Sabbath Day Thoughts — “The Kingdom of Mercy and Grace” Luke 23:39-43
Jubilee is a Christian community and working farm set in the beautiful, rolling countryside of Comer, Georgia. For many years, until recent changes in our national immigration policy, the Jubilee partners welcomed refugees to their farm, offering a safe place to land for weary newcomers to our country, many of whom had survived exile and trauma, languishing for years in refugee camps around the world. When I visited Jubilee in 2008, I was drawn to a grove of oaks near the center of the 260-acre property. There, in a quiet clearing, stands a cemetery, a peaceful final resting place for both the residents of Jubilee and the people whom they have ministered to over the years. Robbie Buller, one of the original Jubilee Partners, pointed to a plain grave with a simple marker. “That grave is William “Pop” Campbell,” Robbie said, “He was the very first to be buried here in 1983.”
William “Pop” Campbell had a complicated moral picture. In 1975, Pop killed a smalltown barber near Athens, Georgia in a robbery gone wrong. At the time, Pop insisted that he was innocent. He was just getting his haircut when another man Henry Drake entered the shop and began to beat the barber and demand his money. Pop claimed that he tried his best to intercede, but Drake overpowered him. The jury didn’t buy it. Pop was convicted of murder and landed on death row. Henry Drake, the man Pop accused of the killing, was also convicted. Both men awaited execution by the state of Georgia.
The second thief on Golgotha also had a complicated moral picture. Luke doesn’t tell us much about him, but the teachings of the early church do. According to John Chrysostum, the 4th century Archbishop of Constantinople, the thief’s name was Dismas, a desert bandit, who robbed and killed pilgrims as they traveled to Jerusalem for the Passover. A century later, Pope Gregory the Great taught that Dismas was also a fratricide, guilty of murdering his own brother. On Golgotha, Dismas faced the Roman consequences of his life of thievery and murder: death on a cross.
Dismas and his fellow bandit weren’t the only ones dying on Golgotha that day. Throughout Lent, we have been following Jesus through his final week in Jerusalem. At the start of Lent, when I preached on the Palm Sunday story, I pointed to two radically different kingdoms that would clash in that holy week as the Roman Empire would collide with the Kingdom of God.
Last Sunday, we considered Jesus’ final supper with his friends and the foot-washing lesson he taught them about the prime importance of love and humble service. This Sunday, we encounter Jesus less than twenty-four hours after his object lesson and new commandment that we love one another as he loved us. In those bleak and bitter hours, Jesus was betrayed by Judas, abandoned by his closest disciples, and denied by Peter. The Temple court found him guilty of blasphemy. Pilate condemned him to death on trumped up charges of sedition. Now, Jesus was dying on a cross. Crucifixion was a state-sponsored weapon of terror, a public execution that inflicted excruciating pain in a slow, humiliating death. Above his head hung Jesus’ death sentence in Greek, Hebrew, and Latin, “King of the Jews.”
William “Pop” Campbell learned a lesson in Jesus’ Kingdom from Rev. Murphy Davis. She befriended Pop in her ministry to inmates on death row. She visited him weekly, listening to him and praying with him. In 1981, Pop confessed to Murphy that he lied when he implicated Henry Drake in the crime for which he had been sentenced to death. Pop had invented the story, hoping to muddy the waters, pass the blame, and avoid the death penalty. “What I said were lies,” Pop confessed, “I was the one to kill Mr. Eberhart. Henry wasn’t even there.” When Pop’s lawyer learned of his confession, he was irate. He insisted that Pop renounce his admission of guilt, arguing that it scuttled their chances of a commutation and was a virtual guarantee of death. “I want to do the right thing,” Pops argued back. “What I did was wrong.”
Dismas knew the innocence of Jesus. Dismas also knew his own guilt, as with the hindsight of fast-approaching death he looked back at his long history of thievery and brutality. Jesus didn’t deserve to die, but Dismas did. In the eyes of Rome and in his own eyes, his life of selfish ambition and casual cruelty had landed him on a cross. When the other thief dying on Golgotha began to deride Jesus, Dismas knew it was wrong, just as surely as Pop Campbell knew it was wrong to blame Henry Drake. “We have been condemned justly,” Dismas called out to his criminal colleague, “We are getting what we deserve for our deeds.”
