Incarcerated People Are Not Vermin

Sermon for 4 August 2019 at St. Mary's Episcopal Church in Eugene, Oregon

Scripture Readings: Ecclesiastes 1:2, 12-14; 2:18-23; Psalm 49:1-12; Colossians 3:1-11; Luke 12:13-21

I am part of Ecumenical Ministries of Oregon a group of churches cooperating together to seek, among other things, justice in our criminal justice system. As part of this effort I was asked to help put together a “Criminal Justice Sabbath” which would try to raise awareness and gain support at the congregational level. I’ve been involved in various kinds of jail ministry for about seven years, so I’m grateful for this chance to reflect on that experience.

To begin, I want to make sure you noticed the reading from Ecclesiastes. Wow! That right there is what we call a hard truth. If there’s one thing almost all of us want, it’s safety. Freedom from the worry that our life might be gone in an instant (though of course it can). Freedom from realizing, as the writer of Ecclesiastes did, that goodness and wickedness receive little in the way of observable, fair reward and punishment. Oh, we have powerful myths by which we distance ourselves from these realities, such as the myth that we deserve what we have, or the myth that there are dangerous people who will take away what is rightfully ours, or the myth that we have the moral right to take away some people’s freedom if doing so will protect our lives and property.

None of those myths is false from our perspective; they keep the world spinning along pretty much as we’ve always known it. But there’s an underside that we rarely allow ourselves to see which comes from the fact that life and wealth aren’t nearly as stable as our myths tell us. And the human cost of maintaining these illusions is incredibly high. The United States incarcerates more people by far than any other nation. Our life of apparently peaceful serenity comes at a high cost, and the burden of that cost falls disproportionally on the poor. It’s their stories that I want you to hear today, to put a human face on persons whom we persistently think of as monsters or vermin.

These stories are composites, because all of them are people who might be known to you — your neighbor, your fellow parishioner, your college friend. I met a man in jail a few months ago, I’ll call him Bob, who stumbled down the rabbit hole to find his home and cars confiscated by police, his job lost, his wife and children estranged and living in another state, and he himself facing several charges that would take months to sort out while he was kept in county lockup. He didn’t have the money to pay for an ankle bracelet. A year ago he had a good construction job and a family home and a normal relationship with his neighbors. Then things fell apart and, like the Bible’s Job character, he lost everything that mattered to him.

Bob had been a soldier in Afghanistan and had a pretty bad case of PTSD, which translated into heavy alcohol use and a dangerous temper. On the night of his arrest he had been in a bar fight; then he had driven home, still in his agitated state, and was arrested on a DUI. I don’t remember all the charges that were brought against him (there’s never just one charge; always its a bunch of charges, to pressure people into plea bargains), but he was being held at county lockup awaiting trial, which took longer than it should because of the backlog in the courts. Bob’s story has a happy ending of sorts, because his veteran status gave him access to a new alcohol and PTSD treatment program. He has lost everything but his life, but he will at least be able to start over. It’s more than some get.

I met another man, whom I’ll call Darryl. Darryl is a 37-year-old black man who had been in lockups of one kind or another almost all his adult life. His parents had been drug addicts and so he was a ward of the foster care system as far back as he could remember. In his teenage years he started selling drugs and his winsome personality made him pretty successful at it. He didn’t use the drugs himself much; they were a source of income. Darryl keeps trying to “go straight” when he gets out of jail. But do you know how hard it is for someone on probation to get and keep a job? Darryl was in jail this time, not for selling drugs, but for a “parole violation.” His boss had scheduled him to work on the day he was supposed to go meet with his parole officer, and neither the officer nor his boss was willing to change their expectation, so he missed the parole officer meeting in order to keep the job. He was arrested and put in jail, just for seven days, but it was enough to get him fired. His last words to me are haunting: “I’m just so tired,” he said, with tears streaming down his face. “Tired of being in jail, tired of being out of jail, tired of being homeless. I just want to die.”

There was another man — I’ll call him Stephen — whose family had cut off all contact with him because of his erratic behavior. I could see why. In the four or five times I met him Stephen told me no fewer than three separate conspiracy stories that involved occult groups killing infants, powerful people involved in the sex slave industry, the CIA and the Mossad coming after him personally because he had worked for both and knew dangerous secrets of theirs. And there were lots of other names and places that I wasn’t able to see how they fit together or how they connected into any of the main narratives. I’m not a psychologist, but I was able to recognize signs of paranoia thoroughgoing enough that he belonged in a hospital, not a jail. But it took six months before finally he was remanded by the court to the state hospital for treatment.

