Hilton Head Island, SC – October 11, 2015
The Chapel Without Walls
II Corinthians 4:13-18; John 15:12-17
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” – John 15:13 (RSV)
S.O.S.: Socially-Oriented Suicide
An opening caveat: I don’t expect anyone to agree immediately with everything I shall say in this sermon. I don’t expect everyone ever to agree with everything I am going to say. I expect many will strongly disagree with much of what I shall say herein, and many will never agree with any of it. But I want you to know I have not come to these conclusions lightly, nor quickly, nor without deep thought over a growing number of years. Besides, most of you will have several years to ponder the thrust of this sermon, whether or not you now affirm its thesis, so you don’t need to decide anything right now, and it is probably best that you do not.
Ben Franklin wrote, “In this world nothing is certain but death and taxes.” Well, if Donald Trump wins the presidency, he said half of us won’t even have to pay taxes. But about death we can be certain. The trouble is, most of us don’t deeply think about death until it is too late. It’s too late when death is nearly upon us, and we have given no serious thought about how to face it.
In the next 25 minutes or so you will hear many provocative statements. Let me begin with one of the most provocative. God does not determine when anyone dies. Let me repeat it: God does not determine when ANYONE dies. We die when we die, but it is not God who causes our death. Children die of cancer or heart defects or illnesses or accidents. Would God cause that? Surely not! Young adults die of similar causes, as do older or old adults. There are physiological reasons to explain every death, but theology is -- or at least ought to be -- silent about the time or cause of our death. We shall die, but God will determine neither the date nor the cause.
As a minister I have had many scores of people, perhaps in the low hundreds, tell me they wanted to die. If God causes our deaths, and if He answers prayers, why did these people keep on living? They did because they were either too healthy to die or not sick enough to die. But listen, for this is important: Only within the last hundred years have millions of people taken too many years to die. Modern medicine has done wonders to sustain life, but it has also unnaturally postponed death. Too many people take far too long to die. They know it, their families know it, the medical establishment knows it, but with increasing frequency, too many people are living too long for their own good or the good of society. Doctors can keep people alive, but many of those people are convinced the quality of their lives is not worth the expense or the effort.
This sermon is called S.O.S.: Socially-Oriented Suicide. A friend told me I should call it S.O.D.: Socially-Oriented Departure. In terms of genteel public relations, he is probably right. But I have always had a decided proclivity for calling a spade a spade, so I decided to stick with my original title. However, it is important to know that this sermon is not about doctor-assisted suicide. More and more developed countries have adopted laws allowing doctors to prescribe drugs which will end life in mere seconds or minutes, but not our country. Six American states do allow DAS, and 23 other state legislatures are considering laws to approve it. However, a very small fraction of people actually avail themselves of the opportunity. Oregon, which has had DAS since 1997, has had only 1,327 people request lethal drugs, and of them, only 859 actually agreed to have the drugs administered. A small clinic in Switzerland called Dignitas has been administering lethal drugs since 1998 to people who have come there from all over the world. Only 1700 have actually died there. Out of seven billion people, that’s not a lot.
Why? When more and more people say they favor doctor-assisted suicide (in the US almost 70% do), why do so few people make that choice for themselves? As an aside, let me say this: No one who hears this sermon in person will ever have the opportunity for DAS in South Carolina. Our state is a leader in many things: poor public education, poor health for poor folks, the number of people killed by firearms, and such. However, considering who controls the South Carolina legislature, unless any of you live to be anything less than 150 or so, no doctor in this state is going to be allowed to help you enter heaven earlier than otherwise it might happen.
There recently was an article in Time Magazine called The Last Choice (Sept. 28). Its opening paragraphs told of a California doctor who was diagnosed at age 49 with a benign tumor in his liver. He was well acquainted what was likely to happen if this tumor were treated by any suggested means, and he decided he was not going through the ordeal he felt would certainly follow. He was hoping that the California Governor, Jerry Brown would sign a bill on his desk approving DAS. Last Monday Gov. Brown obliged, and California has joined the list.
