Good Friday: The Celebration of the Lord’s Passion, rcl yr a, 2023
ISAIAH 52:13-53:12; PSALM 22; HEBREWS 10:16-25; JOHN 18:1-19:42
I will put my laws in their hearts
Kelly Gissendaner was executed by the State of Georgia on September 30th, 2015. It was an unusual case. She had conspired with her lover to kill her husband. Despite the fact that she hadn’t committed the murder herself, she was sentenced to death in 1998.
The fact that she had only conspired in the murder of her husband, however, did not take much part in the campaign to commute her death sentence. Instead, the campaign to commute her sentence and save her from execution—a campaign that included letters from theologians and pastors from all over the US and Europe, and even included a plea from Pope Francis—had to do with the very real conversion she experienced in her time in prison.
According to her pastors, and prison chaplains, Kelly had entered prison angry, closed, self-centred, and with little insight. But as Susan Bishop, her chaplain, would say, “I have seen much ‘jailhouse religion,’” but, with Kelly, “It [was] not a superficial religious experience.”
After not being able to face the significance of her role in the murder of her husband, particularly the “pain and destruction his murder wrought on their children and extended family,” and hiding from what she had done, “maintaining a tough and arrogant persona,” with support Kelly would face the terrible truth: that she had become “a selfish and bitter person who ‘no longer valued life.’” God’s forgiveness, however, was transforming. And “[g]radually, the layers of self-serving behavior and self-loathing thinking began to peel away.”
Kelly would eventually enter an academic theology program while on death row at Metro State Prison. She would thrive in this program, and even begin some correspondence with Professor Jürgen Moltmann—one of the leading German theologians of the 20th century—a correspondence that became a friendship. It was especially through Moltmann’s writing, and her friendship with him, that Kelly was able to hope, even, even as she faced death on a gurney by lethal injection—a hope that was not about escaping death, but a hope built on the promise of God in Christ in the resurrection—it was a hope that she was able to share with other inmates, eventually becoming an informal inmate pastor.
But I am getting a bit ahead of myself; I will say more about this way of hope on Sunday. Today is about something else: the wreckage that is the cross, and what that ruins has to do with our ruins, and our wreckage.
Kelly was convicted in the Bible Belt, and Jesus haunts the imagination of the Southern US; Kelly’s whole Board of Pardons and Paroles were Christian men, men who would decide not commute her sentence. They had some fatal theological ideas. “Doesn’t the fact that Jesus died on the cross show that good can come from death?” said one board member. A pastor working on Kelly’s pardon responded at a prayer vigil the night of the hearing, in indignation: “ … in the Bible Belt in Georgia, you’re asking a room filled with pastoral leaders that question? Really? Why did Jesus die on the cross? Why? So that Kelly can live … and ‘declare the works of the Lord.’”
We do hold that something good does come of this cross, the crucifixion of Jesus; that it is a sacrifice, there is an exchange, and that in this death the sinless one carries our sin, in order that our sin would be blotted out; sin and death are exchanged, through sacrifice, for holiness and life.
That Jesus gathers up all the suffering of the world here, God suffering in Jesus with all those who suffer; as Denise Levertov puts it in her poem on Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love, this unity of humanity and God on the cross, “… opened Him utterly to the pain of all minds, all bodies … from first beginning to last day … within the mesh of the web, Himself woven within it, yet seeing it, seeing it whole. Every sorrow and desolation He saw, and sorrowed in kinship.” Our Lord sorrows on the cross in kinship with our sorrow and desolation; and with Kelly’s sorrow and desolation. This is the love of Jesus poured out for us.
One of the theologians that Kelly read in her theology program was former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, a sermon of his that speaks of the way that resurrected life “must be built upon the ruins of the past.” We come here today knowing how the story will play out—that the crucifixion here remembered is not the last word on death or suffering, but that life will come of it. But it is a new life that is built on the ruins, a life built on the wreckage of the past. Williams puts it this way, speaking about the disciples, in that sermon that became so important to Kelly: “Their failures, his cross, [are] all bound together … memories never to be obliterated, but now taken up and healed in the new age.”
