Today we begin a four-week exploration of "moral values." After last year's Presidential election, a number of members asked me if I would consider preaching about "moral values" and I am glad to take it up. Like "family values" of the early 1990's (remember Murphy Brown?), "moral values" are everywhere in the media, they goes to the heart of who we are as people of faith, and there is little meaningful discussion on what they really are and on how we might come to some conclusions about them. So I am glad to spend some time together searching and seeking for our own perspective on moral values. A first question to consider is: which moral values we will take up. If you listen to the media, you would think the only moral values that are important to us as a nation are gay marriage, abortion, stem cell research, and most recently end-of-life decisions. These are all important moral issues, but they are hardly comprehensive. This series will not be comprehensive either, but they will take up four issues that are certainly "moral" and demand our thoughtful and faithful consideration. Today we will look at the death penalty, and in a bit I will explain why I am starting here. Next week we will consider access to health care, then environmental care, and finally poverty.

A word about my approach in these sermons. The purpose of these is not to persuade you all to come to the same conclusions about these issues that I hold - as appealing as the idea can sound - at least to me! The purpose is to help us find ways to think about, discuss, struggle over how we come to make decisions about these issues. Because that is my intent, I will begin each sermon by telling you my position on the issue of the day. I will do this because if you don't know and if I am not clear up front, the sermons may come across as subtle attempts at persuasion. Plus, some of you may spend the entire sermon trying to guess my position. I would rather get my position out of the way, and focus on ways to come at these issues rather than persuading you of one position. Admittedly, the framework I present is the very one that gets me to my conclusion - so in that regard, we are playing with a stacked deck. So I encourage each of us not to view these sermons as complete entities, but as starting points for our own individual reflection as well as a conversation between ourselves and with the larger community.

Two more words: First, I believe that it is essential for every person of faith to admit up front that any "moral value" that we speak of is a complex, multi-faceted issue. As our understanding of science, medicine, and human behavior expands, these issues only become more complex and multi-faceted, not less. Fifty or sixty years ago, we wouldn't have had a public debate about Terri Schiavo because she wouldn't have lived 15 years past her catastrophic heart attack. The same is true of people with Alzheimer's and a whole assortment of the diseases. When cloning didn't seem possible, it was the stuff of science fiction. It is no more. Second, on almost every "moral value" the Bible does not speak a clear, unambiguous word. The Bible was written from a variety of positions and perspectives - remember that this is the book that has given rise both to pacifism and the just war theory, and for that matter for imperial conquest. We must remember that the writers of the Bible had no knowledge of genetics, chemistry or physics. So when we use the Bible to help us sort through these important issues, we must always be careful not engage in what I call the "theological show-stopper" - asserting that the Bible says and then leave it at that. Scripture will lead us into the truth, but it is a messy, confusing, and tenuous journey that requires our best thinking, our creative imagination, and an openness to new understanding. Phew! That's a lot of introduction, but it is necessary if we want our journey into these issues to be more than political props clanging around in our own echo chamber.

So why begin with the death penalty? It's not the one of the issues that has sparked public debate over the past couple of years. In fact, if someone wants to get elected to public office, opposition to the death penalty is a risky position to take in most jurisdictions. But I want to start here for one major reason: Jesus died because he was accused of a crime that was punishable by the death penalty. Jesus was not put to death by an out of control mob; he was given the death penalty by the governing authority of the state. The death penalty sits uncomfortably and in the center of our Holy Week and Easter story.

Now, my position: I am opposed to the death penalty in every situation and circumstance. I am not opposed because I think it is unfairly applied (which I think is true); I am not opposed because I don't think it is an effective deterrent (which I don't). I am opposed to the death penalty because I believe it is wrong in every case - always.

So, how do we approach this highly charged issue? We begin with a story. A woman was caught in the act of adultery - caught red-handed, I might add. There was no question as to her guilt. She was guilty of crime that according to the 20^th chapter of Leviticus was punishable by death. And so she was brought to Jesus. Now remember, because this woman is brought to Jesus while he is in public, much is riding on this response. But not only is he in public, he is in the Temple - the very place from which moral values flow. And not only that - the scribes and Pharisees who dragged this woman to Jesus appeal, not to some arcane bit of the law, but to Moses - to the lawgiver himself. The scribes and Pharisees did this to test Jesus, to see how he would interpret and utilize the law. Would he respect Moses and perhaps violate his own teachings or would he contradict Moses and therefore invalidate his teaching? This is the very kind of bind these folks were always trying to catch Jesus in.