Doctors usually don’t take a long time to die. Have you ever thought about that? They know what slow death is all about, because “Do No Harm” and purported medical ethics and the ridiculously litigious nature of American society force them to put people through the tortures of the damned in order for their patients to experience hell on earth before they can experience unending joy in heaven. We shall all die anyway, folks, and God will bring all of us into His presence, so why choose hell on earth when you shall have heaven in heaven?
This, in one sense, is literally a life or death sermon. I have talked about death before, probably too much, because I may admittedly be fixated on it. I likely have seen too many people die and I have officiated at too many funerals for me to have psychological and theological equilibrium on this subject. But this time I am going beyond anything I have ever said before. This time I am saying it may be ethically acceptable to take one’s own life, not for the sake of oneself, but for the sake of one’s spouse or family or friends, and for all of society. That is why it is socially-oriented suicide. It isn’t for the patient or for the person who decides to end life sooner than would occur naturally; it is for the sake of the world than we might choose to die.
You need to understand that there is an unintended but nonetheless real conspiracy to keep us living longer than we might otherwise live. The conspiracy results in many people who have added years of poor health, pain, or debilitation to the lifespan of countless people. Medical advancements, Medicare, health insurance, and doctors all team up to keep us going as long as humanly possible, which turns out to be inhumanely possible. The main culprit in the conspiracy, however, is human shortsightedness; nearly all of us have a fierce will to survive at all costs. It is understandable, but also it is costly foolishness. For too many people, “all costs” are expended to keep them alive. Do something; do many things; do everything. Nevertheless, there is far too much support for living as long as possible and far too little support for socially oriented suicide.
We can’t afford very long lives. As a society we are going broke, in part, because of advanced medical care. We can’t afford what we have become able to provide. Every year hundreds of thousands or even millions of people around the world go bankrupt because someone is kept alive beyond what nature in its kindness would have granted them. And why? Because “the system” does all it can to keep them alive, and because so many want so much to stay alive. Is there another way? Is death sometimes more kind than more battered, bankrupting months or years?
If you think it is time to die, if you know it is time to die, you can die. That is, you are able to die, because you can choose to hasten your death. You alone can do it. No one else can do it for you. But there are several – pardon the expression – vital factors you must first consider.
To begin with, if you are married, by all means you must discuss this with your spouse. It would be a travesty to make such a crucial decision without consulting that person. If he or she is unalterably opposed, you will have an interpersonal and ethical dilemma on your hands. If you go ahead, it will be very hard on your spouse. If you don’t, it may be very hard on you. But it would be an unthinkable mistake not to take your life partner into your confidence on what you plan to do. However, and this also is very important, do not discuss it with anyone else, including your children. If you decide to do this, it must be you who makes the decision, and you must make it while you are still in possession of your mental faculties. Don’t wait till you are too mentally debilitated to do this, because then you won’t be capable of doing it. Sadly, the majority of people who have told me they wanted to die were unable to act on their desire to die.
So if the preacher is suggesting such a radical decision, how does the preacher propose that people should enact a socially-oriented suicide? Here is what NOT to do: Don’t use a gun or a rope or an overdose, and don’t drive the car rapidly into a bridge or beside a bridge or off a bridge. Tragically, none of those methods is guaranteed to be effective. Use only a means in which you are in total control and which you know will succeed.
This is one extremely strange sermon, and I readily admit it. But it is also an extremely important sermon in a personal and familial and societal and ethical and theological sense, and you need to hear it. Longer lives which are often elongated at immense cost are undermining the economic viability of every nation which has deluded itself into thinking it can afford those costs. Millions of lives are being badly affected by medical bankruptcy for no good outcome, and scores of developed nations may disintegrate because they are spending too much to keep too many old people, and also some younger people, alive. Listen, Christian people, listen: It is not right! It is not moral! It is not ethical! Those are very sober and sobering observations. But really, why should people who would otherwise die soon anyway live at the expense of those whose lives will be diminished so that the elderly or very infirm can be kept alive in a very compromised state of ill-health? Why should individual lives take precedence over society’s life? Too many inheritances are squandered on health care for the elderly that doesn’t produce health, but rather prolonged agony. With very limited resources, the Eskimos had a superior if also very sobering idea, didn’t they? The survival of the many necessitated the death of the few, they reasoned, and so the old went far out onto the ice, there to die.
