Tuesday, May 16, 2023
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Opens prison doors, sets the captives free
The crowd in Philippi joined in the attack on Paul and Silas. Magistrates had them stripped and beaten with rods for many blows. Then they were thrown into prison, into the innermost cell. The jailor secured their feet to a stake.
In Drums Along the Mohawk, I read about Old New-gate Prison deep underground in Connecticut, where a number of Tory prisoners were kept for years at the beginning of the Revolutionary War. One of them, the fictional John Wolff, reflected on his prison, later, after his remarkable escape:
It was awful when the other men yelled. It started the echoes whirling in the high air shaft, seventy feet high. It was fifty feet across the bottom, but at the top the shaft was four feet across with an iron grating fied into the stone. The voices would start picking each other up, and it used to make John Wolff sick. The voices would start picking each other up, catching and passing each other until the echoes acquired individual personalities of their own, and the echoes had echoes, and it went on and on, a bedlam that wouldn’t die. It was like the eternal drip of water magnified. (p. 278-279)
John Wolff, guilty of a small treason against the new USA, was meant to be shamed into oblivion, and he nearly was. Sometimes when I have read Genesis in the past, I thought God wanted to shame Adam and Eve, when they were forced to leave their home in the Garden of Eden. But I realized I was wrong.
God came to Adam in the woods, knowing what Adam and Eve had done. He provided clothing for them both after they became ashamed of their nakedness. He spoke with wisdom and tenderness about his first children: “The man has now become like one of us, knowing good and devil. He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever.” This might have been tough love, but it was the best thing he could have done for Adam and Eve.
Paul and Silas prayed and sang hymns to God as the other prisoners listened. Then a severe earthquake shook the foundations of the jail, all the doors flew open, and all the chains were pulled loose.
God brought his evangelists out of the depths of that prison. God does not shame his children, nor does he imprison them, nor does he leave them naked. But in our own primordial unconscious (think original sin) we can’t help but feel ashamed anyway, and nothing we do can change that deep sense of failure. Everything we try on our own is a reaction to that shame.
Then God shows up. Richard Rohr watches God find us and take the lead in our rescue:
God is always the initiator. God is always the Hound of Heaven who goes out after us because God knows our primordial shame. God is always sewing garments of love and protection to cover our immense and intense sense of unworthiness. Our very movements toward God are only because God has first moved toward us. Â
What happened to the Philippian jailer, steeped in his own “primordial shame,” after he and his family were baptized? Yes, baptized!
When the jailer woke up and saw the prison doors wide open, he drew his sword and was about to kill himself, thinking that the prisoners had escaped. But Paul shouted out in a loud voice, “Do no harm to yourself; we are all here.” The jailer asked for a light, rushed in and, trembling with fear, fell down before Paul and Silas. Then he brought them out and said, “Sirs, what must I do to be saved?”
The jailer, Paul, the magistrates, Lydia, all the characters in this story, all descendants of Adam and Eve, all acting out their shame. But some, rescued from the bonds of shame and death, are given God’s gift of life.
 (Acts 16, Psalm 138, John 16)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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