A decisive moment in my shift to understanding church as a verb, as enacted, as an incarnational reality, occurred as we were tromping through the wilderness. Literally. In the middle of a North Carolina forest near Ashville, I had taken a group of divinity students on a wilderness adventure in which a near-disaster was redeemed.

At the time I was a professor at Yale Divinity School teaching a course entitled, “Encountering God in Creation.” The course was designed around a ten-day camping trip in a wilderness area where there would be no showers, no electricity, no take-out; nothing but raw nature. Somehow we had the crazy idea that we would come to encounter God in a deeper way if we loaded ourselves up like pack mules and left all traces of civilization. By the end of the first day of arduous hiking with seventy pound backpacks, we had become a collective voice crying in the wilderness, hoping for our path to be made straight, wishing we were anywhere but there, praying that around the next bend a Holiday Inn would appear.

As a boy scout, I had done a little camping in my youth, but my most recent experience of sleeping outdoors was in our backyard with my children, neither of whom lasted the night. I was certainly not qualified to lead anyone off the beaten path, much less into a wilderness area where we would be setting up camp, cooking, and avoiding wild beasts. So the camping trip was organized and led by two wilderness guides, both of whom were rather hardcore Outward Bound drill sergeants. Their idea of fun was marching every day from dawn till dusk up and down steep mountainous terrain, finding our “limits”. What even our guides had not anticipated was the capricious temperament of Mother Nature, who blessed us with every form of precipitation possible. We marched through snow, slid on ice, and slogged through torrential rain. It was awful and we were miserable, and our frazzled spirits reflected our harsh conditions. We growled and snapped at each other as we set up tents, cooked our gruel, and collapsed from utter exhaustion in soggy sleeping bags.

By the way, God was nowhere to be found.

On the eighth and gloomy morning of our wilderness ordeal, the day’s agenda was to break camp, pack up, celebrate eucharist, and head home. A few of the young men traipsed off to a nearby river for a swim. While the rest of us were cleaning up from breakfast, we could hear their howls of pleasure and pain in the distance as they played in the frigid water. Their delight lifted our spirits and washed away our melancholy. When they returned from their icy baptism and we began to pack up for our departure, the mood of our entire troop lightened, and in agreement, the clouds parted and the sun shone lovingly on us.

If we had left then, without celebrating communion, I daresay the entire experience would have been considered a failure. There were some among us, including myself, for whom God was distant and inaccessible. I thought that perhaps the ritual of communion would be experienced as an empty gesture, but since I had carried the bread and juice all the way, I did not want it to be for nothing. So, I instructed everyone to go off by themselves for a while, and at the appointed time to return with a symbol of what they had discovered and who they had become during the week. While they were away – probably getting in touch with their inner couch potato –  I set up a make-shift altar out of rocks and arranged some logs in a circle for us to sit on.

One by one, the members of our group walked back and took their places around the circle. When we had all gathered, I initiated what I thought would be a rather perfunctory ritual. I was unprepared for the liturgical drama that ensued. Each person placed a symbol on the altar. Referring to a piece of tree bark, or moss, or rocks, or an unexpected flower, they testified about what had happened to them over the week, that their lives were intertwined with the others, that in retrospect the struggles with nature and with each other vividly demonstrated their interdependence upon one another for their very survival. They recognized that the community they had formed over the week was one in which they helped and hurt each other, their interactions were both nourishment and poison, the community they formed was both life-giving and toxic. In all the ambiguity of the journey, they had offered themselves to one another, and time after time, they saw the face of Christ in one another.

When it came time to invoke the Holy Spirit and say the words of institution, I realized several things. First, I did not have to invoke the Spirit, who had been hiding and working among us all the time. Second, as I looked at the altar that was covered with the debris of our journey along with bread and cup, I realized that we had been offering ourselves to one another the entire week. Sometimes we held back, sometimes we rejected each other. But more often than we had realized, we had given of ourselves for the sake of another and for the group as a whole. We had, to greater and lesser extent, placed ourselves on the altar, hoping and praying that the Holy Spirit would transform our meager offering for the sake of the body of Christ. Over the week and at this moment in particular, not only was bread and cup changed, but more importantly we were changed. It was apparent in hindsight that deus absconditus had been at work among us, but surreptitiously. Through our trials, little by little, God was transforming the ambiguity of our lives into living bread for one another such that we came to share a common life.

