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Sunday, April 17, 2005
The End of Life-Who Decides—Part II
By Rev. Dr. Harvey C. Martz
Psalm 31:9-16
9 Be gracious to me, O Lord, for I am in distress; my eye wastes away from grief, my soul and body also. 10 For my life is spent with sorrow, and my years with sighing; my strength fails because of my misery, and my bones waste away. 11 I am the scorn of all my adversaries, a horror to my neighbors, an object of dread to my acquaintances; those who see me in the street flee from me. 12 I have passed out of mind like one who is dead; I have become like a broken vessel. 13 For I hear the whispering of many— terror all around!— as they scheme together against me, as they plot to take my life. 14 But I trust in you, O Lord; I say, "You are my God." 15 My times are in your hand; deliver me from the hand of my enemies and persecutors. 16 Let your face shine upon your servant; save me in your steadfast love.
We are looking at the second of two sermons about the end of life and I said last week that in my 35 years in ministry I have been involved in dozens of settings when families have had to make the painful and anguished decisions that Terri Schiavo’s family made. Judy and I were talking about one of those families last week from one of our former congregations.
The son in this family, seventeen-year-old Brian, was driving back to Colorado Springs one night after going to Denver for a concert. It was late at night and he had three other teenagers with him in the car. He was coming back on I 25 and was almost to the exit he needed when the car ran off the road and rolled over. One of the kids was killed and the others injured.
Brian himself had severe head injuries that put him in a coma for a long time and he appeared to have no hope for recovery. His parents were both health professionals—a physician and a nurse— and finally after many weeks in the hospital, as they believed there was no hope for Brian to get any better, they brought him home and cared for him there themselves until he died.
They were certain, however, unlike Mrs. Schiavo’s parents, that he had no possibility of getting any better.
There is a time to be born and a time to die, says the book of Ecclesiastes, one of my favorite books in the Hebrew Bible. And Psalm 103 says each of us is finite and mortal; in the sight of God we are dust in the wind; we are like flowers that are beautiful for a while and then when the wind passes over them they are gone. We are going to hear that music during the offertory from Jim Becker. It is based on Psalm 103. But the rest of that psalm says that the steadfast love of God lasts forever and will always surround us. The Bible is more comfortable with talking about the end of life than most of us are. We need to become more at home with our mortality!
I said last week that I have never seen a family case that has been so complex and so painful and so tragic and I think, so misunderstood, as the one with Terri Schiavo. Dr. Richard May who is the president elect of the Colorado Medical Society said in an editorial two weeks ago that the perspectives on her case were very different: some people believed that she had some consciousness and awareness and that she was being forced to painfully starve to death.
Others, Dr. May included and some of the physicians who were in our panel discussion last week after each service, said that she had no awareness, she is not there, she is able to feel no pain, she is not conscious, and that to prolong her existence “through incredibly invasive medical procedures has been tantamount to medically supervised torture.”
This tragedy has been multiplied with the dialogue in our country over the powerful and controversial film Million Dollar Baby in which – I told you in last week’s sermon that I would reveal a part of this movie—the protagonist is severely injured and does not want to live with her disability. But even with her injury the film’s character was still in a radically different place from Mrs. Schiavo because Mrs. Schiavo was in a vegetative state with only reflexes and with no awareness.
This national discussion was further complicated by the intervention of congress in what Dr. May has called legislative maneuvering to create political sound bites for the next election. He goes on to say that this was the worst type of hypocrisy and he hopes that voters will soundly reject on any future attempts to capitalize on a poor brain damaged woman in hopes of capturing some imagined moral high ground. I agree with him and apparently a huge majority of our fellow citizens do as well as 80% of people in surveys say it was wrong for congress to get involved.
Why? Because this is and always should be a family issue. You need to be talking with your family about advanced directives and about giving medical power of attorney to a loved one. This is a family issue and not one for cynical politicians. And, secondly, there are 30,000 people in our country who are in a state of existence called a vegetative state. They have no consciousness, no awareness, no feeling, no recognition of loved ones. They are simply existing. I don’t think we want our congresspersons trying to make medical decisions about each of those 30,000 people.
The debate has heated up even more in the past few days about what the role is of each of our branches of government and President Bush has had to remind some religious extremists that it is a good thing to have an independent judiciary and that the separation of powers is a healthy thing. I am glad he made that statement since we are in a risky time for judges in America. One of the other times I remember these kinds of attacks on judges is in the 1960’s when courts were declaring racial segregation to be unconstitutional and some politicians were attacking the judges who made those rulings, so I get very suspicious when I hear criticisms about activist judges. And I get very worried about the kind of comment from Mel Gibson who told one talk show host that some “big guys” could “whip a judge” if they really wanted to stop the “state sanctioned murder” of Mrs. Schiavo.
