April 26, 2026

Indianola Presbyterian Church

"The song of the caged bird"
Sermon by Rev. Trip Porch

April 26, 2026                                                                                                                                            Based on  Acts 16:16-34

It's January 1968.
Folsom State Prison, mess hall number two.
A thousand convicts packed in, not to eat but to listen. 
They're hooting, hollering, pounding fists on metal tables, harsh fluorescent lights flood the room, and Johnny Cash is on the stage.
Now if you don't know the story of this concert, it's worth knowing. Cash had been pushing his record label for years to let him record a live album inside a prison. He felt his personality, and his music fit that audience incredibly well. They finally said yes, and what came out of that January morning became one of the most celebrated live albums in country music history. Cash at Folsom Prison. It changed his career. It changed a lot of things.
He works through his set - playing his hit songs that land a bit differently in a room like this, because they are songs that know something about where they're being played.
And down in the front row there's an inmate with a dark pompadour haircut. California state prisoner A597959C. 
His name is Glen Sherley. 
And right now he's just another face in the crowd.
Johnny Cash announces his final number. A song called "Greystone Chapel." A three-chord song written about the granite chapel that sits inside Folsom Prison's walls. Written, it turns out, by that same man in the front row.
Glen Sherley had no idea this was going to happen. He jumps out of his seat.
He'd written the song in his cell at Folsom prison. He’d been in and out of California penitentiaries for years. San Quentin, Soledad, Chino, Vaca-ville, Folsom. Songwriting became the thing that kept him sane. Simple songs. Stark lyrics. True things about life behind bars.
And now Johnny Cash is playing his song back to him, in the building where he wrote it, in front of a thousand men who know exactly what the song meant. (this portion of the sermon came from the KCRW radio show: Lost Notes, with reporter Peter Gilstrap https://www.kcrw.com/stories/johnny-cash-and-the-ballad-of-glen-sherley)
The chorus goes like this:
Inside the walls of prison, my body may be, 
but my Lord has set my soul free.
And the verse:
There’s a grey stone chapel here at Folsom 
A house of worship in this den of sin. 
You wouldn't think God had a place here at Folsom.
But he’s saved the souls of many a lost man.
That lyric, and the story of this song I think is a whole sermon unto itself. 
And I think it helps us get a better sense of what it is going on in our scripture today… as Paul and Silas sit chained in a prison cell at midnight and begin singing hymns of praise to God.
Not long before they were arrested, Paul and Silas had just arrived in Philippi -- a proud Roman colony, deeply invested in its Roman identity -- And something good happens first. They find a group of women gathered for prayer by a river. Lydia is there -- a dealer in purple cloth, a woman of means and standing. She listens. Something opens in her. She and her household are baptized, and she insists Paul and Silas stay with her.
That must have been the boost of confidence they needed to affirm that they were on the right path. 
They arrive and someone immediately opens a door. 
Someone tells them you belong here. 
That sustains them for what's coming.
Because what's coming for them is hard.
A slave girl starts following them. She is a fortune teller, the scripture says she has a spirit of divination and her owners profit from it. She follows Paul and Silas for days, calling out true things about them publicly. Paul, worn down, some of the translations say he’s annoyed… 
turns and speaks to the spirit and it leaves her.
It’s a healing story for this girl but it means her owners lose their income stream and They are furious. They drag Paul and Silas to the authorities -- not for the exorcism, but for disturbing Roman order.
The complaint is dressed up as a civic concern. Underneath it's money. As a fortune teller she was worth something to them and now she isn’t worth anything to them, and someone has to pay.
Paul and Silas are beaten and thrown into the innermost cell. Feet in the stockades. Backs torn open.
This is where the Spirit's redirection has led them. Two blocked roads, a dream, Lydia's house and table, and now this.
If you were measuring their success on paper, you might think something had gone very wrong.
Who knows how much time passes… 
But at midnight, Paul and Silas are praying.
And they start singing.
The other prisoners are listening.
They are not singing because it's going well. There is no version of this situation that looks promising. There is no court date, no lawyer, no appeal. The people who put them here are powerful and legally in the right.
Their wounds haven't been tended. It is the middle of the night and they are in the innermost cell and the only people who can hear them are other prisoners who are also not going anywhere.
And they sing praise to God.
It’s like in the middle of Folsom state prison, they find their very own Greystone Chapel. Locked in the innermost cell of a Roman prison, in a city that has just made clear it does not want them. Everything about their circumstances says: this is as bad as it looks. Everything about their circumstances says: you are forgotten in here.
But still they sing.
Because something in them is free even though they are clearly not.
