When Jesus forced the issue

The eleventh chapter of the Gospel of John begins with Jesus learning that his friend, Lazarus of Bethany, had fallen ill. Despite the news, Jesus stayed two more days where he was.

Then he told his disciples they were leaving for Bethany, which was only two miles from Jerusalem. The disciples want none of it, reminding him that he and they had almost been killed in Jerusalem less than a week prior. Finally, they agreed. When they arrived, Lazarus had already been in his tomb for four days. Many people had come to console Martha and Mary, Lazarus’ sisters; some had come from Jerusalem.   

Martha went to Jesus [and said], “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him.” Jesus said to her, “Your brother will rise again.” Martha said to him, “I know that he will rise again in the resurrection on the last day.” Jesus said to her, “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.”

Martha went to her sister Mary and told her that Jesus was here. Mary quickly went to him. There were many people nearby.

Mary said to Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her also weeping, he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved.  He said, “Where have you laid him?” They said to him, “Lord, come and see.” Jesus began to weep. So the Jews said, “See how he loved him!”

But some of them said, “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?”

Then Jesus, again greatly disturbed, came to the tomb. It was a cave, and a stone was lying against it. Jesus said, “Take away the stone.” Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, “Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead four days.” Jesus said to her, “Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?” So they took away the stone. And Jesus looked upward and said, “Father, I thank you for having heard me. I knew that you always hear me, but I have said this for the sake of the crowd standing here, so that they may believe that you sent me.” When he had said this, he cried with a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth, and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to them, “Unbind him, and let him go.”

The story of Lazarus perplexes and confuses almost as much as it enlightens. Jesus showed no sense of urgency about Lazarus’ illness. He seemed strangely unconcerned when he got the news. He responded, “This illness does not lead to death,” yet Lazarus had died either the day the messenger arrived or the day before. “Rather,” Jesus continued, “it is for God’s glory, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it.” 

This statement almost makes Jesus seem cold or calculating. First, he dismisses the seriousness of the report, then he says that Lazarus’ illness is not really about Lazarus at all – it’s about him, Jesus. Despite the apparent callousness of Jesus’ attitude, I think this statement really holds the key to understanding the whole story.

The Lazarus story is the pivot point in the life of Christ as John tells it. The raising of Lazarus is the last miracle Jesus performs in John. John says that many of the people who saw Lazarus come forth from the tomb put their faith in Jesus, but others went to the Sanhedrin and reported what had happened. “If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him,” said one of its members, “and then the Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation.”

Caiaphas, the high priest, said, “It is better for you that one man dies for the people than that the whole nation perishes.” So, from that day on the Sanhedrin plotted to take his life (John 11:48‑53).

Jesus almost certainly knew how those things would work out if he went to Bethany. Tempers were flaring all over about him. Jesus must have known he was the center of potentially deadly controversy. Then he got the message of Lazarus’ illness and said that the illness would not lead to death, but it would serve for God’s glory, so that he, Jesus, might be glorified through it.

I don’t think that “glorified” refers to the raising of Lazarus here. In every instance where John uses the word glorified, he means Jesus’ trial and crucifixion. I think Jesus understood as well as the Sanhedrin that the Romans might respond violently to his ministry. Jesus was well connected, with friends who were members of the Sanhedrin itself. Lazarus himself was probably wealthy and also well connected. They well understood Pilate’s mass murdering record and so did Jesus.

If so, then it may make sense to understand Jesus’ words this way: “This illness does not lead to death [of the Jewish nation at Pilate’s hands], rather it will lead to my death, which will glorify God.” The resuscitation of Lazarus’ corpse, then, may be seen as a powerfully symbolic act of Jesus preserving the life of his people. Jesus is probably less focused on Lazarus himself than on the big picture. Maybe that’s why he waited two days before setting out for Bethany, to think, ponder, and pray whether it was the right time to force a decision by the Jewish hierarchy about who he was. Could he, by bringing Lazarus forth from the tomb, force the Sanhedrin to recognize him as the Messiah? Or would the act drive them to turn him over to the Romans for their perceived good of the nation?

Whether these questions and considerations were actually ones that Jesus pondered we cannot know. But he finally made up his mind to go to Bethany.

The sacrificial scene is set. Jesus goes to meet Martha and Mary and tells them that he is personally the resurrection and the life. But at that time and place, in the cemetery, surrounded by death and wailing and grief, words are cheap. His acts are required, and they will prove decisive. 

 Often you will hear preachers try to humanize Jesus with the verse that says, “Jesus began to weep.” It seems a sentimental scene: Jesus, disturbed in his spirit, deeply moved, weeping in sympathetic grief with Mary and Martha. And no doubt that was part of it, but not the main part. As John wrote it, which doesn’t translate to English very cleanly, different language describes the mourners’ crying and Jesus’ weeping. The mourners are wailing in despair, but Jesus’ tears are of anger and frustration. John says some people comment on Jesus’ tears by saying, “See how he loved him.” In John, the crowd never understands what’s really going on. Jesus did love Lazarus, but his love moves him to action, not weeping.

