The Holy Prison Break--June 7, 2024

The Holy Prison Break--June 7, 2024

"The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because the LORD has anointed me;
he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed,
to bind up the brokenhearted,
to proclaim liberty to the captives,
and release to the prisoners;
to proclaim the year of the LORD's favor...." [Isaiah 61:1-2a]

The Holy Spirit's calling card is setting people free.

The old apostle said as much in a letter we Christians call Second Corinthians when he famously wrote, "Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom" (2 Corinthians 3:17). And Paul didn't make that up from whole cloth himself, either. He's clearly riffing on a theme that the prophet first spoke in what we call Isaiah 61. The Spirit of the Lord is in the business, the prophet says, of raising up people to set captives free and to release prisoners.

But let's be clear about what is being envisioned here. The prophet doesn't see the Spirit as the warden of the prison, or some kind of heavenly corrections officer--the Spirit is provoking a jailbreak.

That is to say, Isaiah 61 doesn't see the Spirit of God as the divine authority backing up the guards holding the keys to the cellblocks, but rather that the Spirit is the One actively working against the guards to set people free. That really changes our understanding of the Spirit, doesn't it? Instead of seeing God as the one who guarantees "law and order" in the universe, the prophet dares to see God from the underside--from the vantage point of people who have been held captive under the boots of an overpowering empire. And for the ones who have been held captive, good news is always going to look like freedom, not staying imprisoned.

The backdrop of these words is likely the shadow cast by the Babylonian empire, the foreign power that had conquered the people of Judah and driven them from their homes. Some were literally carried away to Babylon in chains. Some were forced to run and seek refuge in other lands (notably some to Egypt, where the prophet Jeremiah went for a while, too). Some simply felt like they had become prisoners in their own land, stuck with no hope and no direction once their king had been deposed and their temple destroyed. But in any case, it was the powers of the day--the empires and superpowers--who held the keys, and the people were at the mercy of the conquerors.

And to be further clear, from Babylon's point of view, all the people of Judah were criminals and transgressors, guilty as a nation for breaking treaty with Babylon and not sufficiently submitting to Babylon's rule. They carried people away from where they had made their homes in Judah, and detained them in Babylon indefinitely, with no thought or plan that they would ever be allowed to go back to their families or the lives they had built. This was, of course, Babylon's design all along--one more way to make sure the people they conquered did not make trouble, one more way to break their spirits, one more way to assert their dominance. That is the way of empires, no matter what the letterhead or century.

But that is not the way of the Spirit.

As the prophet tells it, the Spirit shows up taking the side of the people carried away from their families and left to rot in exile indefinitely. The Spirit is the One instigating the jailbreak--or better yet, the one closing down the Judean Relocation and Internment Centers scattered throughout Babylon and letting the captives who had been driven from their homes go free to start over again. If you want to know where God shows up, where the Spirit is moving, in this moment of Israel and Judah's history, Isaiah 61 says that God is the One setting captives loose and allowing displaced people to build their lives all over again. God is decidedly NOT helping the powers of the day to hold onto their captives.

So here's the thing, dear ones: this is the God we claim to worship. A God who does not hesitate to take sides with the deprived, disheveled, displaced people who have been labeled "rule-breakers" by the Empire and detained in Babylon. A God who exposes the deities of Babylon as pretenders and phonies. A God who is in the business of setting captives free, whose calling card is liberation of prisoners and healing for the brokenhearted.

What will we be about today, if this is the kind of work the Spirit of Lord anoints people to do?

O Holy Spirit, we are a little nervous to ask this, but stir us up with your movement and do your work of setting people free--using us as you will to do your work.