That's the claim Glen Sherley was making in his cell, writing lyrics on whatever he could find. “Inside the walls of prison, my body may be but my Lord has set my soul free.”
There is something in me that the walls cannot hold. There is something in me that belongs to God and not to this place. And the song is how I know it's still there.
Paul and Silas are making that same claim. They're not performing courage. They're not in denial about the reality of their situation. But no matter where they are, they still have faith in God. So they do the most true thing available to them in that moment. They're singing what they still believe even when the odds are stacked up against them.
And the other prisoners listen.
The same way a thousand convicts went quiet when Cash played that song back to Sherley in mess hall number two. Because something in the human spirit recognizes when a song is carrying something real. When it's not decoration. When it is, quite literally, the last free act a person has.
It reminds me of the poem Maya Angelou wrote
“I know the caged bird sings of freedom”
Decades after that morning concert at Folsom prison, in a completely different scene …an ICE detention facility in 2025 somewhere outside of Minneapolis, a Nicaraguan man who had only recently come to Christian faith found himself detained… so far from home, so frightened, so without options, he found himself doing the only thing he could think to do.
He started to sing. He started to sing the hymns he had only just started to learn.  Songs that had gotten into him somewhere between his baptism and this cell. He sang them not because things were going well but because the song was the only free thing left.
And the other detainees started singing with him.
His pastor heard about it later during a visit and was moved -- partly because of what happened in that room, and partly because this man had only just come to faith. He didn't have years of faith formation behind him. He hadn't read all the theology. But he still knew that the song was still there, and that it meant something, and that other people needed what it was carrying.
Two thousand years of Christian history collapse in that moment. 
From Paul and Silas, to Glen Sherley, 
And this a new Christian in an ICE detention cell, 
all reaching for the same thing. 
All making the same claim.
My body may be here in this situation. But my Lord has set me free.
After the Folsom concert, Cash and Sherley bonded backstage. Cash heard something in Sherley that he recognized within himself. He spent years working to get Sherley out of Folsom, calling in favors, pushing Sherley’s music in Nashville. And when Sherley was finally paroled, Cash was there.
That's what the singing produced. Not a clean escape from the walls, but a man who heard the song and couldn't leave it alone.
Which is also what happens in Philippi.
The earthquake comes. The foundations shake, doors fly open, chains fall loose. The jailer wakes up and draws his sword -- he knows what Rome will do to him if the prisoners have escaped. And Paul calls out from the dark: don't hurt yourself. We're all here.
We're all here.
The jailer comes in trembling. What do I do, he asks.
And then, still in the middle of the night, he takes Paul and Silas and washes their wounds. The wounds his system helped to create. He washes them with his own hands. Before morning, he and his whole household are baptized.
That's what the midnight singing produced. The song of freedom sung in faith in a desperate circumstance… Not a tidy neat resolution. Not a clean exit from everything that led to that cell. But a man on his knees in the dark, washing wounds, being made new.
The music wasn't the warm-up. It was the most important part of the story.
Today is Music Appreciation Sunday. And I've been thinking about why we sing. Not just here at church, but at all. Why music is woven into what it means to be human, and why it has always been woven into what it means to be the church.
I think Acts 16 gives us an answer though I’m sure there are others.
We sing because there are moments when singing is the most honest thing we can do. When the situation is too large for explanation. When the theology won't fit into a neat statement. When we are too frightened or too tired or too broken to manage much else. The song carries what we cannot.
Paul and Silas couldn't argue their way out of that cell. They couldn't reason their way through the night. But they could sing out with what they still believed. And that song became their witness. That's what the other prisoners heard, their faithfulness and belief in God.
That’s what preceded the earthquake and the open doors and the jailer's trembling question and the wounds being washed before dawn.
Glen Sherley couldn't walk out of Folsom. But his song could. And it did. It traveled from his cell to a rehearsal room in Sacramento the night before the concert, and then back to him, played by Johnny Cash, in a room full of men who knew exactly what it meant.
Inside the walls of prison, my body may be. 
But my Lord has set my soul free.
That's what this congregation does every Sunday when we open our mouths. We are making a claim about what is free in us even when things are hard. We are singing what we believe, we are singing out the deepest truths of our heart. We are telling the truth about where we are and telling the truth about who will holds us there at the same time.
We sing because the soul knows something the situation doesn't. 
We sing because God is here, in this, through this, stronger than this. 
We sing because that is what it means to be free.
Thanks be to God. Amen.

