Update #1: Kickoff Orientation
On December 10th, we convened for the very first time via Zoom, joined by OPOP founder Chris and staff members Dexter and Candice. Normally at the kickoff meeting, OPOP teams find out who their incarcerated friend will be. Unexpectedly, we found out that we don’t have one yet. How appropriate it was, during Advent, to learn that we were in another season of waiting. While disappointing on some level, this is actually good news. Incarcerated applicants often have to be turned away due to a lack of ministry teams in the places they are preparing to re-enter. But there is such a strong interest in OPOP in Bellingham that there are currently no applicants waiting to be paired with a team! Nevertheless, we resolved to start meeting monthly as planned while working through OPOP’s series of learning modules.
Our kickoff meeting started with some silent centering prayer - an unfamiliar practice for a lot of us. Personally, I found it daunting to put myself in a prayerful frame of mind while using Zoom for the first time in at least a couple of years!
After three minutes of silent online togetherness, each person present was invited to share their “why” for joining this ministry. The answers were diverse and heartfelt. Some of us already know and love someone who has experienced incarceration. Others of us feel that we’ve led privileged lives and can’t even begin to imagine the loneliness of imprisonment. One person felt God’s prompting as a physical sensation - as if someone was pushing them. When it came to scriptural reasons, this passage from Matthew 25 came up more than once:
Our kickoff meeting started with some silent centering prayer - an unfamiliar practice for a lot of us. Personally, I found it daunting to put myself in a prayerful frame of mind while using Zoom for the first time in at least a couple of years!
After three minutes of silent online togetherness, each person present was invited to share their “why” for joining this ministry. The answers were diverse and heartfelt. Some of us already know and love someone who has experienced incarceration. Others of us feel that we’ve led privileged lives and can’t even begin to imagine the loneliness of imprisonment. One person felt God’s prompting as a physical sensation - as if someone was pushing them. When it came to scriptural reasons, this passage from Matthew 25 came up more than once:
“for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.”
Most Christians can go down that checklist and say “Feed the hungry: check. Welcome the stranger: check. Tend the sick: check.” But how many of us have visited someone in prison? It’s a daunting prospect when our country’s prison system seems so effective at casting people out of society. American prisons house a staggering 25% of the world’s incarcerated people. To put that in perspective, Americans make up about 4% of the world’s population. As Chris Hoke mentioned in his sermon at Faith, prisons act as “human landfills” where society puts people they’d rather not look at or think about. If you missed that sermon, I’m about to recap some of the major points.
In our meeting, we revisited the story of Lazarus in the Gospel of John as a way to go over some key concepts: “stones” and “layers.” In the text, there are two types of work that need to be done for Lazarus’s resurrection. First, Jesus says to roll away the stone at the entrance of the tomb. In OPOP-speak, “stones” are the big structural barriers in the way of incarcerated people as they re-enter the community: things like access to employment or healthcare or housing.
The rolling away of the stone was the obvious, showy portion of Jesus’s miracle. It puts me firmly in mind of Ty Pennington shouting “Move! That! Bus!” on Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, if anyone remembers that show. But there was a second task to be done: “unbind him,” Jesus said. Lazarus was free from his tomb, but still wrapped up in the layers of cloth which served as his burial shroud. In OPOP terms, those “layers” represent the emotional, psychological, and spiritual hurts that prevent formerly-incarcerated people from feeling truly liberated.
Maybe a few strong men in the crowd were eager to “Roll! That! Stone!” but how many were willing to get up-close and personal - close enough to smell death - to undo Lazarus’s burial wrappings? In asking that rhetorical question, I don’t seek to imply that one type of work is more important than another. When someone is entombed or put in a human landfill, it takes a whole community - both stone-rollers and layer-unwrappers - to get that person out.
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The Resurrection of Lazarus Giovanni di Paolo, 1426.
In our discussion, we compared this image with another artistic depiction of the same scene. The fear and confusion and disgust written on the faces of the crowd contrasted starkly with the more jubilant mood of the second painting. But I want to point out that some of those disgusted, frightened, and confused people wear haloes above their heads. Jesus, at the center of the painting, calmly points towards the tomb as his disciples look on. He emboldens the crowd, human and broken as they are, to do the work of liberating their neighbor Lazarus. I guess this is my point: no matter our fears, Jesus is with us. When we enter tombs in the world and within ourselves, He is walking alongside us.