Perhaps Jesus is “greatly disturbed” to tears because no one gets it. The disciples didn’t get it back across the Jordan when Jesus told them Lazarus’ illness would bring Jesus to be glorified. Martha doesn’t get it when Jesus tells her plain as day, “I am the resurrection and the life.” Her response is rote repetition of religious affirmation. Mary doesn’t get it. She sees Jesus as nothing more than a divine rescuer from the troubles of this world: “If you had been here, my brother would not have died,” Mary says, accusing him of dereliction of duty. Jesus weeps because everyone, including his disciples, so profoundly misunderstand what he is all about. Jesus is not a divine knight in armor who rides in to shield tragedy from our lives. Rather, he is the walking proof of God’s promise that despite the troubles of the world, we should take heart because Christ has overcome the world.

Maybe Jesus is troubled and weeping also because he knows that to bring Lazarus out of the tomb will irrevocably set him on the course to Golgotha. If people tried to kill him for saying who he is, then to raise Lazarus will make them go bananas. But he can’t back out because he knows why he came into the world. He calls Lazarus forth from his tomb and within a day or two Jesus is marked for execution.

You know, Jesus’s religious talk with Martha pretty much goes nowhere. When a loved one dies no one is in the mood for theology, not right away, at least. People who cry in anguish when their children or spouses or other loved ones perish are reacting appropriately to the tragedy. And yet, we do not accept death as the final reality. Our real desire is not things that never end, but that when they end, they end well. After all is said and all is done, is everything going to be okay? That is the problem of the grave.

The apostle Paul wrote that all things finally work for the good. He does not mean that tragic deaths are somehow actually good, he means that death and evil and suffering are not powerful enough to prevent God from bringing creation to its final, good fulfillment. The present life of good and evil, pleasure and pain, is eventually resolved beyond this world. When God brings creation to its final fulfillment, the promise is not a point-for-point reward for suffering, but “an infinite good that would render worthwhile any finite suffering endured in the course of attaining it” (John Hick).

Jesus told Martha that he is the resurrection and the life, and that those who believe in him, even though they die, will live. Everyone who believes in him will never die. Then he went to the tomb of a man dead for four days and told him, “Come forth!”

I think John has done us a favor by downplaying the humanity of Jesus in this story. If Jesus, the Son of God, in whom all things were made, responded to the sisters’ plea, and wept at the cemetery from nothing but sympathy with their grief and sorrow at Lazarus’ death, then we have put our faith in a mighty small god. Even we, finite in understanding, can see that there are cosmic dimensions here, such as the pervasiveness of suffering and tragic death in a world we say is governed by a wholly good and infinitely powerful God. Martha’s faith is at best ambiguous, and considering the circumstances, we can identify with that. I would hope these issues, at least, occurred to Jesus.

Do we really want the Christ to approach the graves of our loved ones merely as a sympathetic friend who helps us cry? We can do that on our own quite well. No, we want someone with the power to order them to come forth, who can demonstrate that we do not die, period, we die, comma. And if the Lord is sometimes frustrated at us while we cope with what life throws at us, that’s quite okay. By such things we can come to understand him more fully. In faith, we can turn pain to power, tragedy to triumph, and crucifixion to resurrection, even though it may not be an easy or quick thing to do.

There was a decidedly unordinary day in Bethany about two thousand years ago, a day in which Lazarus came forth, wrapped in grave clothes. “Unbind him, and let him go,” said Jesus. We are no longer bound by death, in this life or the next. Jesus is the resurrection and the life. We shall not reckon our lives by the power of death, but by the fact that in Christ we have the sure promise of eternal life with God.

We are not blind, are we? Well . . .

The Gospel passage for today is the first 14 verses of the Gospel of John. It is a long passage so rather than include it it here, I offer this link. I also include the YouTube video of Jesus giving sight to a blind man – and what happened after that. It is from the 1977 mini-series, Jesus of Nazareth.

Did you know that this story is a joke? I don’t mean that it is funny, not at all. It is quite serious. Nor do I mean that it did not happen in real life. I believe it did. I am not mocking the passage and what it conveys. I am referring to the narrative structure of the passage.  

That is, this passage presents a situation that begs to be resolved, the blind man. Then the situation is resolved; Jesus gives the man sight. But then notice that the story continues, and in the end, there is a punch line: “If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, ‘We see,’ your sin remains.”

This punch line is the actual point of the story. It is not a funny story but a very serious one. Unlike a normal joke, though, this story tells you the punch line at both the beginning and the end: the kind of sight that matters most is spiritual sight that recognizes the true light of the world, Jesus. Those who think they can spiritually see without him are really the blind people of the world.

The disciples saw the blind man and immediately thought that he was blind because of his sin, or maybe his parents’ sin. Jesus will have none of that, for he knows that God does not smite sinners with such misfortunes – after all, where would God stop? The beggar's blindness is not punishment from God. Jesus knows it is an occasion for the redemptive and healing power of God to be displayed in him.