As one of her teachers and friends puts it, speaking about Kelly: there are consequences for the new life, especially when the old life includes things we can’t take back, like “an irreparable act that leaves … destruction and pain in its wake.” The resurrection means going back to the ruins and the wreckage of the past, building from there with God the new city, a new city that stands on ruins. “‘[R]estoration can only begin here,’” says Williams, on the ash-heap, in the wreckage, on the ruins.
And so yes, Kelly can live, and so can we, we too can live because of what Jesus accomplishes for us. But we do not live, any more than Jesus is resurrected, without building our new life on the ash-heap, on the wreckage, of the past.
And this often does mean looking at ourselves, and at the wreckages we have caused; and it often does mean looking at the ways that we, as human communities, cause the wreckages of other human beings, in things like systemic poverty; it does mean looking at the ways that we, as the human community as a whole, are taking part in the wreckage of a planet, and perhaps even on human life itself.
Resurrection does not come without the cross, a cross that reveals the iniquity of human systems, a cross that reveals the iniquity of human beings, a cross that reveals the iniquity of corrupt powers that want to survive by way of death. And so we repent in the recognition that we are part of the ruin of our lives and the lives of others. And the resurrection, the forgiveness, and the new life that Jesus offers does not avoid this wreckage, but builds precisely on that ruin.
Kelly, through reading sermons by Rowan Williams, and through a relationship with Professor Jürgen Moltmann and her theology teachers, and through other inmates and the guards even, and with the family she so damaged—she came to terms with her part in the death of her husband, and the cost of what she could never pay back. “It is impossible to put into words the overwhelming sorrow and remorse I feel …” she wrote; “There is just no way to capture the depth of my sorrow and regret. … I will never understand how I let myself fall into such evil but I have learned firsthand that no one, not even me, is beyond redemption through God’s grace and mercy.”
It took a hard look at her own wreckages for her to build a new life through a repentance that would bring reconciliation, and would bring life; her children, once estranged, were the ones who spoke most passionately on their mother’s behalf and for her life—and this was most certainly new life for Kelly, and for her children—built on a gaze and a long lookat the ash-heaps, and the wreckages— the sorrow that Jesus knows, “Himself woven within it, yet seeing it, seeing it whole. Every sorrow and desolation He saw, and sorrowed in kinship.”
I am not telling Kelly’s story in order to say, “be more like Kelly.” I am not even telling this story in order to say, “be more like Jesus.” Instead, I am inviting you to join with me in bearing witness to the love of God poured out for Kelly; a transforming love that can transform even the tough and the arrogant, the selfish and the bitter; I am inviting you to join with me in bearing witness to the love of God poured out for us: a love that transforms us all, by grace.
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.
Angus Sinclair was appointed Director of Music of St. John the Evangelist on February 1, 2023. Having graduated in 1981 (Honours B.Mus.) in organ performance from Wilfrid Laurier University, he went on to distinguish himself as a church musician, recitalist and accompanist touring in both Canada and the UK. For over 40 years Angus has served parishes and congregations throughout Southwestern Ontario as director of music. He experiences his present appointment to St. John’s as a welcome homecoming, both spiritually and musically.
As our parish musician, he provides both support and leadership so that a variety of parish programs can find musical expression and attract participation. When our handbell choir is in season, he is one of our ringers. At parish dinners, he provides popular piano music for the guests to dine by. For both worship services and concerts, he will rehearse and accompany vocal and instrumental soloists from our congregation on piano, organ, or even accordion.
Angus Sinclair was appointed Director of Music of St. John the Evangelist on February 1, 2023. Having graduated in 1981 (Honours B.Mus.) in organ performance from Wilfrid Laurier University, he went on to distinguish himself as a church musician, recitalist and accompanist touring in both Canada and the UK. For over 40 years Angus has served parishes and congregations throughout Southwestern Ontario as director of music. He experiences his present appointment to St. John’s as a welcome homecoming, both spiritually and musically.