Round Midnight--May 29, 2020

Round Midnight--May 29, 2020

"When they had brought [Paul and Silas] before the magistrates, they said, 'These men are disturbing our city; they are Jews and are advocating customs that are not lawful for us as Romans to adopt or observe." The crowd joined in attacking them, and the magistrates had them stripped of their clothing and ordered them to be beaten with rods. After they had given them a severe flogging, they threw them into prison and ordered the jailer to keep them securely. Following these instructions, he put them in the innermost cell and fastened their feet in the stocks.  About midnight Paul and Silas were praying and signing hymns to God, and the prisoners were listening to them...." [Acts 16:20-25]

Tonight, Thelonious Monk and Ella Fitzgerald are my conversation partners in Bible study.  They have a lot to teach me, and I have a great deal to learn.

My eyes fell across these words from Acts, about Paul and Silas in prison and how, after being beaten by the police and thrown into the maximum security section of the prison, they find themselves singing hymns to God "about midnight."  And all of a sudden, all I can hear is Ella Fitzgerald's voice and Oscar Peterson on the piano, crooning the old jazz standard-and-lament, "Round Midnight."  (If you don't have that recording in your collection, do a quick search for it and given it a listen--go ahead, I'll wait.)

"It begins to tell, 'round midnight," Fitzgerald sings to Monk's composition, "I do pretty well till after sundown... Suppertime  I'm feelin' sad, but it really gets bad... 'round midnight."  Midnight is that low-point, that deepest darkness of the night, the loneliest hour and the time when hope ebbs almost to the point of vanishing.  It is telling, I believe, how much of the Bible's story takes place in those times of weary midnights, and how much of the lives of the wisest and most faithful saints was spent in what John of the Cross called "the dark night of the soul."  When we are just plain word down--worn down by life, worn down by adversity, worn down by dealing with so much swirling hatred and anger and hostility, and worn down by the absence of friends, the absence of support, the absence of help--that's when you know it's 'round midnight in your heart.

And in that midnight hour, sometimes it is all you can do just to keep singing your blues and pouring out your lament.  Sometimes just continuing to exist, just continuing to live for a little bit longer despite the suffocating night around you, sometimes that's the most victory you can muster.  Just keeping on keeping on.... round midnight.

That's where Paul and Silas are at this moment.  It is literally about midnight, as our narrator Luke tells us, but deeper than that, it is as dark a night of the soul as you'll find.  This is a scene we may not want to think much about, especially not about how these two evangelists came to this predicament.  There are old gospel anthems and Sunday School songs about the next scene in the story, when an earthquake comes and breaks open the prison doors and busts their chains wide open (although, we should note, Paul and Silas do not escape, but use the moment to show compassion to the jailer responsible for their torture).  But what brought them to this moment was that some respectable business owner in Philippi was upset that Paul and Silas were a threat to their profits, and they start accusing the two of them of disturbing the peace.  The angry accusers cast them as dangerous lawbreakers who are only causing trouble, and on top of that, they single them out for being the "wrong" ethnicity, too.  You can hear the code-words in their accusation: "These two are Jews!" (In other words, they aren't like us--they aren't "our kind of people," they say, to the judge and the chief of police, winking in confidence that the authorities will get their meaning.)  The accusers don't want their kind around, and they want to make an example out of them.  So the police, along with the angry crowd that has formed by this point, all humiliate Paul and Silas by stripping them naked and now beating and flogging them, all with the clear permission of the local government authorities, too.  Those whose job is to protect the innocent and ensure justice--the ones you might have hoped would keep you safe from an angry mob--they are the ones condoning the abuse and making it happen, because to them Paul and Silas don't really matter.  They are "other."  They are... expendable.

So yeah, it gets pretty bad 'round midnight.

But this is what gets me about this part of the story.  Paul and Silas, despite their weariness and the violence they have suffered--at the hands of "law and order" no less--they bring it all to God.  And they keep on keeping on.  That is the seed of their victory, their rescue, their vindication.  They bear what they have been subjected to by bringing it to God--they pray, they sing, and they sit in silence, too.  I have to think their songs have the cadence and ache of the blues, too.  I don't think there's reason to assume that the "hymns" they sing are all peppy up-tempo praise songs--I think they just bring what they are carrying to God in words and melody, and they cry out for help there.  And yet, that is exactly what is needed in that moment.  They survive by honest lament, by calling out to God for help, by singing their faithful blues at midnight and bringing into God's face all that they have suffered and endured.