The man's blindness in this story serves as the dramatic foil for the real point, a point repeated throughout John's Gospel: sin is failure to respond to the presence of Christ and the Gospel. Jesus tells the Pharisees at the end of the story that if they had been blind – that is, never exposed to the presence of God in him, then they would be blameless for not acknowledging him. But they have encountered Jesus, and their assertion that they surely are not blind is the basis for Jesus’ judgment of them as sinners. Unlike the beggar, the Pharisees' physical sight is not the issue. What they refuse to perceive is that God is present and revealed in Jesus. They are blind to the most important fact of all, a fact that should be obvious to them. Hence, says Jesus, their sin remains because they continue to insist that they can see. 

Throughout John, sin is defined not so much as what one does but as how one responds to Christ. For John, the moral foibles of men and women living their daily lives is of concern mainly to lead people to know Christ as savior of the world. This recognition can be likened to a form of new sight.

 Have you ever needed your sight restored? A dad once told me of his son, whom I will call Sam, in fourth grade when they learned that he needed eyeglasses; in fact, he probably had needed them all along. 

Like most children who need glasses, Sam was very nearsighted. When his glasses were ready, his dad took him to get them. When they stepped outside Sam suddenly stopped, his jaw dropped, and he just stood there and stared around him for quite some time. 

"Look!" he exclaimed. "There are birds in that tree! There are wires between the telephone poles." All the way home he stared out the window, marveling at all the things he saw that he had never seen before.

So just imagine what the nameless beggar's reaction must have been to have his eyes opened! A miracle, you say? It's a greater one than you think,

Physicist Arthur Zajoc wrote that light and the mind are entwined. Many studies, he said, have investigated recovery from congenital blindness. Thanks to modern medicine and new surgery techniques, many people who had been blind from birth could gain their eyesight, perhaps not perfectly, but well enough to function as sighted persons instead of blind ones. Yet success is rare for adults even when the surgery is successful. Zajoc wrote, "the world does not appear to the patient as filled with the gifts of intelligible light, color, and shape upon awakening from surgery." Light and repaired eyes were not enough to grant the patient sight. "The light of day beckoned, but no light of mind replied," despite their "anxious, open eyes."

 The patients can see technically, but not practically. Surgeons alone cannot complete the task. The patients’ minds must be trained to recognize what the eyes detect. When patients’ bandages are removed, they are no longer physically blind, but they are perceptively blind, They do not recognize anything they look at. A clock may chime. The patients know what they are hearing, but they have no idea what to look for. They recognize the sound but have no way to associate the sound with anything they see.

Dr. Zajoc concluded, "Vision requires far more than a functioning physical organ. Without an inner light, without a formative visual imagination, we are blind. [That] inner light must flow into and marry with the light of nature to bring forth a world." 

The question for us all is whether we are seeing with inner sight, with spiritual sight. Do we train our souls to recognize what God wants us to see? What are we looking at, and are we failing to perceive the most important things of all? 

During the Covid lockdowns earlier this decade, an American missionary in Italy wrote what it was like to be in the severe social isolation Italy put in place. He emailed to a friend in America, 

But if you do end up in quarantine-- so far, it's not that bad. We've discovered how it's forced us to stop and notice the beauty in the world and our fellow humans and be grateful for things and people we used to take for granted-- sunshine and birds, flowers out the window, calls with people we've been meaning to catch up with one of these days when we both had time.

If there is a silver lining in the cloud of anxiety and fear that often surrounds us, maybe that is it: that we have the chance to see ourselves and others, and indeed the world itself, with new sight and renewed understanding. Despite all the turmoil, it is still a wonderful world, and we still belong to God. 

Remember these things: 

 There is a light shining named Jesus Christ. The light of Christ can never be extinguished.

 We are called to be reflections of Christ’s light – mirrors for Christ, as it were. These days give us the chance to polish that mirror!

“We are not blind, are we?” I do not believe we are – as long as we remember this: when we think we see everything God wants us to see, that is when we blind ourselves. It is not about simply opening our eyes, but also our hearts and our souls. Look first to Christ, and with Christ at one another.

Contribution or commitment?

Today is the second Sunday of the church season of Epiphany

1 Corinthians 1:1-9

1 Paul, called to be an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, and our brother Sosthenes, 

2 To the church of God that is in Corinth, to those who are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints, together with all those who in every place call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and ours: 3 Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ. 

4 I give thanks to my God always for you because of the grace of God that has been given you in Christ Jesus, 5 for in every way you have been enriched in him, in speech and knowledge of every kind 6 just as the testimony of Christ has been strengthened among you 7 so that you are not lacking in any spiritual gift as you wait for the revealing of our Lord Jesus Christ. 

8 He will also strengthen you to the end, so that you may be blameless on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ. 9 God is faithful; by him you were called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. 

