A Table in the Dark

Christmas in a county jail

This Weekly Edition of Inkwell features Claude Atcho

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MY FELLOW PASTOR AND I pass along the gray walls of our county jail and descend to the bottom floor. Each time I cross this threshold—after handing my badge to the attendant and stretching my arms to be patted down—my body still acts like I’m descending into hostile territory.

Here, I’m more alert than I’ve been all week, especially to the physicality of the space: the peeling and oppressive gray walls, the thick metal doors that will crush a finger if you’re a hair too slow. The weight of this place is visible on the face of the staff. It is dark in more ways than one.

Yet, for the men I gather with here for our regular Eucharist service, there is somehow a kind of celebratory joy that actively defies human logic.

Once buzzed in, we are in the cell block, among the men sprawled out in the open area—playing cards, yelling about the football game, cutting hair, or sleeping in their cells. Depending on the guard that week, “Time for church” is announced in a sheepish mumble or a full-blooded shout.

Then, we move into the side room, and the church begins: Two pastors and anywhere from eight to twelve inmates sing the doxology as best we can. We open the Scriptures to hear the voice of God and declare that this place is not actually forsaken. We shout this living truth responsively:

Is the Father with us?
He is.

Is Christ among us?
He is.

Is the Spirit here?
He is.

This is our God.
The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

A worn-down Costco folding table becomes, by the Spirit, the table where we meet Jesus in Communion, and the pastor and the inmate alike find the Triune God is indeed here. In the dark of this place, we lift our voices in praise, enter sacred time, and share in celebrating the body and blood of Christ.

Not long ago, one of the imprisoned men, shuffling along in our makeshift Communion line, smiled and said, “Man, I’m excited for this!” Others voiced agreement. Expertise in sacramental theology is not required to grasp what this man vocalized: through this table, we are united and lifted into something higher.

THEOLOGIAN FLEMING RUTLEDGE has famously noted that Advent, the season in which the church looks to the first and second coming of Christ, is not a happy-go-lucky affair. Advent, she writes, “begins in the dark,” arguing that God’s salvific in-breaking power arrives to us at rock bottom, where all reasonable human hope is gone. The very shape of the Christian canon speaks this same message: The birth of Christ, as told in Matthew’s Gospel, occurs centuries after the last words of the prophet Malachi. In the long hour of darkness and silence, the light of the world arrives.

The Christian men at our local jail exist in the logic of Advent, even if the season is not known to them by name. Legally, they inhabit a liminal space as they await sentencing. They live under the shadow of the gavel, at the mercy of a chaotic, complex court system populated with workers, judges, and lawyers whose moral and motivational compass can vary from vague shades of Saul Goodman–types to full-blown Bryan Stevenson acolytes.

Spiritually, these men are waiting for God to break into their lives—to redeem their circumstances and strengthen their souls. It is this recognition of the reality of darkness, seen and felt, that makes our jail worship together distinctively celebratory.

KARL BARTH, the Swiss theologian, spent a significant portion of his later ministry preaching to those incarcerated at Basel Prison. Before preaching to the imprisoned at Christmas, he opened with a prayer that demonstrates part of the logic of participation in a higher time:

“Grant today to the whole Christian Church and to the world as well that many may break through the glitter and vanity of the holiday season and truly celebrate Christmas with us.”

Barth sees both through a lens and a logic of participation. This participation is so real and so triumphant that even the walls of prison cannot inhibit the “with”-ness of worship: God with us and us with God. Jesus is in this place, whatever that “this” may be—a gothic sanctuary, a trailer park, an open field, a small dying church, or a county jail.

The church’s higher time is the medicine offered to experience God with us, even in the dark. Barth envisions the whole church joining with the worship in Basel Prison, just as all worship is a participation with the saints and angels in heaven.

BARTH ALSO IDENTIFIES a barrier to truly entering the high time of Christmas—that is, the “glitter and vanity of the holiday season.” One wonders, what would Barth say now, were he to walk into our department stores and witness the sensory assault of NFL and Super Mario Advent calendars, to say nothing of the bombardment of Black Friday propaganda and eerily prescient algorithm ads?

Barth’s language of “break through” is sharply attuned to the Advent season. The only way out of the darkness of vanity and the false joys of consumerism is a movement of God toward us. And this is precisely what happens when the people of God encounter Christ at the table—we celebrate God with us, and us with him, across time and space.

But the movement of “break through” has a horizontal element too. In forsaken places, the vanity of the Christmas season is punctured by the cold realism of life in a world that is both delightful and dying. Once the glitter of comfort and consumerism is seen for the veneer it most assuredly is, we are ready to finally find joy in the dark. Once the soil is laid bare, a new seed is ready to be planted.

TRUE CELEBRATION LIVES at the intersection of divine presence and forsaken places. It is at this crossroads that disciples are privileged to be found. Entering the jail cell to gather with brothers in the family of God has become an unexpected path of deep joy for me.

In one of Barth’s prison sermons, he claims that the criminals crucified with Jesus constitute “the first Christian community.” In the dark shadow of the cross, a family of faith is found. This provocative claim highlights how, in both Advent and on the cross, forsakenness and community meet when divine presence is found in the darkness.

The cross of Jesus mysteriously held together these elements of forsakenness and celebration. As the land turns dim and dark at Jesus’ death, the place where he spoke of being forsaken becomes the very site of celebration—the very location where life is won for the world. So should these intersections really be so shocking to us as Christians, we who find life at the manger, the cross, and the empty tomb?

ENTERING THE MYSTERY of higher time and kingdom paradox—joy in the dark—is slowly reshaping me. I now see that celebration is simply about the presence of God, received with others, rather than about favorable or ideal circumstances. If this is really the case, then perhaps the best way for you and me to journey through Advent and celebrate the season of Christmas is to actually avoid the extremes.

Architecting happiness through glitz and stuff is a dead end. But so is marching through the seasons with a rigorous, individualized religious devotion. Both approaches are cut off from the deep, paradoxical joy found in the mysterious presence of God in the dark.

The invitation is graciously ours: move toward forgotten people and forsaken places and find that God is there, ready to surprise us with joy in the dark.

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Claude Atcho
Priest & Author

Claude is the pastor of Church of the Resurrection in Charlottesville, VA. He is also the author of Rhythms of Faith: A Devotional Pilgrimage through the Church Year and Reading Black Books. You can follow his work on his Substack and at claudeatcho.com.

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📸 Photography by Elizabeth Sanders

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