Our communion in Christ – only now recognized as such – was not a life of leisure and plenty but rather entailed hard work, conflict, and suffering. We came to understand the week as a baptism – of water and snow and ice – into a new life. Viewed mainly in retrospect, we were being raised to new life in the Spirit and shedding sinful preoccupations with ourselves and with things that do not ultimately matter. Our journey together had been a kind of baptismal death to self that prepared us for this moment, for this sharing, for a transformation and resurrection into new life.

After breaking the bread and raising the cup, we shared the common meal by giving and receiving, each to another. The bread and cup were passed from hand to hand around the circle. Through tears and laughter, each gave to the other; each received from another. In so doing, we were following Christ’s admonition to “do this in remembrance of me.” We re-membered Christ. By grace we participated in his life more fully.

After singing a hymn, we were dismissed and sent forth. We gathered our belongings, removed all traces of our presence from the site, and departed for home. We were very different persons and a very different community. That is no romantic, idealistic exaggeration. What I haven’t said yet was that there were two agnostics and one atheist on the trip (in divinity school, you ask??). In the months following the trip, each of these young people professed their faith and (re)dedicated their lives to Christ.

We had been changed but of course not completely and not forever. Shortly after our return, some of the conflicts of the trip surfaced again to cause dissention and pain. Much to my shame and dismay, the most serious of these conflicts occurred between one of the wilderness guides and myself, which to this day has not been reconciled.

Communion in Christ does not make us into saints overnight or over a week. Our community together will still be marked not only by joy, peace, and mutual understanding, but also by tensions, conflicts, and suffering. But this journey through the wilderness into communion taught me more about being church than just about anything else. It helped me to see how during the most ordinary activities of our lives, we give and receive from each other. In our families, in our schools, in friendship and with enemies, we are embedded in a matrix of relationship, an economy of sharing. So much of what we share is colored by sin. But quite a bit of what we give and receive is also beautiful and loving.

Our wilderness experience of communion helped me to understand more clearly what Jesus meant when he said to his disciples, “this is my body given for you.” He had indeed given of himself to his disciples during their three year journey together. He lived with them, taught them, admonished and blessed them; he poured himself into them. Each day, every day, the disciples had taken a little more of Jesus into themselves. Sharing the bread and the wine symbolized that very giving and receiving that the disciples and Jesus had experienced with each other.

And this is what is meant by following Jesus and to gather in his name: To place ourselves on the altar so that the Spirit of Christ can transform the ambiguity of our lives into holy nourishment for one another and for the world. And in giving and receiving from each other – in the Spirit – we become more fully the body of Christ for the sake of the world’s redemption…and our own.

The Season of Passion has always been the most significant rhythm of the year for me as a spiritual pilgrim. One of my earliest memories of the church is sitting in the three hour Good Friday service – my Dad preaching one of the “seven last words” – and my mother singing, in her rich pain filled voice, “he was despised and rejected – a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. (I found out years later that my mother felt despised at the core of her being, deeply acquainted with the grief of having been beaten and bruised by her father when she was a little girl). What I remember about those three hour marathons was how I felt. For me, sitting in those dark pews in dark sanctuaries with dark music and dark words was very comforting. Somehow I felt safe – sure that the love of God in the story of a sad and suffering Jesus was enough to protect me, no matter what. And, that nothing could ever separate me from the dependable arms of a dependable God..

And yet, as I’ve grown in the Christian faith, I have found myself very uncomfortable with the traditional theory of atonement. The idea that Jesus suffered FOR me simply doesn’t match that childhood experience of Jesus suffering/living/ fearing WITH me. And so, a theory of substitutionary atonement simply doesn’t work for me. In addition, as a decades old feminist, I am all too aware of how “suffering for others” has become the expected Christian script for women in a way it has never defined men.

