Community of Prophets

March 13, 2016    Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO

Roger Ray, pastor        “The Community of Prophets”                   

-Phil Berrigan        "The poor tell us who we are,
the prophets tell us who we could be,
So we hide the poor and kill the prophets."

 John Kennedy    "The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty, and all forms of human life."

 Colin Powell     "The US cannot win the war on terrorism unless we confront the social and political roots of poverty."

It will not likely come as much of a surprise to many of you but still, beyond our instinctive sense that the more wealthy people become the less empathetic they seem to be, researchers at Berkley and the University of Illinois have actually put numbers to it.

( Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at Berkeley, and Michael W. Kraus, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, have done much of the research on social power and the attention deficit.)        

When you feel some food insecurity yourself, you can easily be more understanding of hunger. When you have had a house repossessed or had to move back home with Mom and Dad after college, you can feel the imposing threat of homelessness more clearly.

But comfort and security can lull us into indifference. I always meant to do it during my years as a denominational pastor but I always seemed too busy but when we started this church, I made it a part of my personal spiritual and professional discipline to spend time every week with the most poor and vulnerable people I could find. Our weekly trips to Bill’s Place where we serve lunch on Thursdays keeps me in touch with people that none of us should ever forget.

Sometimes, when one of our regulars reappears after a few months of absence, I’ll ask where they have been. Often the answer is something like, “I have been a guest of Greene Co. government.” Which means, of course, that they have been in jail.

Through my contact with the homeless population, I know a lot of people who have been at least short term guests in the Greene Co. jail but there are two prisoners there who have a connection to our church. One is child molester and the other is there on the charge of murder. The child molester is the most recently incarcerated.

I sat in the courtroom last month, next to his victim and the victim’s mother, as her former step-father pled guilty to the several charges against him. It took over three years to bring this case to court and so, our friends and church members with whom I sat in court, were forced to move 3000 miles away to escape his constant stalking and threats which our local judicial system seemed powerless to stop in spite of the felony charges and the restraining order against him.  He will be in the county jail for several more months until he is brought up for sentencing this summer at which time he will likely be sent to a state prison for, in my opinion, not nearly long enough.

The other prisoner has been there for three and a half years since she was charged with murder. She had just turned 18 years old at that time, a couple of years since she had run away from home and was living on the streets, turning tricks to pay for a drug addiction. She evidently shot a middle aged John with his own gun while sitting in his car.

She was too high to remember what happened and there were no other witnesses. Why her case has not been brought to trial in over three years and why she is still a resident in the Greene Co. jail defies any legal or logical explanation.

A county jail is supposed to be a holding facility where people who are charged with crimes are held for a few days pending their court hearing. No one was supposed to be there for a month, or six months, certainly not a year, and three years is nothing short of crazy. County jails are not set up with rehab, counseling, education or the kinds of resources for long term residents.  A jail is not a prison.

However, due to long backlogs in our court system, not enough judges, public defenders or prosecutors, our jail has become a prison. A facility that was built to house 500 prisoners has been over capacity for the past three years. A recent newspaper article talking about David Adam’s granddaughter, Marya, now in her 3^rd year in the jail, described the overcrowding conditions. There are two beds in Marya’s cell but there are often four women in the cell. They take turns sleeping on the floor where one has to prop her head up on their shared toilet.

I don’t know how this is legal… in fact, I have a sneaking suspicion that this is not legal though as I have researched the topic, I have found that this kind of overcrowding exists in jails all over our country. The ACLU is aware of it, documents it and writes about it but I cannot find that they are filing any suits about it.

Many of you know that I am a news junkie. I listen to news podcasts while I exercise and I wake up and go to sleep to news programs. I know that I shouldn’t and no one else needs to take it upon themselves to explain to me why that I shouldn’t… I know several things that I should do that I have not yet decided to do and this is one of them…. I leave the news on all night. I sleep to the company of MSNBC news anchors every night except on the weekends.

On weekend nights, MSNBC runs repeats of hours and hours of reporting on prisons, federal prisons, state prisons, foreign prisons… it is sort of like a “real housewives” program for serious felons. I can’t stand it, so I have to search for documentaries and other news sources to lull me to sleep on the weekends. I can’t stand watching and hearing about the scary people and the frightening conditions in these jails and yet, I know, conditions are much worse, just three miles from here, in the Greene Co. Jail.

