Friday, April 4, 2025
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Arrested
They tried to arrest Jesus, but no one laid a hand upon him because his hour had not yet come.
I remember the experience. I wasn’t in charge of the motorcycle, but I was on it, and we were going faster than fast through a rainstorm on Chicago’s I-94 in midafternoon. Driver Paul finally noticed the police car which drove up beside us, lights flashing. He pulled to the side of the highway and put the bike in park.
“I’ve been following you for ten minutes,” the motorcycle cop said. He gave Paul a ticket but also told us to follow him to the local jail. We did, and he locked us up. We had been arrested. Our forward progress had been utterly and completely stopped.
I’ve been arrested in my car numerous times since then, usually for speeding, but never held, never taken to jail. My path ahead didn’t change on those days, except to be slowed a bit, for 30 minutes or so. I see situations sometimes beside the highway, where the driver is in handcuffs, where two or three police cars are parked. I feel frightened for the person about to be taken to jail.
I’ve never understood why the cop let me stay in jail with Paul until Professor Griffin bailed us out the next day. She taught our cinema class. We were taking film to Chicago to be developed. She might have had memories of her own wilder youth, just a few years before. She bailed Paul out, and I came along. Paul’s motorcycle had been impounded, and in time he got it back. We were freshmen at Valpo, and Paul, from Rhode Island, didn’t come back for his sophomore year.
I lost touch with him. Kind of. Neither of us will forget each other’s company on that rain-soaked miserable day in Hammond, Illinois, where in our cell we found a pen and in our false bravado wrote something on the prison wall.
I have visited prisons and penitentiaries often since then. First as a guitar-carrying retreat team member at maximum and minimum security prisons in Illinois for weekend retreats we called “Kogudus,” an Estonian word which means renewal. Then as a campus minister bringing along U of I students on Sunday nights to sing and pray with 30 or 40 male inmates in their blue jeans and work shirts. We refrained from preaching to them, although they sometimes preached to us. Everyone was learning from each other. The chapel at Danville often filled up pretty good on those nights.
Now, for years and years, I drive to Danville a few times each year to perform weddings, an inmate and his fiancée, who must dress modestly and bring only an unmarked wedding ring for her man. Often the ring isn’t quite within the rules, and she must send him another one later. When there is no ring, we use my wedding ring as a stand-in during the ceremony.
I give you this ring, as a symbol of my vow
And with all that I am, and all that I have,
I honor you.
No question, these words mark my favorite part of the ceremony.
Look into each other’s eyes. Be still, and know that God is here. Then say with gusto and with grace, “I honor You.”
The LORD is close to the brokenhearted;
and those who are crushed in spirit he saves.
He watches over all his bones;
not one of them shall be broken.
The LORD redeems the lives of his servants;
no one incurs guilt who takes refuge in him.
 (Wisdom 2, Psalm 34, Matthew 4, John 7)
((posted at www.davesandel.net)
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