When Paul wrote the Corinthians, he reminded them of who they were right off the bat. They were the church of God in Corinth. They were the only church in Corinth, actually. They were sanctified in Christ, called to be saints. They were recipients of grace and peace from the Lord. They had been enriched by Christ in speech and knowledge of every kind. They lacked no spiritual gift necessary for their church to thrive. They were being strengthened every day. And Paul repeated the fact that they were called into fellowship with Christ. 

It is mistaken to think a calling to Christian ministry is something that happens to men and women who become pastors, and that the rest of the people in a church are not called. This notion is flatly contradicted by Scripture. All people of a church are called to Christian discipleship. Even when we recognize that fact, we say that pastors are called to “full time Christian service,” as if there is any other kind. Is there anyone here who feels called to be a part-time Christian? 

I understand that my own calling is to serve as a full-time pastor. But my prior calling, shared by all other Christian people, was to Christian discipleship.

The first step in effective discipleship is heeding the call. We are called to be saints, we are called into fellowship with Christ. This call is the foundation upon which everything else is built. Responding to Christ’s call does two main things. First, it places each man, woman or child within the realm of salvation. This is no little thing! Just what salvation is and what it means is a topic for another day, but we have to recognize that salvation is a big deal. The Scriptures talk about it a lot, and so did Jesus.

 Answering the call to follow Christ is not a purely altruistic thing. Each one of us benefits, but we benefit principally in ways not found in the other areas of our lives. We benefit in peace, fellowship, assurance, faith, hope and other ways, none of which are listed in the benefits package of a Fortune 500 firm. And we will benefit in being resurrected from death to live in God’s presence forever. The need and desire to be saved is part of human nature. It’s a mistake to turn Christian discipleship simply into other-directed servanthood with no self-interest involved, as long as we recognize that the self-interest served by Christ’s call is not selfishness. It is principally love. Human beings are born to love and to be loved. We live best when we live in the love of God, the love of godly people, and the love of godly things. But love is never turned inward; true love is never narcissism. Godly love is patient and kind. Love is effusive and overflows from one person to another and desires the best for others. The call to discipleship is a call to be divinely loved and a call to love others divinely. 

The second main thing the call does is serve the world’s interest. The self-interest of love is paradoxical in that it cannot be served without reaching out to others and inviting them to heed the same call of Christ that we heard. Ministering to others in Christ’s name, witnessing to them and sharing the Gospel with them are two of the most self-satisfying things we can do precisely because they serve others as well as ourselves. They enrich our own souls, the lives of others and the cause of Christ in the world. 

But this Christian activity is not automatic. Hearing the call is simply to acknowledge that it is given. Heeding the call is to reorient our intentions and lives according to the call’s imperatives. In Ephesians, Paul urges us “to live a life worthy of the calling” we have received (v. 4.1). A life worthy of being called is a life of commitment to the caller, to Christ. The commitment part is where we tend to stumble. Hearing the Word and doing the Word are two sides of the same coin, but the one does not automatically follow the other. 

When airliners accelerate for takeoff, there is a point in the takeoff roll, called the V1 speed, at which the pilot must commit the airplane to flight. Once the V1 speed is reached it is not possible to stop the airplane on the ground before the runway ends. No matter what happens, once V1 is reached, the pilot must commit to takeoff.

 Hearing the call of Christ is like being given permission to run up the throttle and point down the runway. But at some point, individuals, churches or even whole denominations have to commit to takeoff rather than just run up the engines and make a lot of noise and never go anywhere. And we have to recognize when we have passed the point of no return because true progress, once underway, can’t be stopped without crashing. 

Much of the time we solicit people to contribute to the church when we should be asking is for people to commit to discipleship. A contributor can simply watch, but a committer is deeply involved. I am thinking of the time a chicken and a pig decided to go out to breakfast. They came to a diner where the chicken read the menu posted outside the door. "Ham and eggs," said the chicken. "That sounds okay to me. Let's go in."

But the pig replied, "Not so fast. To you than a contribution, but to me it's a commitment." 

Maybe the difference between a contribution and a commitment is that commitments involve risk. I don't mean danger, necessarily, although commitment to Christian discipleship can be dangerous. What I am getting at here is not danger, but presence. Contributions can be phoned it, but commitment requires presence. As the pig in the story knew, contributions are what we do using our things, but commitments are what we do using ourselves.

We make a lot of commitments because most of us lead fairly busy lives. Telephones, radios, televisions, meetings, commutes, deadlines, errands, the crowded calendars we keep, all the clutter of too many requirements and too little time. Our busyness constitutes a lot of static in our lives that the call of God has to punch through. Hearing, much less heeding the call of discipleship can be difficult. 

One crucial element of heeding the call to discipleship is being informed in faith by a community of faith. Being a member of a Christian congregation is crucial to hearing God’s call. Yes, it is true that simply going to church does not make you a Christian any more than simply going into a kitchen makes you a chef. But no one becomes a chef who never enters a kitchen. 

