5th Sunday of Easter
Texts: John 14:1-14;
1 Pet 2:2-10; Acts 7:55-60
YouTube: https://youtu.be/FBglAzb5H9k
Sermon Take-Home Notes
Excerpt Page from N.T. Wright
REDEMPTION OF A PROSECUTOR
I’d like to begin with the second verse of the hymn we ended with last Sunday:
Singing:
Build a safer refuge, not a larger jail;
where the weak find shelter, mercy will not fail.
For any place where justice is denied,
Christ will breach the jail wall, freeing all inside.1
When we hear the word Christ, we typically think of the man Jesus. So we might sing the last line of that hymn and think, ‘So Jesus is in the business now of scaling prison walls and carrying out rescue missions? Really? Jesus breaks into prisons, freeing all inside?’
But what if, in hearing the word Christ, we think Body of Christ? We think about us instead? Then, what might we think of when singing, “Christ will breach the jail wall, freeing all inside”? Might we think of followers of Jesus, like you and I, undertaking prison ministry? In this morning’s sermon, I’m going to tell a very moving story about a friend of mine whose undertaking of jail ministry has literally led to freedom for more than one person in jail.
Before I tell that story, though, I’m going to take a moment to set it up with two themes we’ve been ringing out this Easter Season. The first theme is that raising Jesus on Easter is not so much about us being able to go to heaven when we die as it is about the opposite: namely, the launching of God coming home to earth to set things right and to restore the whole Creation.2 The second theme has been that, in coming home through Jesus and the Spirit, God is being revealed not as the One (like an emperor or strong man leader) who promises to save us from our enemies. But rather God is the One-from-Many, e pluribus unum, who comes alongside us so that we participate in our own redemption.3 The One-from-Many are things like the Body of Christ. Us!
Our Gospel Reading today shows forth both these themes if we read it in that light. I’m well aware that the first four verses are very beloved — especially since we so often read them at funerals — because they sound like they’re about Jesus coming back to take us to heaven, after preparing places for us there. But that’s only because we’ve been taught to read it that way. We read it out of context, with going to heaven in our minds. If read it in the context of John’s whole Gospel, however, these verses about Jesus preparing places for us is more about the opposite.
Listen to what Jesus says only a few verses after today’s reading, where Jesus says, “Those who love me will keep my word, and my Father will love them, and we will come to them and make our home with them” (John 14:23). We will make our home with them. Do you see? Jesus is not talking about us going to heaven; he’s talking about God coming to make God’s home with us.
The second part of today’s reading talks about the Father abiding in Jesus — there and then. Next week, we’ll move on to Jesus’ promise of the Spirit coming to abide with us so that when he goes to be with the Father, they will together, through the Spirit, come to abide in us. Jesus goes on to use the word abide over and over again.4 The many abiding places that Jesus goes to prepare for us are not in heaven. Those abiding places are in us and with us, as we become the Beloved Community, the Body of Christ.
That’s why Jesus can make the astounding promise at the end of this morning’s reading: “Very truly, I tell you, the one who has faith in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these.” Greater works than Jesus!? Isn’t that an astounding promise? Jesus can make it precisely because, in going to the cross and then returning to unleash the Holy Spirit on us — that was the Second Sunday of Easter, Jesus blowing the Holy Spirit upon his disciples — Jesus has prepared for God to abide in and with us. We are to participate in our ongoing redemption and the renewal of the whole Creation.
As promised, I have a story to tell this morning that I think illustrates this remarkable promise. It is a story that puts flesh on that hymn we sang last week: “For any place where justice is denied, Christ will breach the jail wall, freeing all inside.” It’s the story of my friend Preston Shipp, who I got to know in my work in a group called Theology and Peace. He presented at our conference in 2016,5 and this is the story he told us.6
Preston was born in 1977 and raised in his birthplace of Nashville, TN. As a boy growing up in the 1980s, he became enamored with the idea of ‘putting away the bad guys.’ He wanted to work in law enforcement. As he went to college in the late 90s — again in his hometown of Nashville, at Lipscomb University, a small private Christian university — his goal took the shape of becoming a lawyer, specifically a prosecuting attorney. In the Fall of 1999 he enrolled at the University of Tennessee Law School, focusing everything on becoming a prosecutor. After two years of clerking for a judge who heard appeals for criminal cases, he began his dream job in about 2005. He was a prosecutor in the Office of the Tennessee Attorney General. He especially prepared briefs for appeals cases. And here’s an important detail to remember for what later happened: he never met in person those for whom he argued against their appeals. Their trials in court were over. They were already in prison, and it was their lawyers who brought their cases to be appealed. Preston prepared the briefs, and often he didn’t hear about the outcome for months. He would simply receive the ruling from the Appeals Court in the mail.
