Acts 16:16-34
We took off our watches and jewelry, emptied our pockets and gave the guard behind the bulletproof glass our driver’s licenses. Another guard called out five names. “You five go first—into the trap.”
The trap was aptly named. We entered and the door slammed and latched behind us. The door on the other side was shut and locked. The idea was that even if you managed to force your way in through one door, you still could not escape.
The guards were pleasant and accommodating. And they were thorough, waving wands over our bodies and searching our shoes. Finally the other door clicked open. We left the trap and entered the prison.
Reverend Lucy met us and led us through a maze of locked doors and metal staircases, across a courtyard whose flowers were dwarfed by fences topped with razor wire. Back through more locked doors and up three flights of steps. Finally we entered a hall filled with women—all shapes and sizes, races and ages—all wearing green sweatshirts and blue jeans.
For the tenth year, Framingham pastors were invited by the Protestant Chaplain, Rev. Lucy, to come to MCI-Framingham to lead a Good Friday service. After ten years, I knew what to expect. And yet, every year, I am jarred by the sound of doors slamming behind me and sobered by stark gray walls.
Over the years, I have come to understand more about who ends up behind bars in our society. At MCI Framingham, the only women’s prison in our state, the vast majority of women are there because of a crime related to addiction or mental health challenges. Most have experienced physical or sexual abuse. Many of them are mothers, struggling to maintain some kind of relationship with their children. While there are women of all races and backgrounds they, like the nation-wide prison population, are disproportionately people of color.
Each year, I see new faces in the congregation. And each year, I notice the women I have seen every year for ten years, looking a little bit older, still singing and praying with their whole hearts and souls. Some of them, Reverend Lucy told us, are lifers.
The women at that service understand that the concrete and steel surrounding them are not the only walls that imprison them. They pray for freedom from the prison of addiction. They pray for release from chains of guilt and shame. They pray that the walls of distrust between them and their families might be torn down. They pray to be freed from the downward spiral of abusive relationships. They pray for freedom from isolation and alienation.
In our reading from Acts, Paul and Silas sing and pray, and the prison walls crumble. In our annual Good Friday service, we sing and pray. When we are done, the prison walls—the ones made of concrete and steel—are still there. The other walls—walls of isolation and addiction, shame and broken relationships—are also still there. Maybe, though, just maybe, there are a few cracks in them, a little bit of erosion. Maybe, just maybe, there’s been an earthquake that has shaken the foundation of someone’s prison.
The first year we visited, we brought the whole service, identical to the one we had led a few hours before at Edwards Church. We’d selected appropriately somber hymns, since it was Good Friday. The congregation at MCI politely sang along with us, but we quickly realized these were not their songs.
The next year, at Chaplain Lucy’s gentle suggestion, we left the music in the hands of her chapel choir. A dozen women stood in the front of the chapel and led us in joyous songs of praise. Hands clapped. Feet stomped.
What does it mean to sing songs of joy on Good Friday? What does it take to sing songs of joy in prison? It takes courage. It takes a leap of faith. It takes trust that there is something more than the prison, something greater than shame and isolation. Choosing to sing praise lowers those prison walls just a little bit. Suddenly we can see beyond them, to beauty and hope and joy those walls cannot restrain.
The choir works hard. They practice regularly. These choristers go to choir practice when they’ve had a bad day, when they doubt it matters, when they are annoyed with each other because they are stuck in such close quarters. They learn to listen to each other and blend their voices. They learn they have something to offer—a gift of beauty to stir other people’s souls.
The songs they sing on Good Friday are more than momentary glimpses of possibility beyond the walls. They are expressions of community. The music testifies to each woman’s long slow process of coming to see herself in a new way: not as a burden on society but as a beloved child of God with gifts to offer.
Then there are the prayers. For the first couple of years, our prayers at that service were litanies, or carefully crafted pastoral prayers. As with our initial offering of music, the MCI congregation received them politely and with gratitude. One year, we tried something new. We invited women to come forward for anointing and laying on of hands. We figured only a few would come; after all, they hardly knew us. But when we extended an invitation, every single woman in that room got up and moved forward. Now, we do that every year.
Once again, I am struck by their courage. They dare to trust total strangers whose lives are so different from their own. They take a risk that we will honor their stories, that we will hold their pain tenderly. Even more courageously, they dare to trust there is hope. No matter how high and strong and all-encompassing those prison walls may seem, they choose to believe that God is higher and stronger and greater.
In their choice to get out of their seats and come forward, walls crumble just a little bit. When they trust us with their deepest yearnings, when they allow us to anoint their foreheads and hold their hands, barriers of isolation begin to erode. When they hear in our fumbling prayers the assurance that God loves them no matter what, prisons of guilt and shame shake. When they ask for prayers for the people they love, they lay the first bricks for bridges over deep motes.
On Good Friday, we leave the prison the same way we came in—down the stairs, across the fenced-in courtyard, through locked doors and barren hallways, then back through the trap, finally exiting clutching our driver’s licenses as though they are gold. We are back outside; the women with whom we worshiped are stuck inside. Still, I trust that somehow, in our worshipping together, prison walls are shaken and we all come a little closer to true freedom in Christ.
***
The doors in this sanctuary, blessedly, have no dead bolts. There are no bars on the windows. We enter through a narthex instead of a trap. We are free to come and go as we please.
And yet the images from our scripture story still speak to our lives. Even without brick walls and razor wire surrounding us, we know what it is like to be in prison. Some of our prisons are similar to the ones from which our sisters at MCI seek freedom. Prisons of addiction, guilt, isolation. Maybe some of us are trapped in a cloud of depression or pain that keeps us from seeing beauty. Or held captive by old wounds and disappointments that have come to define our lives.
Fear is also a daunting prison—fear of change, fear we might lose what we have worked so hard to build, fear that we can never be good enough. Sometime what imprisons us is an inability to dream; other times, we are trapped in a dream that keeps us from seeing other possibilities. Our prison walls may be of our own making; they may have been there so long we don’t know who built them or how we got stuck inside.
What are the prison walls enclosing your life? What limits your potential? What blocks your vision? What keeps you trapped inside yourself? These prison walls might not be made of concrete and steel, but they are real. They are as real as the walls that confined Paul and Silas. They are as real as the walls that shook when confronted by song and prayer.
The promise of our faith is that God’s love can tear down the walls that imprison us. The story of Paul and Silas, the story of the MCI Good Friday service, assure us that we have a role to play in bringing that promise to fruition. When we dare to sing, when we risk claiming joy we might not be feeling, we discover a spirit within and around us that cannot be contained by any prison walls. We awaken to new vision—and suddenly we can see the cracks in the walls, the weak links in the fence, the slow erosion of stone from a steady stream of hope.
When we pray, we choose to trust there is a power greater than our own at work, a force, a spirit that yearns for our freedom. The very act of praying pulls us out of isolation, into connection. When we pray together, we discover that the ties that bind us are more powerful than the chain links in the fences that divide us.
***
Sometimes it happens like an earthquake. Sometimes it is more like a drip of water wearing away stone. Always, God is at work through our song and our prayer, shaking the foundations, stirring us to new vision, tearing down the prison walls. Amen.