I’m not telling any women’s stories because our chaplaincy corps has a policy — a wise one, I think — of having women visit women and men visit men. But there are also many women in Lane County Jail, and their stories are not too different from the ones I’ve told.

I’m telling you about these people because I want you to realize that the human beings we lock away in our jails are not animals. We would probably treat them better if they were animals. No, they are our brothers and sons, daughters and spouses and neighbors. I’m also telling you about these people because they are not very different from you and me and the people we love. I’ve known so many who are in jail because of circumstances beyond their control. Those of us who are comparatively wealthy and well educated, who have good networks of people who can help us, would be able to weather problems that the poor are unable to cope with. The English Protestant martyr John Bradford, who was imprisoned and killed in the time of Mary Tudor, said, on seeing a fellow prisoner killed, “There but for the grace of God goes John Bradford.” Once you become aware of how easy it is to get into legal jeopardy, once you realize that your ability to survive depends on your money and social standing, you can’t ever think of those who get caught in the system as less worthy than yourself.

It is the powerful who design and run criminal justice systems everywhere. The wealthy can bend the laws or even break them outright, because they can afford to pay bail and fines and hire the best attorneys. The HBO comedian and commentator John Oliver, in his episode entitled “Municipal Violations” (#31), examines things like traffic tickets, which almost everyone gets and about which no one really feels guilty. Even something as small as a jaywalking ticket can lead the poor into a situation where they’re forced to pay many times what a wealthy person has to pay, and may even have to spend time in jail. People adopt an attitude of moral superiority toward the incarcerated poor, while the reality is that they simply have fewer resources to draw on when they get into trouble.

Criminal justice reform is a political hot topic, and I don’t have enough knowledge to make specific recommendations on the public policy. But there are things we can do right now to improve the lives of people in jail. The main thing is to become involved at some level, and opportunities abound. Become a pen pal. Volunteer as a religious or educational worker. Support with your money and your time programs that help reintegrate convicted persons back into society. Hire them if you can. Get involved politically and work for criminal justice reform. The really crucial thing, though, is for us to change our attitudes about incarcerated persons, to stop thinking of them as vermin and honor their humanity. We owe it to one another, in obedience to our baptismal vows, to seek and serve Christ in them.

Elijah and the Woman of Zarephath

Elijah and the Woman of Zarephath: Sermon for Proper 27, option 2 (11 November 2018) 

Scripture Readings: 1 Kings 17:8-16; Psalm 146; Hebrews 9:24-28; Mark 12:38-44

The story of Elijah the Tishbite is a great story, but it takes work to get the full value out of it, and in particular you have to read each episode in the context of the larger story. Like so much of the Bible, casual reading of this passage by itself can yield bad fruit, but put the effort in and it will nourish you. The story goes that God was angry with Israel’s king Ahab because he had married a Phoenician princess from the port city of Sidon, named Jezebel. This secures an alliance with Ahab’s northern neighbor, but involved him in the worship of Canaanite gods, which is the Israelite kings’ quintessential fault. The fact that Jezebel comes from Sidon is important to this morning’s little bit of the Elijah story, as we’ll see in a moment.

Before we get into it, it’s worth admitting that there are at least five ways in which this story is difficult for us modern westerners to hear. First, we no longer believe, indeed I’d argue we CAN’T believe, that the gods send rain or snow, or withhold it, in response to human beings. So to begin with, we have to engage in a little voluntary suspension of disbelief in order for the story to work. Second, we find here a God who punishes the whole people of Israel for the sins of the king. As a portrayal of God, this isn’t easy to swallow since it seems to make God arbitrary and unfair. Third, of all the people God could have chosen to take care of Elijah, God chooses a foreigner from Jezebel’s people, a woman without food to give Elijah food, a woman without a name to contrast with the notorious Jezebel. Fourth, it’s not like Elijah is starving — God has been sending ravens to bring him food, using the same language to describe that feeding as the story we’re reading today — which makes the widow’s situation all the more poignant. She barely lives hand to mouth, like birds, but is asked to make provision for Elijah. And fifth, the city gate is a terrible place to gather firewood, even just “two sticks.” The city gate was the public square, where trials and business deals were conducted. Who gathers sticks in such a place? These five things are genuinely odd. Some of them just have to be accepted as part of the story world, but some of them offer real insights into how ancient Israelites would have heard the story. So let’s dig in.

