Sermon for Easter Sunday 2023

The Sunday of the Resurrection: Easter Day, rcl yr a, 2023
ACTS 10:34-43; PSALM 118:1-2, 14-24; COLOSSIANS 3:1-4; JOHN 20:1-8

Set your minds on things that are above

I invite you today to bear witness with me to the outpouring of God’s love for us in a resurrection that gives us hope for our lives in the present; but today especially, I would invite you to bear witness with me to the outpouring of God’s love through a person we might least suspect; a woman on death row in the state of Georgia by the name of Kelly Gissendaner.

When Kelly was on death row, a number of years before her tragic, and senseless execution by the State of Georgia, and not long after her new, and surprising, but deepening faith—she entered a prison theology program. According to the grizzled chaplains with decades of experience in the penitentiary, Kelly’s experience was no “jailhouse religion,”— “It [was] not a superficial religious experience.” And the theology program she entered only deepened her faith even more.

Part of what happened was that she was slowly able to make an honest appraisal of her life, and the part she took in the murder of her husband; this honesty with herself before God led to honesty with her children, and led to reconciliation, through a supervised mediation program, a reconciliation with her children that was made possible first through God’s forgiveness, and then through the forgiveness of her children.

Kelly’s experience of faith did not lead her away from the irreparable damage she had done, but rather, her faith led her first to that wreckage—and then, building upon the wreckage she caused, she built a new life—a new life of hope, despite the fact  that her death hung over her each and every day she spent in prison.

One of the theologians that Kelly read was Jürgen Moltmann—an internationally renowned professor, known particularly for his theology of hope. Professor Moltmann’s own conversion had happened as a German prisoner of war in the World War 2 POW camps of the United Kingdom, where he was offered the opportunity to train as a pastor for post-war Germany. As Moltmann put it in his biography, “the fellow-sufferer who carries you, with your suffering, summon[s] up the courage to live again, and I was slowly seized by a great hope for the resurrection into God’s “wide space.””

And as this internationally renowned theologian became friends with Kelly, a woman learning theology on death row, they became companions on the way; and Kelly grew in a hope, the hope of a resurrection—but not a resurrection that would take place far away. Kelly believed in the resurrection of the body; in fact it was from here that she began her studies—on the foundation of God’s promise of a new life. And this hope for life after death gave her hope not for the future only, but for the present.

As the German Professor would put it in one of his letters to Kelly, “Resurrection means … Death will be no more, and hell is broken, and the separation from God will disappear …” In response, Kelly wrote, “the resurrection happened in this world. For Jesus himself and for us it means the renewal of human life, not escape from it.” Professor Moltmann responded writing that Kelly “deserve[d] the best grades in a doctoral seminar.”

What this would mean for Kelly was that she now had “a deeper hope,” as she puts it, “a deeper hope than I ever thought I could have within these prison walls!” Despite the whole world slowly closing in on her, she grew hopeful,hopeful in a resurrection that spoke to her future, but not simply her future after death, but her hope within her life even in her present, even in a life of incarceration intended to rob her of all hope. As her new friend and Professor put it in a letter to her, the “kingdom of God comes ‘on earth as in heaven.’” Including in Georgia’s Metro State Prison.

What this meant for Kelly, and for the prison in which she would live out those last years of her life, was that she was “uniquely positioned” “to provide hope for the most desperate [women] in a manner that no one else could possibly understand.” Kelly would risk disciplinary action by starting conversations with other women who were in lockdown with her, “speaking through the ventilation and plumbing systems that connected their cells.” Even the officers would say that Kelly made the dorm “less disruptive and more tolerable.” And that she was a “peacemaker.”

She would “reach out to scared, terrified young women and assure them that they could survive and … find peace” when they wouldn’t listen to or trust anyone else. One prisoner, speaking on Kelly’s behalf in the advocacy effort to get Kelly’s sentence commuted, had come to the lockdown unit screaming, having attempted suicide. But through her intervention, “Kelly stirred in me” she said “a new sight that allowed me to see that I had worthiness. I engaged myself in many different positive outlets and became a peer mentor at the same facility that I had been considered to be a disciplinary problem. At a place and at a time where I had once been hopeless, I had hope.”

Because Kelly was on death row, but incarcerated with people who weren’t, she was treated differently, as if she were a higher security threat. So whenever she was moved across the compound, she alone would have to wear handcuffs and have her feet shackled. Other prisoners were expected to turn their back on her and not speak to her as she was moved. But the respect that the prisoners had for Kelly was so high that in one of the most moving acts of disobedience, they would turn, “like a human wave,” and “face her and look her in the eye, or slightly turn away  but rotate their heads across their shoulders, and offer a simple ‘Hello, Kelly.’”

I wish I could end this sermon and say that the efforts made to have Kelly’s sentence commuted were successful, and that she was still on death row in Georgia, ministering to her inmates and friends, and still writing letters to eminent German Professors of Theology. Instead I have to say that she was executed by the State of Georgia according to an inhumane and unchristian system of retributive justice.

But what it still tells us, this story of Kelly Gissendaner, is that the resurrection is not about escape—it is about a hope in a future that can become real now. The resurrection doesn’t free us from the truth, but allows us to see the truth, to gaze upon the wreckage of our life, and know that there is hope—hope in Jesus, whose own crucifixion reveals the wreckage of this world, and the cruelty of this world. But we can gaze upon the wreckage, and even our part in it, because new life is built upon that wreckage. The victory of Jesus is not for saints—the victory of Jesus is for the sake of sinners; that is, the victory of Jesus is for the sake of us all. And it makes a difference in this world.

This is the grace of the resurrection—that the victory is already made sure in what God accomplishes for us and it changes us now. And if that is true, there is nothing to fear—not our past, nor even a state bent on killing its citizens. And we can have hope. The power of death and sin is vanquished. And it give us a hope that can transform the present—it can even transform the lockdown security unit in a Georgia women’s prison.

And so I will end with a few words from Kelly. Inviting you to bear witness with me to the love of God poured out for Kelly, and the love poured out through Kelly; a transforming love that can turn even the tough and the arrogant, the selfish and the bitter, into the loving and the hopeful.

One of her theology projects was a devotional journal she called A Journey of Hope. In the preface to her devotional, she writes this. “Over the course of the Certificate in Theology Program and through much reading and studying, I’ve learned that the Bible is not a book of saints, but of sinners and prisoners. God’s word is full of very real women and men; it tells of their failures, struggles, and sorrows.

But it also tells a story of their victories— won through the power of the God of Israel revealed in Jesus the Christ … Jesus Christ restored me,” she writes; I am no longer bent on destruction, but filled with new life and love.”

I owe credit, a great deal of credit, to Jennifer McBride and her book You Shall Not Condemn: A Story of Faith and Advocacy on Death Row, published by Cascade Books in 2022, for this sermon. All quotations (unless otherwise noted) are from this publication. If you would like to know more about Kelly, and her extraordinary, tragic story, seek out McBride’s book.

~Preston