The only way in

 John 10:1‑10

 “Very truly, I tell you, anyone who does not enter the sheepfold by the gate but climbs in by another way is a thief and a bandit. 2 The one who enters by the gate is the shepherd of the sheep. 3 The gatekeeper opens the gate for him, and the sheep hear his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. 4 When he has brought out all his own, he goes ahead of them, and the sheep follow him because they know his voice. 5 They will not follow a stranger, but they will run from him because they do not know the voice of strangers.” 6 Jesus used this figure of speech with them, but they did not understand what he was saying to them.

   7 So again Jesus said to them, “Very truly, I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep. 8 All who came before me are thieves and bandits, but the sheep did not listen to them. 9 I am the gate. Whoever enters by me will be saved and will come in and go out and find pasture. 10 The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.”

How do you go to a place you want to be? GPS answers that question easily for driving there. You enter your destination and Google Maps, for example, usually offers three different routes.

Have you ever wanted to go somewhere and found there was only one way to it? Or along the way there was a place that there was no choice but to pass through? When Cathy and I lived in Oklahoma, we found there are destinations in the Great American Desert for which there is one way to go and that’s it. Either follow it or don't get there.

In our passage for today, Jesus describes himself like that. He speaks of himself as a shepherd who guides and leads his sheep. In fact, Jesus taught that not only is he the Way, but he is also the gate for his flock. The actual gate.

The only legitimate way into Christ’s kingdom is through him. He is the gate. We may think there is another way, but we are only fooling ourselves to think that.

We are familiar with thinking of Jesus as a Good Shepherd whom we follow. But what about Jesus as the actual gate, or actual entrance to the kingdom?

The implications of that are very important. So let’s take a look.

I was stationed in Germany from 1983 to 1986. Cathy and I lived in a small farming village called Dorf-Guell, about 35 miles north of Frankfurt. Behind our house was a large, open field that lay fallow the three years we were there. One morning I opened the blinds in the back window and was startled to see a flock of sheep all over our backyard, some grazing right next to our house’s wall. At the edge of the field stood the shepherd, attired in German shepherd’s clothing just as if he had come straight from central casting. I called Cathy and we watched for awhile. After several minutes, the shepherd walked to the right. When he reached the side of the flock he turned and spoke to the sheep. Right away the sheep stopped grazing and walked toward him. The shepherd turned and walked on, the sheep following docilely behind him. The sheep dog brought up the rear, keeping the sheep in formation.

Jesus' hearers would have understood the images of ancient Judea shepherding, of course, in a way that tends to escape us. At night, shepherds in Judea would bring their flocks together for the night for security, but how to separate them in the morning? Each would simply call his sheep, who recognized their shepherd’s voice and ignored other voices.

William Barclay explained that in the fields shepherds would construct a simple pen for the flock at night with only one entrance, and the shepherd would sleep across the entrance. The shepherd literally was the gate for the sheep. Obviously, anyone having legitimate business would come to the shepherd. Anyone who went into the pen by going through the simple fence was up to no good.

But, as John explains in verse six, Jesus is speaking figuratively. His words must have called to mind passages of the Jewish Scriptures in which God describes himself as a shepherd and the people as his flock. Ezekiel 34, for example, portrays most kings of Israel as bad shepherds who through misrule and corrupt religion place the flock - the people of Israel - in danger both physical and spiritual. Ezekiel counters that God alone is the good shepherd who will rescue the sheep and place them in the care of “my servant, David” - meaning a monarchy restored to righteousness of King David.

But in Jesus' day the kingdom of Israel was gone forever. The Romans ruled Judea, so it is highly unlikely that Jesus was referring to any political entity as thieves and bandits. Nor would he have meant that the long line of Jewish and Hebrew prophets who came before him were the bad men because Jesus respected Moses and his successors.

Jesus' teaching, then operates on a religious level, and on at least three of them. New Testament scholars agree that Jesus was directly referring to the Pharisees as the thieves and the bandits. Some versions of the passage say so explicitly. John's Gospel is especially harsh toward them - the prior chapter relates their cold accusations of blasphemy toward a blind man Jesus has healed. They hardly have the best interests of the flock in their hearts, while Jesus, who removed the blindness, is a shepherd to tends to the sheep. So, at one level Jesus is contrasting himself with the Pharisees and the Pharisees come off poorly.

But there is more. If the only authorized access to the sheepfold is through the gate - and the gate is Jesus himself - then membership in the flock is determined solely by one’s relationship to Jesus. The only approved way into the fold is through Jesus.

