Prison, Chains, and Freedom | June 1, 2025

Today’s message focuses on our call as Christians to care for those who are imprisoned and introduces our June monthly ministry partner, Breaking the Chains Church in Milwaukee, a prison congregation in our synod. Before ascending to heaven, Jesus called us to continue following his commands as witnesses to his love. When we love, serve, and care for the least among us, Jesus says, it’s as if we are doing it to him. We love God whom we cannot see by loving our neighbors who are visible to us.

Today’s Scripture readings are Hebrews 13:1-3, Psalm 68:4-10, Acts 16:16-34 (the story of God miraculously rescuing Paul and Silas from jail), and Matthew 25:37-40. Citations are throughout the text below. Here’s the sermon podcast and livestream, both from Christ the King this week.

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Grace to you and peace from God our Creator and our Redeemer, Jesus Christ. Amen

Last Sunday, I talked about the process our congregation will be going through on goal-setting, spending time intentionally discerning where God is calling us next. If you weren’t here last week, I encourage you to listen to it on the podcast or livestream. We’re praying for God to show us where to go, how to best serve our neighbors and live out the love of Jesus we’ve received.

I’m going to focus this morning on a specific way we’re called to live out Jesus’ love, but I think everything in that Gospel reading from Matthew 25 is helpful.

When we ask what we’re supposed to be doing as followers of Jesus, he makes it simple: When we see someone hungry and feed them, when we give the thirsty a drink, when we welcome the stranger, clothe the naked, and visit people who are sick or in prison, we’re serving Jesus. Challenging to live out, but easy to understand.

Jesus says, “Just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.” We serve Jesus by loving our neighbor. First John 4 says the way we love God, whom we cannot see, is by loving the siblings we can see.

And we do a lot of that, right? We can’t do everything; there’s always more we can do, but I don’t think we’re a church focused only on ourselves. We donate clothes and quilts and hats. We make soup, we give food to the food pantries.

When people show up at church meals, we feed them. I’m really proud that last year at the Lighthouse spaghetti supper, which is a fundraiser—we’re selling tickets to raise money—we realized there were two people in need and we invited them to eat, no questions asked.

We have people here who are wonderful about checking in with sick and homebound folks. Even if you’re not directly serving meals at Family Promise, if you give offering to our church, we pass on funds to other wonderful ministries who are doing this work. Yesterday at synod assembly, I heard about ELCA World Hunger feeding people, and Lutheran Social Services of Wisconsin and Upper Michigan serving over 30,000 people in the last year, and the Lutheran Office of Public Policy advocating for justice and equity for our neighbors.

Lighthouse takes youth on service trips where we feed people—you support that. Again, there’s always more we could and ought to do, but we’re a church who take seriously Jesus’ command to love our neighbors.

The one I think we most often ignore is the bit about visiting people in prison, which we’re focusing on today. Some of you have experience with this, with people you know, or even family members, but a privilege of my upper-middle-class life is that I’ve never had a loved one in jail, so it’s easy to skip over this part. Literally the only time I’ve ever been in a jail was as a kid, I got to tour the new Dodge County Jail in Juneau before it opened, because my dad worked on it as an electrician.

One of my regrets as a pastor is that when someone connected to our church in Iowa was jailed, I talked to him on the phone, but I didn’t ever make it to visit. Covid restrictions were a convenient excuse, but the reality is I was uncomfortable going to visit, so when a nearby colleague offered to go, it was really easy for me to say yes. And I regret that in that situation, I think I turned my back on Jesus.

All that’s to say I’m excited about our June monthly ministry partner, which is Breaking the Chains Church.

Breaking the Chains is an ELCA ministry to men at the Felmers Cheney Correctional Center in Milwaukee. They have weekly Bible study, worship, and communion, and now they’ve been meeting on the outside as well, with people who’ve completed their sentences. I met their board president this weekend at synod assembly, and I’m excited he’ll be here with us on June 22nd to share more.

