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Good morning. On 6th September 2018, off-duty Dallas police officer Amber Guyger shot and killed Botham Jean in his own apartment. This week she was found guilty of murder and sentenced to 10 years in prison. While this case might easily have been passed over as one more statistic in a history of violence against black men at the hands of white police officers, it captured public imagination due to the response of Botham’s 18-year-old brother Brandt - who announced that his Christian faith had led him to forgive policewoman Guyger, getting up to hug her after she was sentenced. Brandt’s response was gracious, unnecessary, and misunderstood. Public discussion of his words reveals our tendency to treat forgiveness as an easy salve for a wound that will heal. Forgiveness – like repentance – is not the work of one off hugs and tears. Brandt will grieve his brother for the rest of his life, and, if he chooses, will also carry the lifetime weight of seeking to forgive. In the Lord’s Prayer, Christians ask that God will ”forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us” – they forgive because they have been forgiven, not because their forgiveness removes the need for repentance from those who have harmed them. We do a disservice to Brandt’s forgiveness if we treat it as an alterative to justice – they are not mutually exclusive options. Instead, one should flow out of the other. In his letter to the Romans, the apostle Paul writes: ”shall we go on sinning so that grace may increase? By no means!” Or, to paraphrase Paul, shall we go on killing black men so that we can be inspired by forgiveness from a traumatised teenager? By no means. The court proceedings are also a painful reminder of our warped distribution of sympathy. A society that more easily identifies the image of God in a white police officer than in the black man she killed is not ready to understand the grace Paul describes, either for the perpetrator or the victim’s family. As Botham Jean’s mother Allison made clear, Brandt’s forgiveness belongs between him and God. She said; “what Brandt did this afternoon was to heal himself, to free himself from what has been wrapped up within him for the last year… I don’t want forgiveness to be mistaken for a total relinquishing of responsibility.” This does not absolve Guyger or the associated sins of racism and corruption, but it is an offer that Guyger may or may not choose to accept. Should she choose to accept it, she will encounter the kind of grace that leads to a lifetime of repentance and service – a much longer commitment than the reduced jail sentence she will serve.