I learned to read, in part, on a picket line.
And I mean that literally. Some of the first words I ever sounded out, letter by letter, were printed on the signs I carried alongside my family all over our hometown. And one of the first ones I remember decoding, standing on a public sidewalk while strangers yelled at us, was a quote from Jesus:
“GO AND SIN NO MORE,” the sign said.
Today, I want to share with you the story from the Bible where that quote comes from, and also about the day more than 20 years after I’d learned to read that sign, when the story was turned around on me and changed everything.
First, though, you need to understand something about the infamously homophobic church I grew up in: We were not just a church. We were, to a remarkable degree, a family — and in particular, a family of lawyers.
Before he became one of the most reviled preachers in America, my grandfather — “Gramps,” as we knew him, the infamous leader of the Westboro Baptist Church — was not just a lawyer but a well-known civil rights attorney.
Yes, the same man who led our foul-mouthed, much-hated church had also been an award-winning legal defender of equality for black Americans.
And he wasn’t alone. He required his children — and anyone who wanted to marry them — to go to law school to help with that work. This meant that both of my parents went to law school, and so did nearly all of my twelve aunts and uncles. And when you’re raised by lawyers, you learn quickly that argument isn’t necessarily conflict. It’s a love language. It’s a way of life. You learn to anticipate attacks and to give a reasoned defense of your positions. There was honor in being able to stand before any jury of our peers (think: my 11-year-old cousins) and win the day with words and arguments.
Gramps made sure that we understood this wasn’t just what lawyers do. It’s what Scripture tells godly people to do. The Apostle Peter says in the New Testament: “be ready always to give an answer to every man that asks you[...]” We were being trained, Gramps said, for spiritual warfare. These were matters of eternal significance, and it was essential that we prevail.
But here’s the other thing about the law, both the kind my parents practiced and the kind we preached: the law is not just about arguments. It’s about verdicts. And sentences.
And the law we preached from the Bible included a death penalty.
This may surprise some people, but the Bible prescribes death for a long list of sins. Sins like murder, perhaps obviously, but also homosexuality. Blasphemy. Breaking the Sabbath. Even cursing your parents.
My family did not flinch from this standard. We put it on our signs. Most notoriously, we preached death to gays as God’s punishment for their sins. Others might shrink from these teachings, but we at Westboro shamed the timid world that rejected them.
But it’s interesting to note that the same law that prescribed death was actually pretty particular about how a death sentence could be carried out. For example, you could not be executed on mere suspicion. An accusation was not enough — no matter who it was from — to end a person’s life.
You also could not be executed on the testimony of just one witness. The law required at least two witnesses. And in the Old Testament book of Deuteronomy, there’s this remarkable procedural detail that goes even further: the witnesses themselves — not a third party executioner — had to carry out the sentence.
To quote the Bible: “The hands of the witnesses shall be first upon him to put him to death.”
So, if you stood as a witness to a capital crime — if your testimony helped condemn someone — you had to pick up the first stone yourself.
The legal scholars of the Jewish tradition kept building on these protections and procedures. And you can see that, over time, they kept raising the bar for evidence. So while the violence of the Bible is not remotely restrained, it is coupled with a growing discomfort about taking a human life based on thin evidence. There was a push and pull between mercy and justice.
Today, we’ll get into the ways that Jesus stepped directly into the middle of that tension, and how we today — no matter what we might believe about religion — can still find something deeply human and powerful in that story.
*****
This story is another one from the life of Jesus, and on top of the litigious Hebrew law he’s navigating in this time, there is another legal wrinkle: the Romans.
Remember, this region was occupied territory at the time, and Rome reserved the power of execution for itself. The local courts could still enforce religious law, but when it came to taking a life, Rome had the final say.
So that’s the context of this story: a Jewish law that prescribed death, surrounded by procedures designed to make execution difficult, all under an empire that controlled who had the authority to kill.
Now into that world, early one morning, walks a woman who is facing her own death sentence.
This story is found in only one of the Gospels: The book of John. The final and most unusual — maybe “mystical” is the word — of the four accounts of Jesus’ life and teachings. And as the story begins, it’s early in the morning. Jesus has come to the Temple in Jerusalem, and as usual, a crowd has gathered to hear him teach.
