Christian faith and capital punishment

I wrote this in 1999 on the occasion of Tennessee about to commit a convict to death for the first time since 1960. 

John 8:3‑11

3          The teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought in a woman caught in adultery. They made her stand before the group

4          and said to Jesus, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the act of adultery.

5          In the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women. Now what do you say?”

6          They were using this question as a trap, in order to have a basis for accusing him. But Jesus bent down and started to write on the ground with his finger.

7          When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, “If any one of you is without sin, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.”

8          Again he stooped down and wrote on the ground.

9          At this, those who heard began to go away one at a time, the older ones first, until only Jesus was left, with the woman still standing there.

10        Jesus straightened up and asked her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?”

11        “No one, sir,” she said. “Then neither do I condemn you,” Jesus declared. “Go now and leave your life of sin.”

 Robert Glen Coe is on death row at the Tennessee State Penitentiary, awaiting execution for the murder of eight-year-old Cary Ann Medlin of Greenfield. It was a particularly cold-blooded murder, and Coe was justly convicted of the crime.

Coe deserves to die for what he did.

Coe’s original execution date has come and gone. He is still alive due a temporary stay of execution during which his attorneys are asking for more reviews of his case.

Tennessee has not executed anyone since 1960. Several years later, the Supreme Court struck down all existing death sentences as unconstitutional. But in so doing, the court laid out conditions under which the death penalty would meet constitutional requirements. Subsequently all but a handful of states revised their criminal codes to meet these conditions, and executions resumed in 1977 with the firing squad death of Gary Gilmore in Utah. In 1979, Robert Coe brutally murdered Cary Ann Medlin.

The death penalty is one of the social issues which finds Christian people on all sides. Christian churches have wrestled with it throughout their history. As early as the second century, executioners, magistrates and judges could be denied the Lord’s Supper because of their part in state executions. In late medieval times Saint Thomas Aquinas wrote against harshness in judicial sentencing. Yet both Catholic and Protestant churches either carried out or condoned death penalties until modern times in America and elsewhere.

In the passage from the Gospel of John of the woman caught in the act of adultery, the teachers of the Law and the Pharisees who bring the woman to Jesus accurately state that the law of Moses requires her to be executed for her adultery. Leviticus 20:10 says, “If a man commits adultery with another man's wife – with the wife of his neighbor – both the adulterer and the adulteress must be put to death.” This code is repeated in Deuteronomy. Let us note that the Law required that both the woman and the man be executed, but the scribes and the Pharisees, all men, somehow avoided taking the guilty man into custody. (The double standard was no less alive then as now.) Even so, the woman was indeed guilty, having been caught in the act, and according to the Law she deserved to die. “What do you say?” the men asked Jesus.

Jesus signals he won’t accept the question on the terms it is offered by crouching to write on the ground with his finger. “When Jesus does speak, he speaks to the situation of the scribes and Pharisees as well as to the woman. . . . Jesus treats the woman and the scribes and Pharisees as theological equals, each as human beings to whom words about sin can be addressed” (NIB).

Jesus offers all of his listeners an opportunity to break from old ways of justice, determined by the power of condemnation and death, to enter a new society where grace can endure even when punishment is called for. This new society with its new standards is the Kingdom of God.

At its core, this story in John is not really about the woman or her sin. Nor is it primarily about the self-righteous certainty of the men who accused and convicted her. The story is about how Christ challenges both crimes and punishments that contradict what Christ stands for. Jesus was certainly not sympathetic to the sin of adultery. He pointed out elsewhere that only adultery justified divorce. Jesus did not try to excuse her adultery to the men. In fact, Jesus didn’t seem very concerned about the woman at all – his directed all his attention toward the men who wanted to take her life. Faced with this unmistakably severe transgression of the law, Jesus questioned the cut and dried, hard-hearted manner in which the authorities sought to impose justice. Perhaps Williams Shakespeare was thinking about Christ’s words when he wrote in The Merchant of Venice–

The quality of mercy is not strain'd,

It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven

Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:

It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.

'T is mightiest in the mightiest: it becomes

The throned monarch better than his crown;

...

But mercy is above this sceptred sway,

It is enthroned in the hearts of kings,

It is an attribute to God himself; ...

Though justice be thy plea, consider this,

That in the course of justice none of us

Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy;

And that same prayer doth teach us all to render

The deeds of mercy. (Act iv, sc. 1.)

Jesus condoned neither the crime the woman committed nor the violence the men wish to do. He recognized that they were both gripped in the sinful cycles of their past. If both the men and the woman are to be freed, they must all renounce their former ways. Jesus final words are spoken to the woman but are also addressed to the men with stones. The woman did deserve to die according to the Law, but all her accusers finally realized they did not deserve to kill her.

Jesus challenged both the woman and the men to peer into their own souls and stare in brutal honesty at themselves. By doing so they all, actually, received a blessing from the Son of God – ‘I do not condemn you’ – followed by a command, “Go and sin no more.”

 There is no denying that the Law of Moses lists a large number of offenses for which death is prescribed. Exodus lists murder as one, but simple assault on one’s parents is also a capital offense. Then, a few verses later we discover, “Anyone who curses his father or mother must be put to death”  (Exod 21:17). And we are also informed, “Observe the Sabbath, because it is holy to you. Anyone who desecrates it must be put to death. . .” (Exod 31:14a). How many of us would like to plead for our lives against that charge?

As far as I know, Christian proponents of the death penalty cite only the Judaic Law to support their position, never the Gospels. Yet Jesus said that love is the heart of the Law, and that God is a God of life, not death. If there is any theological support for the death penalty to be derived from the testament of the Good News of Jesus Christ, I have yet to see it, and I have done a great deal of reading on this subject over the years because I used to support the death penalty. What turned me from supporter to opponent of the death penalty finally was realizing that the Law of Moses is not the ultimate revelation of the nature and character of God or of God’s will. God is most fully revealed in the person and work of Jesus Christ, whose fate was to be executed by the state. Luke twenty-three records that even as the Romans nailed him to the cross, Jesus prayed, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34).

Robert Glen Coe is no Jesus Christ, and American justice is more fair than Roman justice, but Christ’s prayer still calls us to reflect whether we really know what we are doing when we push the buttons that cause lethal chemicals to flow into the veins of a man strapped to a gurney.