We live in a tolerant age, and this is an intolerant passage, at least in part. On the one hand, there are no preconditions as to which sheep can be part of the flock. If they enter through the gate, through Christ, then they are part of the flock not because we say so but because Jesus says so. Their membership in the flock is assured. On the other hand, there is no way to be a rightful part of the flock except through Jesus; sheep who try to jump over the fence may get into the sheepfold, but they don't belong and are merely Christian imposters whom Jesus does not include in his flock.

There are staggering implications for churches here. It is easy to become a member of a congregation or denomination. But this passage constrains us from thinking that being listed on a church’s membership roll is the same thing as being part of Jesus' own flock. The act of joining a church does not guarantee salvation, for if the joining is done by jumping the fence, then it is religious pretension. The only thing that counts is one’s relationship to the shepherd: Christ alone gives entrance into the eternal Kingdom of God; no one else does, and there is no other way.

This is not a warm, fuzzy teaching. It's a smack upside the head. Whoever enters the sheepfold through Jesus is saved - but no one else can admit entrance nor is anyone who enters another way saved. By Christ and by Christ alone is our eternal place in the pasture both granted and assured.

Jesus is at one time the entryway into the eternal kingdom, and at the same time the true leader of the flock for abundant life. The church's identity can only be determined by the identity of Christ: if Christ is the one who saves and leads, we are those who are saved and are led.

We become members of Christ's flock by entering into relationship with God through Christ, in whom we receive abundant life. Most importantly, we are among those for whom Jesus was willing to die. By his death Jesus paradoxically opened the gate to life both abundantly Spirit-filled in the here and now and to eternal life in the presence of God.

So, we cannot understand ourselves as some of his sheep unless we keep foremost in mind who Jesus is as our shepherd. When we reflect on what and whom our church is supposed to be in the world, we should ask ourselves whether we are being sheepish enough to be part of Jesus' flock. What does it mean for us to live as Jesus's sheep? How do we manifest our sheepish identity in the world? How do we as Christ's flock point the way to Christ as the shepherd, and not merely the shepherd for us alone, but for the world?

Most urgently, perhaps, we need always to remind ourselves of whose voice to listen to. There are hundreds of different voices calling to us sheep and it is easy for the shepherd's voice to be lost in the cacophony. As author Robert Kohler wrote, there are different kinds of voices calling us to different kinds of work, and the problem is to find out which voice is the call of God rather than the voice of self-interest, cultural values, or something else. "All we, like sheep, have gone astray," said Isaiah, we are all doing our own private thing (Is. 53:6). We are called by the thieves and bandits of politics, consumerism, selfishness, entertainment, inactivity, work work work work - the list is endless. Do we still hear the shepherd's voice?

What does the Good Shepherd call us to?

He calls us to love one another, John 13:34 ‑ "I give you a new commandment: that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you should also love one another.

He calls us from labor to rest (Matt. 11:28): Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.

·     Calls us from death to life (1 John 3:14): We know that we have passed from death to life because we love one another.

·     Calls us from bondage to liberty (Gal 5:13)

·     Calls us out of darkness into light (1 Pet. 2:9)

·     Calls us from bondage to peace (1 Cor. 7:15

·     Calls us to the fellowship of His Son (1 Cor. 1:9)

When we faithfully answer the call, here is what happens:

·     We become children of God (John 1:12)

·     We become the servants of God (Matt. 25:21)

·     We become God's witnesses (I Thess. 2:10)

·     We become workers together with God (2 Cor. 6:1)

·     We live a holy calling (2 Tim. 1:9)

These are merely some of the things that come to mind from this passage. But foremost always we have to remember:

·       the only valid way into God's kingdom is through Christ. To think we have a place apart from going through Christ is lethal self-deception.

·       only Christ is the shepherd; the sheep must heed only his call and follow where he leads.

·       that is the way to life more abundant.

Remember what Paul wrote in Galatians 5.13: “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 servants to one another.”

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.

Lent and Chocolate - What's the Point?

The story is told of Sean O'Flannery, a lad who moved to Boston from Dublin. Coming home from school one day he went into an ice cream shop and told the jerk behind the counter (the soda jerk) "One scoop of yer best chocolate ice cream in four dishes!"

Soda jerks get strange requests, so he set four dishes with one scoop each in front of Sean. Sean took a spoon of one, held it before his face and loudly announced, "This is me beloved cousin eating ice cream back in the old country!" He ate the ice cream and took a spoonful from another scoop, "This is me dear friend Kelly eating ice cream back in me homeland!" The third dish he said was his favorite uncle, Finian, eating ice cream back home.

Sean raised the last scoop and said, "And this dish is for me!"

