The following Sunday we came to church, many of us in a state of shock. In Sunday School the class watched a brief video of Walter Brueggeman. The interviewer asked, “What pisses you off about the church?” I should note that this is an Episcopal church so no one blanched at the language. Brueggeman’s response was, “for the church to handle ‘The News’ in boring ways. I am pissed off by the betrayal of what has been entrusted to us because it is much harder work than too many practitioners acknowledge and are willing to invest in.”
Then it was our turn. We weighed in with our thoughts including platitudes, judgments, non-sequiturs, and, as usual, went all over the map in wrestling with what the church was about. Our answers reflected some confusion about what the News is and also how much more deeply embedded we are with our culture than we are with this News.
Our confusion was exacerbated when the rector brought up the subject of the elephant in the room — the tragedy of the murder and suicide. Someone brought up the issue of judgment, reminding me that if our age has learned any Scripture by heart it is the one where Jesus said, “Judge not, that ye be not judged” (Luke 6:37). In fact, I’ve heard this said so many times by even non-believers, I think it’s become the most popular saying of Jesus.
But remembering that Paul said something about judgment beginning with the household of God, I added my farthing’s worth to the discussion. I shared that I felt judged — and judged myself — for our failure as the family of God to provide the support and care that might have prevented a murder and a suicide in our family. The responses ranged from, “but these were very private people” to a mention of dignified euthanasia. They reminded me that the therapeutic culture in which we live, move, and have our being not only cannot judge others, it can’t judge itself.
But even more, it reminded me that our scattered definitions of Brueggeman’s news are deeply reflected in our habit of seeing the church as more a gathering of individuals committed to being “private people” than brothers and sisters united in one hope, one faith, one baptism. In truth, a gathering of people so private that we would rather die alone than share our burdens, addictions, sins and sickness.
But just suppose. If the Good News is that, in the words of Will Campbell, “We’re all bastards, but God loves us anyway.” If the Good News is “your sins are forgiven.” If the Good News is, “Bear one another’s burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ.” If the Good News is counter cultural, saying each life is precious to God (unborn, living and wicked, or old and ravaged with disease). If the Good News is that the church is a community founded and sustained by God in Christ — then none of us need die alone, none of us need fear the debility and ongoing loss that is old age. All of us forgiven sinners have a family: a family where we, despite our quarrels and disagreements, are watched over, visited, fed (literally), nurtured, taught how to live and die.
Our world has increasingly little patience with the old, sick, the unemployed, the unsuccessful, the imperfect. Abortions have almost eliminated children with Down Syndrome, so we don’t need to bother with that problem anymore. But, after all, isn’t it more “loving” to abort the weak and the slow of thought? Isn’t it more “loving” to let people choose the times of their demise? Maybe even have a nice little dying ceremony by their bedside before they drink the hemlock? Or are we forgetting what the protagonist says in a recent novel, The Dogs of Babel, “There are some things we should not do, even in the name of science or love”?
Can this living, breathing, abundant life-affirming, messy place we call the church say “No” to “death with dignity?” My hope is that I — along with my brothers and sisters in this conflicted ark — can try to let down our guards so people can see our pain, rather than our Sunday faces. I hope that we can stop and listen to one another when we see that unguarded face, and not run away or utter platitudes.
A month ago, our city saw another tragedy when an enraged grandfather shot his six-year-old grandson to death. The investigating sheriff was quoted as saying, “There is no reason for this, except that we live in a lost and dying world.”
In this lost and dying world, (yes, I agree with the sheriff) only the church can be a model of family that transcends the human family and offers an alternative vision.
In a Christianity Today interview of theologian Stanley Hauerwas, Rodney Clapp asked his opinion on the biggest challenge facing the North American church today. Hauerwas answered: “Survival.”
He explained this as continuing the acts and practices that distinguish us from the world we live in, citing Robert Wilkins’ claim in his book, The Christians As the Romans Saw Them, that the Romans didn’t take much notice until their practices became an issue. It was then that the Roman administrator Pliny wrote, “I can’t figure these people out. I think they’re a burial society because they go out to the cemeteries.”
Hauerwas finds that a fitting description of Christians.
“We know how to bury people in a way that shows they are part of our community and our community’s ongoing memory. … My own view is that within a hundred years, Christians may be known as those odd people who don’t kill their children or their elderly. That’s a lot, too. And that’s what I mean by survival: maintaining everyday small lines of resistance to a world gone mad seeking perfection.”
God give us grace to forget our rugged individualism and to risk being loving — and even nosy — brothers and sisters living out the hope that is in us even in this lost and dying world.
Renee Huie is a retired Presbyterian minister living in Decatur, Ga. She worked in communications for city and state government and served as a hospital and hospice chaplain. Her last position was serving as media spokesperson on child abuse issues for the State of Georgia’s child welfare office.