All too often we just want to skip past the pain of this story, the terror of the injustice, and the utter fear that must have been all around Paul and Silas in that place at midnight.  We want to jump ahead to, "And it all worked out because, you know, earthquake."  We want to skip the parts that make us squirm, that make us think, that make us look at ourselves with terrifying honesty.  We (at least we Respectable Religious folk who have been given a lot of privilege in life) want to forget, I think, that our movement began with scenes like these--with the followers of a rabbi who was killed by the state then getting singled out for their ethnicity, too, and being brutalized by the authorities in town after town all across the empire.  I don't think we want to remember the parts of the story that happen 'round midnight like that--before the earthquake comes--because if we remember them honestly, we'll be compelled to make connections to our own moment that we would rather not face.  And I think we are afraid of the solidarity with those who suffer that we will need to practice if we face all of that.

But being followers of Jesus calls for just that kind of honest courage, so let us face it.  For a lot of us church folk, we have simply chosen to ignore or willfully forget that Paul and Silas (and Jesus himself) share an awful lot in common with George Floyd, with Ahmaud Arbery, with Breonna Taylor, and with a list of names that never seem to end.  I have ignored it, I know. And we have also chosen not to think about how many people there in Philippi saw Paul and Silas getting beaten by the civil authorities and just stood there, letting it happen, convinced that "they must have done something to deserve this."  We choose not to think about it, because we do not want to consider that so many times, we are more like the watching crowd in Philippi, condoning violence as long as it is done in the name of "law and order" for people like us, than we are like Paul and Silas, the actual disciples of Jesus in this scene.

And once we modern religious folk face up to how much we are like the angry agitators rather than the apostles, well, we find ourselves in our own spiritual hour of midnight.  And yes, I get it that we are all already each carrying a whole other list of ways we feel like we are worn down at midnight with a host of other worries and troubles.  We can be both like the angry crowd and like Paul and Silas at the same time.  The question, it seems to me, is, What do we do about it?

What do we do at that hour of deep lonely darkness that comes to our souls 'round midnight?  Paul and Silas have a word for us, it seems.  They have the same response that the enslaved Hebrews had during their midnight in Egypt... the same response the three young men had in the fiery furnace... the same response Daniel had in the lions' den... and the same response even Jesus had while he suffocated to death on a state-sanctioned cross.  They carried their weariness to God--they prayed, and they sang, and they prayed and the sang.  And even before help came, the truth-telling kept them going.  Even before their shackles were broken open, the act of bearing their weary souls to God enabled them to keep on keeping on.  Even before the prison doors swung open, they were sustained by lifting up lament to God, calling on God to be present with them in that dark place in the moment between days.

It would seem that is our place to start, too.  Our prayer may well demand confession from us as well as lament; we may have to own the ways we are more like the crowd than the Christians in this story.  But we can also bring our worn places, our threadbare spirits, and the places we are just running on empty.  We bring them to God, we name them, we speak them out loud, and we find strength in naming them all.  That's what Paul and Silas do.  They take what they have lived through, and they lay it before God with empty and open hands.  And that keeps them going long enough until help breaks through and transformation can begin.

I don't have easy answers for how we solve the many things that make us weary and worn.  I don't have some trite religious "fix" for how we'll deal with the anger brewing inside each of us all the time, or the fear that seems as infectious as the coronavirus.  And I sure as heaven can't pretend that if we will only pray harder or do more religious-looking things, all the bad stuff will vanish.  That ain't how it works, and it never was.  But it does seem to me that a starting point is that we take all that we are carrying on this dark midnight of the soul and bear it up to God, both the laments of what feels so wrong and unjust, and the confessions of the ways you and I have each been a part of making things the way they are.  We will lift up to God both the ways we are the violent crowd and the weary, abused apostles, and we will trust that in the darkness, God hears.

God is there--or rather, God is here with us, and with all who are gasping for breath and hope 'round midnight.

Lord God, we lift up to you all that we are carrying, both our failures and our hurts.  Tend to them all, and meet us in these times we feel lost in the dead of night.  Be our hope, and bring us into your new day.  We pray it in the name of your executed Son, Jesus.