This practice went on for several months until one evening as the soda jerk was filling the four dishes Sean stopped him and said quietly, "Only three dishes today, please."

The soda jerk asked, "Did you suffer a loss and that is why you only want three scoops?"

"Heaven's no!" protested Sean O'Flannery. "It's Lent now, and I've given up ice cream!"

The word “Lent” comes from the Anglo-Saxon word, “lencten,” meaning Spring, the season in which Easter occurs. The forty days before Easter constitute the Lenten season, but the forty-day count does not include Sundays. All Sundays celebrate the resurrection, and so are excluded from the forty days count. The forty days duration is drawn from the length of time Jesus spent in prayer and fasting in the wilderness before he set out on his three-year ministry.

Matthew 4.1-4:

1 Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted by the devil. 2 After fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry. 3 The tempter came to him and said, “If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread.”
4 Jesus answered, “It is written: ‘Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.

As originally conceived by the church long ago, the Lenten sacrifice was instituted as a “means of penitential preparation and preparation for baptism, which in the early church customarily took place on Easter Sunday.”

The tradition of fasting during Lent is an early one, originally done between Good Friday and Easter morning, the forty hours that Jesus was in the tomb. Christians would partake of no food or drink at all during that time. The fast was extended to the forty days before Easter sometime between 300 and 325, and changed so that food could be eaten only when evening had come.

The idea behind the fast was to imitate Christ. In addition to fasting, Christians would devote themselves to making prayer a faithful habit. So “prayer and fasting” have been closely linked for a long time.

And that brings me, by a rather circuitous route, to chocolate.

Chocolate is an absolutely unessential food, nutritionally speaking. We eat chocolate for no reason other than it is pleasurable. Since denial of the flesh is a prominent theme of Lent, rejection of chocolate in Lent is often offered as the Lenten sacrifice, particularly by people who wish to diet anyway.

The Lenten season is the time when we are supposed to ponder the extravagance of God’s love for us through Jesus Christ. Perhaps that fact could put a different spin on our concept of giving something up for Lent. The Lenten sacrifice is best oriented toward that which most blocks our spiritual growth. If that thing is chocolate, then it is appropriate to give up chocolate for Lent. But if something else is one’s greatest obstacle in being more Christlike, then giving up chocolate is spiritually pointless. 

The question is this: “What is the one thing that most hinders my Christian growth into the person whom God wants me to be?” The answer may not be easy, but it will always involve self-denial. We think that following Christ is hard because to obey Christ we must first disobey ourselves, and it is disobeying ourselves that makes us think following Christ is hard.

But Jesus said his yoke is easy, his burden is light. We just have to get over ourselves to do it.

As Robert Mulholland put it, “Jesus is not talking about giving up candy for Lent. He is calling for the abandonment of our entire, pervasive, deeply entrenched matrix of self-referenced being.”

If we focus on that between now and Easter Day, then we have a chance to become more mature in Christian faith and practice. It may be a habit that is out of true with Christian character that needs to be overcome for further growth. Or it may be a thing undone which must be done for deeper development to occur. The Lenten idea is for our habits to change enough in the next few weeks so that we can continue at a higher level of discipleship after Easter. The Lenten season and the Lenten sacrifice are not the points in and of themselves, the whole life of discipleship is.

Focusing on the one big thing is not the only Lenten discipline that would be helpful for spiritual development. Methodism’s founder, John Wesley, insisted that the only thing that distinguishes the Christian from the non-Christian are how we use our time and money. So, for the period of Lent I would suggest focusing on those two things in addition to whatever one big spiritual obstacle you might have. Some suggestions:

• Tithe your income until Easter. 
• Devote yourself to prayer daily and attending worship every Sunday. If you are traveling, say on business or spring break, then worship wherever you are.
• Read the Bible each day. 
• Call someone you love and let them know. 
• Ask people who live alone to join you for lunch or whether you can visit them. 
• Become involved in Christian ministries.
• Re-establish or reinforce important relationships in your life.

Spiritually speaking, it is not enough to simply excise sin or personal vices from our lives. We have to replace vice with virtue. Thus, simply giving up something like chocolate for Lent is simply silly if we are only counting the days when we can start doing it again. That’s a game, not a spiritual discipline.

Lent should be a period of joyful, God-directed introspection into how we may be further united with Christ in godly love. If we make Lent into a severe, joyless, self-justifying exercise in self-denial, we have missed the point. Jesus sternly admonished teachers of the religious law and the Pharisees not to practice the letter of the law while neglecting “the more important matters of justice, mercy and faithfulness” (Matt 23:23).