I’m talking about it today because our Thursday story for Vacation Bible School next week is the story we just heard about Paul and Silas being imprisoned, and as a connection to that story, the VBS kids will be assembling 80 hygiene kits to give through Breaking the Chains to people as they’re released from incarceration. You can help by donating the supplies, things like toothbrushes and shampoo and soap. Take a link off the chain back there, and bring whatever’s written on it back by next Tuesday. It’s a way of living out that verse from Hebrews, right? “Remember those who are in prison, as though you were in prison with them.”

This story from Acts is a great VBS or Sunday School story. Paul and Silas are thrown into prison for teaching about Jesus, but around midnight, there’s an earthquake, the doors fly open, and the chains are released. God sets them free. Great story for kids.

But in preaching this story, the temptation, or at least my temptation, is to take it and make it a metaphor, to just talk about people who are imprisoned by fear and doubt, feeling trapped in life, share how God is a chain-breaker for whatever’s holding you down.

And that’s important. If you do feel trapped today, by whatever it is that’s keeping you bound, you need to hear there is freedom in Christ. God is in the business of breaking chains.

But we can’t only spiritualize the story, at the expense of ignoring what it actually says. The chains in the story are literal chains. This is a story about people who are actually in jail.

I’m not saying we should get rid of jails, or allow everyone convicted of crimes to go free. There are plenty of people who need to be in jail. I hate the phrase “lock ‘em up and throw away the key,” but there are people who should never get out of jail. I think of serial killers, drug lords, terrorists, and murderers. I hope they repent, but I don’t believe they should be on the streets.

But at the same time, our country has the third highest rate of incarceration in the world. There are massive racial and income disparities in sentencing. We have more people in prison than any country, other than perhaps China.

That’s a political problem—I get that—but it’s a bipartisan issue. The first Trump administration had a great accomplishment of lowering sentencing with the First Step Act. But now we’re detaining people for things like being brought into the country as children. Our tax dollars are being used to ship people—some convicted as violent criminals, some not—to other countries to be imprisoned. “Just as you did it to one of the least of these,” Jesus says, “You did it to me.” How do we use our freedom as Christians to speak up for our neighbors?

In the story, even though the people are in jail, in the place where society puts people to be discarded, to be ignored, God does not forget about them. God still cares about people who are imprisoned. And if God cares, we need to care. We need to believe in forgiveness. We need to believe in the possibility of redemption. We don’t give up on people because God doesn’t give up on us.

As the ELCA, our 2013 social statement on the Church and Criminal Justice says “Each participant [in the criminal justice system] is a human being with dignity who deserves to be heard.” (pg. 8) It calls for ending for-profit prisons, supporting mental health care, and helping people integrate into society.

Our faith has something to say about how we build a justice system as a society, how we both protect people from crime, value those who serve in those roles, while also yet still valuing the humanity of people who break the law.

I do think it’s pretty clear in this story that Paul and Silas are unjustly imprisoned. Their “crime” was casting a demon out of an enslaved girl, which hurt the income her enslavers were making through fortune-telling. Amy Frykholm points out, “They are arrested, not because they had done something wrong, but because they had gone against the economic interests of people in power.”

But the miraculous freedom God brings is for everyone in the jail that day, not just for the two of them. Verse 26 says “All the doors were opened and everyone’s chains were unfastened.” That’s a vision of God’s kingdom if I ever heard one!

In Jesus’ first public sermon, he quotes Isaiah, saying “[The Spirit of the Lord] has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

Our society will always need jail cells. But we look forward to the kingdom of God, where chains are broken and the imprisoned are set free. Not just metaphorically, not just literally, but in every sense of the word.

God sees people as beloved, not defined by their mistakes, but by the cross. No matter what you’ve done, no matter what’s been done to you, no matter what your neighbor’s done, there is forgiveness in Jesus’ name.

In God’s kingdom, we are set free to be the people God created us to be, set free for life in God’s presence, free from sin and death, free from fear and oppression, and free from chains. Thanks be to God. Amen