Disciples are formed in congregations. People can be religious without going to church, but mere religiosity is not the point of Christian discipleship. People can be spiritual without going to church, but Jesus never called people simply to be spiritual. He calls us to discipleship, and discipleship requires membership because Christianity is covenantal. Christian living always involves Christian community. Christian covenant always involves both the one and the many, not one or the many.

 The vows of membership to join the United Methodist Church are simple: we promised before God and one another to support the church with our prayers, our presence, our gifts and our service. Discipleship takes all four, but I have never known anyone who could do all four in equal proportion. The point isn’t legalistic exactitude, but neither can one part simply be substituted for another. Giving more money to the church does not relieve one from praying. Practicing private devotions does not excuse one from attending worship. Perfect attendance at worship or serving the church on a committee or a ministry does not reduce the obligation to tithe. All of these things take commitment, and they are all necessary responses to the call to discipleship. 

We are being called, each one of us. Let us put aside our childish excuses. No longer shall we ignore the call or pretend not to hear it. No longer shall we hide behind the inactivity of others or pretend that others may be called, but not us. I am called, you are called, and we are all called together.

God is faithful, and by him we are called into the fellowship of his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. Let us hear and heed so that we may live as, and lead others to become, disciples of Jesus Christ. 

Second Sunday of Advent

The season of Advent is the four weeks prior to Christmas Day. Advent is not specifically a time to prepare for Christmas, but a period to reflect on and prepare for the coming of Christ, starting with the first Sunday's typical focus on the return of Christ at the end of the age. 

Today is the second Sunday of Advent, Year A. Its lectionary passage is Matthew 3.1-12:

3In those days John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness of Judea, proclaiming, 2“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” 3This is the one of whom the prophet Isaiah spoke when he said, “The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, make his

paths straight.’” 4Now John wore clothing of camel’s hair with a leather belt around his waist, and his food was locusts and wild honey. 5Then the people of Jerusalem and all Judea were going out to him, and all the region along the Jordan, 6and they were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins. 

   7But when he saw many Pharisees and Sadducees coming for baptism, he said to them, “You brood of vipers! Who warned you to flee from the wrath to come? 8Bear fruit worthy of repentance. 9Do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor’; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. 10Even now the ax is lying at the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. 11“I baptize you with water for repentance, but one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. 12His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary; but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.” 

In the 1991 movie Grand Canyon, a man’s sports car breaks down in a bad neighborhood where the young toughs wear expensive clothes and carry cheap guns. The driver calls on his cell phone for a tow truck but before it arrives the local toughs surround his car and threaten him with considerable harm. Just in time, the tow truck arrives and its driver, played by Danny Glover, starts to hook the car onto the truck. The tough guys protest. So Glover takes the gang leader aside and tells him, “The world ain't supposed to work like this. Maybe you don't know that, but this ain't the way it's supposed to be. I'm supposed to be able to do my job without asking you if I can. And that dude is supposed to be able to wait with his car without you ripping him off. Everything's supposed to be different than what it is here."

John the Baptist saw it that way, too.. He confronted the power hierarchy of his day and place, men who were secure in their position and who had all the right ancestors in a land where ancestry meant something. John's message was threefold: 

• the way things are is not the way things are supposed to be. 
• God intentions for human life and community have not been realized. 
• But help is on the way.

We see daily a disconnection between how things are and how we can imagine them to be. We submit to and commit wrongdoings so commonplace that we hardly notice them anymore. I still remember the indignity of high school gym class during basketball season. The same two guys appointed themselves team captains every time. The rest of us formed a meat line and the two self-anointed captains took turns choosing their team’s members. Basketball was my worst sport. I was always the next-to-last kid chosen. I remember the smirks on the gym teacher’s face as we dregs of basketball talent were picked over after the more talented kids had been selected, and the contempt on the team captains’ faces for us runts of the litter. And I remember my own smug self satisfaction that there were always one or two kids who were even less desirable than I was. 

Adults are not really nicer than children. Adults are just more devious in the ways we harm others, or accept being harmed as just the way things are. We are more ingenious in our justifications, but we adulterate our lives and the lives of others with greater magnitude: we spoil our relationships, pollute nature, bomb cities. 

Most people tend to think of human behavior in psychological terms, so they have no real way to grapple with the fact that things not like they're supposed to be. But John the Baptist addressed the problem head on. The concept is sin, a word much in disfavor nowadays. Somehow “sin” has come in popular culture to be understood as the word used by self-appointed moralists to put the rest of society on a tight moral budget. Sin is a category of conduct used by the puritanical, moral arbiters of culture: the fear that someone, somewhere, may actually be having a good time. 

The prophets of old would have been impatient with such juvenile concepts of sin. They did not confuse sin with mere error or innocent folly. They understood sin to be a deeply inbred fabric of human nature. Theology professor Cornelius Plantinga explained it this way: 

“The Bible presents sin in an array of images: Sin is the missing of a target, a wandering from the path, a straying from the fold. Sin is a hard heart and a stiff neck. It is both the overstepping of a line and the failure to reach it – both transgression and shortcoming. Sin is a beast crouching at the door. In sin, people attack, or evade, or neglect their divine calling. ... even when it is familiar, sin is never normal. Sin is disruption of created harmony and, then, resistance to divine restoration of it. Above all, sin disrupts and resists the vital human relation to God, and it does all this disrupting and resisting in a number of intertwined ways.” 

