How to Die in Paradise

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You can boil the whole promise of Jesus down to one word, “You.”

Luke 23:43

St. Dysmas Lutheran Church: South Dakota State Penitentiary, Sioux Falls, SD

Here is a sermon by my friend Dr. Ken Sundet Jones of Grand View University. Ken is a part of the Iowa Preachers Project with me. FYI: St. Dysmas is the thief on the cross to whom the Lord promised paradise on Good Friday.

Not many sermons elicit immediate requests for baptism. This one resulted in 8 inmates asking to be baptized. And an absolution for the books.

Grace to you and peace, my friends, from God our Father and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

Amen.

1. Poor old St. Dysmas. He got a great promise from Jesus and then one Dysmas recognized as the messiah with the power to bestow a place in paradise breathes his last. Jesus is dead, and Dysmas has the same fate ahead of him.

a. Now Dysmas watches as people scramble at his feet. Messengers are sent back and forth to the Roman governor of this occupied territory. Finally, with hardly any time before sunset and the Jewish law’s demand for an end to all activity, Dysmas watches as Jesus’ hands and feet are released from their spikes and his body is lowered from the cross, wrapped in hastily acquired graveclothes, and carried off somewhere to be buried.

b. Now, in the twilight, our beloved thief has time to think about what Jesus just promised him and what it means for him in the short time left of his life.

c. Saint Dysmas hangs between the two most significant moments of his life.

2. In 1532, John the Steadfast of electoral Saxony died. His brother Frederick the Wise had been Martin Luther’s prince for the first eight years of the Reformation. When Frederick died in 1525, John took over as the prince elector.

a. It was John, who traveled to the city of Augsburg to attend the diet, the meeting of all the representatives of the Holy Roman Empire.

b. John was present when Philip Melanchthon and the others presented what would become known as the Augsburg Confession before Emperor Charles V. John is known by the name of steadfast, because he literally stood fast before the emperor, the powers that be, and all the arrayed representatives of the church in Rome.

c. Now in 1532, Prince John was dead, and Martin Luther was called upon to preach at his funeral.

d. In Luther’s funeral sermon for John, he said that John had died two deaths. Luther argued that this death that everyone seemed to be so upset over was just a little death. It was no big deal.

e. That was so because the prince had died a big death two years before in Augsburg. John’s big death occurred when he risked his life to defend the faith, the preaching, and the teaching of Luther and his fellow reformers, not just in Wittenberg, but in so many and varied places in the empire. Prince John risked it all.

f. Up until that point, John’s life as an important political figure in Europe, and in his territory was a given, in Augsburg, something happened. Everything changed. The prince showed himself to be one fully dependent on the good news of Jesus Christ crucified and risen.

g. That was why, Luther said, that this present death was nothing to weep and wail over. What those gathered for the funeral should do instead of sobbing and wringing their hands was to hand John over with thanks for the gift he had been to the church and its proclamation.

3. Saint Dysmas, too, died two deaths. His second death happened when he, like Jesus, finally breathed his last breath, and they took his body down from his cross to be buried in some unknown plot to be forgotten forever.

a. Dysmas’s first death, however, according to the terms laid out in Luther’s funeral sermon for his prince, happened in that conversation we’ve been talking about all weekend, when he asked Jesus to remember him in paradise.

b. That moment was a hinge, an axial point, a place that could be pointed to that had a distinct before and after. With Jesus’s words that today he would be with him in paradise, it wasn’t possible that anything could ever be the same.

c. Even in the dark of that sabbath night, St. Dysmas

knew he was changed. As he hung there, with his breathing becoming ever more difficult through the night, and through the long hours of the next day, St. Dysmas had time to consider what had changed. Jesus had declared that paradise was his. How was St. Dysmas to die in this new paradise?

4. My friend Jason Micheli reminded me as we were talking about St. Dysmas of the story of a French monk, who saw himself as a modern day St. Dysmas:

a. Father Christian de Cherge was a French Catholic monk and the prior in charge of the Abbey of Our Lady of Atlas in Algeria. He was beatified four years ago.

b. Christian De Cherge had served in Algeria as an officer in the French army during the Algerian War for independence and, shortly after his ordination to the priesthood in 1964, he returned to the country to minister from the little abbey to the poor, mostly Muslim community of Tibhirine.

c. De Cherge’s father regarded his son’s decision to take monastic vows with unmeasured disappointment. After all, his son was brilliant. He’d graduated at the top of his class and his future could have been bright, pursuing any career he chose.

d. Instead de Cherge felt called. Along with his fellow monks, de Cherge toiled in relative obscurity for three decades, winning the trust of the poor and befriending leaders in the local Islamic government.

e. When Islamic radicalism spread to Algeria in the early 1990’s, to the consternation of their superiors in Rome and to the anger of their families in Paris, de Cherge and his fellow monks refused to leave their monastery, because they refused to stop serving the community’s poor. They knew that meeting a violent end might simply be the consequence of faithfulness to the Lord who had called them to such a place.

f. On January 1, 1994, de Cherge, had a vision of his own impending murder. And that’s exactly what happened. He and seven of his brothers from the abbey were kidnapped and eventually beheaded by terrorists calling themselves the Armed Islamic Group.

g. Anticipating his own murder, Christian de Cherge wrote a kind of last will and testament and sent it to his family to be read after his death. This is what de Cherge wrote:

h. “If it should happen one day — and it could be today —

that I become a victim of the terrorism which now seems ready to engulf all the foreigners living in Algeria, I would like my community, my Church and my family to remember that my life was not taken. My life was to God. Indeed this ending had its beginning in my baptism.