 There is an organization called, “Murder Victims Families for Reconciliation.” Its executive director is Renny Cushing, whose father was murdered. These are Renny’s words:

“At about 10 o’clock at night, there was a knock on the front door. My mother was lying on the couch watching the Celtics playoff game. My father was at the kitchen table reading the newspaper, and he got up to answer the door. As he did, a couple of shotgun blasts rang out, ripped his chest apart, and he died in front of my mother. From that day, from that moment, I became the survivor of a homicide victim. And in the aftermath of that I had reason to contemplate – on numerous occasions and in some depth – how we deal as a society and individually in the aftermath of murder.”

We talk a lot about victims’ rights in the legal system. And we should, because for a long time the victim of crime was seen mostly as a witness to the crime rather than someone whose life has been shredded by violence. Relatives of murder victims feel emotions that others cannot comprehend. Bud Welch’s daughter, Julie, was killed by Timothy McVeigh in the Oklahoma City bombing in April 1995. Welch wrote:

      “All my life, I had always opposed the death penalty. My entire family has, even going back to my grandparents. Well, after Tim McVeigh bombed the Oklahoma City Federal Building, the rage, the revenge, the hate – you can’t think of enough adjectives to describe what I felt like. I did change my mind about the death penalty. After McVeigh and Nichols had been charged – I mean, fry them. We didn’t need a trial, a trial was simply a delay. That was my feeling, that was my emotion. You no doubt saw McVeigh or Nichols being rushed from an automobile to a building, bulletproof vests on, and the reason that the police do this is because people like me will kill them. The police presence around Tim McVeigh and Terry Nichols was the very deterrent that kept me from being on death row in Oklahoma today. Because had I thought that if there was any opportunity to kill them, I would have done so.

    “For about the next eight months, I struggled with the thought of what’s going to happen to [McVeigh and Nichols], how am I going to get some peace. [The death penalty] sounded so wonderful to me at the time. I thought about that over the next eight months. I also remembered the statement that Julie had made to me driving across Iowa one time in her junior year. We heard a newscast on the radio about an execution that had happened in Texas the night before. Julie’s response to that was, “Dad, all they’re doing is teaching hate to their children in Texas.” I didn’t think a lot of it at the time, but I remembered her saying that. Then after she was killed, and after I got past [the] initial period, this kept echoing in my mind. I had this anguish about what was going to happen. The trials hadn’t even begun yet, and I went to asking myself, once they’re tried and executed, what then? How’s that going to help me? It isn’t going to bring Julie back. I asked that question for a period of two weeks probably. I realized that its all about revenge and hate. And revenge and hate is why Julie and 167 others are dead today. After I was able to get that revenge and hate out of my system, I made a statement to an Associated Press reporter one day that I did not believe in the death penalty.”

Renny Cushing wrote that survivors of homicide victims want three basic things.

1.    They want to know the truth, how it happened that somebody that they loved could be taken from them. They need to know the truth just to help them get back some control over their lives.

2.    The second thing they want is justice. With murder, said Cushing, the only real justice possible would be to exchange the life of the murdered person with the life of the murderer. But no exchange is possible because we can’t bring the murder victim back, no matter what we do to the killer. So we have to do the best we can to secure justice. One of the ways to do that is to restore the sense of security that’s been lost by families and society by the murder. And that means killers need to be separated from society. Both the surviving families and society need the security of doing that, to hold offenders accountable.

3.    The third thing survivors want is healing. Healing is not an event. The death penalty focuses upon a single event, raising the expectation that if you simply extinguish the life of someone who took a life, the execution itself will be a healing event. It’s a mistake, says Cushing, that if you just kill the killer it will all be better, and you’ll feel better, and you can just go on. The reality is, though, that healing is a process that goes on all the time. It is part of the burden that homicide survivors come to grips with, that healing is a process that will go on for the rest of their lives.

Cushing wrote, “I came to realize that those who were affected by his killing were not just [my] family, not just the people in the community. It also involved the families of the people who killed my father. The idea that I would be healed, that any murder victim would be healed, by inflicting pain upon the family of a murderer” is not true. Grief is not a zero-sum game. “My pain doesn’t get eased by inflicting pain on [them].” The death penalty just creates more victims. “One thing with the death penalty, there’s a kind of finality. When we kill people who kill our loved ones, we forever preclude the opportunity for those of us who want to figure out how to have an interactive forgiveness. The existence of the death penalty in and of itself becomes a barrier to victim healing. I don’t want to live in a society where, in the aftermath of murder, policy prevents people from healing.”

In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus said, “You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matt 5:38, 44). Gandhi put it this way: “An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.”

 In the movie Saving Private Ryan, set in World War Two, Tom Hanks plays Captain Miller, who is assigned the mission of finding Private Ryan to take him out of battle because all three of Ryan’s brothers have been killed in action. With a squad of men, Captain Miller sets forth. Before they find Ryan, two of Miller’s men are killed. One of Miller’s men rebels because he can’t make the math come out right – two of his friends dead before they even find this one faceless Ryan. He demands Captain Miller tell him why Ryan is so important to him.

Miller’s answer surprises them all. “I don’t know Ryan,” Captain Miller says. “I don’t care anything about him. I just want to go home. And if finding this Ryan makes that happen sooner rather than later, well then, that’s my mission.” With that Captain Miller walks to the body of their medic, who was killed shortly before, to pull it into a newly-dug grave. After a few moments the others join in to help. There is no more dissension. They will save Private Ryan, not for Ryan’s good, but for their own.

I don’t know Robert Coe. I don’t care anything about him. I have practically no sympathy for him. I won’t even try to argue that he does not deserve to die. I oppose his execution not for his sake but for mine. My call as a Christian disciple is to reduce violence, not condone more death. To the powers and principalities that seek to take life for life, I say, “Not in my name nor in the name of the Lord I serve.”

Some night soon Robert Coe will be strapped onto a gurney and wheeled into the death chamber. There will be a group of selected witnesses there, of course, but you and I will be there, too, because we are the ones who finally make our laws. We will be there, and in each hand we are holding stones to throw at him. I pray that we will someday soon reach the spiritual maturity of the scribes and Pharisees whom Jesus faced down, so we can drop our stones like they did. Perhaps we will finally realize that although Robert Coe may well deserve to die, not one of us deserves to kill him. _____________________

Statements by Renny Cushing and Bud Welch are found at http://www.mvfr.org. I have minimally edited them for length and clarity for hearing.