Sin perverts what is excellent in human nature and amplifies what is evil. 

The fact that so many things are so excellent about human nature makes contrasts with sin all the more disturbing. We know something is crooked only because we enjoy the things that are straight. We remember times when human beings seemed so close to everything God wanted them to be, and then we know that for all the progress we have made, we still have so far to go. There is much redemptive work yet to be done in humankind. 

Like John the Baptist, we dream of a time when human crookedness will be straightened out and the roughness of life will be smoothed over. The prophets looked to a time when “the deserts would flower, the mountains would run with wine, weeping would cease, and people could go to sleep without weapons on their laps. People would work in peace, their work having meaning and point. A lion could lie down with a lamb – the lion cured of all carnivorous appetite. All nature would be fruitful, benign, and filled with wonders and all human beings would be knit together” as a new family (Plantinga). 

But it’s a long haul from here to there. In the interim, the advent of the savior of the world into human form and life in Bethlehem was understood by John the Baptist as judgment upon the world. The advent, this dawning of a new work of God in the world, was not seen by John as an occasion for children’s pageants. We have made Christmas into a kiddie event, with visions of sugar plums, sounds of sleigh bells, and visits by a jolly old elf, who never actually leaves the coals and ashes threatened for bad behavior. Maybe we’ve sucked all the deepest significance out of Christmas, the advent of God’s personal presence in the world. Maybe John the Baptist got it right: the baby born in the manger will bear a winnowing fork in his hands to clear the threshing floor. 

For if we and God alike envision a better world to come, then we have to face the judgment that the world as it exists is not the way it is supposed to be. If we accept that, then we cannot point the finger at others because our own resistance to God’s redemption is sin, too. The only way to move the world along to what it should be is to start with oneself. We must daily strive to bear fruit worthy of our calling, and we cannot rely on some religious birthright for justification. John said that God could make stones into children of Abraham, so God can make good church members out of rusty beer cans lying along the roadside if wants to. Being on a membership list is less the point than being a disciple. 

Repentance and confession are the first steps of the journey to the transformed world. They are the first steps in shedding sin. We should flee from sin because God is not just arbitrarily offended by it. God hates sin because it separates us not only from his own being, but from the way things are supposed to be. God stands for a peaceful world of justice, and therefore stands against whatever hinders it. Our sin hinders it. 

We are less than three weeks from the manger now. When we reach the manger we will find that in the birth of Jesus is the coming of the Kingdom of God in power, the beginning of the transformation of the world that is into the world that should be. It is an ongoing work. God comes into this world to change it and that it begins with us. It begins when we kneel at the manger. It takes us beyond Bethlehem to Nazareth and then, finally, to Jerusalem itself to a hilltop named the Place of the Skull, Golgotha. 

 Perhaps we do not really want to hear that. We generally want Christmas to be carols and good cheer, parties and fine food. We want it to be an escape from the world, a ceasing of the daily grind. And it can be, but only if we go into the manger prepared to receive God’s greatest gift, his very life and being, and give in return our own lives and being. 

Images that seem to John to be fearful – winnowing, gathering and burning – are really transformed into statements of God’s grace by Christ because Jesus was greater than John. Former Yale chaplain John W. Vannorsdall wrote that the coming of Christ assures us that God comes to us with the message of love, not wrath. “I am prepared for the anger of God,” Vannorsdall wrote, “and believe that God has a right to wrath. What is so amazing is that when God comes among us, God comes not with violence but with love, even as a child vulnerable to our further hurt” (“He Came to His Own Home,” 24 December 1978). 

As we experience God's presence in Advent, we are led to begin or continue a life-long practice of measuring our lives by the call of the gospel. We can rightly celebrate the baby in the manger only by trusting that God goes with us every step of the way. Writer and theologian Madeline L'Engle wrote,

God did not wait until the world was ready,

until the nations were at peace.

God came when the heavens were unsteady

and prisoners cried out for release.

God did not wait for the perfect time

God came when the need was deep and great. 

In joy God came to a tarnished world of sin and doubt

To a world like ours of anguished shame

God came and God's light would not go out.

We cannot wait till the world is sane

to raise our songs with joyful voice

for to share our grief, to touch our pain

God came with Love. Rejoice! Rejoice!

No, things are not like they are supposed to be. But God's promises are true. “In a world that assumes the status is quo, that things have to be the way they are and that we must not assume too much about improving them, ... God’s people are [to be] fundamental indicators that wonders have not ceased, that possibilities not yet dreamt of will happen, and that hope” is a reasonable thing (Miller, Theology Today, 1988).

What's your pearl?

 Here is a true story that I read a few years ago. 