When a lawyer asked Jesus, “which is the greatest commandment in the Law?” Jesus replied, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’”

That is the whole point of spiritual growth and spiritual discipline, and hence the whole point of Lent: love. We are to be living ambassadors from God to one another and the world at large in Christ’s name. Christ was crucified, buried and raised from the dead for our sake and the sake of the whole world. Let us rededicate ourselves to being Christ’s ambassadors. It’s Lent, after all; it’s all about love, you see, Lent is all about love.

Epiphany 3A Calling the Fishermen

Mt. 4:12, 18-23:

12 Now when Jesus heard that John had been arrested, he withdrew to Galilee. ... 18 As he walked by the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon, who is called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into the sea for they were fishermen.

19 And he said to them, "Follow me, and I will make you fish for people." 20 Immediately they left their nets and followed him. 21 As he went from there, he saw two other brothers, James son of Zebedee and his brother John, in the boat with their father Zebedee, mending their nets, and he called them. 22 Immediately they left the boat and their father, and followed him.

23 Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and curing every disease and every sickness among the people.

 

A young lady was accosted by her father one morning after she had come in very late from a date with her newest boyfriend. Dad demanded to know why she had allowed him to keep her out until well after midnight. “Oh, Daddy,” she exclaimed, “he just has that certain something!”

Dad reflected on the young man’s appearance when he had arrived the night before: he was not especially well mannered, he had ragged hair, wore baggy clothes of no particular fashion, and drove a dirty car. “Well,” Dad told daughter, “he may have that certain something, but it would be much better if he had something certain.”

I wonder why Simon Peter and Andrew dropped their fishing trade and walked off after Jesus when he told them to do so. The Gospel gives no indication that they knew Jesus before this time, but they might have known him or at least known about him. In either event, when Jesus said, “Come,” they followed. Then the brothers James and John did the same when Jesus called them, leaving their hapless father to mend nets alone.

Was Jesus’s charisma, that “certain something,” so strong that grown men engaged in their trade would just drop it – immediately – when he said to?

Few people are blessed with such charisma. Everyone else has to develop high expertise to be successful leaders. They have something certain – competence. People do not follow these leaders because they are charismatic or personable. For every Robert E. Lee whose regal appearance and courtly demeanor could cause his soldiers to weep with devotion, there are a dozen like U. S. Grant, whose appearance was uninspiring and mannerisms dull to all who met him. But Grant’s competence was legendary.

Charismatic leaders cause change, and so do competent leaders. When charisma and competence combine in one person, an explosion of change results. George Washington combined these two natures. So did Billy Graham.

Jesus may have combined charisma and competence so supremely that his call to follow was irresistible, which would explain very well why men and later, women, would just up and leave their homes and way of life to follow him. But to follow Christ was different than following Washington across the Delaware River one night and different than helping Billy Graham build the furthest-reaching ministry the world has ever known. Washington’s soldiers and Graham’s workers had first devoted themselves to a cause greater than all of them – the former to freedom and the latter to evangelism. They had a prior commitment to the larger mission, and to accept the leadership of Washington or Graham resulted from their commitment rather than caused it.

Such was not the case when Jesus walked along the lakeshore. No doubt these four fishermen were religious. They probably worshiped faithfully at the synagogue and made the necessary pilgrimages to Jerusalem for Passover. But there was no cause Jesus served to which Simon, Andrew, James, and John had already committed themselves. There was no Gospel yet, there was no church yet, there were no great social or political movements Jesus headed. There were, apparently, no prior points of contact between Jesus and the four men. Yet when Jesus simply told them, come, and they dropped their work and went.

The men could not yet have known of Jesus’ unequaled competence. Jesus was an expert prophet, teacher, preacher, and healer; his expertise in conducting his ministry was unparalleled. He made no mistakes. He did not waver from his mission even when arrest and cruel death threatened. This fantastic level of competence is not hard to accept if one has already accepted the fact that Jesus was the son of God, and that in him dwelt the godhead fully. But none of the disciples knew any of this when they began to follow him. Jesus was still mostly unknown to them when they left their work and homes to follow him.

And Jesus may not have been very charismatic. Isaiah prophesied of the messiah in another passage that, “He had no beauty or majesty to attract us to him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him” (Isa 53:2). Jesus may well have been a plain-vanilla sort of man to look at, with no imposing physical presence. We don’t know.

So the riddle of what made these men follow Jesus remains a riddle.

“A reasonable response to his command ‘Follow me’ would be ‘Where are you going?’ The fishermen do not yet know the destination, which they must learn along the way. . . . The fishermen are already at work, already doing something useful and important, thus they are not looking for a new life. Jesus’ call does not fill an obvious vacuum or meet an obvious need in their lives, but, like the call of prophets in the Hebrew Bible, it is intrusive and disruptive, calling them away from work and family” (NIB).

