It’s nice to know that the U.S. is in the company of such enlightened states when it comes to application of the death penalty. China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the United States, and Pakistan top the list for number of exections carried out last year.
37 years ago today, Martin Luther King was assassinated.
I don’t have anything in particular to note on this sad day, other than to ponder at what he might have accomplished if he would have had a second 39 years on this planet. Unfortunately today, we seem to lack prophetic voices which would challenge us to follow Jesus’ example of nonviolence, his call to raise up the poor, his command to love one another as we would love ourselves, regardless of what the color of our skin or the place of our birth might be.
Louise, in a comment below, asked:
You were not raised in a Christian household? Was it some other faith? If, so what? What brought you to Christianity? I didn’t see anything about this in your about the author statement, but am sorry if this has already been discussed.
I realize that I probably haven’t discussed this formally on the blog before, so I’ll give it a shot now:
My family was pretty agnostic growing up, and so was I. I always figured that there had to be a God out there somewhere, but considered him/her/it unknowable - although I still prayed to him/her/it every once in a while that he/she/it wouldn’t send me to hell. What’s more, folks like Jimmy Swaggart, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and the Republican party had me convinced that Christianity was the religion of self-righteous rich fat cats who didn’t care about anything other than fattening their own pockets, wagging their fingers in condemnation at people they didn’t like, and oppressing everyone else.
In college, though, I actually met some real followers of Jesus rather than the caricatures who manage to get all of the publicity in our country, and decided to give the Bible and Jesus a look (I never had much contact with either previously). What I found shocked me and resonated with the character of God that He had placed in my heart all along. Jesus didn’t condemn people. He loved people who others thought were “icky.” He cared deeply for the poor and called his followers to do the same. He taught us to go against the patterns of this world and lay down our swords and instead lay down our lives for others. And he described the reality of the world in a way that actually fit what I saw inside myself and around me: that while we still have the image of God firmly implanted upon us, we are all desperately sick and unable to express that image in the way God had intended.
I decided at that point that I could do nothing other than follow Jesus. And have been trying to figure out exactly what that means ever since.