The little town of Zarephath lay between the larger cities of Tyre to the south and Sidon to the north on what is today the coast of Lebanon. Another 25 miles past Sidon and you’re in Beirut. God didn’t send Elijah to the people of Israel, but to a Canaanite woman. Earlier in chapter 17 we’re told that God “commanded” (צִוִּיתִי) the ravens to feed (לכלכל) Elijah. Now ravens are unclean (Lev 11:15), and God not only gives them a command but also requires Elijah to eat bread and meat brought by them, which probably would have made any Israelite squirm. In this morning’s reading we heard that  God had “commanded” (צִוִּיתִי) the woman to feed (לְכַלְכְּלֶךָ) Elijah, the exact same expression. So the unclean birds and the widow of Zarephath stand in the same relation to God and to Elijah.

The woman must accept Elijah’s proposal before she can receive God’s gift. She had been planning to cook for herself and her son, but Elijah calls her to care for himself, who in her eyes was just foreign beggar, first. When she stops living her life of scarcity and begins to share with him, abundance opens up. Her handful of flour doesn’t run out and her little juglet of olive oil doesn’t dry up until the drought is over. The narrator concludes with a “happily ever after” moment showing that everything the prophet promised got delivered. But it doesn’t last. The story goes on with the child becoming sick and dying, with the widow complaining to Elijah, and with Elijah complaining to God and the boy being healed. The first resurrection story in Scripture is not God raising an Israelite but a Canaanite child! The result of this astonishing act of God is that the woman comes to believe what Elijah says is God’s word. So in the larger context, we have a Canaanite woman whose response to Elijah is the correct one, contrasted with Ahab and Jezebel’s incorrect response that tried to shut Elijah up.

Now it’s a real danger in stories like this that particular readings of them can be antisemitic in the worst sense, using Jewish texts against Jews. Nothing could be more remote from Scripture’s intent. Admittedly we see Elijah taking God’s grace to foreigners while keeping the Israelites in drought and it’s so easy to slip from there into a narrative in which Israel is more unfaithful than other people, or somehow deserves bad treatment in the modern world. Such interpretations are unfortunately widespread among some Christians, and there’s a fairly direct pipeline that runs from such interpretations to horrible things like the synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh last week. We Christians have more to repent and make amends for in that regard than Jews ever did.

Try to imagine reading this story as a Jew in Jesus’ time, a good 700 years or so after this story was written. In Jesus’ day, Tyre and Sidon were part of the Roman province of Syria despite being close to the Galilee. We’re told in Mark’s gospel that Jesus visited Tyre and Sidon at least twice, though that’s not mentioned in the other gospels. Luke actually records Jesus interacting with our story directly. Jesus says “There were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah … and Elijah was sent to none of them but only to Zarephath, in the land of Sidon, to a woman who was a widow” (Luke 4:24-26). The saying illustrates how Israel resisted its prophets, necessitating that God should send His prophets elsewhere. I’m sure you can appreciate the antisemitic potential in that. The people of Nazareth, on hearing Jesus say this in the synagogue, tried to lynch Jesus right then and there! If this story could be so offensive when spoken by a fellow Jew, I’m pretty sure it would be deeply offensive from Christians. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that any reading of the Jewish scriptures in which Jews are held up to ridicule or scorn cannot be correct.

