Scripture: Romans 12:1-17
All sermons are personal in one way or another. In my view they are supposed to be that way…up to a point.
I had a teacher in seminary who had a different idea about this, however. He believed that a preacher should remove him or herself as much as possible from the sermon. We were there, he told us, to present the truths of the Christian faith as best we knew how—granted that we would have to do that in our own particular way—but we weren’t there, he said, to speak for ourselves; we were there to speak for the Christian community. We definitely were not there to use the sermon to speak about things that are going on in our lives, to spout off about some favorite topic, to have an outlet for personal expression, or in the vernacular to dump our personal “stuff” on the congregation. That all seemed right to me, and I wrote sermons on that theory for a number of years.
That approach still seems partly right to me. But what also seems partly right to me is that if a preacher is not talking about things that matter to her, if a preacher is not letting others in on his own thought processes or some struggle he is having, if a preacher is not speaking in some way from his or her heart or mind, then there will be no heart or mind in the words at all, and people will quickly lose interest, most of all the preacher himself. So I have come to the point of feeling that I need to allow myself to be quite personal but at the same time not so personal that I cross the line into using the sermon for mostly personal purposes. I say all this because that is an issue for me this morning, and I have to admit that it feels to me a bit like I am pushing quite close to that thin line that separates being personal from using the sermon as personal therapy. I do have some need of therapy this morning.
Not that my subject matter is not of general concern. Or for that matter that my words will seem to you to be especially personal. Maybe they will; maybe not. But my reason for speaking about the death penalty, which is what I want to talk about, my reasons for speaking about that are quite personal. I do need to work through some personal feelings, and if that turns out to be too much the case, then I apologize. But I’m going to do it anyway.
This is not a sermon on “Christianity and Capital Punishment”. This is not an attempt to determine what the Christian position on capital punishment is, has been, or ought to be. I am not too concerned about presenting evidence, marshalling arguments, making a case. I am not wanting to prove my point, imply that there is only one Christian position, or suggest that good Christians will all have pretty much the same stand on this issue. I know that there are a variety of thoughts on this not only in the Christian community in general but in this particular Christian community, and I’m not wanting to suggest how other people ought to think, or how they will think once they have seen the light. However, I do have a point of view that I am not going to hide, and if it sounds like I am engaging in an argument as I speak this morning, please remember that I said at the beginning that I didn’t want to sound that way or intend to sound that way. There are lots of things that might be relevant to a debate over the death penalty that I am not concerned about this morning.
In the interest of full disclosure, however, I need to say that I have been an opponent of the death penalty for quite a long time, so long I can’t remember when I firmed up my thinking on the matter. I have been known, not very often but occasionally, to have written letters, stood on street corners or in silent vigils, carried signs, spoken at rallies in opposition to the death penalty. Since I have been in Charlottesville, I have done all of those things, but I have not preached on the subject, though I think every year about the time of Palm Sunday, I have considered using the crucifixion as an occasion to say something about capital punishment. I’ve always decided against it, but thought that I would eventually find some time to preach about capital punishment at Sojourners. It’s just that that time has never come around…until now.
Why now? You may remember that a couple of weeks ago during prayer time, Lee Walters spoke about the murder trial of a young man who had been for a short time the foster child of John and Ruth Stone, who are part of our Sojourners family. Lee gave a little background and she and Sharon both asked for prayers for the Stones and for everyone connected to the trial, and I had sent around a prayer request by email as well. I was among several people from Sojourners who stopped by to see Ruth and John in court in the early stages of the trial, and it ended up that some of us spent some hours in court over the course of the next couple of weeks. I hadn’t necessarily planned to do that. Of course, I wanted to stay in touch with Ruth and John. But the truth is I also found myself involved in what was going on, and on days when I was able, found myself being drawn to the courtroom, not only to offer some small amount of support for Ruth and John, but just for some reason felt drawn to be there.
I had been reading about this case in the papers for several days before Lee called and let me know that one of the people on trial had been the foster child of John and Ruth. What had been a rather distant event, one of those things you sort of glance at in the paper among many other things, suddenly became of much more interest. Then in the course of spending a little time in the courtroom I realized that I had other connections to this case besides the Stones. I gradually realized, for instance, wasn’t sure I was seeing right at first, but gradually realized I knew one of the jurors. I also found that I happened to know an attorney who was connected to the case. And then that I was acquainted with a woman who was present in the courtroom to support the murder victim’s father. Odd connections. Coincidences. That’s Charlottesville for you! You can encounter people you know or are connected to in some way just about anytime, anywhere. That kind of thing happens around here fairly often.
Except that that’s not the way I felt it in this instance. What I felt was not that these were examples of those charming little Charlottesville coincidences that happen every now and again, but that each of those connections was one more nudge, one more reminder that I had been deluding myself in those days, just a short while ago, when I was looking at the headlines and the pictures of strangers looking out at me from the front page of the papers and thinking that I had no connection to what was going on there. First I realized that I did have a connection, through Ruth and John. And then it happened that there were also these other small connections that said to me, “You know, it’s not just Ruth and John.” Then, they also said to me, “You know, it’s not just us either.”
I knew casually one juror. I began to feel connected to all sixteen. I should say quickly that as I understood this case, there was really only one question seriously at issue: whether each of the defendants was going to spend the rest of his life in jail, or whether one or both of them would be put to death. So even before the sentencing phase of the trial began, I was putting myself in the place of the jurors and feeling the weight of having to decide whether someone would live or die, eventually having to do that by making up lists of pros and cons, aggravating factors and mitigating factors, and then making a calculation, adding up the columns on the relative merits of killing someone, or not.
