I want to start this morning with an account of someone I know who has found himself through his wife involved in a prison ministry. He lives in the United States.
In 2005 at the time of the spring proms a young lad in our son’s year at school – we’ll call him Ben – shot both his parents dead. The school immediately closed ranks. Experts were brought in who advised everyone above all to avoid contact with this deranged and dangerous figure. My wife’s first response though – and I attribute this to the work of the Holy Spirit – was “something terrible happened to Ben to make him do that.” She thought this in part because Ben had been kind to our son when he first arrived at his new school as an awkward foreigner in grade 11. Ben had actually befriended him and gone out of his way to include him in parties and gaming events. Shortly after thinking this she was woken in the night with the conviction that she had to write to Ben in jail. A series of near miraculous events unfolded to open the way for a visit, followed by further weekly visits. (Let’s me just say that it’s not easy to show up unannounced to a high security psychiatric prison and get in to see someone.) And now she has been walking alongside Ben for almost ten years. It has been one of the greatest joys of our life, as well as one of the greatest sadnesses. Ben has never explicitly embraced Christ, although we talk of such things occasionally. But God is clearly at work in his life. What is equally clear is that God did not want Ben to be forgotten even though everyone else did.[*]
There are currently around 86,000 prisoners in the UK.
This is a three-fold rise since the 1950s – so in 1950 just under 50 people were in prisoner per 100,000 in UK population, in 2010 this had risen to nearly 160 people in prison per 100,000.
The church rarely thinks about prison and prisoners.
Even though at the beginning of the gospel
Jesus declares that he has come to proclaim freedom to the captives (Lk 4.18)
and at near the end of the gospel,
Jesus says that to visit a person in prison is to visit him (Matt. 25.36, 40).
The gospel is good news for prisoners.
As my friend says: despite prisoners being shut away from the world,
God does not want those in prison to be forgotten.
The Christian gospel dares to announce that there is not one prisoner
who should not receive mercy and forgiveness.
This is why the work of the Prison Fellowship is so important.
This is why I’m glad that as a church, in Glyn and Liz, we have a link to this work.
This is why it is right the church sets aside a day to remember and pray for those in prison, and those who work in prisons, and those who have been the victim of wrongdoing.
Our society argues that if you commit a crime the ultimate punishment is prison,
other punishments are of course fines, community service or particular court orders,
but in the main, the punishment is prison.
We might say that the church should not get involved in what the state does in terms of criminal justice or prison,
but this whole series of Sundays in the last two months have argued that there is no secular, no area of life in which the gospel does speak into.
The church must reflect on prison and crime and punishment
and it must do so as the church, that is, as disciples of Jesus.
Most of us probably have a view on crime and punishment,
but I wonder if we allow the gospel to shape that view.
This is the question I want to ask how do Christians think about prison as punishment?
Society offers three common views about prison as punishment:
Prison as a means of deterring others from committing crimes.
Prison as a means of protecting society from those deemed to dangerous to be otherwise free.
Prison as a means of ensuring a person pays the price for they have committed.
A fourth view, once more common, is now more muted –
Prison as a means of seeking to reform or rehabilitate a prisoner in order that they might re-join society on their release and not return to crime.
What is noticeably missing from society’s view of prison as punishment is any notion of forgiveness or reconciliation.
The history of prisons lies in Christian monastery.
Part of a monastery is divided into cells, where the monks sleep,
When a monk committed a crime, they were confined to their cell
In order that they might after a set time of penance be reconciled to the community.
The cell was a place of isolation and silence.
To be confined to one’s cell was a means of being deprived of the company of others, deprived of participation in the community’s life and worship.
The old name for prisons – a penitentiary – indicated its roots as a place where repentance was done.
The goal always for those who confined to their cell was forgiveness and reconciliation.
The punishment was never an end in itself,
The punishment was not a simple means of retribution,
but also had the desire that the one confined would ultimately be restored,
as a full member of the community again,
forgiven and reconciled.
The problem with a modern understanding of prison and punishment
is they lack the intention, the goal, the telos
of forgiveness, reconciliation and restoration.
Prison has become a means of social control,
a means of punishment for punishment’s sake.
In some cases prison is a means of scapegoating.
A group of mostly Christians in Scotland, which included theologians, judges, prison governors, probation officers, chaplains and criminologists and a prisoner,
were brought together to think about the issue of prisons, punishment and justice.[†]
Some of what they found was:
Prisons had become human warehouses,
deprived of any purpose other than the deprivation of liberty.
The model of justice was almost exclusively retributive, with no sense of seeking to be restorative or reformative.
The other thing they found was that prison was not a place to talk about or deal with notions of guilt and forgiveness.
It is here that as Christians we have something to contribute,
because both guilt and forgiveness are part of the Christian vocabulary.
Guilt for Christians is a universal concept.
As the apostle Paul says: ‘all have sinned’
and in this sense all are guilty – it is impossible
to divide people into the guilty few and the innocent many.
