Ark and Dove Presbyterian Church
February 17, 2019 I Desire Mercy, Not SacrificeWhen lightning strikes, it is not that a bolt from on high hits the ground. This is what we don’t see: an electrical charge surges in a cloud. This causes an opposite charge to surge on the ground. When the charge coming up from the ground connects with the one coming down from the cloud, lightning flashes. This—Sister Helen Prejean said to an auditorium of university students—this is what faith in God is like. It is what happens when divine life connects with human life, when the Holy Spirit and human spirit meet. Faith is like that. At least it was like that for one of those students in the audience. There I sat in the red velvet seats listening to a Lousianian nun talk of her ministry to men in death houses. I was taught to believe that women were not meant to preach and I believed this at the time. I was also taught to believe in an ordained order of crime and punishment, meaning that in life and in death we get what we deserve. But as Sister Helen preached with more power than any man I had ever heard, something like a charge built up within me. And then there was a flash, destroying altogether my backwards beliefs. A new faith ignited my world.In the light I saw Jesus in darkened places. Sister Helen said that day, Jesus is in the prisons. Jesus is on death row. Jesus is not where we most expect to find him. Jesus graces the guilty. I believed her and my faith grew in understanding as not long after graduation I saw Jesus in people I welcomed off prison vans into the shelter I managed. Through Sister Helen Prejean’s preaching, God sparked faith as in a lightning flash.Some of you might not recognize Sister Helen Prejean by her own face, but by the face of Susan Sarandon who won an Oscar portraying the nun in the 1995 film, Dead Man Walking. The film was made after Sarandon and director Tim Robbins were riveted by the book of the same name. Her book begins with a request from the Prison Coalition for Sister Helen to become a pen pal to a death-row inmate at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, Angola. She obliges the request, not knowing that this decision would soon put her in the national spotlight and at the center of a complex cultural debate. She would come to be known as the death penalty nun praised for her conviction and commitment and scorned as a bleeding heart liberal commie who cares for convicts and not their victims. Before all that Sister Helen lived a somewhat simpler life in pursuit of her calling to serve the poor. She resided in St. Thomas, a New Orleans housing project, and taught high-school dropouts at Hope House. When Sister Helen first moved to the St. Thomas Housing Project, she said, it seemed that I had changed countries: gunshots in the night or in broad daylight, blood on sidewalks, open drug deals, pregnant teenage girls, horrific encounters between young men and police, plenty of funerals and weeping mothers, and, for most young male residents, greased tracks straight into Angola Prison. In this country, her new neighbors suffered injustices done to them by law, landlords, employers, and banks. Sister Helen’s eyes were opened to the plight of the poor and the Christ who called her to such suffering. Still, she had more to see. While living in St. Thomas, she began writing to Elmo Patrick Sonnier, an inmate at Angola who was living under a death sentence for his part in an assault and murder. Sister Helen and Patrick Sonnier had a steady correspondence. As she read and wrote letters, she learned about his crime, his troubling trial, and his fate: execution by electrocution. Through everything she learned, she became as disturbed by his punishment as she was about his crime. Sister Helen visited Patrick at prison and became his spiritual adviser. As such, she helped him confront both guilt and grace. Eventually, Sister Helen accompanied Patrick to the death chamber, reciting Isaiah: Do not be afraid. She heard his last words, witnessed guards prepare the death machine, listened to a lawyer say Father forgive them, for they know not what they do, and watched Patrick die. On that night in April of 1984, Sister Helen thought, the people of Louisiana are sleeping, but if they could be brought close to see what happened here tonight, they would realize that we must find an alternative to government killings. That night, she made it her mission to abolish the death penalty in the United States.Death has always been a penalty for certain crimes committed in the United States. While many have opposed such a sentence on moral grounds, the courts have agreed that state killings are neither cruel nor inconsistent with respect for human dignity. Having walked with multiple men to their death by government, Sister Helen Prejean disagrees. No matter the method, she persistently argues, knowledge of impending death causes mental torture. As Johnny Cash sang about it, in your mind, in your mind…it all goes down in your mind… Even more, Sister Helen reasons, human persons have inviolable dignity and human rights simply because they are persons—no matter what acts they commit. I think it goes without saying that a person is stripped of dignity when condemned to death. The death penalty is a cruel punishment denying human dignity.As she walked with men on death row, Sister Helen’s eyes were opened more and more to the many problems of the death penalty. Here are some of them: 1) 99 % of the people on death row are poor and thus unable to acquire good legal representation; 2) it has been shown that the death penalty is far more often sought when the victim is white than when the victim is black; 3) since 1973, 160 wrongly convicted death row inmates have been freed following evidence found of innocence. Sister Helen accompanied two men