Sermons

“Lord, When Did We See You—In Prison?”

Matthew 25:31-46; Luke 4:16-21 – Rev. Rebecca Littlejohn

Vista La Mesa Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), La Mesa, California – March 22, 2015

Holy God, bless the speaking and the hearing of these words that we might open our hearts to your transforming mercy, in order to see your Christ in our midst. We pray in the name of Jesus, Amen.

We are most of the way through Lent by now, with Easter only two weeks away. We have been moving through the various states of need where Jesus says we’ll find him, in the passage from Matthew 25 that we heard earlier. We have talked about the spiritual lessons and real world implications of nakedness, hunger, thirst and welcoming the stranger. I am grateful to Tim Tiffany and to Sadie Cullumber for adding their voices to this exploration. And so today, we’re going to talk about the idea that we can find Jesus in those who are in prison.

I have always been fascinated by the perspective on prisoners that is hinted at in the verses we heard just now from Luke 4. Both in the way Luke writes it, and in the passage from Isaiah 61 that he’s referencing, it seems clear that the “captives” and “prisoners” are in the same category as the poor, the blind, the oppressed and the brokenhearted. Everyone needs good news. Everyone needs release. There is no distinction made about whose fate was entirely unfair and who might have deserved their punishment. There is no assumption in either of these passages that people are in prison because they are paying a legitimate debt to society; rather, the way the passages are written implies that generally, if you’re in prison, what you deserve is freedom.

[slide] This is a far cry from the prevailing perspective in our culture, which might be summed up as “You do the crime; you do the time.” The problem with this catchy slogan, however, is that it assumes that there is a fair and neutral definition of what crime is, and a corresponding agreement about what kind of punishment fits the crime. One could argue that the biblical perspective on prison is shaped by the fact that it’s written for an audience that is living under occupation, where a cruel regime throws people in prison just for looking sideways at Roman centurions and such. We live in a democracy, with checks and balances. Surely our justice system is more civilized? And yet, as we continue on this Lenten journey of seeking Jesus in all the places he said he could be found, when we explore what’s really happening in our prisons, the biblical perspective starts to feel more and more applicable.

[slide] One of the first things we need to learn is that there are more than 2 million people behind bars in this country today. That is in comparison to around 350,000 in 1972.[1] This is an unprecedented increase, not matched by any other country, that is largely due to the War on Drugs, which targeted small-time users, rather than dealers in ways that had not been pursued before. It has led to the severe over-crowding in our prisons that you’ve heard so much about in the news. Forty years ago, scholars were expecting the prison system to fade away, because it was so clear that it wasn’t an effective deterrent to crime, that, in fact, people spending time in prison increased their likelihood to re-offend.[2] Instead, the opposite has happened, with prisons becoming a big business, even as the rate of violent crime has gone down. And the zero-tolerance ethos of the War on Drugs has influenced many realms of life, each contributing to our exploding prison populations in their own way.

I had a long conversation this week, with a woman I’ve never met. She called the church simply because she was at her wits’ end. Her husband hadn’t been home in three days. He is an active alcoholic who struggles with mostly untreated bi-polar disorder. [slide] She had been making the 2-hour trolley trip from San Ysidro up to Santee, every day, hoping to persuade him to come home. What she really need from me, I think, besides a listening ear and fervent prayer, was permission to stop going up there and trying to get him to do something he didn’t want to do. But what she was afraid of was that he would get arrested. As he had before. And what she kept emphasizing, over and over, was that the County Mental Health facility has about 12 beds and the County Jail has about 650. So where do you suppose they would take him, once he got picked up? According to Human Rights Watch, in 2006, the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics reported that over half of all prison and state inmates struggled with mental health problems, including major depression, mania and psychotic disorders.[3] How well equipped to deal with that reality do you imagine the prison health care system is? Where is Jesus?

[slide] Another reality of our modern penal system is what scholars are now calling the “school-to-prison pipeline.” With zero-tolerance policies inspired by the War on Drugs and increasing numbers of police officers in schools, there has been a huge shift in the definition of normal childhood behavior, versus arrestable offenses. The editors at Rethinking Schools share this story from Philadelphia:

Robert was an 11-year-old in 5th grade who, in his rush to get to school on time, put on a dirty pair of pants from the laundry basket. He did not notice that his Boy Scout pocketknife was in one of the pockets until he got to school. He also did not notice that it fell out when he was running in gym class. When the teacher found it and asked whom it belonged to, Robert volunteered that it was his, only to find himself in police custody minutes later. He was arrested, suspended, and transferred to a disciplinary school.[4]