So here’s the rest of the story. It didn’t take long for Preston to begin feeling some doubts about his dream job. He saw the warts in our legal system up close — things like how wealthy people seemed to be able to ‘buy’ more justice than the poor. Things like how the legal system jailed a much higher percentage of people of color. Couple that with Preston’s upbringing in church. When Preston as a young man in 2002 joined a suburban Nashville congregation with his wife Sherisse, it was a church that had a prison ministry in which he participated, adding to his doubts about being a prosecutor.
But his misgivings really revved up when he said yes to his college professor, Richard Goode, to a different kind of prison ministry focused on helping inmates receive a college education. It began in the spring of 2007, with he and Richard teaching at the woman’s prison near Nashville. An unusual aspect is that they brought 15 students from Lipscomb with them to join with 15 students incarcerated at the prison. It was awkward at first, as you might imagine, but gradually the two groups of students opened up to one another and extraordinary learning began to take place. It began to change the teachers, too. Preston began to hear the stories of these women, some of them guilty by association with others. Many of them having grown up in poverty and also situations of sexual and physical abuse. His doubts grew further.
This was 2007. By November 2008, his misgivings had grown to the point that he resigned his ‘dream job’ as prosecutor in the Attorney General’s Office. And instead took up a position in the Tennessee Supreme Court’s Board of Professional Responsibility, hearing cases of lawyers accused of failing to do their jobs properly. Preston was now kind of working for the other side, making sure the rights of the accused criminals were being upheld. He later would go on to work for renowned legal activist Bryan Stevenson,7 working to eradicate laws that allowed teenagers to be given life-sentences.
Which leads us to the heart of Preston’s story, the injustice of imprisoning teenagers for life. In the Spring of 2009, months after he had already resigned from the Attorney General’s Office, they began another round of classes at the woman’s prison with 15 new inmates. One of them was a bright young woman by the name of Cyntoia Brown. She was 21 at that time, already in prison five years with a life sentence for murder. As the weeks passed, Preston learned her story. She had been abandoned by her family in her teenage years so that by the age of 16 she was trapped in sex trafficking in Nashville, kept high most of the time on drugs. One day, after a john had raped her at knife point, she gained control of the knife, murdered him, stole the money he had, and ran off. For this she was given a sentence of life with no parole. At 16.
One day, about midway through the semester of classes, Preston returned home to find one the results of a case he had prepared the brief for in the Attorney General’s Office, months after he had resigned. Opening it, there was his name near the top, along with the name of the petitioner, the one who was seeking to have her sentence reduced. The name was Cyntoia Brown. He had argued to keep her in prison. Now, after getting to know her and care for her, her name stared up from the page. He spent a week of sleepless nights before seeing her at their next weekly class. Here’s Preston’s own account of what happened, from his book that I highly recommend, a much richer account of what happened that I can share this morning:
I silently made it through the security checkpoint, walked across the yard, and turned the corner to the long corridor leading to our classroom. I immediately saw Cyntoia standing alone in the hallway. The look on her face was clear. She knew. She had seen my name. In her hand she held her copy of the opinion.
I slowly, cautiously approached her, unsure of what was about to happen. “Cyntoia, I don’t know what to say. I’m so sorry for the part I played in your case. I feel terrible.”
Her eyes searched mine. “When did you know?” she asked.
“I didn’t know until I got the opinion. I never made the connection. I worked on your case sometime last year. I had no idea who you were when the class started. . . . I’m so sorry.”
“You don’t need to feel sorry. You were doing your job.”