I ask them to accept the fact that our Lord was not a stranger to this brutal departure.

i. “

I would ask the me to pray for me: for how could I be found worthy of such an offering?

I ask them to associate this death with so many other equally violent ones which are forgotten through indifference or anonymity.

My life has no more value than any other. Nor any less value.

j. “In any case, it has not the innocence of childhood.

I have lived long enough to now that I am an accomplice in the evil which seems to prevail so terribly in the world, even in the evil which might blindly strike me down.

k. “

I should like, when the time comes, to have a moment of spiritual clarity which would allow me to beg forgiveness of God and of my fellow human beings, and at the same time forgive with all my heart the one who would strike me down.

l. “

I could not desire such a death.It seems to me important to state this.

Obviously, my death will appear to confirm those who hastily judged me naive or idealistic: ‘Let him tell us now what he thinks of his ideals!’

But these persons should know that finally my most avid curiosity will be set free.

m.“

This is what I shall be able to do, God willing: immerse my gaze in that of the Father to contemplate with him His children of Islam just as He sees them, all shining with the glory of Christ, the fruit of His Passion, filled with the Gift of the Spirit whose secret joy will always be to establish communion and restore the likeness, playing with the differences.

n. “

For this life lost, totally mine and totally theirs, I thank God, who seems to have willed it entirely for the sake of that joy in everything and in spite of everything. In this thank you, which is said for everything in my life from now on, I certainly include you, friends of yesterday and today, and you, my friends of this place, along with my mother and father, my sisters and brothers and their families — you are the hundredfold granted as was promised!”

o. Finally, remarkably, at the end of his letter Christian de

Cherge addressed his executioner with a word of mercy and forgiveness:

p. “And also you, my last-minute friend, who will not have known what you were doing:

Yes, I want this thank you and this Adieu to be a "God bless" for you, too, because in God's face I see yours.

May we meet again as happy thieves in Paradise, if it please God, the Father of us both. Amen! Inshallah!

5. Christian de Cherge’s letter to his family, the way he regarded his life as no longer his own, and his final absolution of the man who beheaded him give us an inkling of what may have occurred to St. Dysmas i his last hours on the cross.

a. Indeed, they also call us to consider what our lives mean in between our two deaths, between the moment our Lord claims us, and gives us new life in baptism, and the moment we finally lay down our heads and breathe our last.

b. Our first death, as it was for St. Dysmas, is a release. In Jesus’s claim on us, he frees us from captivity to ourselves.

c. Some days I long to be rid of my attachment to my holy self-regard, my self-sanctified self-continuity project. It’s such a long hard slog to be Ken Jones. I get so tired of having to maintain a façade of having it all together, of being in control, of having any idea at all of what I’m doing. I float along blithely, ignoring the consequences of my actions. I act as though every day will be followed by another and another and another where I will do as I please.

d. And yet in my baptism on July 31, 1961, at First Lutheran Church in Newell, South Dakota, Jesus declared I would be with him in paradise. Everything that’s happened in my life since that point, in spite of my delusions and imaginings to the contrary, has been the life that my Lord gave me.

e. Do you suppose that St. Dysmas at sabbath day after Jesus died felt released? Did he feel, like our French monk, that his life, as little was left of it, and as painful as it was, was no longer his own? Did he die in the paradise Jesus had granted him knowing that his existence was one small drop of water in the ocean of God’s eternal grace and mercy? Did St. Dysmas look down from the cross and speak an absolution to the Roman soldiers, who nailed him to the wood, and raised him up to die a humiliating death?

6. Is it possible that St. Dysmas had that kind of change of heart as a result of Jesus’s promise to him? Is it possible for me to be that kind of changed person too? Is it possible that God can wreak that kind of change in you?

a. I know well how the world regards inmates of the South Dakota State penitentiary: criminals, murderers, thieves, addicts, molesters, rapists. The world as a whole and the system under which you live on the hill have no ability to see you as anything more more than a mass of nothing in khaki scrubs with the word inmate written down your legs.

b. But I know the Jesus who spoke to St. Dysmas. I know the Lord, who claims the least, the last, the lost, the leper. I know the God who speaks a word into the midst of chaotic nothing at the beginning, and creates new life.

c. And I have seen evidence every time I’ve been blessed to enter this hallowed space of Hope Chapel and had the privilege of being in the presence of my beloved brothers in Christ in this place.

d. Pastor Jeff, former inmate #39016, is a cleaned up, prettified example that the world sees as a far cry from what they regard you as. But Jeff is no example whatsoever (and he’d probably say that we should think of him instead is a dire warning). I think we could regard your pastor as a lens through which we can access how God sees you.

e. Jeff Backer is St. Dysmas. I am St. Dysmas. You are St. Dysmas. All of us are thieves who have stolen the very grace of God and discovered that Jesus wasn’t ever going to let us steal it. He was doling it out freely and unreservedly to the undeserving, to the godless, to the reprobate, to me and you.

f. All this he does on the cross as he declares the gates wide open, so that you can die in paradise with him, and live in his grace and mercy forever. This day. Today. And every day after. Amen.

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