As he’s sitting there — and I always picture him dressed simply, in humble, well-worn clothing — enter the scribes and the Pharisees. These are religious authorities, educated men of status and reputation. And like I’ve said before, you can think of a scribe as a kind of lawyer: an expert trained to interpret, debate, and apply the Scriptures. And the Pharisees, as a reminder, were like the top brass of what we’d now think of as a local religious movement, devoted to rigorous obedience to that law. (You may remember that Saul of Tarsus — the Apostle Paul — was a Pharisee at the beginning of his story.) These are serious men with authority and considerable influence.
These men bring with them in their custody a woman who they’ve arrested. They haul her into the middle of the crowd gathered before Jesus, and they announce: “Master, this woman was taken in adultery, in the very act.”
That always struck me. How did they catch her? What must that scene have been like? The Bible doesn’t say. But it’s clear that they want everyone here to know that there is no ambiguity, no question of guilt.
And then they declare, in a very lawyerly fashion, their assessment: “Now Moses in the law commanded us that such should be stoned,” they say.
Of course they’re talking about the law of Moses, the sacred legal and moral code at the very center of Jewish life. One of the commandments is “Thou shalt not commit adultery,” and the punishment for violating it is right there in the law, as well: “the adulterer and the adulteress shall surely be put to death.”
But then they turn to Jesus and ask: “But what sayest thou?”
And the text flat-out tells us why they do this: to test Jesus — to tempt him, it says — to force him into an impossible choice with grave consequences.
It’s a trap, in other words, and it is a beautifully constructed trap. Because whether Jesus answers “stone her” or “don’t stone her,” he risks violating the law and the punishments that go with that.
Because if he says, “Yes, stone her!” he walks directly into the trap that they’ve set. Because remember, they are under Roman occupation here. Rome tightly controls the power of execution. So if Jesus openly advocates carrying out a stoning, he’s not just weighing in on a religious dispute. He could be accused of defying imperial law, which could possibly lead to his arrest or even his death. And by this point in the Gospel of John, we’ve already been told explicitly that his enemies are looking for grounds to arrest or kill him.
And on top of all of that, if he advocates killing this woman, he would also be torching his own ministry, in a way. Because by now, he is famous — or infamous, depending on who you ask — for all the ways he has been preaching compassion, for how he receives sinners, befriending and loving them.
But if Jesus says, “Don’t stone her!” — well, then he can be accused of defying God’s law, the legal code given to Moses by God himself. He could be accused of setting his own teaching above the law, in front of witnesses and in the Temple itself. That would also be damning in the deepest way.
It’s an argument that he — ostensibly — cannot win.
But before we get to what Jesus does, I want you to notice what the lawyers in this scene apparently hoped no one would.
Someone is missing.
If it’s true that this woman was taken in adultery, “in the very act,” then that means that there was a man involved, right? And the law they’re citing, the law of Moses, is unambiguous that in a case of adultery, both parties shall be put to death.
So where is the man?
These men standing in the Temple, so concerned about the strict enforcement of the law, are failing to uphold it even as they speak. They’ve brought a selective prosecution. They have dragged one defendant into the public square and presumably let the other walk.
So whatever this is, it isn’t justice, even by their own code.
And Jesus, in his characteristic way, then does the strangest thing.
Instead of answering, he stoops down and starts to write in the dirt with his finger. The text says, “as though he heard them not.”
So, picture it: in front of this crowd that must have been transfixed by the drama of the scene unfolding in front of them, Jesus squats down and starts doodling in the dirt with his finger.
People have now speculated for two thousand years about what he might have written. Maybe it was the name of the missing man. Maybe it was the accusers’ own sins. The story doesn’t say.
Yet the scribes and Pharisees keep pressing Jesus.
And finally he stands up, and he says the line that even if you’re not familiar with the Bible, you might know:
“He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.”
Or as it’s better known today: “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”
Jesus is doing something radical here, as he often does. He is holding up a mirror to these men who are standing there in judgment of this woman. He is reminding them that the same law that condemns her sin also condemns them for the sins they’ve committed. He is highlighting the fact that condemnation is easy when the target is other people — but feels very different when the weight of judgment is weighing on you.