We know the story well. Jesus does not follow the law - a law that he clearly knows and understands. So why is that? Why doesn't Jesus issue a verdict (a verdict that is not in doubt) and then pronounce sentence (a sentence that is clear in the law)? There are a number of theories: Jesus thought that this was a case of the death penalty being unfairly applied - after all, it takes two to tango. Sure, the woman might be guilty, but where was the man? Why was there only one brought before him? Maybe the man (who must have been caught in adultery too - you can't catch one person in adultery and not another!) maybe he got a better lawyer (if the toga doesn't fit, you must acquit!) or maybe the system treated certain perpetrators less harshly than others - I know that's hard to believe, but it has been known to happen. But even if that were the case, the woman was still guilty and the law said she should die. So maybe Jesus thought the problem was with the law - maybe he thought the punishment was out of proportion to the crime. But Jesus was not a law ignorer; he, in his own words, was a law fulfiller. He was the one, after all, who elevated anger to murder and lust to adultery. So I don't quite buy that approach. Another thought is that Jesus was mad at the scribes Pharisees and used this situation to shame his enemies - that he turned the tables on them, not to make a point about sin and punishment, but to make a point about their motivations. This is certainly one important part of the story, but we are then left with a curious ending - the bad guys have left, the woman still is before Jesus, no less guilty than before, and Jesus essentially pardons her. He doesn't even give her a warning, or the first of her three strikes.

So what do we make about this story, especially if we are using it to help us sort through a moral value? I believe that this story gains its power when we focus on Jesus and on his actions. First, notice that Jesus never questions this woman's guilt - in fact, he knows she is guilty. His final invitation to her to go and sin no more is an acknowledgment of her sin. So what is Jesus doing here? What is his attitude about sin and crime and punishment? The first thing we can say is that he treats sin as a corporate issue, not only a personal one. We don't know exactly what Jesus wrote in the ground, but it was something that convicted those who had brought this guilty woman to him. Jesus seems to be suggesting that when we talk about sin and punishment, when we seek ways to establish justice, we must first acknowledge that we are sinners and all fall short of the glory of God. There are no righteous when we speak of the guilty, we are all guilty. Jesus does not so much shift the spotlight away from the woman, but he broadens it to include all of us. By doing so he also reminds us that the law (any law) is not some objective entity but that it is a way to establish relationships with another - in this case, the law wasn't just about past actions of the woman, but the present motivations about the scribe and Pharisees and their relationship with the woman.

One of the great missed moments in the modern American debate on moral values happened in the 1988 Presidential debate between the first George Bush and Michael Dukakis. Dukakis, who was opposed to the death penalty, was asked by a reporter how he would respond if his wife were brutally attacked and murdered - what then? In a monotone, Dukakis reiterated his position. He came across cold and unfeeling - and his moral position was lost. What he should of done was something like this: "First, I am offended by the hypothetical - that you would use my wife as an example in such a horrific case is deeply offensive. On the other hand, I know that this is a situation that some people actually face, so we can't ignore it. Yes, I would want that person to die - in far more painful and terrible ways than that person killed my wife. But my desire for personal vengeance cannot be the basis of our law. Our law reflects our nation's highest aspirations, not my lowest. Such a case only strengthens my conviction that a nation such as ours must oppose the violence we abhor." I think Jesus is pushing us in such a direction in our story - not necessarily to a conclusion about the death penalty, but in how we frame any human interaction - especially with those who have violated our sense of justice. In order to allow justice to roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing, we must acknowledge that we all stand in God's judgment and that we all need to be washed by those waters.

The second lesson that we can take from this story as we wrestle with our position on the death penalty is found in Jesus' final interaction with the woman. Now some might accuse Jesus of being soft on crime, or perhaps we might excuse his final word to the woman because Jesus thought she was an unlikely recidivist. But as we have already noted, she was guilty - that was not in question - and the law was clear about what to do with her - and Jesus was righteous and he had every right to cast the first stone. But instead, Jesus sets her free and tells her not to sin again. Now we may think that this is not such a big deal because it is a victimless crime - although even there we can't be sure of that. And besides, God's a victim in this crime - that was one of the main reasons for putting adulterers to death - they had offended God by violating God's law of holiness and purity - plus adultery damages the community that is at the heart of God's covenant. So I don't think Jesus is being soft on crime or trying to lessen the impact of this woman has done. Rather, Jesus does what he always does - when given the choice between justice and mercy, he defaults to mercy. Ours is a God of second chances - this is what theologians call grace - a freely given, undeserved chance to be made new. With God, there is always an escape valve, there is always a Plan B for sinners like us. Now we may want to claim that murderers are not sinners like us - but they are. And Jesus' heart, in our story, breaks for the sinner - not the so-called righteous.

So does this mean that we should just let every criminal go with an admonition to go and sin no more? I don't think so. But then again, I don't think that this passage is about how we should structure our justice system, but how we should approach all of God's children - even the criminals and the sinners - especially the criminals and sinners. We may conclude that some violators need to be locked up for life, we may conclude that some violators deserve to be put to death, but Jesus calls us not to treat other people as objects and the law as some dispassionate entity that can reasonably sort out the good guys from the bad guys. Instead he calls us to reflect on our own motivations as we seek justice, to recall that none of us is righteous enough to escape God' condemnation, that each of us is loved and embraced by a God of second chances.

When we engage in topics like the death penalty, it is sometimes easy to approach them from a distance, as outsiders. But Jesus, by forgiving us, again and again calls us to a deeper relationship with him and with all of humanity. When we frame our justice system in those terms, when our starting point is God's outrageous forgiveness, then we will not only see others differently - we will see ourselves differently - as the beloved, forgiven children of God who are redeemed by love of Jesus Christ. And that's never a bad place to begin our reflection on any moral value.