At Just the Right Time

“That’s it?”

He looks at me with a mixture of incredulity and suspicion across a grungy table in a glorified storage closet at the jail. The setting, even given the context, is unimpressive. A broken vacuum cleaner. A bunch of haphazard toilet paper rolls. Some dust-covered supplies from the pandemic era. A couple plastic chairs. On the other side of the door, the buzzing and clanging and crashing and shouting that is the near-constant soundtrack out on the remand units.

Across from me sits a man not much older than me (according to our birth dates). But life takes far harder years off the clock for some than others. And most of his years have been very hard. Abandoned by addicted, angry, and absent parents (or angry, absent, and addicted—who can parse the order of these things?), about being punted around between the church and foster homes between 8-12, sexually abused by priests, coaches, foster parents, foster siblings, into booze and drugs by age ten, violent eruptions around the same age, frequent escapes and returns, sleeping on streets, kicked into juvie, embraced and enlisted by gangs at 16-17, and, well, the story of the next forty years pretty much unfolds according to script.

And now he wants to know about what it means to be “born in new.” His English is rough, but I get the idea. He’s done a lot of time in a lot of prisons over the years, and in every one he’s heard people like me talk about leaving your past behind, about fresh starts, about new beginnings, clean breaks. “How does it work?” he asks? “Do I need to do baptism again? Talk to a priest? Do I need to make confessions?” He tells me about a chaplain who once talked about confessing our sins. “He had a list of ten laws” (I assumed he was referring to the Ten Commandments). “I looked at them and said, ‘well, I broke all these.’” I quickly rehearse the Decalogue in my head, trying not to pause too long on the fifth.

I tell him that being “born in new” is simple. We simply confess our sins, ask God to forgive us, and commit to a life of turning toward Jesus. It doesn’t matter what we’ve done, God is a forgiver. As far as the east is from the west, I say, that’s the distance God puts between us and our sins. I talk about crimson stains and snow-white absolutions.  About lost sons coming home to unconditional welcomes. About sin, like death, not needing to have the last word on the story of one of God’s children. About a God who sees the heart, who knows what we’ve endured and what we’ve inflicted (and how to parse it), whose mercy knows no limit. Who forgives our sins.

“That’s it?” That’s it.

I hasten to add, of course, that God’s forgiveness doesn’t preclude confessing to those we have wronged, seeking to make amends, etc. It doesn’t mean the consequences of our behaviour magically disappear. But he knows all this. He has already started the process. He’s suspicious that this could be enough. He feels like he should do more. “Should I be baptized again?” he asks. I was baptized by a priest when I was a baby, but I don’t remember that. I tell him that baptisms are tricky in the jail, but we can talk more about it. Perhaps when he gets out. “Where would I go?” he asks. “Who would baptize me?” “I would,” I say. A smile plays on the corner of his mouth.

We talk for nearly an hour about life and death and sin and failure, about trauma and violence and toxic family systems. We talk about the devil, about accusations, about how hard it is to leave a gang when a gang is the only family you’ve ever known. We talk about the pain of losing an adult child to an overdose, of the crushing weight of guilt and sorrow he feels. We talk about names and what they mean, about how he wants a new name because the old one is associated with a father who never loved him, about—again—how God knows us truly, sees who we are, no matter what it says on our birth certificates. He asks if I can give him something to read about dealing with grief. And maybe a bible.

I get back to the office, find some pamphlets on grief and dealing with emotional pain. I dig a new bible out of the filing cabinet, put his name in it. I grab a few neon sticky notes and affix them above two passages. The first is the story of the lost son in Luke 15. Incredibly, he had never heard this story. He seemed utterly fascinated by it. I hope he reads it again. The other was over 2 Corinthians 5:17: “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!” On the sticky note, I put three words: “This is you.”

Throughout the season of Lent, the Thursday readings in the prayer book I used always included a reading from Romans 5:6-8 (which, like so many readings, lands different in the jail than during morning prayers or behind a pulpit in a church sanctuary):

You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.

When we were still powerless. While we were still sinners. At just the right time.

Thanks be to God.

——

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