William H. Willimon - "Suicide Is Not a Private Matter" (March 29, 1998)
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| - | The third reading is from | 0:06 |
| the Gospel According to St. John, chapter 12. | 0:07 | |
| Six days before the Passover | 0:11 | |
| Jesus came to Bethany, the home of Lazarus, | 0:13 | |
| whom he had risen from the dead. | 0:16 | |
| There they gave a dinner for him. | 0:19 | |
| Martha served, | 0:22 | |
| and Lazarus was one of those at the table with him. | 0:23 | |
| Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, | 0:26 | |
| anointed Jesus' feet, and wiped them with her hair. | 0:32 | |
| The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. | 0:36 | |
| But Judas Iscariot, one of his disciples, | 0:39 | |
| the one who was about to betray him, said, | 0:43 | |
| "Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii | 0:46 | |
| "and the money given to the poor?" | 0:49 | |
| He said this not because he cared about the poor, | 0:52 | |
| but because he was a thief. | 0:55 | |
| He kept the common purse | 0:57 | |
| and used to steal what was put into it. | 0:59 | |
| Jesus said, | 1:01 | |
| Leave her alone. | 1:03 | |
| She bought it so that she might keep it | 1:05 | |
| for the day of my burial. | 1:07 | |
| You always have the poor with you, | 1:09 | |
| but you do not always have me. | 1:11 | |
| This is the word of the Lord. | 1:14 | |
| - | Praise be to God. | 1:16 |
| - | I want to know Christ and the power of His resurrection | 1:26 |
| and the sharing of his sufferings | 1:30 | |
| by becoming like Him in death. | 1:34 | |
| I press on to make it my own, | 1:39 | |
| because Christ Jesus has made me His own. | 1:41 | |
| We are following Jesus down a lonely road toward death. | 1:48 | |
| Jesus did not want to die. | 1:58 | |
| In Gethsemane He prayed, | 2:01 | |
| let this cup, this cup of death pass from me. | 2:03 | |
| Jesus did not want to suffer. | 2:09 | |
| Who does? | 2:12 | |
| And yet He went to the cross, | 2:14 | |
| not because it wouldn't hurt, | 2:18 | |
| and not because He had some romantic desire | 2:22 | |
| to die heroically, | 2:26 | |
| but rather He went because in Jesus' words, | 2:30 | |
| not my will, but Thine be done. | 2:34 | |
| Jesus vividly displayed that His life was not His own. | 2:40 | |
| His life was owned by God, | 2:50 | |
| caught up in the purposes of God, commandeered. | 2:53 | |
| In Genesis 2:18, it says that we are here | 3:02 | |
| because we were created to be social creatures. | 3:08 | |
| It is not good for humans to be alone. | 3:12 | |
| That was the thought that first put us in God's mind. | 3:16 | |
| We are created for community. | 3:21 | |
| Our lives are not our own but they are interconnected | 3:24 | |
| to the larger purposes of God. | 3:28 | |
| Wandering in a cemetery in a small southern town, | 3:33 | |
| I read a tombstone to some departed local hero, | 3:36 | |
| and in large letters it said on the tombstone, | 3:41 | |
| he was a self-made man. | 3:44 | |
| What a curious, arrogant designation for a person. | 3:50 | |
| Self-made. | 3:56 | |
| This is the error underlying liberal democracy. | 4:01 | |
| The notion that we are self-made, | 4:06 | |
| that we are autonomous, self-sufficient. | 4:07 | |
| But who here today is somehow detached | 4:12 | |
| from a web of relationships, | 4:16 | |
| standing alone? | 4:19 | |
| Self-made. | 4:22 | |
| If you are, I feel sad for you. | 4:24 | |
| Createo ex nihilo. | 4:28 | |
| Created out of nothing. | 4:31 | |
| This term can never apply to human beings. | 4:33 | |
| The modern notion that I am the creator of me | 4:39 | |
| is a terrible fiction. | 4:45 | |
| Which means at its core, | 4:47 | |
| I am alone. | 4:49 | |
| I am therefore free. | 4:53 | |
| Free to do as I please. | 4:55 | |
| No wonder in such a society everybody seems a stranger, | 4:59 | |
| a competitor. | 5:02 | |
| The Supreme Court justifies abortion | 5:05 | |
| on the basis of right to privacy. | 5:09 | |
| The destruction of a fetus based upon my right | 5:14 | |
| to be by my self? | 5:18 | |
| But what else could the Supreme Court do? | 5:22 | |
| We have no higher value, it appears, | 5:25 | |
| in life, in death, than privacy. | 5:29 | |
| The right in the words of Justice Brandeis, | 5:32 | |
