I used to support the death penalty.  After all, that’s what good Christians did, right?  Murderers received what they had measured out to others.  The death penalty was in the Bible and that was good enough for me.  But as the years went by, I began to wrestle with facts and ideas that didn’t fit.  It took time, years, even decades before I realized that I was changing my mind.  Even then, as a member in, and then as a pastor of, conservative congregations, I didn’t talk much about it. 

    I was troubled as I wondered how grace and mercy were served by the death penalty.  I was also troubled as I heard more about the costs of a death penalty conviction.  I suppose the last straw was when I first heard about the number of convictions being thrown out as DNA testing was first being used in the legal system.  Over the years, the evidence piled up until I had to surrender a notion that I once thought was reasonable.  I am not any different than I used to be.  My political and religious leanings are not significantly different than they ever were but I now believe that it is both logical and reasonable to oppose the death penalty from both a practical and a religious point of view.  Here’s why…

The Death Penalty is Not a Deterrent–Crime statistics in places where there is a death penalty are not statistically different from places where there is not.

Cost – It costs more to incarcerate a death row inmate.  Prisoners convicted under a death penalty statute are granted mandatory appeals and that process is expensive.  Estimates are that a death penalty inmate costs 2 to 5 times more over his or her lifetime than one who is incarcerated for life.

Fairness and Justice – The scriptural standard of evidence, particularly for murder, was from the beginning (Deuteronomy 17), two eyewitnesses.  In our modern world, having two witnesses is rare.  Mistaken identity is now one of the leading causes of error in our legal system.   Add a host of other errors, and suddenly a lot of people find themselves wrongly convicted.  For the last decade or so, an average of 18 death row residents per year were cleared by DNA evidence.  It’s so bad, that nationwide, a Columbia University study found serious errors in 68% of all death penalty cases and 2 out of 3 death penalty cases were overturned on appeal.  Of those overturned, 82% were retried on lesser charges.  Granted, no system is foolproof, but when ours is so messed up that we get it wrong 2 out of 3 times, its time to try something else.

Consistency – The church is usually among those who proclaim the sanctity of all life and declare to the world how God loves all people.  If we really believe that, then why is the life of a murderer not just as sacred?  Does God love murderers less? 

Grace, Forgiveness and Redemption – If we believe (and I do) that the Gospel message is all about grace, forgiveness and redemption, how do we justify the state sponsored killing of incarcerated criminals?  Where’s the grace and forgiveness in that?  How can God do a work of redemption in someone’s life when they’re already dead?  If we believe that God can change the hearts of human beings, then why are we so quick to assume that these men and women are unredeemable?

    As I wrestled with these questions, I realized that I didn’t have any answers that could make my continued support of the death penalty make any logical or spiritual sense.  That doesn’t mean that there isn’t a part of me that thinks the perpetrators of particularly horrible crimes shouldn’t die in some particularly painful way.   

What it means, I think, is that I’m beginning to understand the difference between retribution and justice.

...

    As promised, here are my top ten blog posts of 2012.  There are a few interesting points that I will note along the way, but among these is just the growth of this blog.  While it is still pitifully small compared to some of the mainstream “big name” bloggers with tens of thousands of subscribers (I have five), there is a marked difference between 2011 and 2012.  In the last year, the number of readers has grown enough that of all the posts included in last year’s list, only the number one post from 2011 would have made this list and even then at number eight. Hey, while you're here, why don't you click on the "Subscribe to Blog Updates" link in the right hand column?

    In any case, the readership of this blog, however small, has doubled in one year, and for that, I am both humble and grateful.  I hope that my musings make you think, regardless of whether we agree or not.  This year’s list is reversed, David Letterman style, with number ten presented first, so that you have to scan the whole list to see the most popular.

10) As was the case in other multi-part blogs I have written, “Part 2, Politicians, Rape and Bad Theology”, was less popular than Part 1 (which comes in at number 7).

9) In, “Is It Time to End Spousal Benefits?” I pondered the injustices of the way that many employee benefits as well as Social Security and other Federal benefits are calculated.  Several comments showed me that that my thinking was not as clear as I would have liked and made me think that I may need to think this through a bit more and revisit the subject sometime down the road.

8) “Why I Stand With the Catholic Church” discusses why I agree that our federal government is overreaching in its demand that church agencies be compelled to pay for contraception and abortion inducing drugs despite in a clear violation of their religious beliefs.

7) Politicians, Rape and Bad Theology (Part 1) is the first, and most popular, of my reaction to some seriously dumb things that were said by politicians.  Honestly, I sometimes think that this happens every day, but when these same politicians begin to justify their dumb stuff by saying that it’s God’s fault, I have to say something.

6) In John Wesley's Crazy Rules?, I list the rules that the early Methodists had agreed to live by.  Today, most all have been abandoned and most church members would panic if we even suggested bringing them back.  On the other hand, under these rules the church grew and under ours we’re shrinking.  Perhaps something in this list we ought to learn from?