Instead, let’s pay attention to what GOD is doing here. God tells Elijah to leave his raven-fed hideaway in Jordan and go to Zarephath, assuring him, “Behold, I have commanded a widow there to feed you” (1 Kgs 17:9). When God gives people a command, it is always for their good. God commands Elijah twice, and commands the woman once, to the end that both Elijah and she and her son may eat. What seems at first like a hopeless act — a last meal before curling up to die — becomes the very means by which hope comes in. Her obedience to the prophet’s word results in her receiving God’s provision of food as well as, later on, the life of her son. But Jesus’ observation is still apropos: God might have sent Elijah to any number of Israelite widows to save them, but instead sent him to this foreigner to save her. What do we learn about God by observing this? We learn what Israel needed to learn, too, that God is not only the Lord of us and our people, but the Lord of aliens, legal and otherwise, and even the Lord of other nations regardless of whether or not they know it. God loves and cares for the unclean as well as the clean, the sick as well as the whole, the addicted as well as the teetotalers, the Canaanites as well as the Israelites. In the words of Psalm 147 God delights to feed the ravens when they cry out. We can see in the Elijah story the beginnings of the idea that Yahweh, Israel’s God could and did save  other peoples, which would eventually evolve into the idea of Yahweh as the universal God. In the process of Israel’s discovery of God’s Oneness, stories like this one played an important part.

The season after Pentecost is a time when we typically talk about evangelism (though because we’re Episcopalians we may use a different word) and the spread of Christianity throughout the world, and this story weighs in on that matter. We may be tempted to make people convert before we give them help, but in this story it’s precisely the miraculous provision of food that leads to the widow’s conversion. Like all Jews and Gentiles, she is presented with a command from God obedience to which will make her live. That command, which we also receive multiple times in Scripture, is that she care for the stranger living in her vicinity. Even this Phoenician woman can recognize the truth of that command and obey it. Will we?

A Tale of Two Daughters: Sermon for Proper 8

Sermon by Loren Crow, Ph.D., preached at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church on 1 July, 2018.

Readings: Wisdom of Solomon 1:13-15, 2:23-24; Psalm 30; 2 Corinthians 8:7-15; Mark 5:21-43

You may have noticed that Jesus sometimes commands people not to tell others about him, and especially about the miracles that he does. Mark is the gospel that contributes this theme to the tradition. In Mark, when Jesus casts out a demon, he silences the creature before it can spill the beans about His identity. He heals a leper, then commands him not to tell anyone. After Jesus is transfigured in front of some disciples, He commands them not to tell anyone until after the resurrection. Now that strikes most people as odd, because we’re used to thinking of Jesus’ life-work as sort of like a Billy Graham crusade with its goal being to convert as many people as possible. The other gospels say that after Jesus’ resurrection He commands His disciples to spread the Gospel far and wide; but by way of contrast, Mark presents Jesus as keeping his head down, trying to go unnoticed … as he goes about doing all kinds of crazy things which are not exactly designed for stealth. It raises the question: if Mark’s Jesus is so keen to keep a low profile, why is he constantly on the move, healing and casting out demons everywhere he goes?

Scholars over a century ago dubbed this the “Messianic secret” in Mark, and developed two explanations for it, one historical and one theological. Historically, if Jesus was as obviously the Messiah as he is made out to be in the Gospels, then why didn’t most Jews at the time believe it? To that question Mark provides an answer: maybe Jesus commanded His disciples to keep his true identity a secret until after the Resurrection. This explains why Jesus’ following during his lifetime was negligible, but afterwards quickly spread. More important than the historical reason, though, is a theological concern. Mark wants to reveal one of the central mysteries of faith: that the power of Jesus is already at work in the world, secretly, bringing life and healing and salvation. Usually Jesus goes unnoticed, working behind the scenes, underneath perception, almost like it’s a secret. Like a little yeast that works its way into the whole batch of dough and voila, the whole batch is leavened! Or like a farmer who scatters seed in her field and waters it, and then it just grows; it’s a mystery. Actually it shouldn’t be too surprising that Mark’s Jesus stays hidden: He comes to us hidden, too, in sacramental forms of bread and wine and in the persons of our fellow Christians; He comes to us hidden whenever we meet people who seem of no account — the sick and the dying, the poor, the hungry, prisoners. The whole world regards such people as dismissible. Only with eyes opened by God’s Spirit do we begin to be able to see Jesus walking in our midst; only with the ears quickened by the Holy Spirit can we hear and obey Jesus’ voice.