An aging woman decided to move into the city to a retirement home. She had a big sale to downsize. One thing she did was slap a "for sale" sign on her late husband’s pride and joy – a 1963 Mercedes 300SL Gullwing that he had bought in 1972. She remembered that he had told her the Mercedes was collector’s item worth one hundred thousand dollars not long before he had died fifteen years ago, so that’s what she priced it. One shopper saw the for-sale sign in the car’s window, and he immediately wrote her a check for twenty-five hundred dollars to hold the car for him for the day. Then he went to the bank and opened a home-equity line of credit. On the way there he called his broker and cashed in mutual funds. Then he maxed out his Visa card on a cash advance. He wound up with a certified check for $100,000 and drove back to buy the car. He knew what the widow did not: in the years since her husband died the car had increased in value to $250,000. 

That man was willing to take risks to obtain something of tremendous value. I knew a man in Nashville who told me a long time ago that he was offered the opportunity to become one of the original investors in the franchise license for all of Nashville for Wendy’s restaurants. He turned it down because he did not want to be diverted from the business he had already built up. Later, of course, he wished he had invested.

 Would you pay a hundred thousand dollars for an ordinary orange? Eleven millionaires drowned when
the Titanic sank in 1912. One who survived was Arthur Peuchen, who left $300,000 in a lockbox in his cabin. "The money seemed to mock me at that time," he said later. "I picked up three oranges instead." A hundred thousand bucks each. 

What is of ultimate value to us, so much so that we would sacrifice almost anything else to obtain it? Jesus spoke about that Matthew 13.44-45:

44 “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field.

45 “Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant looking for fine pearls. 46 When he found one of great value, he went away and sold everything he had and bought it.

In the ancient world a large, flawless pearl would have been something like the Hope diamond of its day. Ancient literature tells of single pearls worth millions of dollars in modern value. When this merchant found such a pearl, he cleaned out his stock and sold his personal possessions to buy it. The merchant apparently did not come out ahead financially; he just changed assets at an even value. There is no hint that he sold the pearl later. For all we know, he simply kept it.

But this story is not really about an actual pearl, is it? What Jesus seems to be trying to communicate is the importance of knowing first, what is of ultimate value and second, what will it take to obtain it. 

Contrast this parable with the story of a young man, also told in Matthew, who asked Jesus what he needed to do to gain eternal life. After a short conversation, Jesus tells him, "Sell everything you have, give the money to the poor, then come and follow me." But the man said no. Matthew says he went away sorrowful because he had “many possessions.” Jesus offered him ultimate value, and the young man declined because, he thought, the price was too high. 

Take a moment to think briefly about what this parable means for you.

Matthew 13 is a series of parables, one right after another. Parables are narrative stories that set up a situation at the beginning, show a kind of “twist” in the middle, and end with a punchline. This parable does that, too, although not very obviously. In fact, I think that all of Matthew 13 from start to finish is one long parable about the kingdom of heaven and what it takes to be in it with the punch line in verses forty-nine and fifty, which tell of severe judgment at the end of the age. It’s quite grim. 

So, for anyone who understands the parable of the pearl to mean, “The pearl is the gospel, and we should be willing to surrender everything for the sake of the kingdom,” I think that is a very valid interpretation. But I also remember what our bishop, Bill McAlilly, likes to say about his son’s soccer coach, who would always ask his players after a goal was scored, whether by his team or the other: “So what? Now what?”  

The parable of the merchant is about doing whatever it takes to be in the kingdom of heaven. That’s fine. So what? Now what? 

That is the hard part for me because it forces me to ask, “What is my pearl right now?” Because you see, everybody has a pearl. What’s mine? What’s yours?

What is it that I treasure more than anything else – so much that, like the merchant once he gets the pearl, I am not willing to part with it, ever? That’s my pearl. Everyone here has a pearl, also. So, take a moment now and think about the answer to this question: What is your pearl? What is more important to you than everything else? What is it that would make you give up almost anything else to keep? 

When I served a church in west Nashville, I did some volunteer ministry at Lighthouse Ministries, a live-in center for men suffering from addiction issues or homelessness. I remember counseling a young man who just would not follow the rules of living there. He said in one session with the director and me that he really wanted to go home to visit his mother over Christmas but of course he had no money even to take a bus to Jackson, Tennessee, where she lived. The director said that funding could be provided, but it was not simply free. He had to follow the rules and go through the process of making his life better. He said that was too hard and there were too many things out of his control. I asked him, “You can make your bed tomorrow morning, right?” He nodded. “Well,” I said, “that’s in your control and it is one of the rules here. Don’t worry about what you can’t control. Do the things you can control.”

His pearl was to spend Christmas with his mother. It was a good goal. I remember a discussion about this parable by Vanderbilt Professor Amy-Jill Levine. She said that after class one day where they talked about this parable, a young female student came to her and said, I know what my pearl was. I did give up everything for it – all my money, all my possessions, I even ended my marriage for it. It was alcohol. I was willing to give up everything I had to get the next drink. 

