Praying for the condemned

Who do we pray for? Is it for the saints or the sinners?

Brandon Sigler was a Mobile Police officer who died on June 3^rd after being shot in the chest. He was off-duty, responding as a courtesy officer to a domestic call in an apartment complex. The shooter, Richard Hollingsworth, claimed to not know that Sigler was a police officer. He was caught after a car chase. Brandon Sigler also graduated from Murphy High School in 2001. My father, a Mobile Police Lieutenant, was at the hospital when Sigler was pronounced deceased. Sigler was not attached to his squad, but my father felt that he had to be there.

I was in Mobile at the time of the shooting. I heard from my father and my mother that Hollingsworth had said "Ya'll pray for me" to the news cameras, as he was being transported from police headquarters to jail. This was recounted to me in a sneering tone of voice, as if my parents were asking who that motherfucker thinks he is to ask for prayers.

Hollingsworth could be lying when he says he didn’t know Sigler was a cop. He may even likely be lying. He could also just be trying to create some kind of sympathy for himself by asking for prayer.

Many seem to think he isn’t serious. The Press-Register’s Sound-off column seemed to carry only condemnations, with people commenting that they would, in fact, not pray for Hollingsworth…That they would instead pray for Brandon’s family and his fiancée.

“Why Brandon?” people ask. Why did this happen to someone so wonderful, with so many things going right for him? It’s unfair…Hollingsworth is a waste of life. With pot in his pocket he murdered a police officer with a gun stolen from a sheriff’s deputy’s personal vehicle. As one close to me asked, why couldn’t Hollingsworth have just died in the crash that terminated his car chase (a car chase that also risked other police officers’ and civilians’ lives) instead of surviving?

By his act, Hollingsworth has taken an innocent life and profoundly hurt Sigler’s family and friends, the Police Dept. and individual officers, and the larger community. As we reel back from the pain, we seem to offer only condemnation. Justice requires that he pay for his crime. The state will surely see to that in its own way; he is charged with capital murder and could get the electric chair. We now hope for a vengeful God that will right the weighty wrong of Sigler’s murder and redeem the suffering Hollingsworth has caused. Some may think that Hollingsworth has forfeited his own life in the taking of Sigler’s. He is now a non-person and a villain. We do not pray for villains. I think this is what the person in Sound-Off was saying.

I do not seek to diminish the nature of Hollingsworth’s act but I do find myself asking what the Christian response to this tragedy should be. I don’t have all of the answers yet, but I do know that the approaches I mentioned above are wrong. We should indeed be fervently praying for Richard Hollingsworth. He should not even have to ask for prayer, so why is it that the loudest voices seem to deny him this? I think it is the pain I mentioned. The person in Sound-Off shows a very narrow view of the role of prayer and seems to show little imagination in prayer’s possibilities. It is not as if one must choose to either pray for the comforting presence of God for Sigler’s family or to pray for Hollingsworth.

In my Baptismal Covenant (reaffirmed at every baptism in the church) I promise to seek to serve Christ in all persons, which is an allusion to Matthew 25. What this means to me is that Hollingsworth is (indeed all people are) made in the image of God; that fact is fundamental to his being. His status as a criminal is contingent upon his acts and behavior, but it does not negate his personhood. We must keep that personhood in mind. He is in need of repentance and redemption with his neighbor. The state, with a retributive justice system, may take revenge but it will not bring reconciliation.

So I will pray for Hollingworth…and Brandon…and the families of them both. They all deserve it…they all need it. I submit that Christians should do no less.