And yet, I am also beginning to realize that when we turn Jesus into a fellow sufferer, instead of a mighty savior, we can also fall into a diminishment of God that leaves our faith strangled by human finitude.

Recently, as I march resolutely toward the age of 60, I am all too aware of my human finitude. My back gave out in November – and I had to actually cancel out on a pastor’s trip to Nicaragua – a humiliating realization that I am not in charge, and that my leadership is expendable. And my now daily routines of stretching and sitting a certain way and anticipating twinges of pain have permanently destroyed the illusion that I am still a “young woman.” Combine that with a daily glimpse of wrinkles and brown spots - and the horrifying experience of trying to find a mother-of the-bride dress that doesn’t scream “matronly” – well, I now know in a new and visceral way that I am not omnipotent and eternal. So, thank God, God is!

And so, I am even more grateful for the story – for the reality – of the cross, Yes, as the arms of the cross continue to hold me tight, I know that God is WITH me in every moment of sorrow and suffering, pain and disappointment, anger and doubt – and in every moment of sin and brokenness and violence and greed in this badly bruised world. God does not do FOR us what we must and can do as the image of God in the world. God does not rescue us from the darkness of living, but holds and pushes and prods and challenges and saves and loves in the midst of it all.

BUT, as a seasoned servant of life, I also know that there is a kind of darkness and brutality and tragedy and horror that I simply can’t endure as a finite human being – and it is at those moments, that God suffers FOR me and FOR you and FOR the world which God loves.

AT-ONE-MENT with God. Sometimes it’s up to you and sometimes its up to me. Sometimes it’s up to God and us together. And sometimes it’s only up to God. AT-ONE-MENT is a dance – and it is a dance that celebrates the complexity and confusions of life. And it is a dance where the human and divine partners share the privilege of taking the lead – as the music and patterns continue to unfold.

May it be so!

Editor’s Note: This is the transcript of a sermon preached on June 17, 2007. We have decided to publish it now, on the QTL blog, because of the on-going need for religion in America to allow itself to be defined by grace more than by hostility; by including rather than excluding; by humility rather than pious posturing. Some of the references are dated specifically to the week of June 17, 2007, but the point remains the same today as it did on June 17th.

Today’s lectionary reading (Luke 7:36-39), like all lectionary readings, is the reading that was heard in nearly every church around the world this week. Christians from all over the world heard, this week, about the woman who washed Jesus’s feet with her hair. It’s an amazing event that Luke records. This woman who had not lived her life very well….who was looked down upon by all, ignored, mocked…..she hears that Jesus – the only one in this woman’s world who did not ignore her or look down on her, but instead reaffirmed his love for her as someone who God made and loves – no matter how much she had marred that image of God – she hears that Jesus was going to be eating at a home nearby and she went there to wash his feet with the best oil money could buy. No one had asked her to be there, and the host certainly did not want her there. But there she was, weeping at Jesus’ feet…her tears of gratitude dropping on his feet which she wiped off with her hair.  Now, we don’t know when Jesus forgave her, Luke doesn’t say. The text, if I have read it correctly, makes clear that she is not forgiven because of the way she washes his feet that night. Her acts of love and gratitude are the result of having been forgiven at another time, and she was so moved, she is so grateful…that when she heard he was going to be nearby, she had to be there.

Now, Jesus often acknowledged and blessed people that the world deemed unworthy. And it was often the response of the religious leaders looking on to see such actions by Jesus, as they did in this case, as clear evidence that he was certainly not divine…certainly not holy….because such radical forgiveness was not a reflection of the God they wanted to know. For God to be so radical, so inclined to love a woman like this, was to expose in neon lights how little these religious leaders and the other guests that night were actually reflecting the God they claimed to know.