In the Academy Award Winning film, “Spot Light,” the four reporters working on the Catholic Priest sex abuse story in Boston repeatedly find themselves asking one another how such a large scale series of crimes could have been repeatedly covered up and ignored for so long. So many parents, church officials, police, and prosecutors knew of dozens, what some estimated to be nearly a hundred pedophile priests, and what was eventually discovered to be more than 300 pedophile priests in the Boston diocese. How did it go on for so long? Why wasn’t it stopped?

The sobering, in fact, the morally indicting realization that dawned on reporters, lawyers, priests, and parishioners is that, in all honesty, they had all known about it, at least suspected it, there were signs, there was evidence, for years. It’s just that no one wanted to think about it. No one wanted to look at something so ugly, so unholy, so disgusting.

I remember reading satire materials in the National Lampoon when I was in high school, forty years ago, about pedophile priests. We’ve all sort of known about it for most of our lives but it wasn’t until these four reporters put it in print in a paper so prominent that it couldn’t be ignored that it began to be addressed.

And these were crimes committed against innocent, vulnerable, gullible children. We were able to accept that this is a horrible thing that happens and nearly every one of us knew someone who had kids in vulnerable positions in parochial schools, choirs, and altar guilds who were in positions of risk but we didn’t talk about it.

And if we can diminish these children to the point that we can live comfortably with the knowledge that this huge system of abuse went on interminably for centuries, how much easier is it for us to dismiss the plight of those who are incarcerated, most of whom are likely incarcerated for very good reasons.

And yet, men and women, even prisoners of war are not kept bunched up in tiny cells. And yes, everything that you imagine might happen in those overcrowded conditions, all of the violence, rape, abuse… it all happens. I have talked with guards to admit that it happens and who insist that they cannot do anything to stop it.

Putting a lot of offenders in overcrowded conditions makes them harder to manage so it is not the guards fault that there are rapes and beatings and no opportunities to exercise or move around an outdoor enclosure.  It is not the guards fault.  The sheriff is in charge of the jail and he is frustrated and angry about the situation but he can’t either expand the jail nor turn away arrested criminals. It is not the sheriff’s fault.

The overcrowding largely comes from the longer stays of prisoners waiting for their day in court but the prosecutor’s office and the public defender’s offices are under-staffed and over worked… it is not their fault.

The legislature could approve the appointment of more judges, prosecutors, and defenders but the state budget is already too tight and the people don’t want to pay more taxes so it is not the legislature’s fault.

So I ask you, my sisters and brothers, we are treating human beings, some bad people, some innocent people, some people who are guilty of nothing more complicated that being addicted to drugs or unlucky enough not to have a family that was wealthy enough to hire a better lawyer…. We, not they, we are treating them in a way that if the Humane Shelter housed cats and dogs that way… well, this is awfully ironic to say, but someone would go to jail.

We know it is happening. We know it is wrong. We know it is unacceptable. Now what?

When we started this church we said that we wanted to be a prophetic church. Do you remember? We said that being prophetic happens in two different ways. One is in giving direct aid to the people who are in need…. We distribute groceries through Crosslines, we take meals to Bill’s Place every week, we send shoes to Nicaragua and distribute tents, sleeping bags, coats and gloves to the homeless every winter.

But the other way of being a prophetic church is to speak truth to power. In this case, to tell our county commissioners, our sheriff, our mayor, our city council, our legislators, our prosecutor’s office, our judges, that no matter what their budget is, no matter what their work load is, no matter what bureaucratic hurdles they have that gives them a reason to not fix this problem, that it is not okay.

I’m saying, if you can’t put them in jail and treat them like human beings, then you can’t put them in jail. There are some people in there whose crimes are disgusting to me but that doesn’t justify our county government committing disgusting crimes against these people. 

We need to speak the truth to power but there have been stories about our jail overcrowding in the paper for the past several years. It is going to take more than pointing out the inhumanity of the conditions. Our officials know how bad it is. They know how wrong it is. But until today, they have been comfortable in the knowledge that the citizens do not care. And maybe they are right, maybe no one cares…. But I’m prepared to bet that they are wrong. I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to show them.