Hanging Saddam

Did Saddam face death with dignity or pride? Buried in his subconscious, what did he sense about himself, his life, his impact on humanity and his death? He held his head high until the oxygen entirely vacated his dead brain. He treated his American jailors with class. He asked his Iraqi taunters if they were behaving in a manly way. What a life. What a death. And so much of what we know about Saddam's hanging we see because of an illicit video tape snuck onto someone's modern-mojo cell phone. And there is still a mess in Iraq, so many bloody bodies and families with holes: missing people, broken souls carrying out crazy violence for a plethora of interesting and tragic reasons. How can we heal what is broken in ourselves, our children and the future generations of the human community? How can we forgive the broken sinners who left us with the mess in our souls, our families, in Iraq, in Sudan, and bring healing the our oppressors, that we might all run free in Christ's path of Grace? Grace. What a messy, bloody word. The only way to release from endless cycles of death. And not cheap grace either. Grace accepted comes with the responsibility to change. Repentace means turning around, doing a 180 toward a lifegiving way of being with self and others, including God.

Grace and Truth. What a hysterically complicated duo Christ embodied for us. A table-turner who forgives enemies, loves intimate betrayers and takes on the care of strangers? A Savior who loves the tainted, mocked ones dearly, and asks his father father to forgive the same people he once called, "children of the devil," because, "they know not what they do?" We serve a Lord who called hypocrisy into the light, who was anything but a doormat to oppressors of mercy and justice. He laid down his life out of a profound sense of calling, not out of a ridiculous martyr complex or a lack of self-worth. God stood up and laid down, and rose above, according to God's will. And we are made in her image. In God's image we live and move and have our being. In her image we dance and die and live again.