The Lutheran Hour

"Dying, We Live"

#93-01
Presented on The Lutheran Hour on September 7, 2025
Speaker: Rev. Dr. Michael Zeigler
Copyright 2025 Lutheran Hour Ministries

Text: Numbers 14:19-20

Even from behind the Plexiglass, Bev said that when it came to talking about religion and Jesus, Karla could filibuster “from now on.” Although Karla had objected to Bev’s choice of the word “religion.” Not religion, she would insist. Christ. When the subject of Jesus Christ came up, usually Bev went blank, turned stone quiet, and found a way to skirt the issue. Maybe she had decided she’d seen too much injustice, suffered too much pain, had too many unanswered questions to hope that a wise and loving Father God was somehow ruling the universe. Karla didn’t press for a conversion. But she’d often tell Bev that she was praying for her—”lifting her up in prayer” was how she said it.

When Bev talked about Karla to other people who knew the story, they’d say, “So, I guess she’s found Jesus now.” Bev would always answer the same way: “Yes. She has.” Or maybe it was the other way around?

“Born again” was a hard concept for Bev to come to terms with. In her experience, most born-again converts to whatever couldn’t help but ranting and making nonbelievers feel uneasy in their presence. Bev was grateful Karla didn’t. Reminiscing on their friendship years later, she said Karla mostly kept her counsel, reached out in a way she could stand to hear. And prayed. “Born again?” people would ask. “Unquestionably,” Bev would answer.ⁱ

Beverly Fowler writes about her friendship with Karla in her memoir titled, Crossed Over: A Murder, A Memoir. Beverly explains in the book’s foreword: “In the late 1980s, during a dark and flat time in my life I became friends with Karla Faye Tucker, a confessed murderer who lived on death row in the … Texas Department of Corrections.”ⁱⁱ Ten years later, in 1998, Karla went down in history as the first female to be executed in the state of Texas since the Civil War. It had been 135 years since Texas had executed a woman. But Karla’s case was exceptional on several accounts.

The night of her execution was a media frenzy. Two hundred reporters from around the world came to get a piece of the story. There had been a legal blitz to spare her life, on the argument that she was a changed person. It was noted that the murders—though exceptionally violent and horrifying—Karla had committed these as a 23-year-old, hot-headed, drug-addicted prostitute. And now, she was 38, and a totally different person. She was a new person and no longer a threat to society, so her sentence should be commuted to life in prison, the argument went. Eventually, Karla’s day came and there was no pardon from the State.ⁱⁱⁱ It started on schedule at 6 p.m. But it was anything but ordinary.

Officer Tim Carter was there. He was one of the guards on duty that night who participated in Karla’s execution. In his 20-year career with the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, Tim helped with over 150 inmate executions. But this one, he said, was different. “The impact of that evening weighed heavier on me than anything I can recall in my life,” he wrote later. “It was the only execution that I had to recover from.”^iv

Tim was a Christian, although still relatively new to the faith. He had heard that Karla had supposedly been converted to faith in Jesus while in prison, born again, although lots of inmates claim such conversions, and some use it for self-serving purposes. But Karla was different. And Tim was curious. Still early in his Christian experience, Tim said that Karla was the first inmate (though there would be more), but Karla was the first he “truly accepted as a real brother or sister in Christ.”^v The way she lived and died left him with profound questions. “Is there that much visible evidence of Christ in my life?” he asked himself. “Do others see Jesus in my actions? Do I stay focused on Christ during my hard times?”

Tim had seen a lot of executions. Around 40 every year. Sometime as many as three in a week. And at times, he’s ashamed now to admit, they were just numbers. Normally, the person condemned to die was fearful or anxious, sometimes angry and violent. Karla had none of that. She seemed to have complete peace. There were no signs of anxiety. There was no concern for herself, but only for the people around her, including the prison employees, whom inmates normally counted as enemies. But Karla saw them in the same way she saw her skeptical friend, Bev—people she was called to love as God had loved her, people to reach out to in ways they could stand to hear.

Karla blessed those who brought her last meal. Karla blessed the prison warden for his service. Karla blessed the guards who mourned for her as they escorted her to die. Tim wasn’t used to seeing prison guards cry. They had come to know Karla, to love her. Tim heard her telling them, “You’re going to be okay. I’m praying for you. And don’t worry about me. I deserve this. I have no desire to avoid it. Don’t worry about me,” Karla said, “I already died a long time ago.”^vi

At that time in America, you often heard people taking about someone being a “born again Christian.” It was a trendy way of talking at the time, though the phrase has fallen out of fashion somewhat today. “Born again” is a biblical way of talking. Jesus Himself talked this way (see John 3). But it wasn’t the only way He talked about it—about how things are and how things will be with those who follow Him. Born again is part of the truth, but there’s more. Because new birth in Christ is always preceded by a death—death to the old person. “I’ve been crucified with Christ,” as one of the early followers of Jesus put it. That’s what Karla meant when she said she had died already. She had died to herself.

