Faith Works 6-14-24

Faith Works 6-14-24
Jeff Gill

Hearing good news, 80 years ago
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The most prep time I ever put into a single sermon was for Sunday, June 5, 1994, which turns out to be thirty years ago. That sermon was weak, perhaps, on preaching the Gospel, but it did have the overt intention of tying the meaning of "gospel" & "good news" together.

What I was trying to communicate was how people felt when they heard about D-Day, then fifty years before. We had no one in the congregation I served at the time in Fairmont, West Virginia who had landed in Normandy that day, but there were many still in that community who had been serving both overseas and "fighting the home front" in 1944.

So I went around speaking to now 70 & 80 & 90 year olds, just trying to capture something of what they felt on hearing the news that the Allies had landed in Europe on June 6th. I talked to a woman who had been young that day, with a boyfriend overseas, who thought "they'll be home soon." Not as soon as she hoped, but D-Day meant it would be sooner. Another woman working in a cafeteria downtown told of how the radio was brought out of the kitchen and set up on the counter, so all could hear the news. One lady told me about being called inside by her mother as she hung laundry out back: "you'd better hear this for yourself."

There were a number of men who had been serving in the Pacific, aboard Navy ships; each felt a surge of pride, and a question: how soon will this bring more forces over to our theatre of the war? Some heard it secondhand down in the engineering spaces from a runner off the bridge, some on their ship's intercom system rebroadcasting to the whole crew while under weigh. Other men and women were at work in defense industry in California, riveting armor onto bomber airframes or testing plexiglas canopies, and the news came along the line in bits and pieces, while the work went on. My Uncle Clair, reached on the phone in 1994, almost as deaf as my father but who didn't like wearing hearing aids, had trouble catching my question, but when he did, after explaining he was in New Guinea sweating up a storm replacing engines in B-24s, bellowed "well, we were damned glad to hear about it, let me tell you!"

I talked closer to home with men who had been aircrew on B-17s waiting on bases in northern England, all dimly aware of preparations in the south for invasion, but all cloaked with secrecy. "Now it's come," they thought. "Soon we will be flying all the way to Berlin."

And perhaps most riveting was a lady in a nursing care wing of the hospital, whose English was still poor, born and raised in Holland, grew up a young woman in Southeast Asia, come to America with a man with a complex story of her journey from Florida to West Virginia: but on June 6, 1944, she was a Resistance member riding a trolleycar in Rotterdam, when the story was whispered from one seat to the next "the Allies have landed in France." Antje told me the tale whipped around the city, and as she walked home with a meager harvest of groceries, the German soldiers on every street corner seemed even more on edge, wary, tense.

She felt hope, for the first time in a long while.

That, I tried to connect, is what hearing the Gospel, God's good news of grace, can and should be like for any of us. Those stories have also kept me tied to that day, June 6th, 1944, ever since. All those I spoke to those weeks before the 50th anniversary are gone; I share their stories with you now so you might pass them along, too.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's always glad to hear new stories, especially about old things. Tell him a story at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.

Faith Works 6-7-24

Faith Works 6-7-24
Jeff Gill

Spending time in jail, good for the soul?
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"In Ohio, about 16,500 people are in jail on any given night and 300,000 are booked into jails each year. Jails hold people immediately after arrest, who are awaiting trial and are serving less than 12-month sentence."

That passage was recently in the pages of the Newark Advocate, and also in a number of our partners in the USA TODAY Network Ohio. I invite you to pause, whether you can read the whole piece (or series) or not -- kudos to USA TODAY Network Ohio bureau reporters Laura Bischoff and Erin Glynn, who anchored the reporting and writing of it, and you really should subscribe! -- to consider what that data point alone tells you. 2.5% of ALL Ohioans will be booked this year. Over any 10 year period, that ends up somewhere between 7 to as much as 10% of the population allowing for repeat visitors.

That's one thing you learn in pastoral ministry over time; I had to get out into parish work to learn the difference between jails (see definition above) and prisons (mostly felony charges with a year or more), but it was also a slowly dawning realization — friends, when a preacher gets up into the pulpit on Sunday, you are talking to a group of people of whom 10 to 20% (remember, we're talking lifetime now) have spent at least one night in jail. It does change how you talk about certain things, but it's not something you often refer to directly. Maybe we should.

Think about it, though: this year, almost 3 of every 100 adults you meet will have been through intake at the county justice center. And that's just THIS year. Or to be more direct: the people in jail are not THEM. They are most emphatically US.

When I came to Licking County in 1989, the year before a group of clergy had launched Licking County Jail Ministries (LCJM), a collaboration between many local churches and clergy to serve the newly opened Licking County Justice Center, our county jail (LCJC). Then Sheriff Gerry Billy was supportive and a real blessing to the work we did, allowing us to enter the facility with appropriate training, and for us to help his staff serve those incarcerated at the LCJC, and ultimately for us to employ a chaplain, Mark Shoemaker. He and his successor, Scott Hayes, are the only two jail chaplains we've had in some thirty-five years, a testimony to the stability and quality of the ministry they both have provided: all at the expense of the jail ministry board and supporting churches, not the taxpayers, I should note.

Sheriff Randy Thorp has continued to value the work of the LCJM, and Chaplain Hayes is deeply respected across our community. But I have to admit as a former board member and president and volunteer inside the LCJC, we may not pause to remind people often enough of the facts that Laura and her USA TODAY Network Ohio have put before us.

Again, the people in jail are not THEM. They are most emphatically US. And for Christians, we are called very directly in scripture to minister to those who are locked up; I would read those passages as enjoining us to reach out to the guilty and innocent alike. To give them hope, and a plan for their future.

Some of the most powerful Bible study experiences I've had in my life were inside the LCJC. They were holy moments, and those classrooms and modules can be holy ground. If you don't believe me, you may need to go in there sometime yourself.


Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's not spent any nights in jail (yet), but plenty of time there. Tell him about your experiences seeking justice at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack77 on Threads.