5) Why is Homosexuality an Argument Instead of a Discussion? Isn’t even my blog post, but a link to a post by Dr. John Byron, one of my seminary professors.  Here we wonder why everyone wants to demonstrate and shout from their polarized positions, but not have an honest discussion about the issues.

4) The blog entitled, “Just How Many Homosexuals Are There?” was taken, by some, as a political post even though I made some effort to deliberately distance myself from making any overt political statements.  The unfortunate truth, as we’ve seen in other posts, is that anything regarding abortion, homosexuality and a few other topics automatically become argumentative instead of the opening of a discussion.  Here, I simply found statistics that indicated that nearly everyone has a dramatically wrong idea of what we are talking about whenever we begin such an argument.

3) What’s the Big Deal About Sex? was written after it was discovered that several Secret Service agents and military personnel had been cavorting with prostitutes during a trip in which they were to be guarding President Obama.  While what they did was immoral, I wonder why all the fuss?  These folks aren’t monks?  Clearly there are national security concerns, but otherwise, in a culture that values sex and money above all else, what do you expect?

2) Censorship is never the answer.  The beauty of our freedom of speech here in the United States is that it allows atheists to blaspheme my religion and my God, but it also allows me to spread the Good News of Jesus Christ.  In Christians are Wrong; Atheists are Right I argue that when Christians lobby for censorship to protect them, they really undermine the most important protection of all.

1) This is the one that makes me smile.  I first wrote, Ahimaaz - Patron Saint of Cross Country Running? , about a man known to King David who loved to run.  When it was written, almost no one read it.  For months afterward… almost no one read it.  And then something interesting happened.  Because I suggested that Ahimaaz ought to be a patron saint of long distance runners (clearly, being Methodist, I have no inside track on this), this blog started to turn up in Internet searches for patron saint of cross country and track.  As track season came closer it began to get a few, but regular, hits each week.  By the end of the year, just like the story of the tortoise and the hare, slowly but surely, this blog had become the most popular of the year (and continues to grow).

    Last month, Scribd, the webpage where I post sermons online, indicated that I had surpassed 50,000 ‘reads’ on the 187 documents that I have posted.  One sermon a week, times about 50 weeks each year (I do take time off once in a while) and we can see that I have been posting there for a little less than four years.  In fact, as I dig back through the records, I find that the first file was uploaded in September 2009.  Since then, people from around the world have found their way, by a variety of means, often through Google or other search engines, to read the words that I have written.  And it was all an accident.

    Ten years ago when I first began in ministry, I was more of an engineer than a pastor.  I knew that I could not simply open a Bible and preach without notes, or even preach from a stack of 3x5 cards.  If I was going to talk for 20 minutes and sound even remotely coherent, I knew that I would have to prepare better than that.  And so, each week, I would type my entire sermon, word for word, and then, on Sunday, deliver it from the pulpit.  I had enough experience in High School Theater and in other dramatic productions that I don’t think I ever just stood there and read to people in a monotone voice, although there have been a few folks who accused of something close to that.  I’m sure I could have done better with more training and experience, which is what happened (I hope) over my years as a student pastor, a seminary student and as a full-time pastor.

    After some time had passed, someone suggested that since the sermon was already typed up, that we could make copies and provide them outside the sanctuary for those who had missed the previous week.  From there this thing grew.  People started asking for copies to take to our shut-ins, and then email copies to college students and others, and then, finally, a friend suggested that we might launch a discussion forum on Facebook for folks to ask questions.  When we launched the discussion forum (which never really caught on) we needed a place to post copies of the sermons online and so I searched the Internet for a service that was similar to YouTube, but for text instead of video.  That is how I found Scribd.com. 

    On Scribd, I discovered an online community of readers and writers.  There, people could subscribe to what I was writing, and I could subscribe to theirs.  I had intended to create a place for the people of our community to read and discuss the weekly message but, within weeks discovered that I had subscribers from China to Africa to Pakistan.  There were people who were reading the sermon of a little country church in Ohio because there was no local church near them that spoke English, or because the message of Jesus Christ was considered subversive in the places that they lived.  Now, nearly four years later, nearly 60 people read one of these messages every day.

    I have no illusions that each of those 50,000 mouse-clicks means someone read all the way through something, but I continue to be amazed and humbled by what God is doing with the words that he has given to me. 

    I have never believed that people were reading these things because I was a great writer, nor do I think that Billy Graham or Bill Hybels have need to fear from my speaking ability.  Every time I look at these numbers I remember God’s words in Isaiah 55:10-11:

And Paul’s words in 2 Corinthians 12:9:

God took my weaknesses and is using them to reveal his message to the world.   

I am simply amazed and humbled at what he is doing.