This way of speaking was used in an early Christian letter, written by a missionary named Paul, addressed to Christ-followers living in Rome. Paul said to them, “[as Christians], we know that our old self was crucified with [Jesus] so that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin” (Romans 6:6). Sin, Paul says, is this corrupting, inward-turned power at work in all people. It works differently in each of us. And the consequences of some sins are worse than others, on a human level. But the final result is the same. All sin leads to death. All sin leads to separation from God. It is because of sin that we die, physically and spiritually. And it is from sin that Christ’s death and resurrection deliver us.

So, Karla had already died. Her new life in Jesus was already here, and not even a lethal injection could destroy it.

You’re listening to this program, so I’m guessing you’re a Christian, or if not, at least you’re curious enough to want to know more. Maybe you’re like Tim, the prison guard who watched how Karla died, and was humbled and inspired to trust Jesus more fully and follow Him more closely. Maybe you’re like Karla’s friend Bev, skeptical, but still willing to visit and listen. Wherever you are, probably the best thing that you can do, to explore this faith, this journey with Jesus, is to listen to the life stories of His people. That’s mostly what we do on this program, so come back next week. Invite a friend. And hey, if you’ve got a story that needs to be told, give us a call. We’ll listen. We’ll listen to the stories of Jesus and His people, together. And the more of these you hear, the more clearly a pattern emerges.

Born again is half of it. Dying and rising is the bigger picture. It’s a pattern all over the Bible, an ancient pattern that pointed to Jesus, and Jesus Himself says that He fulfilled it, and offers it to us. That great missionary of Jesus, Paul, he said it this way in another letter. He said, “You all have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God” (Colossians 3:3). Paul was drawing on the Old Testament, the first part of the Bible, the account of God’s dealings with His missionary people, the children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, from whom Jesus was born. Dying to rise is everywhere there, too. When Abraham and his wife Sarah were old and childless, God promised to make something out of the flat and dark wasteland that had been their life thus far, so that they would trust Him as the God who makes something out of nothing. And when Abraham and Sarah’s bodies were as good as dead, God kept His promise and gave them a child, so that they would trust Him as the God who gives life to the dead.

And some 500 years later, when their descendants were slaves in Egypt, and the memory of the land that God had promised them was as good as dead, out of that darkness and death God brought light and life to His people, so that they would trust Him as the God who calls into existence the things that are not. And then, when their me-centered rebellion in the wilderness almost ruined everything, when they were beyond rehabilitation and sentenced to die in the wilderness, God stayed faithful to them and to their children and to their children’s children, so that they would trust, and we would trust that He is the God who gives pardon and peace and hope, hope against all merely human hope.

Dying, we live. That’s the pattern that repeats again and again until it reaches the ultimate expression in Jesus. Jesus, who gave Himself on the cross, who gave Himself over to death for you, His death brought the power of sin to nothing. His resurrection from the dead makes new birth possible for you. His promise to return and raise the dead and bring us into the Promised Land of God’s New Creation gives us hope against hope. The Bible holds out a hope that lets us see this temporary, mortal life as something like that wilderness between slavery and the land of promise yet to come. In the Bible, the wilderness, the barren, flat, dark, death-row wasteland situated between exodus and Promised Land—that’s where God does His best work.

In the wilderness is where our me-centered selves finally die. In the wilderness is where life in Christ is re-born, and trained, and refined to flourish. In the wilderness is where God shows us that He’s the God who gives hope against hope, life to the dead, and pardon to the guilty. “In the Wilderness” is also the name of the fourth book of the Bible, in the Hebrew language, anyway. You might have learned it by the less adventurous name, “Numbers.” Numbers was what it got called when the Hebrew Bible was translated later into Greek. Numbers, because, well, read it, there’s a lot of numbers. It’s not a bad name for the book, but I like the original better.

Over the next several weeks on this program, I’m going to invite you to explore this wilderness book with me. Going forward, I’m still going to refer to it by its more common name, but hopefully we’ll start to see it as more than just numbers. Because they’re not just numbers. They’re people. And God loves them. Every one of them. And when you listen to a book like Numbers, with your eyes trained on Jesus, you’ll see that God’s love is as much at the center of this book as in the rest of Scripture. Even surrounded by innumerable human failures and miseries and unanswered questions, there God’s love is. God’s unfailing love for anxious and rebellious people, expressed in the bread He gave from heaven, expressed in the water He gave from the rock, in the streams in the desert—and pardon.

It’s not by accident that the most famous passage about God’s love spoken by Jesus, John 3:16—you remember it, that “God so loved the world that He gave give His only Son, so that whoever believes in Him will not perish but will have eternal life”—it’s not by accident that Jesus references Numbers 21 to make His point there, about the strange yet certain way God’s love finds His people in the wilderness. That’s where He always finds us, whether in the secured cell of a drug-hazed, murderous prostitute, or in the me-centered insecurity of the guard or the friend on the other side of the Plexiglass—before God it’s all the same. And that’s where Jesus finds us.

