Drawing the Circle Wider: Prison Ministry and Family

"Leaving that place, Jesus withdrew to the region of Tyre and Sidon. Just then a Canaanite woman from that region came out and started shouting, “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.” 
But he did not answer her at all. And his disciples came and urged him, saying, “Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us.” 
He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” 
But she came and knelt before him, saying, “Lord, help me.” 
He answered, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” She said, “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” 
Then Jesus answered her, “Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.” And her daughter was healed instantly."  Matthew 15:21-28 

First, my son is a lawyer, working as a public defender.  He’s the guy who gets assigned to people who don’t have money for a private attorney when they have to appear in court.  He thinks it’s a hoot that he can call his mom whenever he wants to and say he’s headed to jail.  Haha.  

Second, he LOVES to argue.

And third, he likes rules. To be specific, he likes knowing where the line is.  When he was younger, we’d tell him the rules and he would make us hold that line.  We’d tell him not to step over that line and he’d put his toe right up to it and ask, “You mean this line?”  For the longest time, his constant testing of our boundaries and rules for him was frustrating. After a while though, we realized he really DID want to know where the line was because rules helped him feel safe, helped him know where he stood.  That may be WHY he became a lawyer, that love of rules.  He ate all that up, all those laws and statutes, just his cup of tea.  So he likes being a lawyer, at least most of the time, likes helping folks who find themselves in trouble but can’t afford a private lawyer.  

So most of the folks he defends have very little means and many of them don’t get bailed out while they wait for their day in court.  That’s when he calls mom and says he’s going to jail.  It’s been frustrating for him often but every so often, it is also quite rewarding.  For one exxample, a couple of years ago, he was visiting a young client at the jail and the client asked how old my son was.  He shared that he was in fact turning 32 on that very day and the client was floored. “You mean you have to come here on your birthday?” he asked. “Are you gonna get to have a party or a cake later?” he asked. “Probably not,” my son said, shrugging it off. He didn’t think about it again until he saw the young client again a couple of weeks later and the client, in his twenties, pulled a folded up napkin from the pocket of his orange jumpsuit and unfolded it to reveal a cookie.  “This is for you, man,” he said.  “Because you didn’t get a birthday cake.  I saved my cookie from lunch for you.”  My son was speechless, which is significant for him. He’s never at a loss for words.  

It’s not a stretch, though, to say that most of us are not terribly comfortable with courts and jails and prisons so I don’t feel like I’m bragging when I say my son is comfortable going to jail because his mom went to prison.  No no – don’t get me wrong.  I went to prison the way he goes to jail.  

When I was in seminary, we were offered classes that met in Riverbend Prison, classes that were populated half by seminarians and half by inmates.  We studied issues surrounding prisons, legal systems, punishment and forgiveness.  I did that for the entire time I was in seminary, every week, and I can tell you I learned a great deal and came to know about a dozen of the prisoners pretty well – guys in for everything from murder to arson to rape – all of whom were taking the same graduate level classes the seminarians were taking.  When it came time for me to graduate, then, I was invited to continue visiting by getting on the visitation list of one of the inmates.  When you visit Riverbend, like lots of state prisons, you visit during set hours in a large open room and there might be as many as fifty inmates also having visitors in the same room, all seated on molded plastic chairs, all attached in groups of twos or threes. At the corner of many of the sets of chairs are the all-valuable tables.  Tables are at a premium and desired because, all around the walls of the room are vending machines for snacks. Most of the foods in those vending machines are cheese and peanut butter crackers, tuna fish sandwiches and peanuts and candy. None of the items appealed to me much, I realized, because the daily food I had was better and more varied than those offerings. To the men who lived there, the stale hamburgers were a real treat.

Visits generally were on the weekends and lasted several hours; if an inmate had visitor privileges (and those were earned), they could possibly see family or friends who’d been approved by the prison system on Friday evening, Saturday morning and/or Sunday afternoon, for example. Visitors were subject to body searches and metal detectors and not allowed to carry in much, not even key fobs and certainly no phones.  The nice thinga bout the open room was that you can easily visit with several inmates at the same time and that’s what some of us from the classes did.  Usually on Friday night or Saturday morning, we’d go to visit one of the inmates who had been in the class and be able to see several of them and catch up on their lives and share about ours. 

While I always visited as a friend and not as a minister, the inmates always asked about my ministry and the church I was serving and, for a couple of them, it eased the loneliness of not receiving visits from family.  One thing we had learned was that inmates who served their time and then were released were 5-10 more successful staying out of trouble when they got out if they had continued to have relationships that were positive.  So, we particularly focussed on being supportive of those whose families were not involved in their lives and didn’t visit or call. 

Some of us spoke to one or more of the inmates by phone as well.  They were allowed to have up to ten people they called and most looked forward to having someone to call on occasion to break up the monotony if nothing else.  I agreed to be on the phone list of one of the inmates, who is, by the way, not eligible to be released for another decade, if he lives that long.  It was safe.  For an inmate to call you required a LOT of paperwork and clearances and then when they called, you heard a voice say, so and so from Riverbend Prison is calling you, do you want to accept the call?   I was careful and the school and the prison were careful but I know it still made people nervous who knew me. That included, not surprisingly, my parents, who were at that time retired and who worried alot about me anyway. 

Mom and Dad were especially struggling with my being friends with inmates because neither of them had ever even  met someone who had gone to jail, not even for a DUI, and they didn’t even know anyone else who knew anyone who’d gone to jail.  It was too foreign a concept and just not acceptable. So one weekend I went to Missouri to visit them and told them I was visiting an inmate and he was allowed to call me, they were angry.  I assured them that inmates could NOT call cell phones and they only had my home phone number in Tennessee so they could not call me while I was at my parents home in Missouri.

