Love Can Open Prison Doors

by Starr Daily

Who is Starr Daily? A blackened criminal, with his record on every prison roster in the country, he lay in solitary confinement very near to death when the Master, Himself, came to him, looked into his eyes, and changed his life by helping him change his identity. The more inadequate we feel and the more handicaps we must overcome, the more beautiful the fruit God will bring forth when His love turns us inside out.

To be inverted is to be converted. When our past is turned under and ploughed over it becomes fertile soil for God's growth. In his prayer of re-dedication Starr Daily acknowledges, "When I am willing to let Thee change my within, I shall have victory over my without."

Calling All Sinner March 9 2002
http://www.calvinchurch.presbychurch.org/sermons6_9.html

Calvin Church Zeienope PA

Matthew 9:9-13

My guess is that you’ve never heard of a man named Starr Daily, but he was a bad man. He was a man who had very little redeeming value. Daily lived from the early through the middle part of the 20th century, and as a young man he wreaked a lot of havoc and destruction on his own and others’ lives. In the 1920s, as a teenager, he emulated some of the most dangerous people in American history. For example, his heroes were people like John Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde, and Al Capone. He was fascinated by their ability to intimidate even the bravest people.

Daily’s hope was that he would strike the same kind of fear in people’s hearts as these criminals did. He wanted to be the kind of man who walked into a town and even the police shuddered in fear. So, he embarked on a life of crime. Before he had grown out of his teens, he had already been in prison twice. Eventually, he became known as one of the greatest safecrackers alive. There was no safe he could not crack as he and his gang robbed bank after bank after bank. Eventually, he was arrested and sent to prison. Upon his sentencing, the judge said that he felt prison was the wrong place for Daily because Daily was sick and needed help, but that prison was the only place for him because he was dangerous and there was no help for the kind of sickness Daily had.

In prison, Daily was a terror. Twice he tried to escape. He constantly fought others, and eventually tried to incite a prison riot. His plan was to take a guard hostage and to unleash terror upon the prison. Fortunately, his plan was discovered and he was sent to "the hole" – a small, dank cell in the bowels of the prison. It was an eight-foot by eight-foot cell with only one small window that sent in a tiny shaft of light. When a prisoner was placed in the hole, he was given a cup of water and piece of bread at 6:00 a.m. Then he was shackled to manacles suspended from the ceiling that forced him to stand for 12 hours until he was let down. Then he was given another piece of bread and a cup of water, and left to lie on the floor for the next 12 hours.

Daily endured 15 days of this. For 15 days he did nothing all day but stand with his arms suspended over his head, hating everyone he knew. He hated those who had put him in prison. He hated the hole’s brutal guard, a man named Bull. He especially hated the deputy warden who sentenced him to the hole. By day 15 his feet were so swollen that he could no longer stand. Bull came in, saw his condition, and left him on the floor. For the most part, Daily was being left to die. He was nothing more than a filthy animal lying on the floor of a dank cell. His life was ending much the same as it had been lived – with little purpose or merit.

I think that most Christians would agree that Starr Daily qualified as a sinner. There are just times when it seems so clear what is and isn’t sin, and who is and isn’t a sinner. But I’m going to challenge you a bit this morning because over the years I’ve learned that understanding sin is more complicated than most Christians think.

If you really want to understand sin, you have to go back to how Jesus and the New Testament writers understood sin. The way they understood sin is not necessarily the way the Christian church has described sin over the centuries. Over the centuries, the church has tended to define sin as the breaking of God’s law. For example, if you break the Ten Commandments, you are guilty of committing sin. If you live in a way that goes against God’s law as set in the Old Testament, certainly you are guilty of sin. According to the way the church has defined sin, what is and isn’t a sin is pretty clear. Yet if you use this definition of sin, then Jesus would certainly qualify as a sinner because Jesus regularly broke the law. In fact, this is one of the reasons he was crucified. He was accused of being a drunkard, a sinner, and a blasphemer. And they were right, at least according to the law. For example, on one occasion, he and his disciples were caught walking through a wheat field, plucking the grains from the wheat and eating them. This doesn’t seem like such a big thing, except they did this on the Sabbath. According to the law, a person could do no work from sunup to sundown on the Sabbath, and plucking grains qualified as work. Jesus also healed people on the Sabbath, which was also working on the Sabbath. Jesus accepted the mantle of messiah, King of the Jews, and Son of God. He was guilty of violating the commandment that said that we are to have no other gods before our God. By saying that he was the Son of God, Jesus was breaking the law. Yet the apostle Paul tells us that Jesus was without sin. So obviously the church’s definition of sin has been wrong.

If sin is not the breaking of God’s law, what is it? To understand sin, you have to understand the Greek word for sin. The Greek word for sin is "amartia." It literally means "missing the mark." The word originates from the idea of shooting an arrow into a target with a bow. The aim is meant to be on the target, but when we let go of the arrow, it misses the mark. When we sin, we miss the mark. The mark we are supposed to be aiming at is God as we let our hearts fly toward God. The idea of sin is that even though God is meant to be our mark – our aim – too often in life we focus our aim on other things that are not God. We focus our aim on getting power, wielding control, assuaging our fear, acquiring money, serving convention, and so many other things. We don’t place our life’s aim on God, and so our whole life becomes immersed in sin.