America’s Crisis Questions

John 18.28, 33, 36-38a:

   28 Then they took Jesus from Caiaphas to Pilate’s headquarters. It was early in the morning. They themselves did not enter the headquarters, so as to avoid ritual defilement and to be able to eat the Passover. 

   33 Pilate then went back inside the palace, summoned Jesus and asked him, “Are you the king of the Jews?”

   36 Jesus said, “My kingdom is not of this world. If it were, my servants would fight to prevent my arrest by the Jewish leaders. But now my kingdom is from another place.”

   37 “You are a king, then!” said Pilate.

Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. In fact, the reason I was born and came into the world is to testify to the truth. Everyone on the side of truth listens to me.”

   38 “What is truth?” retorted Pilate.

The question Pilate asked Jesus, “What is truth?” is, I think, the second-most important question in the Bible, hence the second-most important question facing all humanity all the time. The most important question is the one Jesus asked his disciples one day on the road to Caesarea-Philippi: “Who do you say that I am?” Unless we answer that one rightly, we will never answer the second one fully. 

Pilate was a politician. He had already answered the first question – who is Jesus – by saying he had been told that Jesus was a pretender to the kingship of Judea. Jesus answered, “My kingship is not of this world,” which Pilate seemed to take as Jesus’ confession of some kind and, hearing Jesus’ explanation, simply waved it away as irrelevant. 

I think one lesson of this passage is that we should not let politicians define what truth is. 

That we as a nation have been allowing that for many, many years is not bearing good fruit for us. It does not take a Nobel laureate to observe that America is not today a “United” States. So I will try to explore what we as disciples of Jesus Christ may do and say that promotes peace and exhibits the spirit of Christ in this tense time. 

I think our beginning point is to look in a mirror. Jesus said in Matthew 7, “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?” In 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote a “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” in which he lamented,

The contemporary church is often a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. It is so often the arch-supporter of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church’s silent, or often vocal, sanction of things as they are.

This we must not do. America will not be better until Americans are better. In the 1830s, French historian Alexis de Tocqueville visited America and later wrote, “America is great because America is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great.” He attributed America’s goodness to its churches. While we should not ascribe too much goodness to our forebears of 180 years ago, we probably can agree that we will not “make America great again” unless we, not politicians, decide to make Americans good. 

And that, I think, relies on how we church people give answer in the way we live, what we do, and what we say to the two most important questions facing the country today: 

1. Who do we say Jesus is?

2. What is truth?

Today, I will address the second one. 

There is a scene in Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark that makes my first point: 

"Archaeology is the search for facts, not truth. If it's truth you're interested in, Doctor Tyree's philosophy class is right down the hall." 

Truth and fact are closely related, of course, but they are not the same thing. People rarely fight over facts. What they argue about is what the facts mean, what is the Truth that the facts indicate. Both sides have the same facts, but both arrive at a different "truth."  

Truth is important and so is truth's relationship to facts. Every one of us operates every day on what is known as the "correspondence theory" of truth. For example, when doctors make diagnoses, they correspond symptoms and test results to disorders, ailments, or diseases. So do mechanics when determining what makes the pinging noise under the hood of your car. In either case the decisions about health or auto repairs rely on a correspondence between certain facts and certain conclusions that are true, or most likely true. Correspondence of facts to truths means that some conclusions must be false. Falsehoods don't correspond to facts. 

But two other claims about what is truth are alive and well in America today. One is relativism, the notion that something can be "true for you" and another thing "true for me." We can each have our own personal truth regardless of facts. But relativism is tolerable only for trivial matters. You may love cauliflower while I despise it. "Cauliflower tastes good," is true for you and its opposite, "Cauliflower is awful," is true for me. And we're both right. But it does not matter. 

However, when the stakes of truth are significant, we all drop all pretense of relativism. Horace and Edna may be wallowing in relativism when it comes to cauliflower, but if Horace is a University of Tennessee graduate and Edna a University of Georgia graduate, and it's football season, well ... . 

This relativism has become today rooted in emotionalism, the insistence that truth is a consequence of how someone feels about a topic, and ensuing hostility toward anyone who crosses that line. A law professor wrote that it is increasingly difficult to teach classes about law relating to sexual crimes such as rape because of the emotional, hostile reaction of students. Lucia Martinez, an English professor at Reed College, wrote, “I am intimidated by these students.” 

“I am scared to teach courses on race, gender, or sexuality, or even texts that bring these issues  up in any way—and I am a gay mixed-race woman,” she wrote. “There is a serious problem here… and I’m at a loss as to how to begin to address it, especially since many of these students don’t believe in either historicity or objective facts.”

Some people think that the truth of a statement is related to whether it "works." So a religion may be true for Horace if he sees some benefit to it, but false for Edna if she sees none. The danger of thinking truth is whatever works is that the perceived benefit might really be bad. "Cigarettes are good" works in the sense that many smokers report a soothing or relaxing sensation when they smoke, but the fact remains that cigarettes can kill. 

 

Vladimir Lenin refined the Marxist idea of Revolutionary Truth, which means that any claim that brought the Revolution closer or more successful was truth, even if it contradicted an earlier statement. Nazi propaganda was the same way. Surely nothing more need be said about that understanding except it is sadly alive and well in American politics today. 

 

Christian faith and practice rely on correspondence, not relativism or utility or the idea that truth is whatever supports our cause. On the first Easter morning, the women went to the tomb and observed certain facts: the stone was rolled away, the tomb was empty, they saw Jesus alive. So they told the disciples, "He is risen!"

  

Yet more than corresponding facts to truth is necessary. As the apostle James pointed out, even the demons know that Jesus rose from the dead, yet demons they remain. John Wesley admonished that we may affirm the truth of one, twenty or a hundred creeds and yet have no saving faith at all. 

 

Life throws us many ways for us to affirm what we think is true. But the majority of them do not challenge us to live transformed lives. Acknowledging propositions is one thing, probing what we believe and for what we will stand firm is quite another. How do we discern what we believe, whether in religion or politics or other endeavors? What we believe is crucial because what we believe impels what we do. Belief, like truth, should correspond to facts but in believing we seek not only to know what is true, but who and what we can trust. 