There is a message here – a call to each of us to think on how well we know and are willing to reflect the God of Jesus Christ. And it is this message that Jesus wants not only to underscore, but to help his host, the other guests and all of us here understand what it looks like to reflect the God of Jesus Christ.

And so he asks his host, who was clearly uncomfortable with the woman and how Jesus was handling everything…he asks his host about two men who owed debts to the same lender, one much larger a debt than the other, both of which the lender forgave. Now Jesus has talked about forgiving debts before, but on this night he asked his host which of the two men will love the lender more. The host answers correctly, Jesus says – the man who had more debt forgiven loved the lender more, which leads Jesus to say these truly revolutionary words: “He who has been forgiven little loves little.”

Now, it is important to note that there are many different kinds of love and many different Greek words for love. In this case, the word used to describe the love the men feel at having their debt forgiven is the same word Jesus uses when he talks about those who are forgiven little, love little. The word used means: moral love. In other words, being forgiven ignites in the forgiven a moral re-compassing, a gratitude that reflects not the relief one feels when they have gotten off the hook, but rather the transforming humility one feels as the recipient of a sacrifice they did not earn or deserve. 
When we forgive, we give someone the gift of grace….think of forgiveness as the wrapping paper on a gift called grace. And it is that grace, grace that reflects who God is, not who we are, it is that grace that moves, that reforms, that reignites a moral love in the human heart. To forgive is not always the option I want to choose. And if you’re like me, it’s not always the option you want to choose either. We get angry, it’s natural, we get angry when we have been wronged in some way, and if the other person has done nothing to earn my forgiveness….just my wrath, then to forgive – especially the big things - is not my first instinct. But Jesus never said we need to change the world, he said we need to allow God to change the world through us. To forgive, even when we don’t want to, is to do nothing less than take part in building God’s Kingdom on this earth. To forgive is to pave a road for God’s grace to become real in the life of another, who is moved to humility and gratitude as the recipient of a pardon they did not earn. It is a radical message. But this, if I understand it correctly, is the way Jesus says God works. It is the concept of the cross. Grace is limited to no one, is not earned and is by our worldly measures, not fair. I imagine this is what the host was thinking that night at his home, as this woman that he looked down upon in every respect was shown such grace and love by Jesus. I can hear him thinking, “You forgave her?” This forgiveness concept is so radical. Not many liked to hear it. It’s hard to hear today……unless you’re one of the people that is forgiven…or you’re one of the people who (though they may not know it) are held captive by the anger, the disgust they hold for another person who has wronged them in some way. Forgiveness is a radical notion. Make no mistake about it. But I think what we learn from Jesus is that when we choose to forgive – we become a vehicle through which God’s grace can break into this world to heal, to make whole.

Imagine how these words, these radical words from Luke, must have been heard this week when they were read in churches in South Africa, where so many people know through their own experience and the living out of his call to forgive, that the words of Jesus are true. I imagine a lot of those people who forgave, did not want to. But they had trust that through forgiveness, they were giving the gift of God’s radical grace, which heals both the giver and the given. I wonder how these words have been heard this week at Duke, where yesterday the DA was found guilty of lying about the case involving the lacrosse team. I wonder how these words have been heard this week in Liberia, where the hearings have just begun for their ousted leader who wreaked such havoc, caused such pain and loss for so many Liberians.  Did these words fall on rocky ground? Will they take root in the heart of just one, who will begin to allow her life to be used as a vehicle for the breaking in of God’s Kingdom in that hurting land? How were these words heard in Iraq this week? How were they heard in New York? How were they heard in Gaza, where ancient angers and hatreds have reared their heads again this week in violence? Will just one allow his life to become a gift of grace, wrapped in the cover of forgiveness?

How do we hear these words? Does your concept of forgiveness has a limit? Are there, in other words, some offenses for which forgiveness is not an option and may actually be considered the immoral thing to do? I admit that there are limits beyond which I would have a very hard time to forgive. But if I understand Jesus, to forgive is to offer grace, not my grace, but God’s…and God’s grace is the only thing, the only power that can transform the human heart. And if God’s grace knows no limits, after all the cross was meant for every single person, good & bad, than how can forgiveness know limits?  The more willing we are to forgive, the more able we are to be a builder in God’s Kingdom.