I am not talking about anyone terminating anyone else! I am not talking about mercy-killing! But I am talking about voluntary death, about voluntary departure, about voluntary suicide. I am truly talking about euthanasia, “good death,” which is what the Greek word euthanasia actually means. I am referring to people who decide that for the good of their families and their communities and their nation and the world, they choose to hasten their death, which would be coming fairly or very soon anyway.
So how might one act on this immensely momentous decision? To answer, I want to tell you about a man I knew for many years. I knew him well, and then I didn’t see him at all for several years because we moved away, and then I saw him again in church occasionally, and then we moved to where he was living, and I saw him more often.
About a month before he died he called to ask me to come to see him, which I did immediately. It turned out he had been diagnosed with a condition I had never heard of before. It was a diverticulum in his esophagus. It preventing him from eating very much, and eventually from eating anything, even fortified liquids, because he choked on everything. They could do surgery, he was told, but at his age (he was in his mid-90s) he would likely not survive the surgery. Thus he would need a feeding tube to keep him alive.
So he made a decision. He decided to eat and drink nothing, absolutely nothing, except small amounts of water to keep his mouth from acquiring ulcers. He decided to starve himself to death in order to hasten what he knew was his inevitable demise. In less than four weeks, he was gone. Four weeks. Four weeks. A person of average weight can live only a month without food or water. Four weeks. It is a relatively long time, but “they” can keep you going for years in a far, far more debilitated state than he endured.
How might someone take his or her own life without resorting to methods that might not work? That is how. Stop eating and drinking, hold fast to the decision, and you will die. There might be pain, but hospice can provide assistance for overcoming the pain. However, you MUST have the assistance of people around you whom you have enlisted to adhere strictly to your living will and your medical power of attorney. If you go through with it, you will need at least the acquiescence of some who may disapprove of your decision, but who love you enough to abide by your decision.
At the Last Supper, according to the Fourth Gospel, Jesus said, “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” Jesus certainly was not talking about what I am talking about. However, the Bible is absolutely silent about this subject. And I am sufficiently skeptical of the historical accuracy of John’s Gospel that I doubt Jesus ever said anything even close to that. Nevertheless, had Jesus lived now, faced with the issues we face, he might have said it, and he might have said it in the context of this sermon topic. But the last thing people in biblical times were concerned with was approval of suicide. People died too easily and often. In any case, socially-oriented suicide does not think first of the one who actually takes his own life. That is an afterthought. If it is socially-oriented suicide, it is a decision made on behalf of others out of the purest and most other-centered thinking, and not from self-centered thinking at all. I don’t expect you to agree with what I have said, as I said at the beginning, nor do I anticipate that tomorrow morning at 7:00 AM someone here will decide to go without food or drink for the next month. I have been pondering this for years, and you have been confronted with it only for the last few minutes. If anyone wants to talk privately about this, please give me a call. I am very willing to discuss it with you, and I certainly will be glad to hear your thoughts on the matter.
In II Corinthians, Paul talked about death as a “slight momentary affliction.” Twenty centuries ago, it was fairly likely literally to be that. Now death may be neither slight nor momentary. Nor is it truly an affliction. It is the final event in every life lived upon this earth. Socially-oriented suicide is not about the taking of a life, but rather about the giving of a life. It is not a threat to life; it is an altruistic assistance offered to ease the lives of others.
He was an independent-minded Scotsman dying in the Edinburgh Infirmary. Both his legs had been surgically removed. He knew he was dying, and that he would soon die, and he did not wince. Wrote William Ernest Henley in his immortal poem Invictus,
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.
If society approves socially-oriented suicide, you too can be the master of your physical fate.