Radical Obedience

Wendy and I recently received a letter from Bill Breeden who years ago was one of the ministers who worked with me at our Missouri church. Bill was raised and educated in The Church of the Nazarene. He was early on a first-rate minister to youth, but as the years went by he took on an increasingly wider vocational perspective. While shedding the fundamentalism of his family, his denomination had introduced him to a living Christ who called Bill to follow him in ministering to those society had ignored. This meant giving himself to a radical obedience.

The Jesus Bill was committed to follow had wrapped his arms around the left out—the nobodies, the lame, prostitutes, Samaritans, tax collectors, the dregs of society. Bill had committed his life to walking in Jesus’ steps: good news to the poor, release to the captives, sight to the blind, liberty to the oppressed.” It was not that Bill was called to believe things about Jesus, finalized in doctrinal creeds, but to follow the Jesus whose mission was alive in those called to be his disciples.

Bill increasingly saw this calling in terms of world peace, and he had been radicalized as he walked through the missile silos in central Missouri. The justice and peace that he saw at the heart of Jesus’ ministry became his passion. Bill and Glenda finally left middle-class society and first lived in a teepee, and then in a simple rural cabin in central Indiana. Eventually Bill became the minister of a Unitarian congregation in Bloomington, Indiana.

There is so much more to Bill’s story, but let me move to his recent letter. When Bill retired from his latest pastorate he became involved in a ministry to those on death row who many saw as the dregs of society. There had been no federal executions for sixteen years until the Trump administration decided to clean out death row in a series of executions Bill called “murders”. Bill knew he needed to act, and he became chaplain to the condemned.

Let me quote from Bills letter.

I volunteered to be a spiritual advisor to Corey Johnson, a black man scheduled to be executed on January 14. I will be in the execution chamber with Corey. I am visiting for long hours. I have had two days of seven-hour visits thus far, with four more to go, and then the execution. I come home every time and fall apart for a few hours. I have helped prepare many people to die, this is the first time I am helping to prepare a man to be murdered, and will then watch the murder take place. I feel stuck in a Kafka novel.

I volunteered to do it because I believe one of life's greatest gifts is to die in the presence of someone who cares, and only a minister can be in the chamber. Members of his family will watch from an adjacent room.

Corey and I have gotten very close in the fourteen hours we have had, and he is very thankful that I am doing this. I am thankful that he accepted me as his minister. .

Bill was in the death chamber with Corey and was allowed to touch his body and bless him. Following the execution Bill detailed the gruesome inhuman way these murders take place. It was a shattering experience, but Bill believes that this is where Jesus called him to be. How much simpler it would be if the Christian faith could be reduced to believing a few orthodox doctrines about Jesus such as the virgin birth and the bodily resurrection. But no, Jesus had called Bill to a radical obedience that included being in the execution chamber witnessing someone die.