We do not stand apart from those in prison,
for each one of us are sinners,
each one of us live in ways that offend our neighbour and God,
each one of us is guilty of some form of wrongdoing.
A Christian response to prison and punishment,
is to confess that there is no perfect innocent guiltless humanity.
In a similar way, if guilt is universal,
so is the need for forgiveness.
As we pray, ‘forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who sin against us.’
Forgiveness is not just offered to the few,
but to the many.
The offering of forgiveness and the reception of forgiveness is costly,
but it is the gift of God proclaims the gospel.
The church offers those in prison and the wider community
a means of seeing life, even life that has caused serious offence and harm to others,
in the context of God, gospel and reconciliation.
The group of Christians concluded that
‘forgiveness, reconciliation, reception back into fellowship is the goal of punishment, the telos which alone can justify the punishment of the offender.’
This is why Christians are or should be against capital punishment,
it removes any possibility of reconciliation and forgiveness.
If the church is to argue that the language of guilt and forgiveness are important when we consider prison and punishment,
the church must also show how to punish in such ways.
It might be shocking to hear that the church should be place in which there is punishment,
but this must be the case if we hold to the conviction that we are not just a group of individuals in a building,
that we are instead a community of God, a family in Christ,
where sins against one another and against God are not ignored,
or overlooked with some notion of sentimentality that covers our fear of naming sin.
In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus teaches the disciples how to deal with sin in church:
what is sometimes called ‘binding and loosing.’
And in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians we see him tell the church to excommunicate – to put the sinner outside of the community.
This is how the church punishes,
not as end itself, not out of some enjoyment,
or for some satisfaction that a wrongdoer is getting their dues,
but in order that the offender might be reconciled,
restored, forgiven.
So that that which is broken can be healed.
Amongst the earliest Baptists they understood the importance of discipline.
Church meetings were not about finance or evangelism,
But about discipleship, about membership.
Church meetings would often discern together what kind of discipline
a wayward member might need to undergo,
because they believed that following Jesus together mattered.
How offensive is that to our ears today?
The discipline sometimes meant being excluded from the Lord’s supper.
They took bread and wine seriously; to miss out was to miss out a communing with God and his people – food for thought perhaps when we next come to the table.
If the church is to proclaim forgiveness, and I think we must,
we must also proclaim repentance and penance
and that is to be able to say something about punishment.
Alongside seeking to be this kind of community,
We must pray for those are prisoners,
and those we work in prisons,
and those who oversee prisons – worryingly increasingly this is becoming privatised –
that they might prisons as a place for coming to terms with wronging,
finding forgiveness and where possible being reconciled with victim.
This is to be for them, even when we cannot always be with them.
[I recognise I’ve not said much about victims today
and this not to because I want to cheapen or pretend some crimes are not horrendous and evil acts,
in which the lives of victims or their families are not devastated – exploring that is a sermon for another day;
at the same time, I think the gospel always holds out the possibility of redemption,
and this must always be the goal of punishment.]
We must be the kind of church that is involved with prison ministry –
Could we imagine what would happen if every church had a relationship with every prison?
At least some, if not many in prison are Christians,
Christ is already there as he says – when you visited someone in prison, you visited me’
and so its about the church reaching out to those who belong to Christ
and together seeking to live as those guilty and yet forgiven.
As my friend says ‘God forgets no one, and so we are to forget no one.’
[*] Douglas Campbell in a sermon preached at Goodson Chapel, Duke University, 6th Feb, 2014.
[†] Duncan Forrester, ‘Punishment and Prisons in a Morally Fragmented Society’, Studies in Christian Ethics 6.2 (1993), pp.15-30.
Thanks, Andy. Wonderful stuff. By happy coincidence, I've just read Rowan Williams' "Reforming Punishment" in Faith in the Public Square (2012) -- which I suppose you've seen, but if not, it concludes:
"[T]he crisis in the penal system is bound up with the wider question of whether our social imagination in general is being fed by the vision of mutual responsibility. It is unhappily easy for the sceptic to suppose that the religious perspective on these matters is essentially and even exclusively about underscoring guilt and penalty. I have been trying to suggest that the most distinctive contribution such a perspective may bring is a stress on finding our adult liberty in carrying the responsibility for someone else's welfare. If at least that dimension of the religious ethic that has grown out of our tradition can be revitalized for our society, it is not only our attitudes to penal policy that will be regenerated and transformed" (p. 264).
Mutual responsibility and answerability, belonging, imagination, empathy -- these are the themes that pervade Faith in the Public Square -- and your sermon too. Thanks again.
Posted by: Kim Fabricius | November 15, 2015 at 05:39 PM
Thanks Kim, for the encouragement, especially from someone who knows how to craft a sermon. I had a quick glance at the Rowan piece you mention, but thanks for drawing my attention to its conclusion. I had also been trying to read an earlier piece he wrote in Theology journal, but wasn't able to get the online access required.
Posted by: Andy Goodliff | November 15, 2015 at 07:36 PM