| the right to be left alone. | 5:35 | |
| Thus the court has forged a nice link | 5:40 | |
| between privacy and death. | 5:44 | |
| The fetus, being utterly dependent, is sub-human, | 5:48 | |
| for humanity by our definition consists in being | 5:55 | |
| utterly independent, autonomous, self-sufficient, | 5:59 | |
| standing alone. | 6:05 | |
| Was it a surprise that next down the slippery slope slid | 6:08 | |
| physician-assisted suicide? | 6:13 | |
| Upheld by the 9th court of appeals as | 6:16 | |
| guarantee of personal liberty. | 6:19 | |
| The Supreme Court unanimously reversed the lower court | 6:22 | |
| this past June, | 6:25 | |
| though I wonder why. | 6:26 | |
| The reasoning might be that | 6:29 | |
| suicide is legal and permissible, | 6:30 | |
| but only as long as you can demonstrate | 6:34 | |
| that it is done absolutely alone, | 6:37 | |
| without assistance from a doctor or a friend or anybody. | 6:40 | |
| But does anybody live or die alone? | 6:48 | |
| Aristotle condemned suicide | 6:56 | |
| as an injustice against the state, | 6:59 | |
| but that was because, for Aristotle, | 7:01 | |
| there is no higher good in life than the state. | 7:03 | |
| Citizens, Aristotle argued, | 7:08 | |
| have no right to deprive the state of themselves. | 7:10 | |
| Aristotle did believe that we are created | 7:16 | |
| as social by nature, | 7:18 | |
| created for community, | 7:20 | |
| born to a web of claims from others laid upon us. | 7:22 | |
| Aristotle did believe that we are in the world for a reason | 7:26 | |
| greater than ourselves. | 7:30 | |
| But maybe it's not this | 7:36 | |
| the human meaning of death. | 7:37 | |
| Maybe this is why we so justly avoid and fear death. | 7:41 | |
| Because death is the ultimate loneliness. | 7:45 | |
| That time when we at last get what this society | 7:51 | |
| and Supreme Court tells us what we're to want. | 7:55 | |
| To be left alone. | 7:59 | |
| Death is ultimate abandonment. | 8:01 | |
| We get a foretaste of death in those moments | 8:06 | |
| when we are in despair and dereliction and gloom. | 8:09 | |
| When we cry out as did Job, | 8:13 | |
| my kin have abandoned me, | 8:16 | |
| my fellows forgotten me. | 8:19 | |
| Jesus quoted Psalm 22 on the cross. | 8:23 | |
| My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? | 8:28 | |
| In choosing death, in suicide, | 8:36 | |
| it's like we attempt a pre-emptive strike on death. | 8:39 | |
| Attempting to take these matters in our own hands. | 8:44 | |
| Maybe it won't hurt as much if it's something we decide. | 8:47 | |
| We therefore wish to die as we live. | 8:53 | |
| Alone, autonomous, | 8:56 | |
| since we believe the essence of humanity | 8:58 | |
| is self-sufficiency. | 9:00 | |
| Oh, we call this death with dignity. | 9:03 | |
| That is, death where we call all the shots. | 9:06 | |
| Where we make the choice of killing ourselves. | 9:10 | |
| Which, when you think about it, | 9:13 | |
| is an odd definition of freedom. | 9:16 | |
| Duke's Kathy Rudy complains, | 9:21 | |
| The government now tells women, | 9:25 | |
| congratulations, you're free, | 9:27 | |
| and as a sign of that we're going to let you | 9:30 | |
| destroy your fetus to prove that you're free. | 9:32 | |
| She asks, this is freedom? | 9:37 | |
| Whereas formerly, death was that ultimately reminder | 9:42 | |
| that our lives are not our own to do with as we please. | 9:45 | |
| A final word that we are not in control over | 9:51 | |
| the significance of ourselves. | 9:55 | |
| Now death is transformed into some great fantasy. | 9:57 | |
| That, hey, this is my life and I can destroy it | 10:01 | |
| as I damned well please. | 10:04 | |
| Of course, nobody advocates physician-assisted suicide, | 10:08 | |
| except for those who are now said to be terminal, | 10:12 | |
| which I guess means everybody here this morning. | 10:18 | |
| If we're all on our way to death, | 10:23 | |
| and if death is the ultimate loss of control, | 10:25 | |
| therefore the ultimate loss of human significance | 10:29 | |
| and dignity since control is everything, | 10:31 | |
| then why not terminate life at any moment in life? | 10:36 | |
| In his classic study Suicide, Emile Durkheim asks, | 10:43 | |
| why is it that suicide rates are always highest | 10:48 | |