Then, the Bible says, he stoops back down and keeps writing in the dirt.
And something remarkable happens next. The same men who were just now so eager to accuse the adulterous woman? The text says that they were “convicted by their own conscience.” And that one by one, they leave.
The Bible even tells us the order in which the men depart: “Beginning with the eldest,” it says. I love that detail. Maybe because age has a way of acquainting us with our own contradictions. Our amazing capacity for self-deception.
But anyway, one by one, the men go their way. Until finally Jesus looks up, and it’s just him and the accused woman.
And he says to her, “Woman, where are thine accusers? Hath no man condemned thee?”
And she says, “No man, Lord.”
And he replies — and this line often makes me tearful these days — “Neither do I condemn thee. Go, and sin no more.”
“Go, and sin no more.”
That sign. The one that helped teach me to read.
Now, to my family, that final line was the crux of the story, the big takeaway that we all should live by. The most important thing we could learn from this story was: “Stop sinning.”
And by the time I was grown, our arguments surrounding this story were well-worn. People passing by our protests would see the judgment and condemnation that we preached — condemnation of America, of gay people, of pretty much everyone who didn’t see the world exactly as we saw it — and they would shout at us: “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone!” And they would act like it was a mic drop.
But I had rehearsed my lines a thousand times. And I would immediately answer back: “We’re not casting stones. We’re preaching words. We are standing peacefully on public sidewalks saying words you don’t like but that are exactly what Jesus said. He did not tell the adulterous woman, ‘You’re fine as you are, keep sinning.’ He said: ‘Go, and sin no more.’ That is our message.”
And I thought that answer was pretty reasonable, actually. My family might have been infamously harsh, but we weren’t actually casting stones. We were just speaking words.
I mean…right?
With my whole heart, that is how I understood it — up until age 24, when, as fate would have it, I would encounter another lawyer.
If you’ve been listening from the first episode, you’ve already met him, actually: David. My erstwhile enemy who would one day welcome me to his table in my time of greatest need. In our early battles on Twitter, and then later on the picket line, David and I would fight about everything. It was really contentious at first, but then somehow, it became funny. Sarcastic. Almost friendly. Before David, I can’t recall anyone spending so much time genuinely trying to grasp the arguments my family and I were making. Most people understandably dismissed us out of hand. But David kept pressing. Maybe it was because he was, like so much of my family, a lawyer, and practiced at keeping the argument going. But whatever it was, after more than a year, he found a weak spot.
One day, he asked me about a sign he’d seen in a photo from one of our protests. It wasn’t our most famous sign, but it was a similar sentiment. The sign said: “Death Penalty for Fags.”
Why, he asked, is it fair to demand such a harsh penalty for this sin?
To justify it, as I always did, I quoted him the verse from the law of Moses: If two men lie together, “they shall surely be put to death.”
And then I gave him another one of our talking points: “If that punishment is good enough for God, it’s good enough for us.”
But then David said, “Wait, didn’t Jesus say, ‘Let he who is without sin cast the first stone’?”
I remember thinking it was funny that a Jewish man with no use for the New Testament was quoting Jesus at me. But his question was so laughably simplistic that I almost rolled my eyes. Instead, I confidently delivered the Westboro retort: “We're not casting stones. We’re preaching words.”
And David, with no idea he was about to crack open my entire worldview, said:
“Yeah, but you’re advocating that the government cast stones.”
Wait. What?
It was a record-scratch moment. Just a few words — words that, in hindsight, seem painfully obvious. But no one had ever said them to me. No one had ever pointed out that in calling for the death penalty, my family and I were demanding the exact same thing as those scribes and Pharisees. And Jesus had held a mirror up to them — the men prepared to assume the power to take a life — and he said: Look at yourselves.
And now, two thousand years later, David was holding that mirror up to me.
Oh my God, I thought. Could I be the Pharisee here?
I felt like I’d been shoved backwards and was trying to catch my balance.
But David wasn’t done. He said to me: “And anyway, didn’t your mom have a child out of wedlock?”