So I think the main question, the main message that comes out of this evening meal we have read about today is: How willing are we to give birth to moments of grace? That’s ultimately what forgiveness does….it gives birth to moments of grace. This is what we are seeing in this incredible display of the woman washing Jesus’ feet with her tears and wiping those tears from his feet with her hair….we see the overwhelming joy of a new person who has been birthed by grace.

If we live in the world this way…And it’s not easy, in fact it is very hard…and I am no master of it…..but if we choose to see the grace that can be given rather than the sin that has been…we help create men & women like the one who washed Jesus’ feet with her hair: people who have been transformed by grace. We live in a world filled with both sin & the potential for grace, all the time. What do we see? I think the point Jesus is making is that a life lived for him, is a life that chooses to see the grace that could be….over the sin that was.

Just for a day
let peace abide.
Just for a day,
let the ancient land called holy
soaked in blood, be quiet.
 
Just for a day
let peace abide.
Bring them away
from Bethlehem and Jerusalem,
from Nazareth and Nablus,
from Damascus, Riyadh and Amman.
 
Just for a day
let peace abide.
Bring them away from violence
slouching toward Annapolis;
unclench fists, open hardened hearts,
shatter foolish pride,
encourage risk takers -
Israelis, Arabs, Christians, Jews, Muslims ¬ with the holiness that births newness.
 
Just for a day
let peace abide.
Let the ancient land called holy
soaked in blood, be quiet.
For in your gaze a single day is a thousand years.

———–
Annapolis summit. 2007

It was a cube consisting of many separate pieces of charred wood, each piece dangling from a thin black wire, hanging from the ceiling of the De Young Museum in San Francisco.  This artwork by Cornelia Parker was entitled “Anti-Mass”.  It was a compelling sight.  It reminded me of the way blackened embers are suspended in air above a fire, as if momentarily weightless.  The installation was thing of simple beauty, taking the mind to a place beyond words. 
 
Then I read the card next to the installation and found that I was looking at the creatively re-arranged remains of a black Baptist church in Alabama which had been destroyed in a racist arson attack.  “Anti-Mass” was at least a double-play on words – referring to the airborne wood, and the violent act against the worship of the congregation that once met inside it.
 
As soon as I knew the story behind the wood, I sensed that I was in the presence of the sacred.  In a way, this work of art was the resurrection of that burned church.  The artist had taken that terrible act of racist arson and turned it inside out and upside down.  Just as the early Christians turned the crucifixion inside out and upside down, transforming the cross from a terrifying symbol of Roman state power into a hopeful sign of salvation.
 
When I got home from the museum, I reflected on the striking difference in my experience of the artwork between my first glance at it and my later discovery of the wood’s source.  It revealed how influenced I am by the emotional and spiritual associations that I make, or that others make for me.  It revealed that I, and the rest of us, seem to be primed for experiences of the sacred.  There is a God-shaped cube inside of me, ready to be filled by encounters with divinity.
 
It also revealed the resurrecting, redeeming power given to each of us by God.  We have within each of us a remarkable measure of divine energy which we can use to turn hopelessness into hope, violence into compassion, despair into positive vision, destruction into creativity.  If a church building, burned down in an act of hatred, can be brought back to life in such a remarkable manner, what isn’t possible for us, both as individuals and as a collective? 
 
What creative, redemptive leap can our nation take to help the people of Iraq turn seared flesh, twisted metal, and dusty rubble into elements of peace and prosperity?  How can we take the emotional charge from the injuries and insults we each suffer, and direct that energy toward healing and wholeness?  What can we do to transform the church from being a reliquary for old dogma into becoming a living spiritual community for the present? 
 
