All Saints’, Dorval
January 5, 2025
Victoria Scott working at the Southern Maine Women’s Reentry Center. Boston Globe.
“May Christ the Son of God be made manifest in you, that your lives may be a light to the world.”
This is the short version of the blessing for the season after Epiphany in the Book of Occasional Services of the American Episcopal Church. When I used to go regularly to celebrate the Eucharist in the men’s prison in Concord, New Hampshire, we used this blessing at the end of every service, year round, regardless of the liturgical season that it actually was at the time. As the leader of the ministry, the Rev’d Deacon John LeSueur of blessed memory, explained to me: the men who attended this service usually didn’t feel like they had anything to offer at all, let alone that their lives might be a light to the world, and so it was our job to remind them consistently that they were still beloved of God.
The first sentence of our reading from Ephesians reminds us that this letter, like several of Paul’s other letters, was written from prison. “This is the reason that I, Paul, am a prisoner for Christ Jesus for the sake of you gentiles,” it begins, before going on to elaborate on God’s grace and goodness in becoming human in Jesus Christ. We tend to skip over these brief references to Paul’s imprisonment as basically introductory, like the long greetings that begin the letters.
But it is not irrelevant that Paul was writing these words from behind bars. The experience of imprisonment – regardless of the reason – changes a person. Being so entirely in the power of other people, having one’s basic freedoms taken away, is not something that you recover from quickly. It behooves us to remember that the early story of our faith is, to a significant degree, the story of people who were, or at the very least were willing to, be locked up and even executed for professing and practicing their belief in Jesus.
It’s also tempting to try to draw a hard boundary between the kinds of prisoners that I visited in Concord – and that the prison ministry here in the Diocese of Montreal visits in Cowansville – and the kind of prisoner of conscience that Paul was. Any distinction of that nature, though, breaks down the instant you start to examine it. People in all epochs of history have been thrown into jail for getting on the wrong side of the people in charge, whether or not they actually did anything that made them dangerous to society at large.
To take just one example, thousands if not millions of people were imprisoned in the US and Canada in the past few decades for doing something that is now entirely legal in many parts of the continent, namely, growing and selling marijuana.
Many of those who did genuinely do wrong and harmful things, did them out of desperation because they had no legitimate way to make a living, or out of the aftermath of trauma that shaped their lives when they were very young. And don’t get me started on women who are serving life sentences for killing abusive husbands in acts that any sane justice system would understand to be self-defense.
Those of us who have been involved in prison ministry, or even have heard about it from those who are, understand that there are no simple stories or easy answers when you start to become familiar with this remarkable aspect of our common life that is so frequently hidden behind a wall of secrecy and misunderstanding – not to mention a literal wall topped with razor wire and guarded by metal detectors and scary-looking prison wardens who will take away your cell phone.
So why am I focusing on prisoners this Epiphany?
“May Christ the Son of God be made manifest in you, that your lives may be a light to the world.”
The Incarnate Christ comes among us as a light-bringer – and a liberator. In one of the paraphrases of our Psalm for today (not the one we just sang): “He comes to break oppression, to set the captive free, to take away transgression and rule in equity.” And while, yes, setting captives free has many symbolic and metaphorical meanings, we should never forget that it is rooted in the most literal and factual sense of breaking down prison walls and releasing those inside.
While traveling in New England this Christmastide, I read a story in the Boston Globe about how the new era of remote work has offered fresh opportunities to some people who are incarcerated in the state of Maine. Instead of working for literal pennies per hour in the traditional prison workshops, they are pursuing professional work that pays a professional salary, which will enable them in due course to reenter society with far fewer risks of reoffending than those who are dropped off on a street corner with $50 and a set of hand-me-down clothes and expected to somehow reassemble a law-abiding life.
Whether prisoners who have genuinely done harm and need to make amends and learn how to live productively with others; prisoners of conscience or circumstance; or those who are imprisoned by more abstract forces like grief, trauma, illness, or oppression – Christ the Liberator comes to set all the prisoners free. Christ comes to tell us all that God is manifest in us, that our lives may be a light to the world. And Christ comes to invite us all into that liberating work.
My friend and colleague Dana Cassell gave me a fascinating angle on the Wise Men from that perspective in a recent essay. She pointed out how extraordinary it was that the magi – whether they were kings or not, whether there were three of them or not – were clearly powerful and privileged people if they could afford to travel all that distance and give Jesus such rich gifts. And yet, when the powerful and privileged King Herod asked them to narc on the Holy Family, they went to great lengths – risking the wrath of an egomaniac monarch – to return to their own country by another way.
We are all called to be liberators, disrupting the systems that keep people imprisoned, following the liberating Christ.
That is where the story of God among us on earth begins, on this Feast of the Epiphany, and that, of course, is where it will end, with the crucified Jesus harrowing Hell, reaching a hand down to God’s people in the ultimate prison, the pit of Sheol, and bringing them up into light and life.
There is an old tradition in the Church – from before there were printed prayer books, let alone Internet search engines – of reading on Epiphany a proclamation declaring the dates of the moveable feasts for the coming year. Here it is, as posted annually by my colleague Kara Slade:
Epiphany Proclamation 2025
Dear friends, the glory of the Lord has shone upon us, and shall ever be manifest among us, until the day of his return. Through the rhythms of times and seasons let us celebrate the mysteries of salvation.
Let us recall the year’s culmination, the Easter Triduum of the Lord: his last supper, his crucifixion, his burial, and his rising celebrated between the evening of the seventeenth day of April and the evening of the nineteenth day of April, Easter Day being on the twentieth day of April.
Each Easter — as on each Sunday — the Holy Church makes present the great and saving deed by which Christ has for ever conquered sin and death. From Easter are reckoned all the days we keep holy.
Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent, will occur on the fifth day of March.
The Ascension of the Lord will be commemorated on the twenty-ninth day of May.
Pentecost, joyful conclusion of the season of Easter, will be celebrated on the eighth day of June.
And, this year the First Sunday of Advent will be on the thirtieth day of November.
Likewise the pilgrim Church proclaims the Passover of Christ in the feasts of the holy Mother of God, in the feasts of the Apostles and Saints, and in the commemoration of the faithful departed.
To Jesus Christ, who was, who is, and who is to come, Lord of time and history, be endless praise, for ever and ever. Amen.
At Epiphany, we welcome Christ the Liberator, and we await with joy the ultimate liberation of Easter.
May Christ, the Son of God, be made manifest in you, that your lives may be a light to the world.
Amen.
Leave a Reply