It was true. I’d had it thrown at me many times, and I answered David the same way I always did: “My oldest brother was born before my mom was married,” I acknowledged. “But everyone sins. The question is whether or not you repent. And she did. The standard isn’t sinlessness. It’s repentance.”
My mother was a leader — one of the most public leaders — in our church.
She was always on the picket lines, speaking on television and in documentaries, organizing the vast array of logistics that fueled the church’s operations and our massive public profile. She even traveled across the country to represent the church in places like university classrooms and the FBI National Academy at Quantico.
This was a woman who had long since left behind the sin of her youth. She had repented.
But David said to me: “Sure, but…if your mom had been killed right after she committed that sin, you wouldn’t exist.”
Somehow, in all my years of argumentation on the picket line, I had never thought through the fact that if we execute a person right after they sin, we immediately cut off the opportunity to repent and be forgiven.
I know this will sound silly to some of you, but that is what it’s like to be inside a prison of belief. It blinds us to things that are very obvious, because we have so thoroughly absorbed the belief as concrete and infallible. It had genuinely never occurred to me that if my mother had been held to the standard we were demanding for gay people — if she had been executed for her sins — then my family would not exist. Nine of my siblings would not exist. I would not exist.
My entire life was made possible by withholding the very punishment my sign was calling for. It was made possible by the space between error and the ending of a life.
In other words, my entire life was made possible by mercy.
And this wasn’t just lawyerly "human logic," as my family would dismissively say. This was the logic of Jesus himself, reminding everyone ready to stone that woman that every one of us falls short of the standards that we aspire to, that we hold others to. It was a reminder that no one standing in that crowd was as righteous as they may want to believe.
“Go and sin no more” is a fair lesson to take from this story.
But so is “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”
I know that it’s bizarre that it took a stranger on Twitter to show me something that had been sitting in plain sight my whole life, in a story I’d read hundreds of times.
But there was something especially perilous about the culture I grew up in — a culture where the pursuit of truth and the need to be right were both heavily valorized. Because at some point, unless you are perfection personified, those two goals will conflict. And it is very difficult to look for the truth, if you’re already certain you have it, if your identity hinges on being correct. If you’ve spent your whole life publicly advocating a position — on sidewalks, in classrooms, on signs even before you could read them — then letting go of a belief like that doesn’t feel like changing your mind.
It feels like a kind of death.
This is something many people don’t understand about leaving groups like mine. The hard part isn’t hearing other people’s arguments. The hard part is the moment the words stop being an argument and become a mirror, and you have to reckon with what you’re seeing reflected back at you. You have to choose between that new reality and certainty, comfort, life as you know it.
My family and I delighted in judging evildoers. And the fact that we read this story again and again, for years, and somehow never once saw ourselves in those scribes and Pharisees — that tells me something about the human capacity for self-deception. About how easy it is to demand judgment for others and conveniently forget that if we were dragged into the middle of that crowd, in our most shameful moment, every single one of us would be desperate to hear: “Neither do I condemn thee.”
So here’s what I’ve come to understand about this story — something I missed entirely all those years of reading it, and something that I think remains profound today:
The woman at the center of this attempted execution never apologizes.
There is no scene where she throws herself at the feet of Jesus, or of the crowd, begging for mercy, swearing she’ll be different. The text doesn’t give her that speech. She just stands there, exposed and terrified, and grace arrives anyway. It arrives before she’s earned it.
And actually that is the point of grace: It cannot be earned. It can only be given.
To me, that is the revolutionary thing about this story. Not the clever trap Jesus escapes from, not even the famous line about casting the first stone. It’s mercy that doesn’t demand or wait for the apology. Forgiveness that outpaces repentance. It is the embodiment of the virtue that we call grace.
And David — my Jewish friend who didn’t even believe in all this New Testament stuff — he didn’t wait for my apology either. He didn’t demand that before we became friends, I must first account for all the harm I had done: the funerals I had protested, the people I had targeted, the years of ugliness I had put into the world alongside my family. He didn’t make me pay for my sins.
Instead, in the moment when I was lost and absolutely guilty, when I needed somewhere to go, he said, “Neither do I condemn you.”
He said, “Welcome to my table.”