Sacred Remembering
Following Jesus in a death-dealing state
“Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” Luke 23:42
Those executed by the State of Florida under Governor Ron DeSantis
Bobby Joe Long, May 23, 2019
Gary Ray Bowles, August 22, 2019
Donald David Dillbeck, February 23, 2023
Louis Bernard Gaskin, April 12, 2023
Darryl Brian Barwick, May 3, 2023
Duane Eugen Owen, June 15, 2023
Phillip Barnes, August 3, 2023
Michael Duane Zack, October 3, 2023
Loran Kenstley Cole, August 29, 2024
James Dennis Ford, February 13, 2025
Edward Thomas James, March 20, 2025
Michael A. Tanzi, April 8, 2025
Jeffrey Glenn Hutchinson, May 1, 2025
Glen Edward Rogers, May 15, 2025
Anthony F. Wainwright, June 10, 2025
Thomas Lee Guidinas, June 24, 2025
Michael Bernard Bell, July 15, 2025
Edward “Zak” Zakrzewski, July 31, 2025
There is a sacred quality to memory, and to remembering. God remembers God’s covenant and God’s people throughout the text, and that act of divine remembering is life-giving and salvific. Jesus asks us to remember him when we take the Eucharist: “do this in remembrance of me.” We remember the Sabbath. Biblical ethics are shaped around remembering a people’s history of themselves being aliens in the land of Egypt.
And in the pained, brutal last moments of his life, a condemned and dying man asked Jesus – also condemned, also dying – to “remember” him.
A plea to be remembered by another is such a poignant thing. It speaks to a sense of deep, relational longing. We hope to have mattered, in a way that exists beyond us, held within the people we know and love. Of course, sometimes, we are remembered for the harms we have caused others, including those we know and love. But then sometimes, by grace, we can change our stories, reconcile, make amends, and get to live as more than the worst thing we've ever done.
There are so many aspects of the death penalty that should horrify people of conscience. But what's sticking out to me this moment is its insistence on reducing the memory of a person to their worst deeds. The death penalty seeks to cement that memory in time and space, so that they can never be anything different in the world. So that there can be no reconciliation, healing, or restoration. And in the frenzied pace of executions in my own state of Florida here lately, it reduces human beings and their stories altogether to statistics. A person becomes another one in the record number of executions in a single year for us, remembered simply as one of the rash of killings that happened that year in 2025.
Crucifixion of course tried to similarly cement a person’s memory in a grotesque image of pain and brutality. It served to humiliate and degrade, and, in that humiliation and degradation, to warn others and assert power. It attempted to manipulate the memory of a person to that one fierce showing of the state’s terrible authority, so that people would primarily remember what happens to the defiant.
But with Jesus’s crucifixion, we remember it differently. While we remember the horror, we also remember that death does not have the final word, and that those responsible for such horror are not the victors. We remember that God lived among us and experienced immense suffering and death at the hands of those in power, and we are challenged to think about power and suffering. We remember that Jesus to the end was with those similarly condemned, and that Jesus promises the condemned man that he will not only remember him… he will continue to be with him.
We remember who Jesus was with and for. And there at the end, he is with and for his fellow condemned – not with the ones condemning.
Christianity is a story of God incarnate being executed by the state, and a story of grace, and a story of how we are all beloved children of God. I simply cannot square the death penalty with any piece of the story I love or how it calls us to live our lives. I pray for Governor DeSantis’s heart to be changed, along with the hearts of other politicians, state attorneys, and the general public.
And, following Jesus, we are called to remember these condemned men. We remember the violence they may (or, all too often, may not) have wrought and mourn it, but we remember they have more to their story, too. We remember and, in so doing, fight the state’s effort to reduce their memory to one, terrible thing.
Tuesday, a group will gather outside the governor’s mansion to remember Kayle Bates for the whole of his person. At 67 years old, he has been on death row for 43 years. He is a veteran who showed signs of PTSD after undergoing jungle combat training, tear gas training, and deployment to the 1980 Miami riots. We remember that the violence he committed in murdering Janet White exists in a context of a violent society: the police brutality of Arthur McDuffie that led to the violent demonstrations in response down in Miami, the violence of war necessitating military training, and the violence set to occur on Tuesday. We remember our own complicity in violence and challenge ourselves to new ways of living in peace.
And, outside the governor’s mansion, we will name every other man the pen of this governor has killed, as we remember them, too, as more than just numbers in a sick tally.
We remember. Because Jesus’s last act was to remember a condemned man.
“Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.”