Hilton Head Island, SC – January 29, 2017
The Chapel Without Walls
II Corinthians 4:13-18; II Cor. 5:1-9
A Sermon by John M. Miller
Text – So we do not lose heart. Though our outer nature is wasting away, our inner nature is being renewed every day. – II Corinthians 4:16 (RSV)
Let me begin this sermon with an important admission. The older I get, the more concerned I get about death. It isn’t my own death I’m concerned about, however. It is the nature and the prolonged difficulty of the deaths of increasing numbers of people I have known personally. The end of life for a growing number and percentage of people becomes a long, slow slide into mental or physical oblivion which continues for months or years. If people want that to happen, or if they allow it to happen, that is their choice, and it is a valid one. But if they don’t want that to be the nature of their last days and years on this earth, there are ways to prevent it.
The underlying theme of this sermon is euthanasia. Euthanasia is a word nearly everyone knows by this late date in human history, because it has been talked about and written about for many years. The word is Greek in origin. Euthanasia literally means “good death.” I looked up the word for “bad” in my Analytical Concordance of the Bible. What would be the Greek word coined for “bad death,” meaning “not a good death,” or connoting “painful or demeaning or agonizing death”? I found three Greek words for “bad.” The one which seemed the most appropriate in our context was poneros. Thus a bad death in Greek would be ponerosthanasia.
The title for this sermon was provided for us by one of our own flock. I have often heard him say it in several different contexts. “Life is a fatal condition,” he says.
What that means, of course, is that everyone who lives shall die; everyone. And also every thing. Nothing that lives shall escape death. Death is completely and absolutely unavoidable. And should medical science discover a way to keep human beings living forever, it will have done an immense and disastrous disservice to humanity, because it shall guarantee a horrible ponerosthanasia for everyone eventually anyway. There are likely too many human beings already living for our planet to be able to sustain them into infinity, and that problem would become geometrically exacerbated by increasingly more billions of bodies to be kept alive being added to the world population forever. Nearly everyone would be in the last of the Seven Ages of Man described by Shakespeare: “Last scene of all/ That ends this strange eventful history/ Is second childhood and mere oblivion/ Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.”
Make no mistake about what I am implying here, and now shall declare openly. I am talking about our voluntarily choosing to end our lives before we get to that last scene, if we conclude that will likely be our last scene. However, as Shakespeare also said in another play, we might decide to “take arms against our sea of troubles, and by opposing, end them.” Did you catch the cryptic euphemisms? Hamlet was talking about suicide, but in his case for unacceptable reasons.
Before proceeding further, however, I need to ask a crucial ethical question, or rather, a series of questions. Do we assume that God decides when all of us are intended to die? What does “intended to die” mean in that context? Are we ethically obligated to live as long as possible as our response to God for giving us life, or are we free to choose when and under what conditions we opt to die, convinced that God never fixes the time of death of any of us?
Many people believe that God does determine when we die. Probably that has been the conviction of most of humanity for most of our history, at least for those who believed in God. And it is certainly theologically plausible for anyone to continue to believe that now.
I confess I am not one of those people. I don’t think God has ever decided at what moment anyone died. Everyone just died, however it was that they died. Life is a fatal condition. Furthermore, more and more people are now dying prolonged, painful, or mentally-oblivious deaths, because medical science can keep more and more of us alive for much longer periods than in previous generations. Surely that is not God’s will. And if it is, I want no part of such a God. Life expectancy keeps rising. For those who were born eighty or more years ago, life expectancy for Americans back then was about seventy years of age. Now it is about eighty. In half a century or less it could be ninety. And for what? To what end? For what purpose?
It is necessary to point out that life expectancies for any national population are simply statistical averages. That means that some shall die as children, some as young adults, some as middle-aged people, but by now most as relatively elderly people. The fastest growing demographical segment of American society is the very elderly. That is because medicine and machines are consigning them to a very advanced age.