That’s where he found Karla. It’s where Jesus showed Himself through Karla to Tim. It’s where Jesus reached out through Karla to Bev. With the Plexiglass between them, Bev once asked Karla if she were offered the chance to erase her death sentence in exchange for a sentence of life without parole, would she take it? “You bet I would,” Karla answered. I can make a life here. I have made a life.”^vii

See, in Christ, we welcome the wilderness as the place where our old selves die. But that’s not the same as having a death wish, because the wilderness is also the place where God gives life—bread from heaven, water from the rock, streams in the desert. Karla wanted as much of this life as God was pleased to give her. Because even life in the wilderness is God’s gift for us—God’s gift for you.

God so loves you that He gives you this gift in Jesus, not just on the day of your physical death, but again and again every day, for however many miles you walk in this wilderness. Karla had worked her way up to 15—15 miles every day when she was in prison. For her, one mile was 23 laps in a figure-eight around the small yard reserved for the death row inmates.^viii And 23 laps times 15 miles times 365 days times 10 years—well, that’s a lot of numbers. It was her wilderness. It was God’s gift. “I can make a life here,” she told Bev.

Karla had befriended the other three women on death row with her: Pam, Betty Lou, Frances. And the four of them, they knitted sweaters and socks as Christmas gifts for family and friends. They crocheted decorations together to make their cells more homey. They threw parties with competitions to see who could carry the most toilet paper rolls across the finish line, and desserts engineered from packets of Department of Corrections cream cheese, Kool-Aid powder, granola bars, and vanilla wafers. Karla had made a life in the wilderness, and more than anything, she wanted her friend Bev to know what made it possible. Who made it possible. Bev, on the other side of the Plexiglass, lost in her own flat, dark place, heard Karla confess that there would be no community on Death Row, there would be no happiness, no parties, no inner peace, without faith in Jesus Christ. Karla didn’t just have a life, she had a mission. “My mission,” she said, “is to love … to love murderers, dope fiends, nonbelievers, everyone. Without Christ, I wouldn’t be able to do that.”

Bev wondered how Karla could say that—Karla, who may have been the most loving person Bev had ever met. Karla hesitated a few seconds, and then came up with it: “Love without having to get anything back. It isn’t me doing the loving, really, it’s Christ in me. I am loving others with the love of Christ, and in doing so I hope to bring others to Christ.”^ix

Bev was among Karla’s friends who pleaded for her life to be spared. They had hoped for a pardon from the state, but it never came. Karla wanted to live, and she had also hoped for that pardon. But she hoped in the pardon that she’d already received in Jesus. And her last words were exactly like her years-long witness to Bev—not preachy or showy. She apologized for her crime, thanked and blessed her family, and told the prison staff, “I love you all very much. You’ve been so good to me.” At 6:45 p.m. she was pronounced dead, although the real change had already come years ago.

Bev wrote a new foreword for her book about Karla few years later. At that time, she could not yet see how God was at work, even in Karla’s death, but she did remember a Scripture passage Karla had often cited. On the question of hope, when Bev wondered where it was, Karla referenced Romans 4, in which Paul speaks of Abraham—his body as good as dead—contrary to hope, in hope he trusted the God who calls the dead to life, the God who calls a murderer-prostitute “My beloved daughter,” and things into being which are not.

In the Name of Jesus. Amen.

i Beverly Lowry, Crossed Over: A Murder, A Memoir. New York: Vintage Books (2002), 197.
ii Ibid., Foreword.
iii “Tucker Dies After Apologizing,” by Kathy Walt, Houston Chronicle, February 3, 1998.
iv Tim Carter, The Executioner’s Redemption: My Story of Violence, Death, and Saving Grace. St Louis: Concordia (2016), 46.
v Ibid., 51.
vi Tim Carter interview, “An Executioner’s Redemption: From Prison to Pastor,” Engaging Truth, accessed June 17, 2025, at https://youtu.be/eWxOiyGdWC4?si=oFskMKOCAzURHUHP
vii Lowry, Crossed Over, 199.
viii Ibid., 25.
ix Ibid., 197.

Reflections for September 7, 2025
Title: Dying, We Live

No reflection segment this week.

Music Selections for this program:

“A Mighty Fortress” arr. Peter Prochnow. Used by permission.
“Crucifer” by Sydney H. Nicholson, arr. Peter Prochnow. Used by permission.
“Chief of Sinners, Though I Be” arr. Henry Gerike. Used by permission.
“Come, Let Us Join Our Cheerful Songs” by Isaac Watts & Johann Crueger (public domain, arr. Peter Prochnow).
“How Clear Is Our Vocation, Lord” From The Concordia Organist (© 2009 Concordia Publishing House) Used by permission.