If an artist can bring about a resurrection with nothing more than wire and bits of burnt wood, think of what you and I can bring to life!  Each counter-intuitive action we take to change ourselves and the world for the better is a form of artwork, as worthy of “ooohs” and “aaahs” as anything hanging in a museum…

In a passage from Marilynne Robinson’s novel Gilead, Reverend John Ames reflects on how “commonplace” our sins are. Speaking of his parishioners he says, “So often people tell me about some wickedness they’ve been up to, or they’ve suffered from, and I think ‘Oh, that again!’” I imagine that, enthroned in heaven, God’s response to most of our confession is probably quite similar. We may find our sins fascinating, but God has seen them countless times before.  And I believe it is God’s intent to help us realize that the glory and the brilliance of Christ’s resurrection is more than sufficient to heal our grubby little transgressions.

But what about our truly heinous crimes? On August 19, 1982, the lifeless body of nineteen-year-old Karen Range was discovered by her mother in the bathroom of their Cincinnati home. Karen’s throat had been repeatedly slashed, her face and head were severely bruised and battered, and her clothes ripped open. Three separate bloody shoeprints were present on Karen’s chest. She had been stomped upon and ultimately bled to death.

On the afternoon of Karen’s death twenty-two year old David Steffen was working as a door-to-door salesman. Karen allowed him to enter her family’s house where he promptly raped and murdered her. Two years later David was sentenced to death for his crime and he has been awaiting execution ever since.

Mansfield, Ohio is a small, depressed midwestern city. The streets are lined with once-stately homes, now sagging and sorely needing paint. The day I drove into town was gray with rain and it was hard to imagine other weather ever visiting the place. Mansfield’s economy is largely dependent on a maximum security prison where generations of residents have worked. The prison itself resembles a particularly grim junior high school more than the gleaming high-tech fortresses Hollywood has placed in our minds. Two guards led me toward death row. We drove through the empty prison yard on a golf cart, rolling smoothly through the rain, and past the the barbed wire. One guard drank a can of Mountain Dew. Arriving on death row, I walked through several gates and past three checkpoints before meeting David in a classic government room, with fluorescent lights and gray plastic furniture.

David looks younger than his age. His skin is smooth and he wears his brown hair short. His face is framed by a pair of thick and heavy glasses. Dozens of prison movies taught me that inmates are sensitive to sudden movements and David proved this cliché true. We sat across a small table as we spoke and he kept his eyes on my hands, ready, it seemed, to respond defensively each time I picked up my pen or reached toward a bottle of water. Aside from this habitual wariness he was remarkably peaceful for a man living under such intense pressure.

Twenty-one years is a long time to ponder eternity and David struck me as someone who was contemplative to begin with. He provided thoughtful, patient answers to my questions about grace and guilt, citing scripture throughout our conversation.

As soon as it became clear that my questions assumed some great difference between sinners on death row and sinners out in the world, David took exception. “Remember, Paul says ‘the wages of sin is death.’ This means that we’re all on death row. Everybody is sentenced to die, because everybody sins.” He went on to say, “Jesus teaches that if you’ve ever hated your brother without just cause you’re guilty of murder! Well, what’s the penalty for murder? We’re all on death row.”

I was taken aback by his gall. A convicted and admitted killer, comparing the gravity of his crime to the petty wrongdoing you and I get up to. But this is a killer who has spent the bulk of more than 8,000 death row days reading the Bible. And, of course, he is right. Scripture is clear. Each one of us spends a lifetime earning condemnation.

Throughout our conversation David consistently prefaced the words “grace” or “mercy” with the adjective “unmerited.” After awhile I became suspicious that perhaps the weight of his sin had caused David to rush toward God’s love before truly reckoning with the horror of his crime. I was concerned that he might have cheapened the forgiveness God offers by seizing it too easily. And so I asked him if his sense of grace had overwhelmed his sense of guilt.  He said, “The gospel requires us to not simply be sorry, but to be transformed by our sorrow. For me, this is a daily transformation.” For David, guilt and grace stand in tension. Forgiveness has not erased the memory of sin.