Nevertheless, while I was there with them, while we were arguing about whether or not this was acceptable behavior on my part be friends with some guy who was sitting in a prison cell, the phone rang and my mother answered, then handed me the phone angrily.  It’s your criminal friend, she said. I took the phone trying to answer while also explaining to them that it couldn’t be him because he couldn’t call me at their house when I heard the voice on the other end say, “…an inmate from the Greene County, Missouri, jail is calling.  Do you want to accept the call?”

I realized suddenly that call was not coming from my friend in Tennessee but rather from my brother, who apparently had been arrested the night before.  And suddenly, the inmate in Tennessee – whom they were sure was dangerous and not to be trusted – was sitting on a hard metal bench next to my brother, their son, in a jail cell. And just like that, the circle of their care and compassion grew a whole lot larger.  

My own circle of care and compassion grew exponentially because of my time visiting prisons. When I was sent to another church, turned out that nearly one quarter of the folks in the church had family or friends who had served or were serving time and it helped my ministry greatly that I knew first hand what it was like for them to constantly to worry about the safety of their loved one, to struggle financially because of lost income, to struggle not to be ashamed of what another person had done, to wonder how things would be when they returned home.  

Those families were grateful when their pastor talked then about visiting the prison regularly. For the first time, their pastor was there with them when they sat in the visitation gallery on Christmas Day or Easter or celebrated with them when their son got his GED in prison, sharing hopes he could change the path he was on.   Their pastor seemed to speak the same language and was one of their people, one who at least accepted and cared about their “kind.”

All of that is what leads me to one of the most troubling aspects of this story in Matthew 15: how the disciples AND Jesus treat this woman, who is not one of them, not one of their “kind.”

We find first that Jesus refuses even to answer the woman, then denies he has anything that she could possibly want and then even likens her to a dog.  This is definitely a troubling passage.

 We may believe that Jesus was “truly human,” but usually we don’t want him to be too human. So over the years, people have tried to clean up this story. But Matthew doesn’t clean up this story.  He lets us see this encounter in all its unvarnished glory.   

The woman is a Canaanite woman – and she is NOT one of Jesus’ “people”. But he is in her part of the world –  Tyre and Sidon. This is her home.  

Nevertheless, this woman seems to know who Jesus is. She has tracked him down in order to ask him –  to beg him –  to heal her daughter who is tormented by a demon. This is a desperate woman and apparently,  comes at Jesus shouting. The disciples want nothing to do with her and want Jesus to send her packing. 

She isn’t going anywhere, though. She may not be “their kind,” but she somehow knows enough about this healer to find him and call to him in the language of the Jewish prayer: “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David.” She has come prepared to fight for her child, it seems. 

Even so, Jesus isn’t even impressed by her using the language he knows is not hers. “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel,” he tells her, and still she doesn’t give up.

 “Lord, help me,” she begs. This is where Jesus says what we really wish he hadn’t said, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” But this woman is feisty and stubborn.   Having a special needs grandchild, though, means there’s one thing I have learned about people who know their children’s lives are in danger –  they will get in your face if necessary – they do not care if you do not like it.  That’s their baby and the hair on the back of their neck stands up every time someone or something threatens that child’s safety.  The life of this woman’s daughter is at stake. She does not back down at all but throws Jesus’s words right back at him: “Yes, Lord,” she says, “but even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.”  

And all of a sudden, just like that, Jesus changes his tone. He says, “Woman, great is your faith!” 

Interestingly, she hasn’t made any confession of faith, though. There’s no sign she’s been converted or planning to become a follower. She simply told him what she had heard – what many in the region had heard – that there had been by that time more than one instance where thousands had been fed when they came to see this healer, this rabbi called Jesus.  “I’ve heard that there were enough crumbs to feed thousands,” she seems to be saying.  “You can’t tell me there’s not enough for me and my daughter.” 

That’s what I believe Jesus finally heard and that’s why he not only changes his mind,  but he changes his mission. “For saying that,” he says, “you may go — the demon has left your daughter.”  And just like that, the circle, the line, that defines his mission on earth is widened to include everyone.

It is disturbing to some folks to think of this episode, such harsh words coming out of Jesus, but one thing was clear that Matthew wanted his listeners to understand: in that encounter, Jesus was converted – he understood something he had not understood before – and the circle of his mission and ministry was much larger than he had realized before.  The Kingdom of God had been revealed to him in the face of the Canaanite woman. The Canaanite woman taught Jesus that she and her daughter and so many others like her deserve more than crumbs. After this encounter Jesus went on to feed those who had not yet been fed, went on to include everyone in God’s kingdom to come.

We saw here something that ought to surprise us, certainly surprised me the first time I saw it: Jesus drew a line – as surely as if he had used a stick to draw a line in the sand and said, this, what I am sent to do, is not for you.  I’ve done enough. I am tapped out. I gave at the office.  I don’t have any more energy to help anyone else, to get to know anyone else, to include anyone else in my circle.  He dismissed her and not in a kind way at all.    

IF we are pushed, we will get ugly too, though; we’ve been known to let others see our disdain for that person who does not deserve any help or who needs to go somewhere else to find it.  “WE” don’t know people who go to prison and we don’t want to….

At least not until one of them is sitting next to our child in that jail cell and suddenly our circle is a little wider than we knew.  Any time this happens, it can be frightening, and it can feel like we are out there where we don’t feel so safe any more, and we might be really unsure about how this is gonna go.

If we look again, though, really look, chances are good we will see God in that cell, sitting there with all of them, sitting next to our child and all of them will be sharing cookies.  Amen