We aren’t Pop Campbell or Dismas, but we know how it feels to have a complicated moral picture. We know the wrong that we have done: the beloved ones that we have failed, the friends we have betrayed, the ethical corners that we have cut, the selfish ambition that we have pursued at another’s expense. We know the good that we have left undone: the times we have refused to help, the occasions when we have turned a blind eye to another’s malfeasance, the good we will not do because the personal cost is just to high, the dirty little secrets that we keep rather than admit our failure. We long to be reconciled with God and with those whom we have hurt. Like Pop and Dismas, we need to believe that there is hope for us—that somehow, despite our wrongs, we can be loved, accepted, forgiven, offered a second chance (or a third or a fourth).
On that lonely hilltop outside Jerusalem, hanging between two criminals, Jesus taught us one last lesson about his Kingdom, even as he was dying at the hands of the empire. Half prayer, half gallows plea, Dismas turned to the Lord and asked “Jesus, remember me, when you come into your kingdom.” In response, Jesus assured him, “Truly, I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise.” Dismas didn’t have to recite the long laundry list of his sins. He didn’t need to undertake the journey of a hundred miles on his knees as an act of penance. He didn’t have to recite the Apostles’ Creed. In Jesus’ Kingdom, Dismas was known in all his frailty and loved in his entirety. In Jesus’ Kingdom there is room for Dismas and Pop Cambell. In Jesus’ Kingdom there is room for us. We are known and we are loved. In Jesus’ Kingdom, there is mercy and grace for all who ask.
Pop Campbell died of natural causes in 1983 while awaiting execution. In Georgia, prisoners whose families are too poor to afford funerals and prisoners who do not have kin or friends to receive their bodies are buried on prison grounds with only their state-assigned inmate number to mark their graves. When Robbie Buller of the Jubilee Community heard of what would be done with Pop’s body, he had a better idea. Jubilee had 260 acres of land. Why not welcome Pop to the community? Plans were quickly drawn up, local zoning authorities approved, and Pop came home to a place and a people whom he had not known during his lifetime.
In speaking about the cemetery, Robbie Buller says, “It’s a final hospitality for people who have had trouble finding acceptance anyplace else.” Since Pop’s burial, the graveyard at Jubilee has welcomed five more death row inmates, as well as seven homeless people, fourteen refugees, and the Rev. Murphy Davis, who so kindly visited Pop Campbell on death row all those years ago. Immediately after someone is buried in the Jubilee cemetery, a new grave is hand dug by volunteers. That’s hard work in the red and rocky Georgia clay. A piece of sheet metal roofing and a blue tarp are placed over the hole. A mound of red dirt waits next to the grave, ready to be filled back in. There is always room for more in the Jubilee burying ground. There is always room for more in the Kingdom of mercy and grace.
Resources
Matt Skinner. “Walking the Palm Sunday Path: A Lenten Sermon Series for 2026” in Preaching Series, January 21, 2026. Accessed online at https://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching-series/walking-the-palm-sunday-path-in-lent-a-sermon-series-for-2026
Melva Sampson. “Commentary on Luke 23:39-43” in Preaching Series, Jan. 22, 2026. Accessed online at https://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching-series/sermon-series-jesus-promises-paradise-to-a-victim-of-crucifixion
Craig T. Kocher. “Theological Commentary on Luke 23:32-43” in Feasting on the Gospels, Luke, vol. 2. Westminster John Knox Press, 2014.
Lincoln Galloway. “Homiletical Commentary on Luke 23:32-43” in Feasting on the Gospels, Luke, vol. 2. Westminster John Knox Press, 2014.
Josina Guess. “Folks Ought to Have a Resting Place” in Sojourners, Nov. 2025.
Barry Siegel. “Parole Board Frees Man Courts Wouldn’t” in The LA Times, Dec. 23, 1988. Accessed online at https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1988-12-23-mn-530-story.html
Luke 23:39-43
39 One of the criminals who were hanged there kept deriding him and saying, “Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us!” 40 But the other rebuked him, saying, “Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? 41 And we indeed have been condemned justly, for we are getting what we deserve for our deeds, but this man has done nothing wrong.” 42 Then he said, “Jesus, remember me when you come in your kingdom.” 43 He replied, “Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in paradise.”
Joann White 