My cousin is in prison.  My mother is one of 10 children so that side of the family has a lot of people I don’t know.  I didn’t know this cousin before she went to prison, and I don’t really know her now.  I wrote to her once, but didn’t hear back.  I hear things about her from my aunt, who does her best to keep this scattered family connected.  I know that she has exhausted her appeals in the courts, and that she has also applied to the governor for clemency.  That was denied and she is still in prison.    Other people have raised her children, who are now grown.  I remember getting a high school graduation announcement about her son a few years ago.  I don’t know her, but I can imagine her anguish at not being able to be present in her children’s lives. 

 

My brother works for the prison system in another state.  Over the years as he has told me about his work, I have noticed that many of his clients are mentally ill.  We often wonder together how many of them were ill before they came to prison, and whether it would have been more appropriate for them to have received treatment rather than incarceration.  The stories he tells are full of tragedy and violence and injustice, and sometimes I don’t know how he keeps on doing his job. 

 

Peace Camp is the annual gathering of the Baptist Peace Fellowship.  One year at peace camp there was a woman named Linda who had just been released from prison.  Linda had been arrested for intentionally trespassing onto restricted government property at Ft. Benning, GA.  It was an act of civil disobedience which she did to protest our military’s involvement in training of Latin American troops in tactics of torture and extortion.  She served 3 months in prison for that action.  At peace camp, she talked about the difficulties of life in a women’s prison and about the us-them mentality that exists between guards and prisoners.  Linda is a retired nurse and community health educator, so she had particularly noticed situations where prisoners’ access to medical care was limited or restricted.  In the three months of her sentence, she saw at least three life-threatening situations that were mishandled by the prison authorities, including a woman recovering from surgery who ran a fever and bled for 10 days before the staff finally took her back to the hospital to see her surgeon and receive transfusions.

 

You may be wondering by now why I am talking about prison.  Well, other than movies and television, I’ve just told you pretty much everything I know about prison.  And you may have noticed it’s all second-hand information.  I appreciate my brother’s work.  I applaud Linda’s courage in following her convictions when she knew it would likely lead to prison.  I hope that God never asks me to do that.

 

I am talking about prison because our reading this morning was written when Paul was a prisoner.   As bad as prison might be in our time, and I think it is bad, it was worse in Paul’s time.   Paul was bodily chained to his guard.  There was no concern for his civil rights. He couldn’t even expect to be fed unless he or one of his friends supplied money for his food.  Bribes were considered part of the guard’s salary.  One of the reasons Paul wrote to the Philippians was to thank them for their monetary gift, which was enabling him to survive prison.   And, at this point, he was not serving a sentence.  He was merely being held over for trial, but it appears that he was in that limbo place for at least two years!

 

So I don’t know much about prison, and even less about prison in Paul’s day.  But I have known other sorts of imprisonment:  

 

·        I have known the incarceration of anxiety, where fear controlled major chunks of my life.  It was unseen by others, an internal battle against an invisible force, but it worked just like an electric fence to keep me in. 

 

·        I have known the captivity of depression, where my desire for life, my sense of joy and anticipation and even a "normal" sense of day-to-day living were suspended and I didn't know how long the sentence would last. I am grateful that my sentence turned out to be brief, but many others are not so fortunate.

 

·        I have observed in friends, the imprisonment of addiction, where the body’s craving for a drink or a hit defined the boundaries of their existence.  I have also seen abusive relationships hold one person captive to the whims and desires of another. 

 

No sort of prison is something to be taken lightly, and yet Paul writing from prison, writes this letter to the Philippians, which is widely regarded as one of his most joyful letters.    

 

It is also the letter in which he says, “to live Christ, to die gain.”  This is a theme for Paul.  In Galatians he says, “I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.”  His life is focused on following Jesus and has reached the point where it doesn’t make a difference to him whether he lives or dies as long as Jesus is glorified in what happens. That is incredible. That is radical.  Paul’s body is in prison, but his spirit is absolutely free.  The usual threats and intimidation aren’t going to work against him, because he has already given his dying over to Jesus. 

 

Joseph Ton was pastor of a Baptist church in Rumania while that country was ruled by Communists. The authorities hated him because of his preaching. They arrested him, and threatened to kill him. Ton said to the arresting officer: "Sir, your supreme weapon is killing. My supreme weapon is dying. Sir, you know my sermons are all over the country on tapes now. If you kill me, you will be sprinkling them with my blood. Whoever listens to them after that will say, 'You'd better listen. This man sealed it with his blood.' They will speak ten times louder than before. So, go on and kill me. Then I will win the supreme victory." The officer sent him home.  Rev. Ton says, "For years I was a Christian who was cautious because I wanted to survive. I had accepted all the restrictions the authorities put on me because I wanted to live. Now I wanted to die, and they wouldn't oblige. Now I could do whatever I wanted in Rumania. For years I wanted to save my life, and I was losing it. Now that I wanted to lose it, I was winning it."[1]

 

Sometimes we accept our imprisonment; we accommodate  the restrictions put on us by our fear, by our pride, by other people’s expectations, by whatever has us captive.  We do it for the sake of living and it takes a while for us to see that we aren’t really living freely. 

 

{pause here for healing prayer exercise}

 

Rabbi Hugo Gryn used to tell of his experiences in Auschwitz as a boy.  Food supplies were meager, and the inmates took care to preserve every scrap that came their way.  When the Festival of Hanukkah arrived, Hugo’s father took a lump of margarine and, to the horror of young Hugo, his father melted the margarine,  took a small piece of string, placed it in the melted margarine, said the prayers and lit the wick.  When he was asked why, his father replied, "You and I have seen that it is possible to live up to three weeks without food. We once lived almost three days without water; but without hope it is impossible to live properly for three minutes.”[2]

 

Without hope, it is impossible to live properly.  But Paul had hope.  In this text, I see three sources of hope.  One is his absolute faith in Jesus.   There is a funeral liturgy that refers to “a sure and certain hope in the resurrection.”  Paul had that quality of hope – sure and certain.  Another source of hope for Paul is in knowing that the Philippians were praying for him.  However it is that prayer works, it was doing that for him.  And finally, Paul is encouraged by their faithfulness to the gospel.  He expects that they will suffer as he is suffering, that some of them may be imprisoned because of their faith, and he is encouraged because of that solidarity.  Perhaps he realizes that even if he dies, others will continue the work of sharing the gospel.

 

He encourages them to live their lives “in a manner worthy of the gospel of Christ.”  The word that gets translated “live your life” is related to the Greek word for city.  It has the sense of “live as a free citizen.”[3]  The Philippians may be citizens of Rome, but what Paul means is that they are to live as free citizens of God’s commonwealth, God’s reign on earth. 

 

Writing from prison, Paul encourages them and us to live as free people, as citizens liberated by God, because he is doing that even in prison.  To the Galatians he says, “For freedom, Christ has set us free, do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.”  And Jesus said that he was sent to proclaim release to the captives.  Sisters and brothers, hear the good news.  Amen.