The two “daughters” in Mark’s story constitute the yin and yang of Christian life, the passive and the active reception of Jesus’ presence. Jesus tenderly calls the daughter of Jairos “talitha,” “little girl” or “sweetie.” She’s either dead or so close to it as to fool everyone, so clearly she does nothing to receive Jesus’ gift of new life. Her father, though, humbles himself before Jesus and pleads with him to come and heal his daughter. Oddly, Jesus does not commend the man’s faith. Here's another oddity, Jesus does commend the faith of the woman in the little story that interrupts the narrative flow, inserting between the beginning and end of the Jairos-and-his-daughter story this story about a woman who has battled not only the physical hardships of twelve years’ blood loss but also the religious impurity that a flow of blood produces. As a practical matter, this woman would have been unable to move among other people without causing hardship, and would almost certainly have been shunned as a result. Yet she brazenly steps forward and touches Jesus’ clothes in the belief that doing so would cure her. And she’s right. Jesus immediately senses power go forth from him and uncovers the truth of her action. Then he speaks a word of such grace to her, “Daughter, your faith saved you.” Think of it! Instead of relegating her to the status of just some random person in the crowd, Jesus calls her “daughter,” a close family member, someone important, establishing with one word a whole relationship of care. I imagine them embracing as Jesus tells her to go in peace.

Such a structure where one story is sandwiched inside the beginning and end of another story, is called an inclusio. It’s quite common in Scripture and Mark is an acknowledged master of the form. The key to understanding these inclusios is to look for ways in which the two stories explicate and comment on one another. The inclusio is set up in the first place by the change of location, crossing the sea at the beginning and then returning to His home end of the narrative. The parallel is highlighted by calling both women “daughter.” Jesus is to heal Jairos’ daughter by laying his hands upon her (5:23), and the other unnamed woman reaches out and touches Jesus’ robe. The little girl is twelve years old; the woman has experienced her affliction for twelve years. The young daughter is a passive recipient of mercy because of her father’s pleading and because of Jesus’ grace and power. The woman with the flow of blood actively presses her claim upon Jesus, not because she thinks she has a right but simply because her need is so deep. Both women, the passive and the active, receive what they need exactly as they need it. Both women receive from Jesus a term of endearment. The older woman is called “daughter” to remind us to look at the story of Jairos’s daughter. These two women symbolize the power death has over humanity. Both of them are saved by Jesus from death, literal death and figurative death in the form of debilitating sickness. Jesus invades the world and throws down its powerful evil rulers, who conquers them all with his Truth and his poured out lifeblood. That blood has been shed, that Truth proclaimed, that Kingdom of God is growing up secretly alongside the apparently powerful kingdoms of the world. But sometimes it sure doesn’t feel that way. We’re supposed to be the victors in this crusade, so why does it sometimes feel like we’re losing ground?

“In the midst of life we are in death,” says the Burial Office. All of us are somewhere on the path that our physical bodies are taking through the world, and death lurks we know not when or where, and so we seek the shelter of the God who walks with us through the valley of the shadow of death. Come back to the Gospel: both of these daughters were in the midst of death at the beginning and then are delivered from it by the end. In the midst of death, we find that Jesus is our life. When we’re stricken by terrors and wickedness and disease and war, we find that Jesus is our life. When we’re bleeding for twelve years straight and half starved and fully starved of human contact, and we feel like God is off somewhere listening to harp music, we see Jesus and we hear his cry from the cross and we know that he’s right there crucified beside us, showing us how to live. In the mist of death we are in life, if we are in God; but also in the midst of life we are in death, unable to provide life for ourselves, dependent absolutely on God’s bounty. Sometimes we may feel particularly energetic or focused, so we reach out in prayer and touch Jesus’ clothing; sometimes, though, it’s all we can do just to wait because we’ve tried every solution we can think of and now we’ve no choice but to leave ourselves and our world in God’s hands. And then he sends us out into the world to become part of his work. And what does that work look like in actual practice? “your abundance at the present time should supply their needs, so that their abundance may also supply your needs.” Not by converting others at big “crusades,” but by the slow, steady conversion of our minds and our wills to the claims of the Gospel. When others see the Gospel played out authentically in our lives, their own hearts and minds will begin the process of conversion. The secret is out: wherever you encounter goodness and beauty, wherever you witness acts of mercy and healing, whenever you find yourself aware that you have succeeded in being kind, where refugees and families endure uncertainty and hatred, and especially when we gather ourselves together in this place and especially around this altar, in all our brokenness and neediness, Jesus is right here among us doing what he always does, and showing us how to do likewise. Pay attention, and I bet you’ll meet Him soon; keep paying attention and Lord knows what can happen.