 

But there is such a thing as a moment of truth, when we have to confront what we trust and are compelled to decide how deeply we hold our beliefs.

Pilate told Jesus, "Do you not know that I have power to release you, and power to crucify you?" Such a bald statement of power would certainly have been a moment of truth for me. Jesus answered him, "You would have no power over me unless it had been given you from above." It was not a diplomatic answer but a naked challenge to Pilate's power and authority. No one, Christian or not, can doubt that Jesus believed completely what he had claimed about himself and trusted that God would deliver.

 

Moments of truth are fraught with risk, forcing is the issue: What do we believe? Who do we trust? What shall we do? What shall we risk? What do we fear? What do we love? And I think that as a nation, those questions loom before us disciples of Jesus Christ at this time.

 

Bonnie Kristian, a columnist at Christianity Today, wrote before election day in 2020,

[Disciples] should proactively “seek peace and pursue it” (Ps. 34:14), but making peace is not a project that begins when battle lines are already drawn. Ideally, it begins in time to keep us from drawing them at all. The word Jesus uses for “peacemaker” in the Sermon on the Mount appears just once in the New Testament, but its [root words] show up together one other time, in James 3:18.

“Peacemakers who sow in peace reap a harvest of righteousness,” James says, and to be a peacemaker is to live with the “wisdom that comes from heaven” (v. 17). This wisdom rejects “bitter envy and selfish ambition,” which lead to “disorder and every evil practice.” It is “peace-loving, considerate, submissive, full of mercy and good fruit, impartial and sincere” (vv. 14, 16–17). In worldly politics of animosity, selfishness, domination, disdain and rotten fruit, prejudice, and bad faith, that is the wisdom we need.

What do we believe, we Americans? Do we really believe that the truth is self-evident that all persons are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, and that governments are properly instituted to secure these rights, as our Declaration of Independence says? Do we say that this declaration corresponds to facts about the nature of God and God's purposes in creation? Do we trust that this American experiment will endure and indeed expand?  

Yet even mounting apathy, dismissal, and indeed enmity toward the American idea is not my greatest fear. Revelation chapter two records the words of Christ as revealed to John: 

1 “To the angel of the church in Ephesus write: . . . 2 I know your deeds, your hard work and your perseverance. I know that you cannot tolerate the wicked, that you have tested those who claim to be apostles but are not and have found them false. 3 You have persevered and have endured hardships for my name and have not grown weary. 4 Yet I hold this against you: You have forsaken your first love.” (Rev 2:1a-4)

Sometimes I wonder whether we American Christians often treat our religion as a mere commodity, to be swapped in or out of our lives according to what suits us at the time. Have we adopted religious relativism, where niceness and tolerance are prized more than truth and faithfulness? Has politics itself become America’s main religion? Could it be that Christ holds something against us, in spite of our good works, because we have forgotten that he is to be our first love? 

John 21 records Jesus and his disciples one morning not long before Jesus died. 

 15 When they had finished breakfast, Jesus said to Simon Peter, "Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these?" He said to him, "Yes, Lord; you know that I love you." He said to him, "Feed my lambs." 16 A second time he said to him, "Simon, son of John, do you love me?" He said to him, "Yes, Lord; you know that I love you." He said to him, "Tend my sheep." 17 He said to him the third time, "Simon, son of John, do you love me?" Peter was grieved because he said to him the third time, "Do you love me?" And he said to him, "Lord, you know everything; you know that I love you." Jesus said to him, "Feed my sheep. 18 Truly, truly, I say to you, when you were young, you girded yourself and walked where you would; but when you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and another will gird you and carry you where you do not wish to go." 19 ... And after this he said to him, "Follow me."

My greatest fear is that we will not feed or tend Christ's sheep, and that when he leads, we will not follow. I think that is why Jesus asked Peter three times whether he loved him. He was setting Peter up for a crisis moment when Peter would have to confront what he believed about Jesus and his love for him.

We all have the same challenge. So here are the things I try to remember in this political season:

1. Jesus does not endorse any political party or their platforms. To say he does is to claim that corrupted political ideology (which is all of them) suborns Christianity and that the work of Christ necessarily is done through the corrupt organs  (which is all of them) of a corrupt political party (which is all of them). 

2. My enduring purpose must be to glorify God, not politics or politicians.  

3. I must get the plank out of my own eye before I worry about the speck in others’. Am I promoting peaceful resolution and reconciliation, or am I part of the discord and anger engulfing our country today? 

4. Do I pray fairly and inclusively for all? I may not urge God to crush the other side of my political aisle! 

Finally, let us remember John Wesley’s advice to the people called Methodist in October 1774.

Let us pray both as citizens of America and of the Kingdom of God that we will hold fast to what is true and good. May we have courage, resolution, commitment, and wisdom as a nation, but especially as ones to whom Christ has said, "Follow me."

I do not want to pray for the killer, but I will

This photo of the unnamed, suspected murderer of Charlie Kirk was released today by the FBI. It is a frame from surveillance cameras on the university campus where Kirk was assassinated while speaking to about 3,000 students. 

I often quote what Preacher Mapple told the whaling sailors before they went to sea in Herman Melville's Moby Dick. Paraphrasing for brevity, he said that the things God wants us to do are hard to do, which is why God commands us rather than tries to persuade us. But to obey God we must first disobey ourselves, and we mistake the difficulty of disobeying ourselves with the hardness of obeying God. And we should recall that Jesus said, "My burden is easy and my yoke is light."

I know that Jesus was not joking when he commanded us in Matthew 5, "But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you... ." Although the wanted killer, whoever he is, is not my personal enemy or persecutor, I know I have to pray for him. 

But I confess I do not want to do that. In fact, I would rather pray about the killer than pray for him, like this: "O Lord, may you swallow him in the earth and commit him to the fires of hell." But of course, I cannot do that and be loyal either to my identity as a disciple of Christ or to my vows as an ordained minister. After all, we are instructed, 

"Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them." (Rom. 12.14)

God himself "is kind to the ungrateful and the evil." (Luke 6.35)

"As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign Lord, I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but rather that they turn from their ways and live." Ezekiel 33:11

So I know that I indeed have to pray for, not against, this wanted fugitive. But in this I remember what my friend Rabbi Daniel Jackson wrote me about such a task, citing Proverbs 25.21-22:

If your enemy is hungry, give him bread to eat, 

and if he is thirsty, give him water to drink,

for you will heap burning coals on his head,

    and the Lord will reward you.

