What if You Were Jerry's Chaplain?

With one phase of the Jerry Sandusky travesty drawing to a close with his life sentence, I have been bothered by a persistent question: What if I was Jerry's chaplain? During my college days, I thought that I wanted to be a prison chaplain. That lasted until I actually visited a maximum security penitentiary, as a part of a Christian singing group, my junior year. The image of hopelessness that I saw in the eyes of one of the inmates, a man about my age, has never left me. What could he have done to be in that place at such a young age? Would could any chaplain have said to him to give him hope? And what can any chaplain say to Jerry Sandusky? The man will not accept responsibility for the horrors that he perpetrated on legions of young boys. Ok, that's the part we all know and acknowledge. Here is the hard part: Jesus would say that Jerry Sandusky is a child of God. He is a very bad example of a child, and he has destroyed lives and blames others for his misfortune. It would be so easy to hate him. But that does not alter, for a moment, that he is God's child. His prison chaplain will be charged with offering pastoral care, and the sacraments to him. Can his chaplain cut through his denial to a point where Sandusky admits to his terrible crimes and prepares the way for sincere repentance? Well, if the gospel is to be believed, the answer must be yes. But would you want to be that chaplain? Would I? Isn't it easier to hate him from a distance than to try to figure out a way to think of him as a child of God? Jesus loved the unlovable, and never closed the door on anyone. Jerry Sandusky shares my United Methodist heritage. There is a pastor or chaplain somewhere who will have to work with Sandusky to seek to recover some trace of God's goodness in the man. Pray for that pastor. Pray for all of Sandusky's victims and their families. And, this is the hardest part, pray for Jerry Sandusky. To do any less is to doubt that God can do what Jesus said God can do. And that, according to some scholars, is what Jesus referred to as the unpardonable sin.