Get out of jail, free, through Grace

A sermon for the congregation of St. Saviour, Penticton on the 1^st week of the 2025 Season of Creation, September 7, 2025 — The Very Rev. Ken Gray

On this the first Sunday in the 2025 Season of Creation, let’s go somewhere unusual. As the Monopoly board says, “Go to Jail – Go directly to Jail.” In a recent article in The Washington Post, “What a prison chapel taught me about public speaking” Cincinnati-based writer P.G. Sittenfeld connected faith with prison life, and with God.

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[Edited for length]

“When I was an elected City Council member in my hometown of Cincinnati for nearly a decade, public speaking was part of my everyday life. What I liked best was that it was a chance to change — at least for a moment — how people were feeling: to try to elicit at least one smile or laugh or jolt of optimism.

Then, in November 2020, I was indicted on public corruption charges. For the next 3½ years, I went from having 10 to 20 speaking invitations a week to zero. And even if the invitations hadn’t come to an abrupt halt, my lawyers would have told me to cease public speaking anyway, heeding the Miranda warning: Anything you say can and will be used against you.

Of course, this was hardly the biggest problem in my life: I also faced the prospect of being separated from my wife and our young sons by a lengthy prison sentence. Maintaining my innocence, I turned down a plea deal and went to trial. At the beginning of 2024, after being acquitted on four counts and convicted on two, I reported to a federal prison camp in Ashland, Kentucky, to begin serving a 16-month prison sentence.

Though prison is full of indignities and deprivations, I encountered one unexpected grace there.

On my second day in Ashland, I joined a daily Bible study and never missed a single session during the remainder of my incarceration. One day, an inmate named Doug encouraged me to deliver the sermon for one of our church services. The prospect of delivering my first prison sermon kicked into gear old public speaking habits and disciplines.

I knew exactly what I wanted to say: that despite our circumstance of confinement, we were still free in the way that mattered most. We were free to love, as God designed us to do. Our bodies weren’t free, but our spirits still could be, if we let them.

“Where we are,” I told my fellow prisoners, “is not who we are.”

A month after my first prison sermon, I concluded my second — this one on Easter Sunday . . . [I felt myself profoundly grateful] for what I’d received from my fellow inmates and the prison pulpit: the gift of grace.” 

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Grace, the approval or kindness that is freely given by God to all humans, whether acknowledged, received, or not. Let’s now join Paul, writing from prison to those he knows well in the Colossian church in what is the shortest book in the bible. He writes with a specific request, that the church receive and care for Onesimus, once a slave, but now, something more. Addressing Philemon as “fellow labourer” and “brother,” Onesimus, a slave who had escaped from his master Philemon, was returning with this epistle wherein Paul asked Philemon to receive him as a “brother beloved.” The letter appeals on behalf of Onesimus, who had subsequently became a Christian through Paul.” [Wiki]

As Paul has discovered, known, and received Grace, he seeks something similar for Onesimus, and for all believers. Like P.G. Sittenfeld, who discovered that grace has no bounds, even behind the walls of prison, Paul knows that grace transcends all distance, history, and circumstance for everyone, and I would argue for and through all creation.

Grace incorporates reconciliation, ethical conduct, individual will, social and ecological consequence, philosophy and theology, liturgy, and music.

Amazing grace, How sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost, but now I am found,
Was blind, but now I see . . .

God of grace and God of glory,
on Thy people pour Thy pow’r;
crown Thine ancient church’s story,
bring her bud to glorious flow’r.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage,
for the facing of this hour,
for the facing of this hour . . .

In another letter, from a different time, from a convent and not a prison, in his Letters to a laywoman, Brother Lawrence (Circa. 1614 – 1691) shares these words:

“God does not ask much of us, merely a brief thought of Him from time to time, a little love, sometimes asking for grace, sometimes offering Him your sufferings, other times thanking Him for the blessings given, and are giving you. In the middle of your tasks you can comfort yourself with Love as often as you can, in all these ways. During your meals and conversations, lift up your heart to God sometimes. The slightest little awareness will always be very pleasant. We don’t need to shout out to do this. God is closer to us than we may think.”
—Brother Lawrence OCD, author of The Practice of the Presence of God

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