Rabbi Daniel explained to me that of course, one may interpret the first verse literally - if your enemy is physically hungry, give him a meal, if physically thirsty, give him water. But the second verse is a key that literalism is not the only way to read this. After all, you will not literally heap burning coals upon your enemy's head, nor is that a metaphor for discomfiting your enemy so much by your kindness that he will metaphorically be that uncomfortable in reaction. 

Instead, Daniel cited multiple Scripture where the image of burning coals being poured over one's head refers to the certain judgment of God. If there are coals to be poured, Daniel explained, make sure you do the righteous things necessary to avoid them. The hunger, then, refers to a spiritual emptiness that you try to fill with the bread of life - for Jews, it means the Word of God, the witness of the Tanak; for Christians it means that also, plus the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. And the same meaning for the water to drink. 

So, how then to pray for Charlie Kirk's assassin? I can do nothing except pray for the grace of God to fall upon him and for the Holy Spirit to lead him and give him clarity of understanding, to turn his purposes to righteous endeavors, to bring him to lay aside the sword and embrace the cross, and to surrender himself peacefully to officers of the law. More specific than that I dare not. The many blanks are ably filled in by God.

And for the record, I also pray for the officers of the law working the case, for leaders of our government, and the temperance of our nation. For this is also commanded by our Lord. And of course, the family of Mr. Kirk are at the top of the list.  

God bless them, every one. 

What is wealth for?

 We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.

Luke 12.13-21

13 Someone in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, tell my brother to divide the family inheritance with me.” 14 But he said to him, “Friend, who set me to be a judge or arbitrator over you?” 15 And he said to them, “Take care! Be on your guard against all kinds of greed; for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.” 16 Then he told them a parable: “The land of a rich man produced abundantly. 17 And he thought to himself, ‘What should I do, for I have no place to store my crops?’ 18 Then he said, ‘I will do this: I will pull down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. 19 And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.’ 20 But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life is being demanded of you. And the things you have prepared, whose will they be?’ 21 So it is with those who store up treasures for themselves but are not rich toward God.”

One day the Publisher’s Clearing House prize patrol pulled into the driveway of a large house in Palm Beach, Florida. The woman who owned the home was presented with an oversized check for ten million dollars. She told reporters, “I already have a Mercedes, but now I want a Jaguar and a BMW, too. And some more antiques. Of course, I’ll have to add a new garage and a new parlor.” She put most of the money in blue chip stocks and contracted with a caterer for a big party for her family and friends. Not much later, she wrecked her new Jaguar and was killed. There was no security in the good life after all. Incredibly, she had no will. The state took over her fortune and kept a great deal in probate fees and taxes. What a pity she did not prepare while she had time.

Actress Mae West was credited with saying, “I’ve been poor, and I’ve been rich and let me tell you, rich is better.” Jesus told a story of a farmer whose lands and holdings produced an abundance so big even he was surprised. It doesn’t sound like a tough problem, does it? There was so much food and produce that he could hardly take it all in. It’s a miracle! What to do with it all? Can’t just leave it lying out on the ground. The farmer is quite happy with himself. There are worse things that can happen to a farmer than having a super-abundant crop. Nowhere does the parable indicate that the farmer actually worked very hard for his abundant crop. “The land,” said Jesus, “produced.” The farmer did not earn the bounty. It was presented to him.

It’s kind of like compound interest or stock dividends. Sure, the farmer had to have done something, sometime, to get any harvest at all. He surely tilled the soil, but then things went along on automatic pilot. It’s sort of like investing in the stock market these days. The Dow goes up, it goes down, but in the last forty years it has gone up by 3,282 percent.

There’s nothing in the parable that tells us the farmer deserved such an abundant crop. But really, this is not a parable about farming and crop production, is it? It’s about you and me and our obligations in managing the things we have and being stewards of our souls.

II

Where did the farmer go wrong? The same way we all do: He asked himself what to do and got an answer from his own best advisor, himself. “I know what I’ll do! I’ll tear down all my barns and build bigger ones.” Then I’ll have enough to last for years and years. Party down and take it easy! That’s what I’ll do! It sure is easy to answer tough questions when one answer is to live high. We don’t need someone else’s advice for that. It’s obvious.

The farmer was all plans, no prayer. “Gosh,” he says to himself, “What do I do with all this stuff? I’d better ask someone I can trust to give me an answer I like! And that would be me!” With God out of the loop, the coast is clear. The thought of asking the United Methodist Commission on Relief or the local food closet whether they could use any of his wealth doesn’t cross his mind. The moral issue of shutting everybody out of his life escapes him. “I will” do this, “I will” do that, “I will” do the other thing. He looks himself right in the “I.”

The old barns have to go, and new ones must be built. Obviously, the future harvests will be just as big. Those dividend checks and annual raises and Christmas bonuses are going to keep coming on in. No plan to pile up wealth seems too far out when we don’t ask God for advice.

The farmer mentally clones himself and says, “Mister, you’ve got it made.” We’ve all done that once or twice: looked into a mirror on a really good day and said, “Here’s to you, kid.” People who admire themselves have no competitors or rivals.

There’s no hint the farmer recognizes that his abundant life was God’s gift. He just wants to figure out how to park it until he can get around to using it. Since he can’t eat it all today, the answer is to eat it all later. What the heck—you can’t take it with you, right? So live the good life and take things easy for a good, long while.

When we look inward, it is easy to check out of public life and public obligation. When our hearts are not thankful, we do not ask God what to do. So we converse with ourselves, “What do I do with all my stuff?” It’s an ordinary question, just one of personal management. But when we cut God out of the loop, we mismanage the gift of God’s provision. It’s obvious what to do when we only seek our own permission to do what we already want.

III

Hello, God, goodbye party! Just when the farmer sees an endless horizon of the good life, God shows up like a fraternity house mom who wants to close down the keg room. The farmer had tried to shut God out of his life. God was not impressed that the farmer debated with himself and won. “You moral vacuum!” God cries out. God is not fooled for a minute.

God made the world, but God didn’t make it infinite. The farmer went off track when he asked himself what to do with the super-abundant gifts of God. He shut the moral issues out and considered only the mechanics. “Where can I put it?” was the wrong question. “Why do I have it?” was the right one. He made a plan, but it was the wrong plan.