Jesus did not call the fishermen to admire him or accept his principles, but to follow him personally. Throughout the gospel accounts, Jesus made it clear that those who followed him were to be devoted to him personally. To what degree Jesus understood he was God-in-the-flesh is argued among New Testament scholars; his self-awareness of his deity seems stronger in some parts of the gospels than in others. But it cannot be doubted that Jesus saw a co-identity between his work and the work of God and thus believed that loyalty to him and loyalty to God were so close that the difference was nil. In fact, Jesus said that God enabled people to follow him.

His call to follow him was primarily to follow him personally, not to adhere to some ethical principle, success program, political campaign or even a ministry of compassion. The ethics and ministry of the apostles and the church grew out of personal loyalty to Christ, but before all, there was loyalty to Christ himself. The first devotion of the apostles was not to good works, or to faith statements, or to social justice, or to religious propositions, or to a church organization. It was personally to Jesus Christ.

We don’t easily realize what an extraordinary thing this is. Throughout history there have been many men who demanded personal oaths of loyalty, but even the best results have been tragic, more often downright evil. Here is a short list of examples, none of which turned out well, most of which became evil outright:

• The cult of the Roman Caesars that began during Jesus’ lifetime,
• In the late 1700s, the rule of the French monarchy,
• Adolf Hitler, who required the proud German army officer corps to pledge its honor and loyalty to him personally rather than the German nation,
• The cult of the Japanese emperor,
• American Jim Jones founded a “People’s Temple” and demanded complete obedience, even to requiring all 900 of them to drink poisoned Kool-Aid and die in 1978.

The historical record is not kind to those who make themselves the first and foremost object of loyalty or worship for people. Yet Jesus of Nazareth is a singular distinction. He did not found a “Jesus cult.” His disciples sometimes got into serious arguments about what following Christ meant, and Jesus just let them work it out. Jesus would patiently explain what his teachings meant when the disciples didn’t understand, but he never attempted to compel people to follow him. They were free to answer his call or not. And some changed their minds: Jesus was abandoned wholesale by many disciples in John’s Gospel, and Jesus just let them go without a word. On the night he was arrested, Jesus seemed more pitiable than heroic in Gethsemane. Before the soldiers arrived, he had to plead with someone to stay awake with him. Then his disciples abandoned him as the soldiers took him away. Jesus was either history’s most spectacular blunderer in creating a personal cult about himself, or he was so purely good that complete devotion to him personally could serve only God’s good purposes, even when that devotion faltered.

But Jesus’ tragedy and triumph were far in the future when Jesus walked along the lakeshore summoning the two sets of brothers. We are no closer than before in understanding why these men, successful in their trade, would give it up to follow Jesus with just a word of a summons.

Perhaps we need to remember that the gospels don’t quite tell history in the way we think of history. The gospels are not simply accounts of what happened. When their writers set the story down, they knew how it would end. From the beginning of these accounts, Jesus is known to them as the Risen One. Thus, the individual motives that each disciple may have had in following Jesus at the beginning of his ministry do not seem very important. The point is that they did follow the One they later came to know as their risen Lord. Matthew simply ascribes to all of them, including himself,

“a common denominator: ... People become believers by the power of Jesus’ word; they follow him because he has spoken to them, and his word generates faith. For Matthew, Jesus’ call to discipleship was spoken not only to a few disciples in first-century Galilee but to the church throughout history (28:20). ... In and through the words and deeds of preachers, missionaries, teachers, family, friends, and the nameless doers of Christian service, the voice of the Son of Man continues to speak and to generate faith” (NIB).

So for Matthew and for the church in every time and place, the call to follow is given to us just as it was to these four men beside the lakeshore. Yet only a few of us will immediately drop everything to follow him. (I certainly didn’t!) The rest of us will wrestle with the call. We’ll temporize and delay. We’ll ask for the details of the program and want to have the objective explained to us. Or we’ll show Jesus all the other work we have to do and all the obligations we have, or we’ll love our leisure time too much and treasure our entertainments and pastimes.

Jesus has heard it all before. He won’t try to coerce us into following him, and we sure can’t talk him out of calling us. To all our objections, Jesus makes no argument. He simply says, “Come and follow me” and walks on. He will do this over and over and over, until we finally realize that all our encumbrances and reasons to go on with life as usual mean not a thing any longer, not to Jesus, not to us, and then we have to follow him – not to join a new project or find a new cause, but simply to be with him and to have him be with us.

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).

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.

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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.