with overwhelming evidence of innocence to their deaths. And finally, 4) Sister Helen often wonders how we can believe that a government, which cannot effectively fill potholes, can righty execute its citizens. In the dark halls of death row, at the dead-end of the law, she saw the real consequences of an ineffective legal system.As Sister Helen advised men on death row and engaged in activism and education aimed at abolishing the death penalty, her Christian opponents have thrown Bible chapter and verse in order to stop her. Truth is, there is much to throw. There is Exodus 21:23-25, which states, if any harm follows, then you shall give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, stripe for stripe. This is the classic Judeo-Christian proof text for many proponents of the penalty. However, insight into tribal communities like ancient Israel reveals that tribes would often kill many for the murder of one of their own. Life for life, therefore, was meant as a limitation to retributive violence. Then there are the opening verses of Romans 13, which encourage people to subject themselves to governing authorities who wield the sword against wrongdoers. These are the verses upon which Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia justified the death penalty. Sister Helen once opposed him in an airport because she understood that these words do not give God’s unqualified endorsement to the will of an empire. Revelation 13, in fact, denounces governing authorities as beasts. And back in Romans 13, only a few verses from Scalia’s proof text, Paul quotes a higher law to govern all peoples: love your neighbor as yourself. Lastly, with tragic irony, advocates cite the crucifixion of Jesus as justification for state executions. Last week, Wyoming Senator Lynn Hutchings defended the death penalty with these words: The greatest man who ever lived died via the death penalty for you and me. I’m grateful to him for our future hope because of this. Governments were instituted to execute justice. If it wasn’t for Jesus dying via the death penalty, we would all have no hope. Senator Hutchings’ appeal to the crucifixion is wrong for many reasons, but I will stick to two: one historical and one theological. First, early Christians opposed government executions because their Lord was unjustly executed. As Albert Camus pointed out, Emperor Julian in the 4th century did not want to give official offices to Christians because they systematically refused to pronounce death sentences or to have anything to do with them. How can we crucify when they crucified my Lord? The second problem with the senator’s statement is that it ignores God’s answer to the crucifixion: God raises this condemned criminal from death. The resurrection is God’s refusal to let a death sentence have the final word.As one of my friends says, bad theology kills. Sister Helen engages in rigorous theological debate about the death penalty because what we believe about crime and punishment reflects what we believe about God. On a New Orleans TV show, District Attorney Harry Connick Sr. told Sister Helen that God punishes wayward souls by condemning them to an eternity of hellfire and that the death penalty is a lesser judgement than the one handed down by the Divine Judge. Connick’s god is an offended and angry one who demands retribution for wrongdoing. It is a god who will even sacrifice his son to appease his own wrath. This is not our God.Our God is One who is praised in the Psalms as abundant in mercy. Our God, the prophets proclaim, loves kindness. Our God does not abhor the human condition, but enters into it in Jesus Christ. It is in Jesus Christ that we come to know the true nature of our God. Jesus convinces stone throwers to stop an execution. He accompanied wrongdoers and when the lawmen questioned, he said, I desire mercy, not sacrifice. Go now, figure out what that means. He took on the cross not to settle a divine debt or soothe the Father’s rage, but to rob death and all its servants of power. On that cross, he looked to the condemned criminal beside him and told the criminal not of his coming damnation, but his imminent salvation. And he taught that he will always be found not in throne rooms, but in prison cells. As the Swiss theologian Karl Barth said, Jesus Christ is the judged Judge and his judgment is grace.For these reasons and more, Sister Helen asks of DA Connick: is God vengeful, demanding a death for a death? Or is God compassionate, luring souls into love so great that no one can be considered enemy? Sister Helen identifies the many wrongs of the death penalty. To Christians, she is asking whether it is commensurate with the character of God. So for a moment, set aside its arbitrary application, its bias of class and race, the cases of innocence, and consider whether it is ever an appropriate punishment for even the worst crimes. Here is where the death penalty nun pushes us: who are we to judge an unfinished life? Do we really believe that a person can reform? Are we each the sum of what we do or is our worth something other than the sum of our actions? Do we have qualifications for believing that God saves sinners? Just how gracious is God?Sister Helen often says, everyone is worth more than the worst act of his or her life. If that is believed, then no one should be killed for their actions. It takes faith to believe this. Faith, she told death row inmate Dobie Gillis Williams, faith is when you so believe in Jesus that you shape your thoughts and actions to his way of seeing and doing things, especially the way he reached out and loved everyone, even outcasts, even his enemies.This is faith that strikes both church steeples and prison towers—faith like a lightning flash.- Pastor Jon Nelson ................
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