So God announces the truth of the inner man. If the farmer looked in a mirror and liked what he saw, God looked through a window and didn’t. On the outside was the picture of success and prosperity. On the inside was greed and covetousness, morally empty of godly considerations.

The farmer will die that very night. It will be a natural death, maybe in his sleep. God won’t kill him. God is no avenger lashing out in anger. The farmer just happened to strike the jackpot shortly before his time on earth ran out. All his hopes and dreams will die with him.

The farmer wanted to possess his things, but his things wound up possessing him. When God asked him who would get them when he died, he had no answer. He had no higher goal for God’s gifts than to use them for pleasing himself. Whose things will they be now? He can’t reply. He never thought about that.

Oh, he had time to do it right! He could have managed his affairs so that his wealth could benefit others. Then it would have been easy to handle the superabundant gifts of God’s creation. He could have had a bigger dream than his next meal. He might have formed a higher hope than for another day to sleep late. He could have managed his affairs to do God’s work and achieve God’s purpose. Then when God asked who will get his things, he could have answered, “The people of your Kingdom, Lord, for that’s why I have these things from you.”

Not long after the funeral of John D. Rockefeller, a reporter called Rockefeller’s accountant. “How much did he leave behind?” the reporter asked. The accountant thought for a moment, then replied, “All of it.”

The farmer was right to know he couldn’t take it with him. He was wrong to think that his only obligation was to himself. God reveals the farmer’s immediate future to him. It’s grim, but not as grim as the vacuum of his soul. His end is already on the way. The party’s over before it began.

IV

There are two ways to be rich. One way is to make all we can, save all we can and pile up all the extra stuff we can as fast as we can. “A penny saved is a penny earned,” said old Ben Franklin, who was rather well off when he died. The other way is to make all we can, save all we can and give all we can. In the end, the rich farmer came to ruin because all his wealth meant something only to himself. His self-satisfaction destroyed his compassion. He chose the wrong way to be rich.

The farmer’s fate was typical of those who choose the wrong way. He piled up extra things for himself but was not rich toward God. The tragedy is not that the farmer died; we all die. The tragedy is that he died so poor in spirit that he left not a ripple among the lives of those around him. That’s an inherent problem with material wealth. It can be overcome, but it’s tough. Maybe that’s why Martin Luther liked to remind people that God divided the hand into fingers so money could slip through.

There was a twelve-year-old boy whose school asked the children to bring a contribution to Santa Claus Anonymous, a group that provided gifts to poor kids who wouldn’t get any otherwise. The boy saved a dollar to take to school, but it snowed that morning and only teachers reported. So the boy hiked through the snow to give the dollar to the principal. The principal almost broke down when the boy appeared with the money, because the boy was on the list to receive a gift from Santa Claus Anonymous.

It doesn’t take wealth to be rich toward God. Whether one is wealthy or not, it takes love, a love of people greater than a love of things. We like to think success in this world is measured by how much money we leave behind. Maybe its best measure is by how much love we give away, and how we use God’s gifts for God’s work. We can be funnels of God’s generosity to the world at large. It is God’s grace that makes this possible.

With every provision God puts in our hands, he creates a fork in the road of life. Both ways lead to getting rich. But the way of one fork is piling up stuff and hoarding it for empty purposes. It ends in false hopes and shattered dreams. The way of the other is a life of love and sharing and giving God’s things for God’s purposes. It’s being rich toward God. Every day we choose a path, and there are no other paths to choose.

 A philosopher once wrote that there is only one universal problem. In all the world, he said, there is only one question that everyone faces, everywhere, at all times. It is simply what to do next.

The rich farmer stared at that question and blew it. “What do I do now?” he asked himself. Then he stretched out his arms and raked God’s gifts into his pile like a poker player in Las Vegas. He mismanaged God’s miracle, and, in the end, he was busted.

We don’t need to gamble with the future. We know who holds the future. The things we have, we have from God, sometimes so much that we’re not sure what to do next. But it is not where to stash them that is the problem. It is why do we have them. God knows, God knows, and we will get be wealthy in the ways that matter in the end, if only we seek to know what God knows.

Why does prayer work?

1 John 5:14

This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us.

James 5:16

Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective.

Several years ago, Christian writer Cory Copeland wrote of the death at 55 years of age of his father’s best friend, stricken by a heart attack standing on his own driveway.

   Over the next few days as the news of the event spread, I began to see Facebook posts and tweets asking for prayers of comfort and healing for the family. As a close‑knit Church often does, our congregation was rallying around this crestfallen clan and asking everyone to seek God’s love and mercy so that He might prop them up in grace throughout their difficult time. Yet, as I read the numerous statuses and 140‑character messages of caring devotion, one question began to run rampant through my still‑reeling mind: Why?

   It wasn’t that I didn’t care about the grieving family this great man had left behind. In fact, it was quite the opposite. I hurt for them and with them, and I shared in their sudden and brutal loss.

   No, I was haunted by this question because I wondered what good it might do to ask God to comfort this family. After all, He’s a benevolent God, and there was no doubt He was already surrounding these hurting people with His love and grace and mercy without my instructing or requesting Him to do so. He didn’t need me pointing Him in their direction. ... 

Prayer is a paradox. We take it for granted that God already knows the things we are praying about, and that God knows whether those things are good or bad. God’s knowledge and goodness are a given. People mostly pray to get God to do something, to get God to exercise divine power.

We do believe God has the power to intervene in human affairs. If we thought God could not act in our lives, we would not ask God to do so. But we don’t take God’s power for granted: The very fact that we ask God to act means we are uncertain he will. Prayer sometimes seems like a roll of the dice. We can find ourselves praying with no real expectation that it will accomplish anything. Yet, says James, “The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective.

It’s baseball season. A player stands at the plate. He raises the bat. The umpire calls out, “Play ball!” The catcher signals the pitcher for a fast ball. The pitcher winds up and throws. The hitter sees the ball and predicts where it will go. He has to decide whether to swing. Just think how many happenings are all coming together into the one single moment at which the ball passes over the plate. So many happenings are related together to make that moment that we couldn’t name them all if we tried. Before the players even arrived, the grounds crew mowed the grass and raked the infield. The custodial staff cleaned the locker rooms. A bank approved a new loan to keep the stadium afloat for another year. The visiting team traveled into town. We could go on like this all the way back to Abner Doubleday, who invented baseball in the first place.