Sin controls our lives whenever our life’s aim is on anything other than God, and it is so easy for that to happen. There’s a simple test you can use to tell if your life is aimed upon God. In even the smallest things, are you acting out of faith, love, and a desire to serve God, or is your focus on yourself? The more your focus is on yourself, the more your life is in the grip of sin. You see, sin has much more to do with intention than with action. Even the best actions can be sinful if our focus is on ourselves. For example, why do we do good deeds for others? Do we help others because we are hoping for a reward from them or from God? If so, our actions, as good as they are, are steeped in sin. When our lives are immersed in sin, we serve God for what we can get, not because of God’s call. It all has to do with our heart and our focus. In the same way, if we break the law because of a love for God – because we are trying our best to serve God – then we are not in sin. It has more to do with intention than with action.

I’m not trying to say that your motivations have to be entirely pure to be free of sin. All I’m saying is that the more you act based upon a desire to please God, the more God changes your sin into grace. This is the amazing thing about sin. Even if your acts are sinful and self-focused, the moment you become aware of that and decide to act out of love, faith, humility, generosity, kindness, and a love of God, God transforms your sin into grace. Even our worst actions and deeds can serve as a source of grace once we turn our lives over to God. This is hard to understand, but perhaps by looking back at Starr Daily I can make it clearer. Remember the story of Starr Daily? Now let me tell you the rest of the story.

Daily lied on that cold, dank cell floor, barely alive. And as he lied there, he thought to himself, "I have always been a dynamo of energy. What if I had used my energy for good instead of bad?" Then he slipped into unconsciousness. Strange images flooded through his mind until they started to become coherent. He found himself in the midst of a beautiful valley covered in green grass and wildflowers. As he looked toward the other end of the valley, he saw a man walking toward him. He soon realized that this man was Jesus. Jesus was walking toward him, but instead of judging and condemning Daily for his sin, Jesus poured out love. Daily felt a love he had never felt before. It was overwhelming and healing. He knew what love was, and he knew that this was the purpose of his life.

Next, a line of people passed before him. They were everyone he had ever hurt in his life, and he poured out love upon them, telling them he loved them and asking them to forgive them. Next, a line of all the people who had ever hurt him passed before him, and Daily poured out love and forgiveness on them. In this unconscious experience, Daily finally understood love, and made a decision to serve God and love all for the rest of his life.

Soon he woke up, still lying on the floor of his cell, yet everything was different. It was as though a warm glow of God’s grace permeated the cell. The next moment the door opened and the brutal guard, Bull, was standing in the doorway. He looked down at Daily and said, "Starr, you’re starving. I can steal a sandwich for you from the cafeteria." Daily looked up at him and said, "No, Bull. I don’t want you getting in trouble on my account." Bull looked at him differently. This was not the response he expected. This animal named Starr Daily was no longer an animal.

From that point onward, things changed for Daily. He was taken out of the cell and placed in the infirmary, where he slowly recovered and regained his life. He committed his life to Christ and began to love all those around him. Small miracles began to happen, and he was eventually let out of prison five years before his sentence was up. Daily went on to become a well-known speaker and writer about God, faith, and prison reform. He did all this despite having only a sixth-grade education. All of his sin, all of his experiences, and all of his troubles became transformed into grace. Daily tapped into the experiences of his own corruption to teach others how to find God. He could speak with an authority and with a perceptiveness that other Christians lacked. God took all of Daily’s sin, and turned it into a source of understanding that allowed Daily to reach others in a way few could (story from Catherine Marshall’s Beyond Ourselves).

What you see with Starr Daily is not rare. Often the greatest healers are those who have been hurt and injured the most. Do you know who often makes the best drug and alcohol counselors? Recovering alcoholics. It is out of their own sin that they bring healing to others immersed in sin.

So, this brings us to Jesus’ comment for today. Jesus said, "For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners." If we are perfect, there’s no place for us at Jesus’ table. It is only when we know that we are sinners, that we have failed, and that we are in need of God’s transforming power that we find a place at Christ’s table.

You know, when I first came to Calvin Presbyterian Church I heard that it had the reputation of being a church of sinners. I think that this was meant as a bad thing. When I heard this, I didn’t take it the way they meant it. I took it as a sign that this was the place God wanted me. Churches are not meant to be places of perfect people. They are meant to be places where sinners come together and work together to place our collective aims upon God. This is not a perfect place, but it is a place where we try to aim our focus upon God. This is the whole point of being Christian. If you are perfect, there is no place for you here. There’s only space for you hear if you are a sinner.

One of the greatest compliments I’ve heard about Calvin Presbyterian Church reflects this. A woman who is a member here, who went through a terrible divorce years ago, said that the thing she loved about Calvin Presbyterian Church is that it is a place where you can be divorced and have problems. This captures Jesus’ statement in a nutshell. Jesus does not call those who are perfect. Jesus calls those who are sinners.

You see, to be a disciple of Christ, you don’t have to be perfect. You are simply called to be a person who is willing to change the aim of your life. And the question is, are you willing to place your aim on God?

Amen.

Now to Him who is able to keep you from stumbling, and to make you stand in the presence of His glory blameless with great joy, to the only God our Savior, through Jesus Christ our Lord, be glory, majesty, dominion and authority, before all time and now and forever. Amen. Jude 1:24-25

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