A chaplain s take on capital punishment



Saturday, June 27, 2009

Some years ago I posted myself at the back fence of the Governor's 
Mansion on Lavaca Street so that I might be a silent, and therefore 
unobtrusive, witness to Jesus on a night when the State of Texas was 
scheduled to put to death a young man from my father's hometown of 
Grapeland.

Several vocal protesters had arrived before me, and like many of us 
did in the '60s in the context of protesting everything from the 
Vietnam War to the Jim Crow laws of those days, these folks lifted 
high homemade placards while they marched in a wide circle, chanting 
the predictable slogans of a tepid and typically ineffective civil 
disobedience.

I gave thought to joining their parade but just as quickly decided 
against it. I'd already written the governor a heartfelt letter 
appealing to the better angels of his nature. Even before I slapped a 
stamp on the envelope, I told myself that this letter would never 
reach the governor's desk, that it would be read by some scribe on 
the state payroll who would, no doubt, send me a reply filled with 
all manner of rationalizations justifying state-sanctioned murder in 
the name of law and order.

On the other side of the street, an elderly woman wearing a T-shirt 
identifying herself simply as a member of Austin's First United 
Methodist Church sat alone in a lawn chair as she held a sign that 
pleaded: "Please don't kill anyone in my name." I liked her sign and 
I appreciated her willingness to come sit on a street corner on a 
hot, humid evening so that she might witness to God's kind of justice 
as opposed to going blissfully along with Caesar's irrational agenda 
of killing human beings so as to demonstrate once and for all that 
killing human beings is wrong.

The last time I checked, seven out of 10 Texans approved of the death 
penalty, and not surprisingly, Texas executes more people than any 
other state (and for that matter, most foreign countries). Hence, it 
should surprise no one that our current governor has sat by while 200 
fellow human beings have been executed over in Huntsville. If he 
commuted death sentences, he'd never be re-elected.

But I wonder about those pro-death penalty Texans. Don't they know 
that Jesus was a victim of the same state-sanctioned murder to which 
we've become so tragically inured here in the Lone Star State? The 
Jewish Sanhedrin did not kill Jesus. Rome did! And from the very 
beginning of his brief three-year ministry, Jesus opposed any and all 
expressions of violence.

By far, the most authoritative book I've read on the subject of the 
death penalty was "Within These Walls: Memoirs of a Death House 
Chaplain," written by a fellow Presbyterian minister, Carroll 
Pickett. The Rev. Pickett begrudgingly began assisting with 
executions back in the '70s when capital punishment was once more 
ruled legal. Today Carroll Pickett travels coast to coast, advocating 
passionately and effectively against the death penalty, but more 
importantly he witnesses to the life and to the radical love of Jesus.

I think Pickett's book is a must-read for every human being who, like 
me, believes that all human life is sacred. Pickett has come to 
understand that Caesar's kind of justice all too often looks and 
smells a whole lot like vengeance, while for God justice is quite 
simply always the same thing — an incomprehensible love made public.

Bob Lively serves on the adjunct faculty of Seton Cove Spirituality 
Center and is a teacher in residence at First Presbyterian Church.

Find this article at:
http://www.statesman.com/life/content/life/stories/faith/
2009/06/0627words.html