All these prior events come together in the first pitch, coming in waist high over the plate. The batter doesn’t swing. “Strike!” yells the umpire. Many things had to work to make this one moment, but the batter was free to swing or not. No swing.

In every moment there are countless prior events, some good and some bad. But in every event, no matter how enormous or small it seems to us, there is the will of God toward the good. We call it grace. The grace of God is everywhere, in all times, in all places, and in all circumstances. In the dedication of a church building, there is grace. In the birth of a child, there is grace, in the vote of the U.S. Senate there is grace. There is grace even in the veins of a heroin addict, grace all the way down to where his blood cells rub together. God’s grace is everywhere, even in the most desperate times and places, even when it is not apparent or much perceivable. God’s grace is custom-fitted for each situation, nestling within all the other events that make up every moment.

In every moment, God’s will is toward the good. Every moment is made up of many influences, and one of those influences is God’s grace pushing toward the good. But like Casey at the Bat who decided not to swing on a perfectly good pitch, God’s grace can be resisted. God’s grace is not coercive. Some level of self determination is built into creation. In human beings, we call it free will. God’s grace influences but does not crush our freedom.

Prayer is a grace multiplier and grace magnifier. Prayer is raw material for God’s grace. In prayer we connect through faith our weakness with God’s strength, and God connects our faith with the things or persons prayed for. By praying we participate in God’s work. In prayer we seek to influence events to conform to God’s good will. God receives our prayers and fits them into all the influences working within each moment.

Our prayers during worship services are mostly for medical-related reasons. I’ve heard it called it the organ recital  – Aunt Edna’s kidneys, Uncle Albert’s heart. Beginning in the 1980s, medical science began to pay attention to whether praying for the ill or injured actually does any good. Studies continue today, including by the National Institutes of Health, which beforehand refused even to publich an article that had the word “prayer” in it.

Studies at Duke, Dartmouth, and Yale universities show, for example:

• Hospitalized people who never attended church have an average stay of three times longer than people who attended regularly. 
• Heart patients were 14 times more likely to die following surgery if they did not participate in a religion.
• Elderly people who never or rarely attended church had a stroke rate double that of people who attended regularly.

A journal published by Harvard University in 1998 included this tidbit:

In a 1987 study, cardiologist Randolph Byrd at San Francisco General Hospital asked intercessory prayer groups from across the United States to pray for roughly half of the 393 individuals admitted to the coronary care unit with either heart attacks or severe chest pain. This was a scientific experiment in which none of the patients, physicians, or nurses knew which individuals were receiving prayer. Those who were prayed for showed dramatic improvement: fewer deaths, fewer complications, and fewer medical interventions.

To be fair, other studies have not shown a positive link between prayer and healing. So while the body of research is compelling, it is not necessarily convincing in a scientific sense. That’s okay. Science cannot provide every answer for every question. Persons pray from faith rather than research.

So why does prayer work? Methodist theologian Marjorie Suchocki put it this way:

Prayer changes the world. God works with what is, in order to lead the world toward what can be. To pray is to change the way the world is by adding that prayer to the reality of the world.

Prayer changes what is possible for the future. There is a future possible with prayer that is not possible without it. There are “redemptive possibilities” for the world that are not reached without prayer.

Not every prayer is useful to God. James wrote that if we pray selfishly, God does not respond (James 4:3). God’s will is only for the good. If we pray for something not good, then that prayer is useless to God for influencing events. It’s like handing a lawnmower to a brick mason. A brick mason can’t use a lawnmower to build a wall, and God does not use prayers for bad to accomplish his will for good.

Isaiah said that sin separates us from God and makes God ignore our prayers. “Your iniquities have separated you from your God,” Isaiah wrote, “your sins have hidden his face from you, so that he will not hear” (Isa 59:2). Since we all have sin in our lives, how will God hear our prayers?

Jesus said that we should try to have faith at least the size of a mustard seed. Just the tiny amount of faith that leads us to say, “Thy will be done” – and mean it – is enough to break through our sin in prayer. Faith enough to begin is faith enough for God to hear.

Prayer is intimate communication with God. As we continue to pray we open ourselves to God’s grace. We give God permission to change us in our deepest places. God leads us to renounce the reign of sin in our lives. As we grow in faith we become more godly. We gain greater understanding of God’s will. We grow in compassion for other people. As our own character becomes more like God’s, our prayers become more powerful. Righteous people pray powerful prayers.

The Apostle John tells us to be confident that God hears us when we pray according to his will. We can and should pray for specific things. After all, on the night Jesus was arrested, Jesus prayed very specifically about what he wanted. But at the end, Jesus said that what he wanted most of all was what God wanted. That’s the place to end up in our prayers: turning our own desires, as heartfelt as they may be, over to God.

The world consists of events, of things that happen and affect other things. Prayer is something that we make happen that God uses to affect other things.  We count on God to hear and respond when we pray. God counts on us to pray. Our prayers become tools in God’s hands to shape the world for the Kingdom of God. We’re all in this world together, you and I and God. God uses our prayers to work his grace fully. So prayer is not empty speech. Prayer is as fundamental to the makeup of the universe as atoms. Our prayers help God bring the full potential of grace into each moment.

John Wesley put it this way:

   God's command to "pray without ceasing" is founded on the necessity we have of his grace to preserve the life of God in the soul, which can no more subsist one moment without it, than the body can without air.

   Whether we think of, or speak to, God, whether we act or suffer for him, all is prayer, when we have no other object than his love, and the desire of pleasing him.

   All that a Christian does, even in eating and sleeping, is prayer, when it is done in simplicity, according to the order of God, without either adding to or diminishing from it by his own choice.

   Prayer continues in the desire of the heart, though the understanding be employed on outward things.

   In souls filled with love, the desire to please God is a continual prayer.

   As the furious hate which the devil bears us is termed the roaring of a lion, so our vehement love may be termed crying after God.

   God only requires of his adult children, that their hearts be truly purified, and that they offer him continually the wishes and vows that naturally spring from perfect love. For these desires, being the genuine fruits of love, are the most perfect prayers that can spring from it.

“This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us. Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective.”

Why do we love our chains?

