"Release and Resurrection" - Sermon for 3 Advent, 12-14-25

“Be patient, beloved. Strengthen your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is near.”  

†

Quoting Isaiah elsewhere in the gospels, Jesus promised release to captives, in addition to good news for the poor and relief from a litany of ailments. Today, Jesus added raising the dead to his performance self-review. But did you notice that Jesus didn’t offer his cousin John that get-out-of-jail-free card. I wonder what John thought about that bit of not-so-good news brought back by his disciples. Poor John wouldn’t have known yet that he was on death row; he would later lose his head only because of a rash promise the besotted King Herod was shamed into keeping.    

Last week Kate and I went to Alcatraz Island. It was our first time there. Our daughter Susan and her husband Pete were visiting and they wanted us to take the tour with them. Since European settlement in the Bay, Alcatraz has been an Army fortress, a military prison, a federal prison, the site of an indigenous people’s reclamation attempt, and now a national park. I was fascinated and sobered. The cells are smaller than I expected, the solitary confinement hole hopeless and grim. The view from outside is both spectacular and dispiriting. Several prisoners attempted escape; none were successful. And no inmates were executed on Alcatraz. They were shipped to San Quentin if that was their draw.

I suppose if you had asked an Alcatraz inmate, or John the Baptist, for that matter, if he preferred release or resurrection, he’d likely have chosen release. Being sprung from a dank prison cell back into society is easy to imagine. Short-term gains are attractive, especially for people with low impulse control. Choosing resurrection is a play for the long game. It requires faith and, I expect, counsel from one of Alcatraz’s chaplains.

But, of course, we don’t have to choose between release and resurrection. We can have both; and even if the former isn’t granted, the latter may be assured. What if Jesus, by leaving out release of captives in his report to John’s disciples, and adding resurrection, what if Jesus was telling John, and us about something larger than this life?

Captivity, incarceration, imprisonment are true enough on their face. We, the United States, are the experts at locking people up. But captivity, incarceration, and imprisonment are also metaphoric: symbolic of anything that locks up our hearts, that keeps ourselves from opening to their fuller potential.

These may be chronic or terminal physical ailments that escape a cure, but must be endured. These may be emotional or spiritual hurts that years of therapy or rehabilitation only begin to touch. These may be financial setbacks for those who are one missed paycheck away from ruin.

Sometimes, like an inmate nearing the end of his sentence, the miracle of release happens for the metaphorically-captive. A new treatment is found; the psyche moves in the right direction; a better job or an unexpected windfall lands in our lap.

And, sometimes, this symbolic parole is denied and the sentence is for life. We know people for whom this is true; maybe it is true for you today. And in the end, of course, death comes for us all … but there is hope!

John wasn’t freed from Herod’s prison. But he was freed from the hell of death’s prison, raised from that dead-end into heaven’s paradise when Christ, after his own execution, was raised from the tomb. John was raised along with the psalmists and prophets, the patriarchs, and matriarchs who preceded him to the grave.  

Resurrection into heaven’s paradise is our hope, too. In the words of the catechism I grew up with, God made us “to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him forever in heaven.” The great John the Baptist did just that. May we, the least in the kingdom of heaven, be blessed to do the same.

†

 Father Daniel S.J. Scheid, SCP

3^rd Sunday of Advent – December 14, 2025

All Saints’ Episcopal Church, San Francisco

“Release and Resurrection”