Surprisingly, American life expectancy is lower than that of several other advanced nations. There are at least two reasons for this. First is that our medical system is twice as expensive as that of any other modern nation. That is because America alone has profit-based medical care rather than socialized medicine. We are not talking about socialism here; we are talking instead about socialized medicine, which is the only reasonable modern way to provide medical care for any modern country. Only socialized medicine is able to control rising costs. Profit-based medical care charges --- and gets --- whatever the traffic must bear. In our case that means twice what other people in other countries pay. Secondly, because our medical care costs are so high, and because millions of Americans cannot afford profit-driven health insurance, they don’t go to primary care physicians on a regular basis. In fact, they may never go to a primary-care doctor, and go instead only in dire emergencies to be treated by highly paid and skilled specialists.
Atul Gawande is a Boston surgeon, professor at Harvard Medical School, and the director of Ariadne Labs. Two weeks ago he had an article in The NewYorker. As a medical specialist, he heaped praise on primary-care physicians, or as they used to be called, “G.P.s”: general practitioners. He stated they probably do more to prolong the lives of people in good health than do specialists, who usually don’t know the patients for whom they utilize their skills. He hinted, without saying it directly, that primary-care doctors may keep people living longer, healthier lives than do the surgeons, oncologists, gastroenterologists, and so on.
Be all that as it may, there still is no cure for various forms of dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease. Nor can all patients be prevented from dying slowly in great pain but also with no obvious terminal condition gnawing away at their shriveling bodies. Millions of people, especially old people, die in agony all over the world every year because they are very old.
If people choose that, it is their choice. As I said, ethically it is a valid one. But also, many of those people believe it is a grave sin to take one’s own life when they realize it has become either untenable or unbearable. They may believe they will be prevented from going to heaven should they end their own lives prematurely. Many of us don’t believe that, but they do.
On the other hand, if God does not determine when anyone dies, in reality there is no such thing as a “premature death.” Even the death of children is not truly premature, if it is true that life for all is a fatal condition. But the death of young children, especially babies, is very sad, and the grief engendered by such deaths knows no bounds.
Unless we believe there is life after death for everyone, or unless we are strong enough to believe it does not matter if there is nothing but nothingness after we die, death seems to be a terrible anomaly, a cosmic flaw, a rending of the fabric which holds every life and all life together. If death has the last word, it is literally one hell of an ending for all of us. But as Christians we do not believe death does have the last word. God has the last word. God has always had the last word. And God’s word for everyone who dies and maybe even for every thing that dies is that those lives shall live on in another realm and on a completely different axis of life.
I recently bought from the Friends of the Library a used copy of a book by Thomas Lynch. Mr. Lynch is a funeral director in a town in Michigan. Occasionally he has an article in Christian Century, so I was familiar with his writing. He is delightfully humorous, deliciously irreverent, and theologically profound. The book is called The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade. In it he observed in a matter-of-fact recollection, “My mother left big things to God. Of her nine children, she was fond of informing us, she only “planned” one. The rest of us, though not entirely a surprise – she knew what caused it – were gifts from God to be treated accordingly. Likewise she figured on God’s protection and, I firmly believed, she believed in the assignment of guardian angels whose job it was to keep us all out of harm’s way.”
Thomas Lynch described the philosophical differences between his parents, so he wrote of his father, from whom Thomas purchased the funeral business, “But my father had seen, in the dead bodies of infants and children and young men and women, evidence that God lived by the Laws of Nature, and obeyed its statutes, however brutal. Kids died of gravity and physics and biology and natural selection. Car wrecks and measles and knives stuck in toasters, household poisons, guns left loaded, kidnappers, serial killers, burst appendices, bee stings, hard-candy chokings, croup untreated – he’d seen too many instances of (God’s) unwillingness to overturn the natural order, which included, along with hurricanes and meteorites and other Acts of God, the aberrant disasters of childhood.”
It is possible to believe that God is the ultimate arbiter of the specific time at which everyone dies, but Thomas Lynch, who has seen a lot more of death than I have, although I have also seen a lot of it, is led to believe that we die when we die and how we die and that would seem to be the end of the story, except that it isn’t. I agree. Not by a long shot it isn’t.
