For twenty-two years, I was a part-time chaplain at Western Penitentiary in Pittsburgh. I had a group of six to eight men, all of whom had killed someone and who were spending the rest of their lives in prison. In Pennsylvania, a life sentence is a life sentence. They don’t let people out after twenty-five or thirty years as they do in a lot of other states. All of the men in my group knew that and had settled in to their lot. It wasn’t easy. All of them carried the guilt of what they had done. I had one man tell me over and over again when I would talk about forgiveness, “Listen, preacher, there are two people in the graveyard because of what I did. God is never going to forgive that.” That is the reality of how they all live every day. Getting them to come to even a tiny understanding of what forgiveness meant was and remains a daunting job.
But forgiveness was theirs for the asking. What I tried to help them all to comprehend was that forgiveness is the great gift that is given to all of us by the God who loves us all as God’s own children. Do we make mistakes? Certainly. Is that the end of the story? Hardly.
At the moment there is a great argument raging in one of our Western Pennsylvania communities about a monument that has been erected to celebrate the Ten Commandments. It is on public property and an organization protecting the First Amendment has raised a question about whether having the monument on public property violates the separation of church and state.
A group of people in the community have rallied to “protect” the monument. They have had a march and a demonstration with signs and speeches that proclaim their love of God’s law. I have wanted to ask those folks if they have kept all of those commandments; or have they broken one or all of them. Those men in my prison group had all broken at least one of the commandments, the one about not killing, and they were devastated for life. All of us have that in common with them. We have all broken the commandments. The one thing that I know about the Ten Commandments that we all share is that we can’t keep them. We break them over and over again. But yet, we have a loving God who forgives us what we have done and makes us whole again, even after we have broken the law of laws.
Jesus had his disciples gathered together in Caesarea Philippi. He asked them who people were saying that he was. The disciples answered him that some say that he was John the Baptist, some Elijah or one of the prophets. He then asked them, “Who do you say that I am.” Peter answered him, “You are the Messiah.” Jesus then told them not to tell anyone about him. He went on to tell them that the Son of Man had to undergo great suffering, be rejected by the elders, be killed and then after three days to rise again. Peter took him aside and rebuked him. That is when Jesus told Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are setting your mind not on Divine things, but on human things.”
I would have been with Peter on this one. How could any of them understood what Jesus was saying? Which of us understands resurrection? Which of us really understands forgiveness? That is what the men in my prison group were all struggling with. Those us us who are not incarcerated also struggle with it. Forgiveness is not an easy concept to get our minds around. But it is true. We are all forgiven by our loving God of what we have done. Our God longs to gather us all in his arms as the children that he created. That doesn’t alter the consequences of what we have done. We create chaos and we must live with it. But God’s love is eternal. That we can count on. And because of that we can forgive one another. That is the greatest gift of all.
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