Worth Living.

So here’s the thing: I want to address a conversation that’s been happening recently about the ending of life and what choices are valid to avoid suffering. And we just heard 1 Corinthians 3:16-17, which couldn’t be a better text for that: “Don’t you realize,” Paul asks, “That you are God’s Temple, and that the Spirit of God dwells within you? If anyone destroys the Temple of God, God will destroy him, for the Temple of God is holy, and that Temple you are.” So that’s our topic, and the thing is it’s a very tough one to preach. For one, it’s intensely personal and intensely painful for some of us. For another, we have all ages here and I never want to short-circuit parents’ decisions about when certain topics are broached. But silence doesn’t seem like an option so I’m going to try it. If I fail in either of those respects, I ask two things of you: forgiveness, and feedback.

All I really want to say this morning is that human life is sacred. That idea is something we might be tempted to take for granted, but the truth is we can’t, not anymore. I’m very sorry to say that people who describe themselves as Christians are already divided on this point. But if anything or anyone is going to salvage the idea of the sanctity of life, and salvage our civilization along with it, Christians are going to have to be at least a big part of that. Hopefully we’ll find many allies.

God knows we have plenty of opponents. There’s a fellow named Peter Singer who believes that newborn children aren’t people yet, and that if they’re disabled or inconvenient they can be humanely got rid of. He says it’s not morally different than doing the same thing before birth, and he’s at least right about that. The same guy says that killing an animal is murder. Follow that? He values a bass more highly than a baby. They made him chairman of the ethics department at Princeton. I’ll understand if you won’t believe that without looking it up for yourself. But I’m not making it up.

That’s just one example of a change that’s happened over the last decades. The idea that human life is sacred used to mean basically the same thing to almost everyone. It meant that life belonged to God, not to us, and that to commodify it as we wish, generate it as we wish, and end it as we wish, was to play God… and that playing God was wrong. We can’t count on that agreement any more. Now, when you talk about the sanctity of human life, some people think as we did before. Some find the phrase dopey or hillbilly-ish. Some think of just a vague notion that people deserve respect, but define what that means in incompatible ways.

So where does that leave us? Well, have you ever seen the old cartoons where Wile E. Coyote runs off a cliff, but just keeps going straight for a bit, and then he looks down, realizes there’s nothing under him, and then falls? That’s us; that is exactly us. Except we’re noticing and falling in stages. We left the solid ground of holding life sacred long ago, and have only been noticing gradually. In 1973 or thereabouts we suddenly noticed that without holding life sacred, there’s no particular reason not to end it in the womb when it’s especially inconvenient. In 2014, more and more people are suddenly realizing that without holding life sacred, there’s no particular reason not to choose the time and method of your own death to avoid suffering, since you’re certain to die anyway, and the balance of life you have left isn’t something you want. People talk that way as though it’s different from suicide, as though anybody who ever committed suicide wasn’t doing exactly that.

Sometimes people describe things like euthanasia as being slippery slopes. They’ll argue that we should be careful about starting down that road because once we start, it’s a slippery slope. In this case, that’s not quite correct. We are not standing on the edge of a slippery slope. We are simply noticing certain mileposts as we careen down it with increasing momentum.

We’re attacking at both ends of life. When they speak of the unborn, one of the things people talk about is whether or not this human being is wanted. Now, take a second to marvel at the obscenity of that question, the depravity of that question. Every human baby is worth more than the rest of the universe put together, an unrepeatable and eternal image of God, and people talk about whether they’re wanted or not.

It’s all too easy to twist words around in whatever way suits us. I was in a very limited online exchange this week about assisted suicide, and someone brought up losing her parents in a very difficult way. With things getting that personal, I didn’t press the issue. But she talked about the way their lives ended, and her question was ‘where’s the dignity and compassion in that?’ I was amazed at how those words had been twisted. Don’t you see what an offensive and depraved question it is to look at a suffering person and ask where the dignity is? What do you mean where’s the dignity? It’s in being a human being, that’s where. It’s in being the image and likeness of God. Please don’t fall for this twisting. To need a lot of care, to need help doing the most personal and basic things… this does not take your dignity. It may be uncomfortable, it may be indecorous, but it is never undignified. You have to believe this: your dignity does not depend on what you can or can’t do for yourself, or how well your mind works, or how much you may suffer. Your dignity is yours because it is yours, always, everywhere. I can be pretty patient, I think, in general, but it’s hard not to blow a gasket when someone suggests that sick or disabled people lack dignity.

The other word that came up was compassion. Another twisted word. What compassion actually means is suffering (passio) along with (com). What I wanted to tell this person, what didn’t seem like a subject that could be handled well in an online comment box, was that compassion is exactly what she did with her parents. She suffered with them. And that’s exactly what would be avoided by choosing to end life before its time. Is that not the clearest thing in the world? Am I just crazy here?

Now listen, we don’t judge people and we should seek real compassion for everyone. When someone makes an evil decision in circumstances that are terrible and desperate, who are we to judge? Who are we to say we would have done any better? I’ll tell you right now, I’m fairly certain that in the right circumstances, barring some miraculous infusion of courage and strength, I would betray these principles. I say that because my strength has a limit. Anyone who says otherwise may be suffering from either pridefulness or lack of imagination. But that doesn’t make it right. When someone makes a wrong decision in terrible desperation, we mustn’t condemn them or judge them. But we mustn’t call evil good. And for humans to play God is evil.

I’m not just trying to philosophize here. This is getting talked about a lot, and the Gospel has something to say about it. I wanted to cut through some of the static, and untwist some of the language, but most of all I am praying that you will believe this: your life is sacred.

Your life has been sacred from the very start. Before you had your first thought, you were a child of God. Regardless of whether anybody wanted you, regardless of whether you were smart or athletic or disabled or healthy or sick or simple. Your life is sacred now. You are God’s beloved son or daughter. Regardless of what bad decisions you’ve made, or sins you’ve committed, or addictions you have, regardless of whether you believe in God, or whether you’re depressed or lonely or rich or poor. Your life will remain sacred. Even if you become severely disabled. Even if you’re in a great deal of pain. Even if the moment comes when, like Job, you pray that God would call you home… it is not evil to make that prayer. It is evil to make that decision.

Bishop Fulton Sheen was a prophetic and far-sighted man. He saw the signs of the times, judged the prevailing winds decades ago, and seeing to the secret heart of the matter he published a book titled simply Life is Worth Living. That’s good news for a world where despair advances day by day. That’s the Gospel we are sent to proclaim to the poor and the captives of our disenchanted age: that life is worth living. That it is sacred. That every newly conceived life, every hospice patient, and everyone in between possesses a dignity that depends on nothing, that cannot be lost or taken. It is not ours to dispose of how we will. We belong to God. We belong to a God who values us enough to suffer for us. Have you never heard of the Passion of Christ? We all share it, in whatever way he asks us to. Christ went through his Passion, and to be Christian is to join Him out of love. That’s really and literally com-passion. We need more of that. More of the real thing. Perhaps it's needed most of all for our brothers and sisters who have forgotten where their dignity lies, forgotten that they are sacred Temples of God, forgotten that every life is worth living.