When I ask myself what my pearl is, I also cannot avoid asking, Is that what my pearl should be? Is my pearl a good one? 

Professor Levine also talked about leading a Bible study at River Bend prison and discussing this parable, where an inmate told her that his pearl was freedom, to be released from prison. Another said that his pearl was simply staying alive while he was in prison. 

Viktor Frankl wrote a book called Man’s Search for Meaning not long after he was liberated from a Nazi concentration camp near the end of World War Two. The Library of Congress lists this book as one of the most significant books of the twentieth century. Frankl lost his entire family in the camps – his wife and children did not survive. 

But Frankl wrote about all the things the Nazis, with all their evil designs, could not take away. He wrote of people who entered the gas chambers praying the Lord’s Prayer or the ancient prayer of the Jews, the Shema Israel. He told of starving prisoners who went through the huts giving their meager bread ration to others near death. Such acts convinced Frankl that a person’s ability to choose one’s attitude, to control one’s inner life, no matter the circumstances, was the single human freedom that no earthly power could ever destroy. So even the worst that this world can throw at us cannot take everything. Frankl did not talk about parables, but he did find his pearl, to be in control of his inner life. And that was how he found freedom in the camps, even surrounded by death at every hour. 

What’s your pearl? Should it be?

The error I have made so far in talking about this parable is individualizing it, as if Jesus was talking to and provoking thought in individual persons. Yes, there is a lesson for each of us in this parable and my lesson and yours won’t necessarily be the same. But there is a lesson for us together also, with the same focusing question: What is the pearl of our church? What is the centering and central focus of our life together as the body of Christ? Is that focus what should be our focus? 

So, I ask this question of the whole church: What is it that we do, that if we stopped doing it, would lead us to think we had surrendered a central, vital element of being a church belonging to Jesus Christ? 

Here is a second question: Is there anything that we are not doing that, by its omission, is already surrendering central, vital element of being a church belonging to Jesus Christ?

And here is the third and final question. Does it matter – does it really, truly matter enough for all of us together – as a church – to do whatever must be done to take hold of that pearl?

These are hazardous questions. If we are honest with ourselves individually or with ourselves as a congregation, we would have to admit that, as W. Edwards Deming pointed out, the main purpose of human organizations is to maintain the status quo. 

The first time I thought about this for myself, I came to understand that my pearl was just that: preserving the status quo. I understand that the prospect of change can be disturbing. At the outset it can seem like entering a dark room blindfolded. Yet as Sam Cooke sang in 1964, “A Change Is Gonna Come” whether we like it or not, whether we want it or not, whether we are prepared for it or not. And there are only three ways to deal with change: 

1. Make things happen, 

2. Watch things happen, or 

3. Wonder what in the world just happened. 

Over time, I came to realize that no matter how wonderful the status quo feels, it is not possible to maintain it. The only place the status quo is maintained is a cemetery. As Jesus said, “Let the dead bury the dead” and, “God is the God of the living.” To be alive is to change. 

So, in the coming months and years, what changes to our status quo are coming? And what would we like the changes to be? Here is a template I use: 

First, rediscover and renew our calling from God as Christian ministers and lay people, as individual disciples and as connectional Methodist church people. Jesus told Peter he would make him fish for people. Do we remember when we got hooked by Jesus? Is it still fresh? Or did we get stuck in a rut, which is to say, did we devote our energies to preserving the status quo?

Second, are we intentionally making disciples or just accepting people into membership? We should discern together and put into place together an intentional path to discipleship. It cannot be enough any longer simply to accept people into membership and leave them free lancing afterward. No longer can we say, “We have Sunday School classes and Bible studies and women’s groups and community ministries, and we hope that one of them is right for you.” Jesus did not give us the mission of making church members, but of making disciples. 

Of course, we will have to figure out just what a disciple is, but I will leave that for another day.

Third, do we see all the people, including both the people of our fellowship, whether members or not, and the people of our larger community? William Temple observed, “The church is the only cooperative society in the world that exists for the benefit of its non-members.” I think that’s a bit of an overstatement, since I think we would agree that police, fire and rescue departments and the US military also exist for the benefit of non-members. But Temple’s point is still sound: Jesus didn’t begin the Church in order to convey member-benefit packages to church people. 

Now, we do benefit, and very richly. But not in ways awarded by other organizations. Jesus put it this way to his disciples just before he was arrested: “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. So, do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.”

Fourth, how shall we preserve that of our church which is excellent and gives glory to God, of which there are many examples? It is true, that as Sebastian says in The Tempest, “What's past is prologue,” but it is also past. We cannot plan for the past, only for a church we will bequeath to our children and grandchildren. 

Personally, I am optimistic! After all, Jesus said, "Do not worry, saying, 'What shall we eat?' or 'What shall we drink?' or 'What shall we wear?' For people who don’t know God wear themselves out themselves over such things. Your heavenly Father knows that you need them. So, seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, then all those other things will be given to you as well."

Good words to live by and plan with. Thanks be to God!

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, none 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.

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.