I don’t remember the exact date, but it was near February 23, 2013, which was the day my wife’s aunt was buried. We were in Florida for the funeral and while waiting for a table at lunch, my phone rang. It was the Forsyth County Sheriff’s Department.
“Reverend Rice, are you ok?”
“Yes, I’m fine. Why?”
“Your neighbors haven’t seen you in a couple of days and want to make sure you’re ok.”
“I’m sorry?”
That is how I learned a member of my parish was found dead. Another member of the parish was the suspected murderer. For reasons I still do not understand, and perhaps do not want to know, the investigator called to make sure I was ok. In the days that followed, the details were stomach-churning. The murder was premeditated. He was shot while he slept. For 22 days, the body was kept in a yard waste container in the bedroom. Air fresheners were hung to dissipate the odor. Prostitutes were invited over the next weeks downstairs. It’s all horrific and sordid and a matter of public record, discussed in great detail in the media, and the only reason I have in writing this is to make the point as how absolutely evil this act was.
I buried his victim, my parishioner, in a private funeral. Now I had to visit the murderer, my parishioner, in jail. It was hard. Three weeks after the murder, he fled the state. When he was caught (as I was Florida), I was among his first phone calls.
I will not lie; I had a hard time visiting him. His guilt was not in question. The facts were not disputed. Four months later, in one of his letters, he chastised me for not visiting more often. “I was extremely hurt that you did not make any effort to come back and minister to me, in what you knew was a difficult and traumatic time in my life. I really needed you and you were not there for me.”
I was livid. The author of this letter killed a man in cold blood, a man I had to bury. In my jailhouse visit, I discerned no remorse, no regret. A “difficult time” in his life? At least he had his life! But what made me angrier than anything is that, at least in regards to his letter, he wasn’t wrong. I could have made a greater effort to visit him. I should have.
My feelings, as real as they were, could not excuse my duty to visit him, to share the mercy of Jesus Christ, and to pray with him. The scandal of the cross is that Jesus Christ died for him as much as he died for me. That doesn’t excuse his acts or release him from any sort of accountability. My job was not to mete our justice, but love. To love is to will the good of the other, and I can’t do that unless I’m in relationship with him.
I was not a great pastor to this man, but I forced myself to stay in some kind of relationship. I visited him in jail, and we exchanged letters for a couple of years. I sent him a Book of Common Prayer at his request. I still pray for him at the altar on his birthday. I pray he has repented and earnestly sought the mercy of Jesus Christ.
This is a complicated story, and there are even more complications that I do not need to share. However, I offer this extreme example to make the point that we don’t have to agree with people to love them, to will their good. We don’t have to pretend that their actions are even remotely ok, we can freely acknowledge what they are – evil. But we do not have permission to damn them. We cannot demonize the person while we beg the Holy Spirit to cast out their demons.
Jesus did not call us to visit only those in prison who were wrongfully convicted. Visit those in prison. Even the rapists and murderers. Especially the rapists and murderers. I will not virtue signal my pastoral care to his man, there’s little virtue to signal, but his chastisement, even from a vessel void of remorse, was right.
The Gospel of Jesus Christ is too scandalous for our politics, it demands too much. Politics is the art of the possible, faith focuses on what we deem to be impossible. We can love and speak the truth. If we don’t, we are noise. And I’m tired of noise.
We’ve been told the days ahead will be difficult and full of tension. That’s probably true, but it doesn’t have to be that way. We don’t have to hate one another and assume the worst. We don’t have to cut people off and damn them what whatever hell we’d like to create for them. Even if things are hard and tense, we don’t need to enjoy it.
We must push through our feelings and grab hold to the stability of our duty to God and one another. The person we despise, whose actions are heinous to us, need us to minister to them. They are not wrong.