I have numerous skeptical queries regarding the theology of the apostle Paul, into which we now shall not go. But on the subject of death and its aftermath I am with the Tarsus tentmaker 110%. In his Second Letter to the Christians of Corinth, Paul was talking about how, as we get older, our physical bodies, which he calls “the tent we live in,” start to break down and wear out. So we don’t lose heart, he said, because our inner nature is being renewed every day. We shall all ultimately be consumed by death, said Paul. But we shouldn’t focus on that; we should focus on what lies beyond death. And that, he said, shall be our resurrection to life eternal.
No one has to believe in life eternal to decide to end life when it has naturally run its course and everything beyond that will be unnatural. In fact, even if the Christian hope of the resurrection is utterly unfounded, one can still make a strong ethical case for ending life when, otherwise to maintain it, would be fiscally insupportable and physically unsustainable.
We spend far too much of our inevitably limited resources on heroic measures for elderly people in the last months or few years of life, and far too little on keeping younger people in good health for many, many years. If we changed our priorities for providing medical care to those who most need and deserve it, our total population would live longer and better lives than they are living now. As long as we allow insurance companies, drug companies, and for-profit hospital corporations to determine how our health-care dollars are spent, we shall continue to be their victims. Now, the only way around this problem is for older people voluntarily to choose to end life sooner while in relatively good health rather than later when they are severely debilitated.
Our society needs to give widespread support to patient-chosen suicide. We also need to make it possible for self-determined death to be quicker, easier, and much more socially acceptable. Physician-assisted suicide is one way to do that. A guaranteed lethal prescription is another. But in many states, particularly ones like South Carolina, certain kinds of Christian and other legislators will prevent those options from being offered for the foreseeable future.
If you believe it is important to think about this sermon, and to decide something because of it, the time to do it is now. Don’t wait for five or ten or twenty years to think about it. By then you may be too physically or mentally depleted to think about it, let alone to do anything about it.
However, it is crucial that you don’t make a hasty decision about either euthanasia or ponerosthanasia. Ruminate on it. Ponder it. Sleep on it over several weeks or months. You may conclude one of the most ethical decisions you could ever make is to prevent your spouse or family or friends from having to care for you when the person they are caring for is not the one you ever intended to become. You may believe it is the right thing for you to spare your family and society the cost of paying for your unnaturally prolonged death, using up your investments or life savings, Medicare, Medicaid, and health insurance. If so, then end the inevitably fatal condition called life by taking your life into your own hands. This is a deeply personal choice.
Many modern, well-educated people, especially Christians and other believers, need to accept and affirm ethically self-directed euthanasia by means of the ending of life in a timely, as opposed to untimely, manner. It certainly shall never be anything close to a universal practice. But with courage and faith, it can become a far more common and ethically-based practice.
Unless I should be fortunate enough to die from an accident, or a massive coronary occlusion, stroke, or very rapidly advancing cancer, I shall almost certainly take my life when I decide it is worth it neither to society nor to myself to keep my body functioning. I assure you, I will not make such a decision in haste nor without much forethought and discussion. Nor shall I end it all because I encounter several of the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to, and I breezily choose to do myself in. To the degree this can be humanly determined, people should only be of sound mind if they decide to end their lives. Otherwise their deaths would certainly be a tragedy.
Is this a dark and negative sermon? It is only if you believe death is unnatural and dark instead of natural and inevitable. Absolutely no one is obligated to do what I have suggested in this highly unusual, perhaps even bizarre, sermon. I hope you will think about it, however. If you agree with me, you might let me know sometime, just to alert me to the fact that I am not simply again tilting at the homiletic windmills I carefully construct for myself from time to time.
If you don’t choose to do what I have tried to spell out, then you need to be prepared for the fact that your last years may be spent in pain and psychological misery. The choice is yours. No one else can, or will, make it for you. May God bless all of us in our lives and in our deaths. He always has, and He always will.