Paul in Jail

Preaching on Acts 12:1-17

In the last little while, I have not been handling quarantine very well.

I feel tired, cranky and negative and I’m not sleeping very well. Sometimes my brain feels fused to the internet. ‘Maybe I have never really been happy,’ I told myself the other day, ‘and have just disguised it to myself with the blips of pleasure that come from spending time with friends and doing activities out in the world.’

I don’t think that is true. But having not had much of a reason to leave the house, and not being able to see people or to do activities out in the world, it is easy to find those thoughts very seductive.

If you’ve been feeling fine, I hope that next week’s sermon is more up your alley. For those of you who are also struggling, I hope you know I’m in it with you.

We have been muttering it to ourselves, but perhaps not officially acknowledging it, so let me say for all of us: man, this is just terrible. It hurts! I can’t wait for it to be done.

Now, there are a bunch of churches in the GTA who have written Doug Ford asking for communities of faith to be reopened. The Shining Waters Regional Council of the United Church of Canada has responded – ‘Our deep and profound need for face-to-face human connection does not suspend the responsibility we have to our faith communities (and our wider communities!) to do everything we can to curb the spread of this virus.’

I am glad we’re in quarantine, and I hope we all keep it up. I suspect it’s going to be get worse before it gets better. That said: man, this is terrible. I can’t wait for it to be done.

One of the reasons I suspect I am struggling is the absence of useful stories. I believe that our sense of self is derived from a collection of narratives that we carry – “I am a bad driver,” we might say about ourselves, referring to that tense time at the drivers test, our friends mentioning discomfort with how fast we go, and that time we were almost in an accident. We have stories about hopes and disappointments, and about relationships – together, those make up our identity.

If it is through them, that we know who we are, and give a sense of meaning to our lives, but we don't have links from our experience of this world to that nest of interconnecting stories in which we make our lives.

We don’t have stories for periods of resourcelessness like this, for what to do when there is nothing to be done, which means our whole web of identity and self-knowledge has become jumbled and hard to access.

*

It is in that spirit that I think about the Book of Acts, in which the apostles are making what is essentially a scrapbook of their daily lives.

There was a time when following Jesus had been their story and, soon enough, being the church will be their story.

For the time being, they don't have narrative coherence.

And think about the pressure! ‘How should we commemorate Jesus?’ they ask themselves, and someone notes ‘he did say “do this in remembrance of me” during dinner,’ and then ‘Of course,’ someone says ‘sure, let's do that.’ And we’ve been collectively doing that ever since. ‘How do we welcome people into the community?’ ‘Well, you know, John the Baptist did immerse people in water an awful lot.’ And here we are, a baptized and baptizing community!

Amidst all the theological speculation, and liturgical creativity, and all the bickering about who is in, under what regulations, they are desperate for models of how they should be living in their circumstances: with nothing, with enemies breathing down their neck, and with incredible standards for themselves.

They need someone to turn their lives in stories, and weave their circumstances into the pre-existing net of narrative they have been formed by - Jesus calling them from their boats, and his sermon on the mountain, and that time he walked on water, and the trauma and hope of holy week in Jerusalem

They need stories of those who struggle as much as they do, but which ties them back into the webbing they have begun to weave around Jesus last impossible stand.

And so, they start to scrapbook, essentially. For a while, we just have this collection of little vignettes, where they have jotted down what it is they do, what they experience, and how they process it, in the hopes that at some point they will be able to tie it together and make sense of it.

Most of Paul’s vignettes are quite unpleasant – his travels across the Mediterranean are a long series of beatings, imprisonments, shipwrecks, illnesses and desperations. Most of the New Testament is written by people in jail, on their way to jail, or just out of jail, someone at some point memorably told me, and that is never as true as it is for Paul.

Here, Paul and Silas are arrested, beaten, imprisoned and then an earthquake hits.

*

Here is my vignette, from this week in quarantine.