“Early contact with police in schools,” they conclude, “often sets students on a path of alienation, suspension, expulsion, and arrests.” The students who need the most help from our school systems, that is the ones whose parents are less involved, are instead being pushed out of school and into the juvenile justice system. Alongside this failure is a larger one with even deeper implications. [slide] We were shocked to learn at our Bible study this past week that 70% of inmates in California state prison are former foster care youth.[5] Let me say that again, 70% of the people locked up in California state prison came out of our foster care programs. At what point do we begin to admit that we’re doing it wrong? The children who are the very most vulnerable amongst us, the ones with no trustworthy parental figure, are being worked through a system that is most likely to turn them into inmates. Something is very wrong with this picture. Where is Jesus?

[slide] On top of these travesties, we have seen the re-birth of debtors’ prisons in recent years, where people who can’t afford to pay fines for civil offenses like traffic tickets, are instead held in jail, thus likely losing their jobs, making it even less likely they can pay the fines. And then of course, there is the other reality that is hidden behind “Do the crime; do the time.” It is practically impossible to re-build a life after being in prison. Discrimination against former inmates, in the realms of housing, education access, voting, employment, public benefits and jury service,[6] is not only legal, but considered wise public policy. The time may be done, but the punishment is a life-time brand. Former inmates are, in effect, a permanent underclass, shut out of normal, American life and any shot of getting ahead.

We discovered the other day that most of us at Bible study have very little personal experience of the prison system. We haven’t been in prison; we don’t have loved ones who are in prison. And I’m guessing that when there are exceptions to this lack of exposure, we’re not talking about it openly. [slide] The truth is that the morass that is the American prison system is also one of the starkest reflections of the systemic racism that has infected every part of our society. Violation of drug laws occurs at similar rates across cultures, and some studies show, at slightly higher rates among white youth. And yet, black men go to prison on drug charges at rates 20 to 50 times higher than white men.[7] The children getting suspended and taken away by police, rather than taught why what they did was wrong, in the classroom by the teacher, are children of color, not white kids. And within our foster care system, 50% of the children are black or Latino.[8] The system is so skewed and so life-altering that Michelle Alexander, who has written the definitive book on the subject, argues that it is most descriptive to call it the “new Jim Crow.”

I promise I’m not sharing all this with you simply to depress you. We discussed in Bible study on Wednesday that all this contemplation of the world’s needs is rather overwhelming. Trying to care for the people who make our clothes, and feed the hungry, and ensure everyone has clean water, and find ways to integrate immigrants into our society, and now considering the vastness of the problems that plague our prison system can make us just want to go back to bed. In circumstances like that, it’s always helpful for me to remember Micah 6:8. It says that what the Lord requires of us is to do justice and the love kindness and to walk humbly with God. It doesn’t say we have to do justice and love kindness and save the world. God is saving the world. We are being invited to walk humbly with God, as that happens. [slide] And isn’t it interesting that Jesus, in Matthew 25, didn’t say, “I was in prison, and you came and set me free.” Again, that release is what the Messiah proclaims, but all we are being asked to do is visit. We are asked to see Jesus. We are asked to see those in prison and know that, in some very real sense, they are the Holy One in our midst.

But then again, this may be a difference between our modern reality and that of the original, occupied nation audience of this story. [slide] The truth is that we have the capacity to do more than visit. Unlike first-century Jews, we do have some influence upon the institutions in our society, like schools and the foster care system and even prisons, even if the problems at first seem too big to comprehend. We can advocate for schools to use fair disciplinary methods, that restore children to classrooms, rather than isolating them and cutting them off from the opportunity for education. We can get involved with helping children come through the foster care system better off than they were when they entered it. And we can push for prison reform, making clear to candidates for office that these are issues that matter to us, that we’re watching what they do and which laws and reforms they will support. Once we start to see Jesus in prison, it becomes hard to ignore this horribly broken part of our society. We may not know just how to get started, but opening our hearts to those affected is the first step. Let us live the good news of release to the captives! Amen.

[1] “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,” by Michelle Alexander, p. 6. The New Press (New York) 2010.

[2] Alexander, p. 8-9.

[3] http://www.hrw.org/news/2006/09/05/us-number-mentally-ill-prisons-quadrupled

[4] http://www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/26_02/edit262.shtml

[5] http://www.reconciliationministry.org/Resources/SchooltoPrisonPipeline/tabid/1531/Default.aspx

[6] Alexander, p. 17.

[7] Alexander, p. 7.

[8] http://www.reconciliationministry.org/Resources/SchooltoPrisonPipeline/tabid/1531/Default.aspx