Second Sunday of Advent Sermon

Like many prisons (most, I assume), San Quentin State Prison in California has provisions for church services. Now, I don’t know much about their policies other than this: that when the inmates gather to worship, a volunteer from the outside needs to be present for the service. They don’t need to lead it; they just need to be there.

And I know this, because of friend of mine is one such volunteer. So the church he attends a couple times a month is a Spanish speaking service in San Quentin. And he and I talk about it from time to time. It fascinates me, as a minister, to have this glimpse into a worship service and church culture so vastly different than what we do at St. John’s.

And it’s equally fascinating for my friend. He struggled a bit, especially at first, because of what he was hearing in the sermons. Remember, they aren’t being preached by outside do-gooder ministers. The preachers are simply prisoners, telling their fellow prisoners what they believe faith is all about, who God is, what God requires of us. They have no official training. They haven’t been to respectable, accredited seminaries. Who knows what resources they’re drawing from, other than their own earnest convictions fostered within the culture they live. So for my friend – a white, educated, liberal protestant – he’s sitting there, eyes wide open.  “Oh my God, Eric – some of the things you hear. They’re so chauvinistic and God is this violent, severe, ready-to-damn you, so get-your-mess-together god.” The whole tone is totally contrary to the culture of “good news in Christ” my white, liberal friend has come to believe and hope in. But he knows his role is simply to be present, and by being presence, allow this church to assemble.

But a couple weeks ago, he’d just come out of the prison and was still in the parking lot when he called me. “Eric,” he said, “I’ve just come from the first baptisms that have happened at San Quentin since COVID. It was amazing. They set up this big tank in a courtyard, that’s actually surprisingly pretty. There were thirty or forty guys being baptized. And when they’d come up, out of the water, and climb out of the tank, most of them would just collapse on the ground – unable to stand. And then they’d start hugging each other – fiercely and emotionally. Black guys and Latino guys and white guys – all hugging each other – guys you know, not long before, had been enemies within the culture of the prison.”

And I have to tell you – just like my friend – I was really moved by his story. For a couple reasons.

First, I’m sure if I were the one sitting through those church services, listening to what was being preached, I’d be really squirmy too – uncomfortable with what I was hearing, wishing I could be the one preaching, to present a gospel of good news such as I’ve come to hope in. Which is, of course, terribly conceited and arrogant. What do I know of prison culture and the cultures that feed it? What do I know of the good news these men’s hearts are craving to hear? Or what, for them, is the appropriate next step of faith God is inviting them to take? Very little. I don’t know that world.

But those preachers do. And God certainly does.

And it is my deep hope and conviction that God meets us where we are, using our faith and what we have to offer, to make manifest the Kingdom of God. It becomes a mingling – of our good intent and God’s holy power and love – to make peace on earth, as it is in heaven.

When I’m here, preaching with you, I do the best I can with what I’ve learned – through study, though life – to share the hope of God I believe in. Those inmates in the prison are doing the exact same thing. And, God forbid, it should all depend on any one of us, or the purity of our theology or passions, for God’s Spirit to be at work among us.

There’s a kind of freedom that comes with this. For all of us are bearers of Christ’s good news for this world. We share what we know and what we’ve learned to be trustworthy from our own experience. And if our intent, as bearers of the gospel, is to love God and to love our neighbor, rest assured, that God is in it. And all will be well. For surely, when you see former enemies hugging each other, we can trust that the Spirit of God is very present and very alive, and not at all hindered by our inadequacies.

Which leads me to the second part of this San Quentin story that I find so compelling. And that’s the powerful, palpable presence of forgiveness in it. For that, I suspect, is what they are bearing witness to as they collapse on the ground after their baptisms. They are forgiven, washed clean of their sins. And they feel it! It presses down upon them as an unbearable weight of glory. They are forgiven.

And in this, they have a message for us. There’s a power in their response we don’t often see or feel in our church culture. We speak comfortably of God’s love. We speak confidently of being made in the image of God. We stand up in our prayers – a sign of the inherent dignity befitting God’s beloved children. These are themes I preach all the time because I do believe they are life-giving and true.

But a consequence, perhaps, of these emphases, is how we neglect the parallel reality that we are also sinners. Our sins may not be as blatant as they are for someone in prison, who’s been convicted of murder or other serious crimes, whose whole world is now structured and confined by the centrality of their sin.

But all of us are all sinners.

We were born of sinful parents, who themselves were born and formed in a sinful world. We have consumed and absorbed falsehoods that have confused us, abused us, and utterly misled us. So, like every generation before us, we are the product of sin and we are the agents of sin, feeding it to our children, who themselves will pass it on to every generation yet to come.

We may not be residents of a penal institution. We may have the wherewithal to function adequately within the basic constructs of society. But we’ve made bad choices and we make bad choices. We all have private habits that would mortify us if they were broadly known. We’re all selfish and lazy and divisive of spirit.

And at a deeper level, most of us (if not all of us) are bound and chained by any number of fears and shames and addictions that wield tremendous power over us. And as Christians, when we’ve heard God’s call “to repent,” we’ve wanted to. And we’ve tried. And we’ve failed. And so we beat ourselves up for being “so bad” and unredeemable. Or we deny the very existence of the threat, because the only lesson we’ve learned is despair. And we’ve presumed that God shares the same outrage or disgust we feel towards ourselves.

I suspect, however, God is not nearly as obsessed by our sin as we are. We marinate in our badness and self-loathing, even as we deny it. God know from whence we have come and the tangled web of brokenness that has formed us. God knows our complicity in weaving that web for ourselves and those around us. And God knows (and freely uses) the power that exceeds these forces. And that is forgiveness.

God’s call to repent does not come from a spirit of outrage or disgust. It comes from a well of deep compassion. “I know, my child, how hard it is for you.” The call to repent is not an accusation. It is an invitation to be honest – with yourself, with God, with one another – and to name quite plainly those things of which we are ashamed and afraid, and which have fostered all manner of bad behavior. And in naming them, to hear God say, “I know, my child. And I forgive you.”

Forgiveness is the portal to life.

This is our hope. This is the good news of our gospel – the gospel we receive, and the gospel we proclaim.

As Zechariah prayed over his infant son, John, so it becomes a prayer for us:

Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel;
who has come to his people and set them free.
He has raised up for us a mighty savior,
born of the house of his servant David.
…
This was the oath he swore to our father Abraham,
to set us free from the hands of our enemies,
Free to worship him without fear,
holy and righteous in his sight
all the days of our life.

You, my child, shall be called the prophet of the Most High,
for you will go before the Lord to prepare his way,
To give his people knowledge of salvation
by the forgiveness of their sins.
In the tender compassion of our God
the dawn from on high shall break upon us,
To shine on those who dwell in darkness and the
shadow of death,
and to guide our feet into the way of peace.

This is a gospel of hope I am continuing to learn and believe in. I recognize in my own life how many boogeymen I’ve kept locked outside the door, afraid to let them in, lest they roar in and destroy me. Lately, though, I’ve felt a shift. All those things a “good Christian” shouldn’t struggle with, (which means they can’t be admitted to), I now hear myself saying, “Oh, hello. Come in and have a seat. Can I get you something to drink?”

Which is all to say, I feel a shifting compassion towards myself and my struggles because it’s a compassion I increasingly believe derives from God. If God is not threatened by my boogeymen, I need not be threatened by them. If God is forgiving me, I can forgive myself. If God offers a future and a hope, I, too, can look to my future and hope.

In the tender compassion of our God
the dawn from on high shall break upon us,
To shine on those who dwell in darkness and the
shadow of death,
and to guide our feet into the way of peace.