| in modern, affluent, industrial societies? | 10:52 | |
| Durkheim's answer was sociological, | 10:57 | |
| that sense of anomie, | 11:01 | |
| that sense of being disconnected from others | 11:03 | |
| not part of any web of relationships, | 11:06 | |
| that sense of loneliness that we feel | 11:09 | |
| when we are no more to this world | 11:13 | |
| than expendable producers and expendable consumers. | 11:15 | |
| And is not this the rational behind many legitimations | 11:21 | |
| of assisted suicide? | 11:25 | |
| She is no longer living a productive life. | 11:28 | |
| And in this economy when somebody can no longer | 11:33 | |
| either produce or consume then why should they live? | 11:36 | |
| Comedian Dennis Miller recently referred to suicide | 11:44 | |
| as merely thinning the herd. | 11:47 | |
| I've noted as a pastor that | 11:52 | |
| the greatest fear most people have of aging | 11:54 | |
| is not that they're moving closer to death, | 11:59 | |
| but rather in their aging | 12:03 | |
| they are at a greater risk of dependency. | 12:05 | |
| I don't want to be dependent on my children, they say. | 12:10 | |
| Isn't it revealing that we fear dependency, | 12:15 | |
| the need to reach out | 12:19 | |
| to the care and concern of other people, | 12:21 | |
| that we fear that even more than we fear death? | 12:24 | |
| Admittedly in this society, | 12:29 | |
| there's real good reason to wonder | 12:32 | |
| if when our time comes as it will do to most of us, | 12:35 | |
| to be dramatically dependent upon others | 12:39 | |
| if there will be anybody there to care. | 12:42 | |
| Why was I not surprised that an editorial | 12:46 | |
| in the Duke Chronicle praised Dr. Kevorkian | 12:49 | |
| as a national hero. | 12:51 | |
| I for one, by the way, want to go on the record as saying | 12:54 | |
| when I become dependent and incapacitated and needy, | 12:57 | |
| please do not put me at the fate of the editorial board | 13:00 | |
| of the Duke Chronicle. | 13:03 | |
| (congregation laughs) | 13:05 | |
| Don't you worry about a society that tells us | 13:07 | |
| in those gloomy moments in life | 13:12 | |
| when we are tempted towards self-destruction, | 13:14 | |
| hey, you're on your own. | 13:17 | |
| It's in these dark nights when we are least self-sufficient. | 13:23 | |
| When we are most vulnerable | 13:29 | |
| and least able to choose and to decide, | 13:31 | |
| it's in those moments that we most desperately need | 13:36 | |
| the love and concern of others. | 13:39 | |
| This past week a couple of kids in Arkansas | 13:44 | |
| have reminded us of the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, | 13:49 | |
| words that he spoke just two months before his own death | 13:54 | |
| in saying we may live in the most violently and | 13:57 | |
| death-dealing culture in the world. | 14:01 | |
| We live in a violent society | 14:07 | |
| that's got this thing about death. | 14:11 | |
| We need others to overcome our naturally | 14:15 | |
| self-destructive tendencies. | 14:20 | |
| I remind you it was the first youthful murderer, Cain, | 14:23 | |
| who asked, am I my brother's keeper? | 14:28 | |
| God, have I been put in this world somehow to be | 14:35 | |
| connected to other people? | 14:38 | |
| To have some kind of responsibility for their lives? | 14:40 | |
| As Christians, we believe the answer to that is yes. | 14:45 | |
| We have been charged by God | 14:50 | |
| to love and to care for human life, | 14:52 | |
| especially the most vulnerable human life. | 14:54 | |
| In a society where productivity and consumption | 14:59 | |
| are elevated as the supreme human virtues, | 15:04 | |
| those who are labeled non-productive, | 15:08 | |
| those who are labeled dependent, needy. | 15:12 | |
| They deserve our special attention because | 15:16 | |
| they're the ones most likely to be disposed of | 15:18 | |
| in a society like ours, | 15:22 | |
| because they live as visible, truthful reminders | 15:24 | |
| that this society lies. | 15:30 | |
| One reason it's so hard to visit people who are in pain | 15:35 | |
| one reason that there's so few cars in the visitor's lot | 15:41 | |
| at the parking lot of the nursing home is | 15:45 | |
| people who are dependent and needy and in pain | 15:50 | |
| are visible reminders of who I really am. | 15:53 | |
