Death on the Streets and Death by Executions

Death on the Streets and Death by Executions

When Manna House opened almost nine years ago, I was also engaged in visiting a person on death row at Riverbend Prison just outside of Nashville.  One day I was talking with one of our guests at Manna House and he asked me who I visited on death row.
“Andrew Thomas” was my reply.
“Really? I used to run with him.  I went to school with him. Tell him hello from me.”
And with that the connection between the streets and the death penalty became real for me once again.
I got my start in offering hospitality with persons on the streets with the Open Door Community in Atlanta.  The Open Door, then and now, also offers the hospitality of visitation to those who are on death row.  At the same time, the Open Door works to abolish the death penalty.  The first time I lived at the Open Door I was there for six weeks and during that six weeks the state of Georgia executed four people.
One of those executed was Joseph Mulligan.  He asked the Open Door to do his funeral.  I helped pick up the casket for him (donated by St. Vincent de Paul Society).  And on the day of the funeral held at Jubilee Partners, just outside of Athens, Georgia, I was one of the people who helped carry the casket down a rutted red clay road to a small cemetery.  Also helping with the funeral and carrying the casket were members of the Open Door who had been homeless, along with guests of the Jubilee community, campesinos from Latin America who were at Jubilee because they were fleeing from U.S. trained death squads in their own countries.
Death on the streets as a result of homelessness as social policy in the U.S., and in Latin America as a result of death squads, along with the death penalty as social policy both here and there, all began to come together for me on that day.
Jesus’ statement that “I came that they may have life and have it abundantly” inspires my life.  Hospitality is offering a welcome in which we share abundance in accord with God’s vision for abundant life.  But as both Jesus and the prophets make clear, hospitality that ignores the wider death-dealing structures of social policy is really nothing other than cheap status quo supporting charity.
That people are living on the streets is intimately connected with prisons and executions.  All of these are forces of death.  The death of the streets I have seen many times; especially in this past year as so many guests of Manna House have died.  The death of prisons and executions is gearing up again in Tennessee with ten executions scheduled for this year and the barbaric practice of the electric chair is re-enshrined in state law.
The powers of sin and death need to be confronted with the powers of healing and life.  Hospitality for people on the streets and people who are poor needs to be matched with opposition to the systems of death that produce homelessness, imprisonment, and executions.