In his essay Punishing Christians, Stanley Hauerwas writes “the Christian understanding of punishment must begin with the recognition that [God does not] punish us for our sins, but sin is our punishment.” In other words, the sinner’s punishment is the agony which comes from knowing that he is wholly estranged from the person he was created to be, from his victims, and from God. David said, “I’ll never forget what happened 23 years ago. That always is deeply, deeply disturbing to me. But I press on toward the goal [of living a righteous life]. There has to come a point where you receive forgiveness and then forgive yourself. Not in order to justify your actions, but in order to accept what God did for you on the cross.”

My sense is that David is “transformed by his sorrow” in that he wrestles daily with his horrifying sin, and is therefore driven daily into the arms of a God who gives him mercy he has not earned. To his credit, he is well aware that it is then incumbent upon him to live a life which reflects that love.

There was only one point in our conversation when David lightened up. He smiled while saying, “Christ says to love your neighbor as yourself. Which is easy to say, not so easy to do. Especially when you have people around you who are so recalcitrant that they seem oblivious to anything positive.” I imagine this is true. There are days when I have a very hard time showing God’s love to my neighbors, and they are polite professionals, not unrepentant killers. 

Toward the end of our talk David became animated as he told a story. He began to gesture with his hands and the chains tying them together clanked and rattled in accompaniment. Outside his cell there are two fences, each about 20 feet high, covered with roll after roll of concertina wire. The space between the fences is empty, a no man’s land designed to strand escapees. There is a rabbit that lives between the fences. David watches him every morning. He said, “The rabbit has no sense of where he is. He doesn’t know he’s living out his life in a maximum security prison. He eats his clover and his little dandelions and wakes up early. He has no sense that ‘I’m restricted by these fences all around me.’ It is the same for myself, I’m in prison, but I’m not letting myself be restricted, simply because I have shackles and handcuffs on. It doesn’t matter where you are. It is who you are that matters. It doesn’t matter that I’m in prison on death row. I still want to be pleasing to my Creator.”

At my church we confess our sins for two reasons. First, confession reminds us of how bad we are. By naming our sin we come to recognize how distant and different we are from God, from our own best selves, and from those our mistakes are wounding. At the same time, we confess in order to be reminded of how good God is. We do not bare our souls so that we might be punished. Rather, we confess in order to be forgiven. Even though he wasn’t expecting the overwhelming grace he received, the prodigal son came home to be fed, not kicked. Each week in worship after we have laid our burdens down and named our sins, I see the reality of forgiveness in the relief on people’s faces. In confession we discover a love much more powerful than our wrongdoing.

But, on the scale our world uses to rank its crimes, my congregation’s wrongdoing pales in comparison to the murder of Karen Range. I stepped into that prison with my heart in my throat, anticipating the worst of the worst. Instead I found a broken sinner, redeemed and pieced back together by the love of God. Instead of a monster I found grace, a power strong enough to transform monsters into gentle men.

I was surprised to learn that David is not opposed to capital punishment. Sticking to his rigorously scriptural worldview he cited Paul’s claim that God has given the state power for a reason, and that this power is to be respected. “Society has its own yardstick by which it measures righteousness. Most people don’t think they’ve done anything bad enough to go to hell and so they’re ok. But they think people on death row [should be sent to hell]. And although God may show us mercy, he’s given the State the authority to bear the sword, should it choose. But if the state bears the sword in vain it will have to answer for itself one day.” 

His argument is compelling and Biblical as well, but nevertheless sitting on death row with him, I sensed the pressure of a greater reality pressing against the neat division he has made between the values of Christianity and the values of our world. In this reality — let’s call it what it is — the Kingdom of God, David has not only been rehabilitated, but something more important and more primary has happened; he has been forgiven. David may think otherwise, but in talking to him I found myself wishing that God’s Kingdom determined our world, rather than remaining isolated in the ineffectual realm of religion.