Imagine a fellow who has been in state prison for 25 years. Then he receives a pardon from the governor. The warden and a couple of guards come to his cell, open the door and tell him he's free to go. Good news! So the former prisoner runs out of the cell, but after only a few months he discovers that his newfound freedom is harder to handle than he imagined it would be. He has to make decisions he never had to make before. He has to work for a living, decide where to live, what to eat and what to wear. He has to pay taxes and maintain a car. He has to set his own agenda for each day. Life outside the joint is complex and confusing. Being free actually overwhelms him. Finally, he commits another crime so he will be returned to prison, where the routines are familiar, the stresses are known, and in his mind life is easier even though he has no freedom. 

Believe it or not, this kind of thing actually happens once in a while. 

Spiritual imprisonment is one way of understanding how the Apostle Paul came to understand the human condition apart from Christ. He used the metaphor of slavery to describe it. Slavery was found all over the ancient world and then as in modern times, slavery was a form of imprisonment. Paul taught that our prison doors are opened by Jesus, but we have to get up and walk out and make sure we don’t go back. 

Galatians 5:1, 13-14:

1 For freedom Christ has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery. 13 For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become slaves to one another. 14 For the whole law is brought to fulfillment in a single commandment, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself."

What Paul says is: we have already been pardoned by Christ, but we must not go back to spiritual prison once we have claimed the liberty Christ has already given us. Our freedom in Christ has a purpose and unless we live out that purpose, merely being pardoned does not make us free. 

We are pardoned first of all from imprisonment by every kind of spiritual bondage already in the world. Paul handily provides an incomplete list just a few verses later that he calls works – note the plural – works of the flesh: 

“… fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these. I am warning you, as I warned you before: those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.” 

The plural, works, is important to note because these are sins or sinful habits that we get to pick and choose. I’ll never fall into drunkenness because alcohol holds no attraction to me. But I have to plead guilty to at least some of the others, especially that category, “things like these.” 

Works of the flesh are chains that bind us in spiritual slavery, they are the bars that hold us in spiritual prison. The tragedy is that we forged the chains ourselves and we installed the bars by our own choices. That is the real issue: apart from spiritual liberation, we do not make the right choices because we cannot. 

“By contrast,” Paul continues, “the fruit” – note the singular – “the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things.”

We do not get to pick and choose which of these we want and which we do not. The Christian character is a whole package. Unlike the works of the flesh, the fruit of the Spirit is sharply defined. It is these nine things and that’s all. There’s no “things like these” because love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control encompass everything we need to be free in Christ. They are inter-related and inter-dependent. We grow in holiness in all of them or backslide in all of them. 

The paradox of Christian discipleship is that while spiritual freedom is gained for us by Christ, we can only realize it by serving Christ’s friends through love. Just following rules won’t do it. In fact, Paul said the whole Law is brought to fulfillment in the single commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves.

Christian freedom is the will and ability to love others as Christ loves them: as perfectly as is humanly possible. 

But our freedom in Christ is not freedom to do just anything. Paul never would have agreed that, say, adultery is immoral for Jews but permitted for Christians since we are not bound by Jewish Law. Being released from legalism does not give us a license to do just anything we want. Obtaining a driver’s license might bring new freedom, but it certainly gives its bearer much more responsibility, not less. True freedom always brings responsibility. 

Such it is with Christian freedom. We haven’t been granted freedom by Christ in order to stay enmeshed in habits of sin. Our responsibilities are greater now than before! Indeed, in our baptism we have “crucified the flesh with its passions and desires.” We are to live by the Spirit of God and be guided by the Spirit. 

Jesus requires his followers to leave their past shortcomings, failures and sins in the past. No wistful looking back! I don’t claim it is easy. But our freedom to give Christly love brings responsibility to live as perfectly as possible, trusting that Christ’s power is strongest in our weakest places. We strive to become more and more conformed to Christ’s character in love. Martin Luther wrote that Christ makes Christians lords and masters over sin and death, so from deep thankfulness to Christ we become servants to one another in love. We are not compelled to do right from duty but delighted to do right in joy. So, said Luther, we are first to love God wholly and then we can do what we want, trusting that by the Spirit’s guidance we won’t go too far astray. 

Here’s the rub, though: Freedom truly lived means making choices. But Americans today prize personal autonomy so much that, in the words of David Hart in Atheist Delusions, our culture has become "a fertile void in which all things are [claimed] possible, from which arises no impediment" to our desires – and therefore we "may decide for ourselves what is right or wrong.” 

Which is to say that modern Americans as a whole no longer believe that there are objective criteria by which to judge our choices because there can be no higher good than being able to make a choice in the first place. All judgment, whether divine or human, infringes on choosing – and being able to choose solely on one’s own has come to take "an almost mystical supremacy over all other concerns." 

This would be merely silly if it was not so literally lethal. True human freedom is emancipation "from whatever constrains us from living a life of rational virtue" and that leads to our intellectual and spiritual flourishing. Freedom is the ability to overcome "our willful surrender to momentary impulses, our own foolish or wicked choices. … We are free not merely because we can choose, but only when we have chosen well.”

To choose poorly is to enslave ourselves to the impermanent, the irrational and eventually the destructive. Simply choosing, unconnected from divine guidance and godly standards, is to choose ultimately to reject freedom, to stay enslaved to what Paul called the body of death and finally to choose to perish rather than attain everlasting life. 

And that is one thing from which Christ has freed us – the dictatorship of personal autonomy unshaped by godliness or divine virtue. In contrast, wrote John Wesley, we should live as people who are washed and sanctified, “as well as justified, in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God.’  

You are really changed [Wesley continued]; you are not only accounted as righteous but actually made righteous. The inward power of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has made you really, actually free from the power of sin and death. This is liberty, true gospel liberty, experienced by every believer: Not freedom from the law of God, or the works of God, but from the law of sin and the works of the devil. See that you stand fast in this real, not imaginary liberty, wherewith Christ has made you free. And take heed not to be entangled again in the yoke of that vile bondage to sin, from which you are now clean escaped.

For freedom Christ has set us free: free to love, free to live in joy and peace and patience. Free to be generous in all we have, free to be gentle with even those who offend us, free to control ourselves to live in ways to please God. 

Free at last!

Free at last!

Thank God Almighty,

We’re free at last!