. (2)
We could choose to read the story of Paul’s imprisonment and release as a metaphor for our kinds of captivity. But if we recognize that Paul was actually quite similar to those currently held in America’s prisons, then this story also becomes a call for us to consider the injustices of our society and the ways that we are complicit in that injustice, if only because of our silence about it.
Consider some of these statistics about the U.S. criminal justice system:
The U.S. has 5% of the world’s population but nearly 25% of its incarcerated population.
Our spending on jails and prisons reached $87 billion in 2015, an increase of 1000% from the $7.4 billion spent in 1975.
In 1972, there were only 200,000 people incarcerated in the United States. Today that number has grown to 2.2 million, an increase of over 1000%
Today, nearly 10 million Americans—including millions of children—have an immediate family member in jail or prison.
More than 4.5 million Americans can’t vote because of a past conviction.
From 1980 to 2017, the number of women in jails and prisons in the U.S. grew 750%. Over 225,000 women are incarcerated today.
Studies have shown that an increase in incarceration doesn’t equate to a reduction in violent crime. And “using prisons to deal with poverty and mental illness makes these problems worse. People leave overcrowded and violent jails and prisons more traumatized, mentally ill, and physically battered than they went in.” (3)
The problems with our prison system are intimately connected to the problems with our society; they are deeply rooted and won’t be simple to fix. But there are glimmers of hope. In one innovative program in North Carolina, the Rev. Sarah Jobe, a Baptist minister and prison chaplain, directs a certificate program at Duke Divinity school that offers graduate-level classes and brings together divinity students and people who are incarcerated.
The Duke seminarians aren’t there to teach the prison inmates– they’re there to learn with them and from them. “We don’t want them to just hear from one another,” says Rev. Jobe. “We want the men and women who are incarcerated to experience themselves as having something to teach. It’s important to us that they experience their own giftedness and their own worth and that they experience someone listening to them as if what they have to say is meaningful.”
Rev. Jobe herself has learned deeply from working with people who are incarcerated. She has learned that many of the things they struggle with— struggling to know their own worth and believe in their own beauty—are the very struggles that she has. “That has become a deep fact and a deep truth, and I am so glad to know that truth about the world.” says Rev. Jobe. “I am so, so glad to be freed from a notion that I, and people like me, are somehow inherently inferior. It gets pretty soul-killing to live in that lie that is so pervasive in our society—that some people are deserving and some are not, that some are gifted and some are not. I don’t even think I had realized how twisted my spirit had become from living in that lie, and now I think I’m finally settling into a new truth.” (4)
Through prayer and praise, through faith in the Resurrection, Paul and Silas were freed from prison. May we too be freed from all that confines us, and may we, in our freedom, stand in solidarity with all who are held captive. Amen.
1) Sarah Jobe, “Why was the apostle Paul in prison so often?” Christian Century, March 23, 2022, https://www.christiancentury.org/review/books/why-was-apostle-paul-prison-so-often. Accessed April 19, 2024.
2) Ibid.
3) Statistics from the Criminal Justice Reform section of the Equal Justice Initiative: https://eji.org/criminal-justice-reform/ Accessed April 20, 2024.
4) “Sarah Jobe: Mass Incarceration Is One of the Biggest Problems of Our Time,” Faith and Leadership, Duke Divinity. Accessed on April 20, 2024. https://faithandleadership.com/sarah-jobe-mass-incarceration-one-the-biggest-problems-our-time