And I found myself aching for the day when the society which sees David Steffen as an irredeemable criminal, and the God who claims him as a beloved child are folded into one another. As we wait for that day, as we wait for the final trumpet in our long and tragic meantime, my fear is that by killing David our country will contradict the work of the God who has already redeemed him. Even worse, by killing other monstrous criminals who have yet to be redeemed, I fear we are taking the outrageously bold step of stopping God’s work in its tracks. 

When I walked back through the prison yard the rain had let up and the guard who had maintained such a steely silence on our way to death row and during the interview began to talk. I didn’t ask her, but my impression was that she had also sensed God’s reality straining against the chains tying David down. She proved to be the most pleasant person I’d spoken with in days. Surprisingly, dogs were out running in the yard, free, chasing tennis balls thrown by inmates. The guard explained these dogs had been removed from abusive homes and were being trained by prisoners before returning to the world. I fought back tears and held it together until I reached the parking lot. Then, I began to sob. I cried for Karen Range and for her tortured family and for the twisted mess David Steffen must once have been. I cried for the guard, so kind yet seen by David as one step removed from an executioner. And I cried for our world which is enlightened by a grace so great it can transform the cross into a sign of love and death row into a place of redemption, but is still convinced that the best response to sin is vengeance.

Lately, I have been hearing – deep inside my heart and my head – fragments of old hymns – those songs of the faith that formed me as a child. Cherub Choir. Church Camp. Vacation Bible School.  I’m not sure why these melodies are haunting me – except that this is the archetypal language of our faith.

“Jesus loves me, this I know” – “The Church’s one foundation is Jesus Christ her Lord” – “I would be true” – “I love to tell the story of Jesus and his love” – Oh, the B-I-B-L-E, that’s the book for me.” And the non-inclusive, but lovely words : “Dear Lord and Father of mankind, forgive our foolish ways.” Yes, these days, the foolish ways seem to follow me everywhere I go.

Don Imus provocatively naming the ugly truth of our national racism. “Forgive our foolish ways.” American provoked violence flooding the streets of Baghdad - innocent blood drenching God’s fragile earth. “Forgive our foolish ways.” Bickering among our diminishing Presbyterian voices, arguing about which exclusion is worse than any other – while EVERY exclusion grieves the heart of God.  “Forgive our foolish ways.” Global warming complicating all our climate predictability  – spring time warmth drowning in the confusion of nature’s tears. “Forgive our foolish ways.” Budget angst and building woes and worship wars consuming the best energies of our faithful congregations. “Forgive our foolish ways.” Our childhood faith – so fresh and powerful and real – compromised by middle age survival anxiety. “Forgive our foolish ways.”

For thirty years I have been reading the appearance stories in scripture – those post Easter tales of astonishing power – the touch point of our faith – so hard to comprehend, but so tantalizing with trustworthiness – shattering our temptation to be cynical and negative and depressed. And this year, John’s account of that first visit to the Upper Room has resurrected me more completely than ever before. Jesus appearing through locked doors – announcing Peace – and breathing power.  Why?  Because he offers one thing more clearly than anything else – he offers forgiveness. And then he empowers forgiveness – sending us to forgive – ourselves and everyone else.

After the Virginia Tech shootings, some of the earliest visitors to the campus were representatives of the Amish community from Pennsylvania. They were, of course, survivors of their own tragedy – that senseless shooting of Amish children by a disturbed gunman last year. The forgiveness flowing out of those Amish hearts following that tragedy both stunned and healed the nation. And now they are sharing that wisdom and witness in the shadows of the Blacksburg carnage. The lesson is so clear – forgiveness frees, bitterness destroys. God knows that – which is why Jesus appears after the resurrection in that upper room. Jesus simply appears – so that he can breathe Holy Spirit power and infuse forgiveness deep within our troubled hearts And it is in that forgiving moment that the church is born – as the resurrected Body of Christ on earth.

“Dear Lord and Father of mankind, forgive our foolish ways.” And the Easter gift is clear. We ARE forgiven. And as forgiven people we are sent to forgive – and set free all the foolishness of our human living.

Thanks be to God!

May it be so – for you and for me.  Amen.