| And we can't stand the truth. | 16:00 | |
| We ought to intervene when any of our sisters or brothers | 16:04 | |
| is tempted toward suicide. | 16:08 | |
| If you've got a friend | 16:11 | |
| who speaks of hurting himself or herself, | 16:13 | |
| you need to intervene. | 16:17 | |
| You need to reach out and get help. | 16:19 | |
| Because in their unique, God-give humanity, | 16:24 | |
| they are valuable. | 16:28 | |
| It takes guts in a feel-good society like ours, | 16:30 | |
| to be depressed. | 16:35 | |
| It takes courage in those dark moments | 16:37 | |
| to admit to how flat and meaningless life can become, | 16:41 | |
| and people who face that darkness | 16:45 | |
| are a threat to the rest of us. | 16:49 | |
| In all the more need they should be cherished | 16:51 | |
| and loved deeply. | 16:54 | |
| And they ought not prematurely | 16:56 | |
| to deprive us of their presence by taking their own lives. | 16:58 | |
| You ask, is it fair to ask | 17:04 | |
| some terribly suffering person to go on living? | 17:07 | |
| Life is suffering in different kind and degree. | 17:12 | |
| And by the way, I say that as a terribly impatient patient. | 17:17 | |
| A terrible bearer of pain. | 17:21 | |
| And yet, when it becomes my lot to suffer, | 17:25 | |
| the Christian Gospel bids me to see my suffering | 17:29 | |
| as opportunity to witness to others | 17:33 | |
| that life is a gift of God worth living. | 17:36 | |
| As long as God gives life. | 17:40 | |
| That even in pain, there is reason to go on. | 17:43 | |
| A person who endures terrible pain and suffering | 17:48 | |
| is not disposable and unwanted. | 17:51 | |
| Indeed, in this society, | 17:54 | |
| such a person becomes a prophet of the truth. | 17:58 | |
| Testifying to the rest of us that the goal of life | 18:01 | |
| is not hedonistic pleasure and comfort, | 18:04 | |
| but courage, love, endurance, | 18:08 | |
| patience in the confidence that God gives life, | 18:11 | |
| that God owns life and that only God can take life. | 18:16 | |
| I can only testify that from seriously | 18:22 | |
| incapacitated, sick people | 18:25 | |
| I have been given virtues I would not have had | 18:28 | |
| had God not given them to me. | 18:31 | |
| I've been taught patience, a difficult virtue. | 18:36 | |
| I've been taught joy in the tiny little things of life | 18:41 | |
| and simple courage. | 18:47 | |
| The bravery and perseverance of those | 18:49 | |
| who are seriously ill threatens the rest of | 18:52 | |
| who are made to wonder | 18:56 | |
| if when we are called to suffer, | 18:58 | |
| we will have the sort of souls that are | 19:01 | |
| enable to do something with our suffering. | 19:05 | |
| That we will have the spiritual and intellectual resources | 19:08 | |
| to go on. | 19:12 | |
| It is tragic that many who are near the end of life | 19:15 | |
| are considered burdens, | 19:18 | |
| obstacles to our self-fulfillment | 19:20 | |
| and are thus made to feel unwanted, unloved, | 19:23 | |
| made to feel as if they now have responsibility | 19:26 | |
| to take matters in hand and become their own executioners. | 19:30 | |
| I remember the day when it used to be bad enough | 19:37 | |
| to be suffering from a terminal illness. | 19:40 | |
| Now things have come to a point | 19:43 | |
| where not only do you have to suffer, | 19:46 | |
| but you're made to feel as if you owe it to your family, | 19:50 | |
| you owe it to the national debt, | 19:54 | |
| and our problems with funding social security, | 19:55 | |
| to go ahead, take your own life, | 19:58 | |
| and stop being a drain on national resources. | 20:00 | |
| And that's sick. | 20:04 | |
| In extremis. | 20:10 | |
| Which maybe not where I am today | 20:12 | |
| but where a lot of my sisters and brothers are. | 20:14 | |
| In extremis. | 20:17 | |
| My best prayer is one of the last prayers Jesus ever prayed. | 20:20 | |
| It is a prayer the Church tries to get me to learn by heart | 20:27 | |
| in the bright days of life | 20:31 | |
| so in the darker, more difficult days | 20:33 | |
| I may be able to say it on my own. | 20:35 | |
| The prayer which Jesus prayed. | 20:38 | |
| Not my will, but Thine be done. | 20:43 | |
| That is our last, best prayer. | 20:49 |
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