“I never should have been in that job,” I said quietly.
“I know. And now you’re not. You recognized you were wrong and you quit. That counts for something. I was mad at first, but we didn’t even know each other back then. It’s okay.”
I knew it wasn’t, but it seemed like she was ready to be done with the conversation.
“I don’t know what else to say, Cyntoia. I’m just so sorry.”
Cyntoia said everything she could say. She showed me more grace than I could have ever asked for. In the face of such heartbreak and disappointment from having her appeal denied, compounded by the sense of betrayal she had to feel from the part I played in the case, she showed me compassion. In a moment that beautifully crystallized the wonderful person she is, Cyntoia didn’t lash out at me in anger, although she had every right to hate me. She didn’t curse me or call me a fraud or a hypocrite. She didn’t bad-mouth me to others. Instead, Cyntoia began the process of reconciliation by listening to and accepting my apology for the pain I had caused her.8
To make a long story short, over the next ten years Preston would take Cyntoia’s side, arguing for her early release from an unjustly long sentence. He didn’t get very far through ordinary legal channels. But in 2018 Preston began to lobby the outgoing governor of Tennessee for a pardon (technically, a commuting of her sentence) as he left office. In January of 2019 the pardon of Cyntoia Brown became a reality; by August she was a free woman. “For any place where justice is denied, Christ will breach the jail wall, freeing all inside.” Freeing all inside. In this case not just Cyntoia Brown, but also her prosecutor. Amen
Paul J. Nuechterlein
Bethania Lutheran Church,
Racine, WI, May 3, 2026
YouTube: https://youtu.be/FBglAzb5H9k
Sermon Take-Home Notes
Excerpt Page from N.T. Wright
Notes
1. “Build a Longer Table,” text by David Bjorlin (music NÖEL NOUVELET, a French carol), hymn #1062 in All Creation Sings (Augsburg Fortress, 2020).
2. We began this theme on Easter Sunday, inspired by N. T. Wright’s most recent book God’s Homecoming: The Forgotten Promise of Future Renewal (HarperOne, 2025). The Excerpt Page for the day is Wright’s argument regarding John 14:1-4 as being about God’s homecoming, not about ‘going to heaven when you die’ (pages 116-21).
3. This theme is based on my reading of Luke 24:13-32 on the Third Sunday of Easter, based on the line from the disciples on the road to Emmaus, “But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel” (Luke 24:21a). Preaching with nationalism in mind these past several years, it hit me that nationalism is based on hoping for the One to save us. In Jesus the Messiah, on the other hand, we meet a God who suffers in solidarity to the marginalized ones sacrificed by “the One” human authoritarian leaders we look to; then in raising the suffering Messiah does a switch and bait of a Risen Lord who keeps disappearing, ascends out of sight, and then returns in the Spirit poured out on many. God does not send us the One who will save us. God sends the One-from-Many, e pluribus unum.
4. See my webpage “‘Abide’ in John.” John uses the noun monē twice in John 14, vv. 2, 23, and the verb menō fifteen times in John 14–15, peaking at eight times in John 15:4-7. Note from the webpage list that both the noun is not translated as “abode,” and the verb is not always translated as “abide,” though the latter is the dominant translation in these chapters.
5. See the webpage for this conference: https://theologyandpeace.com/2016-conference/
6. My telling of his story is based on Preston Shipp’s book, written with Eric Wilson, Confessions of a Former Prosecutor: Abandoning Vengeance and Embracing True Justice (Chalice Press, 2024). See his publishers page for several relevant YouTube videos, including, “Redemption of the Prosecutor”: https://youtu.be/dQpQlqN8EY0?si=9NS_WfscRltZpL2J and a video interview about his book: https://youtu.be/j9r9dy5YWTs?si=WUIB-72zGo4rr34j
7. An Internet search of “Bryan Stevenson” yields pages of results. He is the founder of Equal Justice Initiative in 1989 and author of one of my favorite books, Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (One World, 2014). On the internet, see especially the documentary about him on YouTube, “True Justice: Bryan Stevenson’s Fight for Equality,” and https://justmercy.eji.org/
8. Shipp, Confessions, 96-97.