The role of the judiciary is not to represent the will of the people at a particular moment in time-it is to apply our great constitution to current questions and sometimes that will be uncomfortable for some people.
One more thing about the controversial intersection of religion and politics in spring 2005 that disturbs me as a United Methodist Christian right now. The judge in Florida in the Terri Schiavo case, Judge George Greer who is a religious conservative and a political conservative and who refused to order the reinsertion of the feeding tube based on his reading of the law, has been asked by his pastor to leave his church because his pastor believed Judge Greer did not make the right decision!! This was reported in the Christian Century this past week. One of the judge’s friends said that while the judge took comfort in being upheld by higher courts that he was upset by his church’s stance and this friend said, “the people in that church should be ashamed of themselves for trying to demonize Judge Greer and to ask him to leave for upholding the law.”
This was not a United Methodist Church—it was very different from a United Methodist Church. The full article about this is on the foyer table.
Part of the helpfulness of this weeks long controversy is that is asks us to look again at how we define “life”. Is life just a matter of existing without any feeling or consciousness? Most people do not think so and so most Americans have said that if they were in a vegetative state for 15 years with no hope of ever getting any better or recovering that they would choose to let nature take its course and to die. When we asked that question last Sunday of those present, the response was even higher—almost 90% of our congregation raised their hands.
There is another concern that I see as a pastor of a mainline congregation. I am becoming increasingly uncomfortable with folks on the extreme end of the religious spectrum saying that they have THE Christian perspective on these questions. There is in your bulletin what I believe is a thoughtful statement from some United Methodist sources about the end of life and they are different from the statements from Randall Terry and James Dobson. Randall Terry and James Dobson do not speak for me but they are trying to. If they speak for you that is OK and that is a sign that we United Methodists are a big tent church where differences are expected and encouraged. They do not speak for me nor, I believe, do they speak for most American Christians and they should not speak for most American Christians.
What I am offering this morning is what I believe from my reading of scripture and of church thinking and from my reading of American history and social ethics and I do not want the religious right to be dominant in discussions about what “life” is and when it ends and when it begins.
Let us conclude. What do you and I need to do differently now that we have participated in an international dialogue about the end of life–international because it was not only Terri Schiavo’s family who gave us an opportunity to learn together and talk together, it was Pope John Paul II who chose not to be kept alive by extraordinary measures and who seemed to exemplify a Biblical posture of acceptance and peace at end of life that we might learn from.
First, each of us needs to accept our own mortality and not avoid talking about that. When my daughter Meredith and I were in Boston two weekends ago we saw this painting at an art museum on the Harvard campus by the Dutch artist Joos Van Cleve. This is St. Jerome who, 1500 years ago, translated the Bible into Latin from Greek and Hebrew and who is pictured contemplating death so he can be fully alive every day. Think about your own death. Make plans with your family and with your pastors.
Come to the dialogue sessions today and get any information you need and make sure your will is current and that you have talked about advanced directives with your family.
One writer, Susan Nielsen, who is an editor for the Portland Oregon newspaper did that in a humorous way. In a portion of her living will she writes this:
“I (name), do not want my body to be kept alive after my life is over… if I am incapacitated, I forbid all relatives from circulating footage of me on national TV and on the Internet. If I am unable to make medical decisions for myself, please ask (spouse or trusted loved one) to make them for me…I want this person to reject any life prolonging treatments if I permanently lose the ability to learn, communicate, sustain relationships, and comprehend the world around me.
Like three fourths of Americans I believe in heaven. This does not mean I want religious extremists to march outside, compare me to Jesus and clamor to enter my bedroom with cups of water. Remind them that there is a time to be born and a time to die; a time to mourn and a time to dance, a time to speak up and a time to butt out! On the off chance that politicians try to seize custody of me or disparage the best judgment of (my decision maker), please ask them to use their time more productively. Ask them to improve Medicare or Medicaid.
Finally, please don’t fight for my “right to die”. Remind people I already have that right. In fact, I have a biological imperative to die, barring any major advances in genetics or Botox. The trick is, to live fully, take advantage of modern medicine without getting trapped by it, and die at peace.”
To die at peace. That is what our children said to us when they told us about the picture of God as a shepherd in our favorite and most familiar Psalm, Psalm 23. The Lord is our shepherd who walks with us and cares for us as we walk through—not around—but through the valley of the shadow of death. That is the Easter faith that we proclaimed three weeks ago. That is the faith that let Pope John Paul die with dignity and grace. Thank you God for that assurance and for that peace. Amen.