I knew casually a lawyer not arguing the case but connected to it in another way. I began to feel connected to all the attorneys. I put myself in the place of the defense attorneys and felt the weight of not wanting to minimize or excuse the loss of one person’s life, the murder victim’s, but trying to prevent the loss of two more. I put myself in the place of the prosecutors, mandated by John Ashcroft to seek the death penalty as part of a nationwide effort to secure more capital convictions, who I wanted to believe did not have their heart in taking life, but who sometimes as part of their honorable work in trying to make society safer than it would otherwise be, sometimes are required by their superiors to try to see to it that people die. I felt the weight of their task.
I knew very casually someone connected to the family of the murder victim, but it was not hard at all to feel connected at some basic human level to all of them. I put myself in their place and tried to feel the weight of their loss and the weight of other parts of their story as I became aware of it. It was a heavy weight, and while I could feel connected, I knew I couldn’t begin to feel it the way they did.
I knew John and Ruth. Not just because of them, I began, just began, but did begin to feel connected to the defendants and their families. I tried—and failed, but kept on trying—to put myself in their place and to experience their lives as their stories were told in sometimes depressing detail to a jury sitting in judgment while unemotionally someone types it in to the court record and a newspaper reporter does her best to take notes so that these very difficult life stories, stories that defy understanding and acceptance can be reduced to a few inches of newspaper copy.
As I in various ways at various times tried to put myself in the place of the various other people in the courtroom, everywhere I turned, there was this heaviness, that affected everyone, an accumulation of duties and responsibilities and the playing out of tragic roles. I came away from my brief involvement with not some new ideas about the death penalty but with a bodily sense that this process takes a heavy toll on everyone involved. And it is not just the process of imposing the death penalty, which in this instance was averted. It is in the process of even seeking the death penalty. It is a process that is unremittingly heavy and gloomy. I of course don’t know that others felt the weight or the gloom that I was feeling on their behalf as I put myself in their place. It doesn’t matter. What I am testifying to is my own sense of being overwhelmed with the horror of it all. Of course just because something is heavy, or weighty, or filled with gloom does not mean it shouldn’t be done. I’m sure there are arguments to be made and people willing to make them that would say that no matter how burdensome or grim a process it may be, it needs to be done. I can only say that I hope those arguments are very compelling because I believe the costs of even seeking the death penalty, not the financial costs, the human costs are very great and are more than we are willing to admit.
I at first didn’t know what scripture to choose for this morning. There are lots of verses from the Bible that I suppose could be pulled in to support one idea or position or another relating to the death penalty. God knows there is enough killing in the Bible and enough passages that recommend or condone various kinds of killing, including capital punishment. There are also plenty of passages that point in the other direction. Then I remembered the passages from Romans that doesn’t say anything directly about capital punishment but talks about our being connected to each other, in fact being part of one another, members of the same body, called to weep when others weep and rejoice when others rejoice and suggesting that we not think too highly of our own wisdom or virtue. It seemed appropriate. In fact it helped me realize what it was that I most wanted to say today.
In my mind and spirit everyone sitting in the courtroom, everyone connected with this case, was bound together in the sense at least that we were all involved and all afflicted with the need to decide whether to kill. Not everyone may have felt it that way. I did. We were all afflicted, and whether we wanted to admit it or not, members of the same body.
I also could not help but wonder to myself just how many degrees of separation there are between the defendants and me. I’m thinking less than six. There is of course the inevitable question of what would have become of me if I had been born into that situation, raised in that environment, had to deal with those conditions. How would I have fared? What would I have done? I don’t know of course. And maybe it’s a pointless question since we can never know the answer. But what is not pointless is the reminder that it does take a village to raise a child and sometimes the village fails some of its children and I am part of that village and that failure. We are members of one another, and in some deep way I am part of the crime that has been committed. Not guilty of it, but not separate from it either. Of course we don’t justify or excuse bad actions, especially violent actions, especially murder, because someone has had a tough life, no matter how tough or how heart-wrenching it was. We hold people accountable for their actions no matter how hard their life has been. That’s why some people get to go to prison for the rest of their lives and some people get to live outside of prison.
But executing someone, even if it is a non-innocent someone, even if it is a someone capable of horrible violence, says that there is no connection between me and that person who may receive a death sentence who is sitting just a few feet away from me across a wooden railing in a courtroom. The death sentence, even the possibility of a death sentence, says that there is no connection between him and me, and that is not so. The death sentence, even the possibility of the death sentence, says that I am so sure of my own complete virtue and his complete lack of virtue that I can ask the state, otherwise known as “the people”, of which I am one, to keep me and dispose of him, and I can’t agree to that. The death sentence, even the possibility of the death sentence, says that we are absolutely sure that the disease we are fighting and need to get rid of is this person and can be gotten rid of by flicking a switch or administering a disease fighting injection, that it is no more complicated than that and does not in some way involve me, does not involve all of us. But it does.
I have had all these thoughts, and many others, brought home to me in a personal way over the last couple of weeks. It has resulted, I hope, not in an argument, as I said at the beginning. I haven’t wanted it to be in the spirit of an argument. I have wanted this morning to testify, in the religious sense of that word, not the legal sense. I still want to allow that there may be legitimate arguments to be made for the death penalty, legitimate arguments based on a person’s Christian faith, but to be true to myself and to the Christian faith I hold, I have to say that those arguments will have to be made by someone else. The person who makes those arguments will never be me. Amen.
Jim Bundy
October 17, 2004