I was walking along my new route – up Spadina, into the Nordheimer Ravine, past St. Clair into Cedarvale – and was glowing in the sunshine. As you know, I’ve been feeling crumby, and it felt so good to get sun and to dwell among the trees for a little while. It felt like I was attuned to something deep and ecological and powerful and real.

I was looking out at the beauty of all the tiny white flowers on serrated leaves, scattered through the forest floor, and then realized they were probably garlic mustard. I googled them up and realized I was right. Perhaps, in my heart of hearts, I always kind of knew.

I don’t know how up on invasive species you are, but garlic mustard is one of the worst. It has no predators or diseases in Ontario, and its roots release a toxin that kills other wildflowers. Perhaps once, you might have seen trilliums or bloodroot or dog-tooth violet out in a Toronto ravine in May. No longer.

As some of you know, my mother is a forester, and invasive species are one of her favourite apocalypses. We have all seen our parents muttering angrily at the morning paper – for me, that’s buckthorn and dog-strangling vine overtaking the Taiga.

Amidst what was already quite the gloom, briefly punctuated by the glory of nature, those darling white flowers on their serrated leaves reignited an inherited horror.

Now an ex-congregant of mine also hates garlic mustard. He participated in a crusade against its presence in the Rouge. It is pernicious, he said, but does make a mean pesto.

With his words in mind, I made my way back to the Nordheimer Ravine, and made my solitary stand. I did not win. I barely cleared the tiniest corner of one particularly beautiful copse of trees. It’s done already. I have lost.

I did pick a spot on a crossroads, and got to give my spiel to a few amiable passersby. I must have looked odd, crouching in my grove, lovingly tearing up bits of the forest floor, weeping in love for what might have been.

I filled a back-back, which I treated like a ticking bomb, and brought it home and made pesto, and it’s now lurking perniciously in the corner of my fridge. We shall see how the pasta is. It felt good to make a hopeless and symbolic stand for what I believe in in the midst of apocalyptic forces marshalling around me. I slept well that night.

It feels good to be have been able to take something heartbreaking, and – theoretically – turn it into something delicious.

*

I would like to tell Paul’s vignette too.

He and Silas are in the city of Thyatira, staying with a woman named Lydia, when they encounter a young slave who has been possessed by a spirit through which she offers divination on behalf of her owners.

Even though this spirit acknowledges God and the mission that Paul and Silas are on, they argue that the girl has been unjustly imprisoned, and they drive the spirit off. The owners have lost a source of income, are enraged, and have them beaten and thrown into prison. Even though they are jailed, they get to know the other prisoners, sing with them, and pray together.

Late in the night, an earthquake comes and the prison is destroyed. Even though their shackles are broken, they make sure that the jailer doesn’t punish himself in shame and guilt for their escape, and he ends up joining them.

Having experienced clear divine interference, and therefore recognizing that evil has been done, the city officials try to have them set free and sent away. Even though they could happily leave, Paul and Silas demand an apology before they’ll depart.

Still bruised from their beating, but having stretched the authority of that earthquake quite far in the process of getting their apology and feeling pressure to leave town, they dawdle their way back to Lydia’s house and spend time encouraging everyone there.

Offered the easy but bankrupt victory of being affirmed by an enslaving spirit: they stop, commune with God, and offer liberation. Confronted with imprisonment, they stop, commune with God, and offer care to those imprisoned in jail. Offered an easy escape, they stop to offer liberation to their jailer as well; offered a hushed-up freedom, they ensure that the injustice of their imprisonment is publicly recognized; with the looming power of the authorities, they take the slow and meandering route.

Again and again, the apostles tell the story of the Romans executing Jesus, with the support of the elite in Jerusalem, daring to think that they could bring him down. Now they add a vignette, from their own lives in a post-Jesus world – they tried to imprison Paul and Silas, and then they dared to think that they could get ride of them after.

We are the inheritors of a web of stories of small, hopeless and largely symbolic stands for what we believe in, amidst apocalyptic forces marshalling around us. Sometimes they work. Let us add our vignettes as that scrapbook grows.