2021.12.12 | Joy in Jail
“Joy In Jail”
Rev. Dr. Arlene K. Nehring, Senior Minister
Eden United Church of Christ, Hayward, CA
Third Sunday in Advent 2021
December 12, 2021
The Apostle Paul wrote his epistle to the Philippians from a jail cell in Rome. The overarching theme of Paul’s message in today’s passage is joy. I find the juxtaposition of Paul’s location in jail and his theme of joy more than a little ironic. How about you? I have been to jail a few times, and haven’t found it to be all that joyful.
The first time I went to jail was in Advent 1988. I was fresh out of seminary, serving as Assistant Minister at the Old South Church in Boston. I went with a woman named Denise. Her husband was the Massachusetts Attorney General. I went because she asked me to serve on the Board of Directors of an organization that she helped found called “People to People.”
Denise and some of her well-to-do friends from suburban Boston founded People to People with the hope of reducing recidivism among inmates at MCI-Framingham, the Commonwealth’s only women’s prison. Their strategy was to help inmates build their repertoire of life skills, so that they might experience more success in family and work life in the future, and avoid making a U-turn and ending up right back in jail.
II
I don’t know if I contributed much to the organization or the inmates, but I learned some things about our criminal justice system that continue to trouble me, such as how strong the correlation is between poverty and incarceration, and the huge disparities that exist between the sentences for which women and men are sentenced to prison.
The female inmates at MCI-Framingham had convictions related to addiction, theft, and prostitution. Most of the inmates were young single mothers. Most lacked the schooling and experience needed to obtain a living-wage job. When they couldn’t make ends meet on welfare or their children’s fathers weren’t providing child support or both, they turned to robbery, check kiting, and/or prostitution in order to put food on the table, and pay the rent for their families. I found that disturbing. I bet you do too.
Another disturbing fact was that most of the crimes committed by female inmates were nominal compared with those committed by men who were locked up in Massachusetts. Men whose crimes were on par with most of the women’s crimes were released on parole after serving a small fraction of their sentences, because the men’s prisons, of which there were several, were overcrowded. So the courts filled up the cells at MCI-Framingham, and the prison industry “made bank” on a full house.
Rather than fund the prison system, our organization endeavored to reduce the number of women who were repeat offenders by helping them stay connected to their families. Because those who stayed in touch with their children rarely returned to jail, and those who did not were typically right back in the slammer within a year of release.
One of the ways that our group tried to sustain and strengthen family relationships was exemplified in the event that was the occasion for my first trip to jail. It was to help host a holiday event for the inmates with young children.
We organized a mini-mall where the moms could pick out a gift for each of their children. We provided gift bags so the moms could wrap their children’s presents. (Scissors aren’t allowed in jail.) And we played games, shared snacks, and sang a couple of holiday songs. The event was a far cry from being home for the holidays, but at least for a couple of hours these system-involved families experienced a modicum of holiday happiness.
I can’t remember very much about that holiday party anymore, but I remember this--we sang “Joy to the World.” All the way back to Boston that Saturday afternoon, I couldn’t shake the sense of irony about how hard it must have been for those inmates to sing “Joy to the World” that Advent season.
III
How does anyone or any family sing “Joy to the World” when Mommy’s in jail for Christmas? How does anyone experience joy in their hearts when they’ve just lost a loved one during the holidays? How does an asylum-seeking family sing “Joy to the World” when they’re ordered to “remain in Mexico,” or when they’re afraid of being evicted from their home, or when they have lost their housing and have to resort to sleeping in their car?
Yes, just exactly how does anyone sing “Joy to the World” or experience joy in their hearts in these and other deeply challenging circumstances?
I don’t think answers to these questions come easily–or at least they shouldn’t. Platitudes don’t begin to touch deep grief. Greeting card companies can’t generate verses or images that touch the depths of these examples of human suffering.
However, if we look to people who have known deep suffering and explore the way they frame hardships, we can begin the long, circuitous path to healing. We can, for example, turn to examples of people like Isaac Watts for the hard-won map to true joy and deep peace.
Unless you’re a church musician, you may never have heard the name Isaac Watts before. And unless you read the biographies of church musicians like I do, you probably don’t know much about Isaac Watts, so I’ll share a few interesting facts.
Isaac Watts was the son of a deacon at the Congregational Church in Southampton, England. He was also a jailbird. He was sentenced twice to prison for espousing what the establishment saw as heretical religious views.
Even though he was sufficiently intelligent, Isaac Watts was forbidden admission to Oxford and Cambridge on account of his so-called “nonconformist” ideas.
Rather than venturing into the world upon graduation from a less prestigous university, Watts moved back home and mooched off of his parents. When he eventually got on his feet, he enrolled in and graduated from a theological school. He eventually received a call and enjoyed a vigorous and successful career in ministry and music. That was, until his late thirties, when his health collapsed.
Had it not been for the generosity of his congregation and the charity of a wealthy patron, Isaac Watts would have been living in the poor house and he would have died a premature death. (Whitney J. Dough, The Hymn Writers—Our Unknown Friends. Franklin, TN: Providence House Publishers, 1983, 18−20, and www.cyberhymnal.org.)
Despite his poor health, Isaac Watts was one of the most prolific hymn writers in the English language. He wrote more than 600 hymns in the early 18th Century, including one of the most familiar Christmas carols that we still sing in church: “Joy to the World.”
Watts did not write this song at the pinnacle of his health. No, he wrote “Joy to the World” at the age of 45—seven years after his health collapsed, and he had been forced into early retirement.
He wrote “Joy to the World” not because he had so much to rejoice about, but because he knew in his heart that the message of Christmas was less about the way that things were, and more about the way that God wanted things to be. Watts knew that Christmas was about God’s deep desire for all people to experience joy rather than sorrow and peace rather than conflict.
Watts knew that by sending the baby Jesus into the world that God was proclaiming the good news that suffering is not our purpose, and death is not the end, and that God offers us peace that passes human understanding.
So we ask, “How can we sing “Joy to the World” this Christmas? How can we sing “Joy to the World” in times and situations that don’t seem all that joyful?
The answer is borrowed from Isaac Watts--we sing “Joy to the World” because we must!
We must protest the way things are and proclaim how God intended them to be. We must sing ourselves out of the blues and open ourselves to the joy that the holy spirit would usher in--not as the world gives, but as Christ gives.
Now that’s something to rejoice about! Amen.