WE GATHER IN AWE AND PRAISE

PRELUDE                                                 "Chant and Celebration"                                Douglas E. Wagner

                                                                                   Sanctuary Bells                                         

INTROIT                         "Christ Has Arisen, Alleluia!"                               Tanzanian Melody

WELCOME                                                                    Rev. Trip Porch

One: This is the day that the Lord has made

All: Let us rejoice and be glad in it.

*CALL TO WORSHIP

One: In the darkest hour, when the night feels longest,

Many: we gather with a song still stirring in us.

One: When the world presses in and the walls feel close,

Many: we remember there is something in us that cannot be bound.

One: Come, bring your prayers, your breath, your voice.

Many: For even here, even now, God meets us in our singing.

*HYMN 641                         “When in Our Music God is Glorified”                                       ENGELBERG

*PRAYER OF CONFESSION                                                            Robert Bird

God of truth, we confess that we do not always live as people who are free. We let fear close in around us. We measure our lives by what is going wrong. We forget the songs that have carried us before, and we grow quiet when we most need to speak or sing. We turn away from the suffering of others or accept systems that wound instead of heal. We hold tightly to what feels secure, even when it costs us something. Forgive us for the ways we have settled for less than the freedom you give. Open something in us again, that we might trust, sing, and live as people whose deepest life belongs to you. Amen.

*ASSURANCE OF PARDON                                                        

*RESPONSE OF PARDON 240       “Alleluia! Alleluia! Give Thanks”                     ALLELUIA NO. 1

*PASSING OF THE PEACE                                                                  

One:   The peace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you all,

All:      And also with you.  

WE LISTEN FOR GOD’S WORD

ANTHEM                               "Plowshare Prayer”                  Spencer LaJoye/arr. Nate Terry

                       Mary Rebekah Fortman, Skye Johnson, Marie Boozer soloists; Greta Zender, cello

GODLY PLAY

  Congregation: May God be with you there   

    Children: May God be with you here.              

Children’s Recessional 188       “Jesus Loves Me” vs. 1

PRAYER FOR ILLUMINATION                                                                  

SCRIPTURE        Acts 16:16-34    MSG

  One day, on our way to the place of prayer, a slave girl ran into us. She was a psychic and, with her fortunetelling, made a lot of money for the people who owned her. She started following Paul around, calling everyone’s attention to us by yelling out, “These men are working for the Most High God. They’re laying out the road of salvation for you!” She did this for a number of days until Paul, finally fed up with her, turned and commanded the spirit that possessed her, “Out! In the name of Jesus Christ, get out of her!” And it was gone, just like that.

When her owners saw that their lucrative little business was suddenly bankrupt, they went after Paul and Silas, roughed them up and dragged them into the market square. Then the police arrested them and pulled them into a court with the accusation, “These men are disturbing the peace—dangerous Jewish agitators subverting our Roman law and order.” By this time, the crowd had turned into a restless mob out for blood.

 The judges went along with the mob, had Paul and Silas’s clothes ripped off and ordered a public beating. After beating them black-and-blue, they threw them into jail, telling the jailkeeper to put them under heavy guard so there would be no chance of escape. He did just that—threw them into the maximum security cell in the jail and clamped leg irons on them.

Along about midnight, Paul and Silas were at prayer and singing a robust hymn to God. The other prisoners couldn’t believe their ears. Then, without warning, a huge earthquake! The jailhouse tottered, every door flew open, all the prisoners were loose.

Startled from sleep, the jailer saw all the doors swinging loose on their hinges. Assuming that all the prisoners had escaped, he pulled out his sword and was about to do himself in, figuring he was as good as dead anyway, when Paul stopped him: “Don’t do that! We’re all still here! Nobody’s run away!”

 The jailer got a torch and ran inside. Badly shaken, he collapsed in front of Paul and Silas. He led them out of the jail and asked, “Sirs, what do I have to do to be saved, to really live?” They said, “Put your entire trust in the Master Jesus. Then you’ll live as you were meant to live—and everyone in your house included!”

They went on to spell out in detail the story of the Master—the entire family got in on this part. They never did get to bed that night. The jailer made them feel at home, dressed their wounds, and then—he couldn’t wait till morning!—was baptized, he and everyone in his family. There in his home, he had food set out for a festive meal. It was a night to remember: He and his entire family had put their trust in God; everyone in the house was in on the celebration.  

SERMON                                                                                 Rev. Trip Porch

WE RESPOND TO GOD’S WORD

*HYMN  661                  “Why Should I Feel Discouraged (His Eye Is on the Sparrow)”                      SPARROW

PRAYERS OF THE PEOPLE  followed by the Lord’s Prayer using debts and debtors.

TIME OF OFFERING   online giving is available at  www. indianolapres.org/give

OFFERTORY                            “Thou Wilt Keep Him in Perfect Peace”                                                  Eric Thiman

                                                                                         Betsy Tullis, soloist                         

*OFFERTORY RESPONSE 609        “Praise God From Whom All Blessings Flow”

*PRAYER OF DEDICATION 

God of every good gift, receive what we offer today. Take these gifts and let them become more than what they are in our hands. Let them carry your freedom into places that feel bound, your mercy into places that feel hard, your song into places that have gone silent. Shape us, too, into people who give ourselves with open hands and steady hearts, trusting that even small offerings can be part of your transforming work. Amen.

*HYMN 538                      “Hallelujah! We Sing Your Praises”          HALELUYA! PELO TSA RONA

TIME OF COMMUNITY SHARING

CHARGE & BENEDICTION

CHORAL RESPONSE                       "Amen"                                                                 K. Lee Scott        

POSTLUDE                              "His Eye is on the Sparrow "                                                  arr. Kathryn Carpent      

  Acknowledgments: Unless otherwise indicated, all texts and music are printed and broadcast under OneLicense.net license #A-702452