Last Sunday's Sermon: Suicide-Am I my brother's and sister's keeper?

These are days when Christians are called to walk through minefields. Our cultural landscape is riddled with cultural bombs. Like the IEDs or improvised explosive devices that became a part of our vocabulary during the war in Iraq, these cultural bombs have been carefully built for the purpose of wreaking maximum damage. In the coming months, I will preach a series of sermons, one a month, about how “honest to God” Christians can dismantle the cultural bombs of our times.

There are two types of Christians. Some build cultural bombs. Others dismantle them. Some believe faith is about a personal relationship with God. Others see their faith as the basis for the entire community’s relationship with God. If there were a Myers-Briggs personality test to determine which sort of Christian you are, it would ask but one question. The one Cain asked God. “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

The differences are evident in how we approach one of the most destructive cultural bombs. Suicide. As cultural bombs go, this one not only takes the lives of the intended victim but produces a lot of collateral damage. Wyoming is in the top three states in the union for the suffering the death and damage of suicide. It is, therefore, something preachers around here ought to be talking about.

However, many churches don’t talk about it. When it happens in families among the church, they are left to rely on platitudes and trite sayings, chicken-soup-for-the-soul. That’s easier than facing head-on the cultural issues that result in a choice to end one’s life. They make it about the victims and not the broader community.

During my years as a pastor, I have been called to thankfully few, but oh so painful meetings with parents whose children have taken their lives. But, each time, I have had to dismantle bombs other Christians left behind. One of the most damaging is the one that blames God. It was part of God’s plan, they say.

What kind of God would have plans for a child to hang herself in her mother’s bedroom or a young man to shoot himself to death with his father’s gun? God had other plans for them, plans for abundant life.

The other saying feckless preachers use is that God won’t give us more than we can handle. Your loved one should have prayed harder, been more faithful, because God doesn’t give us more than we can handle. Well, it’s not about God. God doesn’t test us, God guides us. Life tests us, lives lived in communities that refuse to deal with the difficult issues that give people more than they can handle.

Thus it was, that St. Augustine long ago declared a great, moral sin and to this day, some teach that suicide is an unpardonable sin. Apparently, it didn’t seem odd to the early church that the Bible told stories of several suicides without a single word of condemnation. Matthew records that after betraying Jesus, Judas repented, returned the bribe money and hanged himself. The Gospel does not criticize the choice Judas made. Neither are the suicides of Saul (1st Samuel), Ahitophel (2nd Samuel), or Zimri (1st Kings) condemned by Biblical writers.

The story of Abimelech portrays assisted suicide as an honorable way to die. When a woman inflicted a mortal wound on Abimelech by throwing a millstone onto his head, he “called to the young man carrying his armor and said, ‘Draw your sword and kill me, so others will not say of me, ‘A woman killed him.”

The absence of scriptural support did not prevent theologians from declaring suicide a sin, a way in which early Christians sought to differentiate themselves from the Romans. In the Roman Empire voluntary death was the fodder of heroic stories. Politicians and military leaders were glorified for voluntarily ending their own lives.

During the Middle Ages, suicide was considered not only a sin, a criminal act of such revulsion that the dead body of a suicide victim was brutalized, the estate of the deceased confiscated by the state.

By the fourteenth century condemnation of suicide found its way into Dante’s description of Hell, largely responsible yet today for perceptions of the punishment awaiting those who kill themselves. They were, according to Dante, sentenced to the 7th Circle of Hell, guarded by Minotaur, transformed into gnarled and thorny trees and bushes, and fed upon by winged witches known as harpies.

During the French Revolution, those the government planned to behead were forbidden from committing suicide under penalty of the confiscation of their estate from grieving heirs, because, as suicide historian Georges Minois explains, “A prisoner sentenced to death who killed himself deprived them an opportunity to display their authority.”

When I wrote the biography of Wyoming Senator Lester Hunt, “Dying for Joe McCarthy’s Sins,” I dug deeply into the question of suicide. Lester Hunt Jr. who blamed himself for his father’s death, had spent a great deal of time in therapy and studying the causes of suicide.

He referred me to the works of Emile Durkheim, a 20^th century academic who wrote extensively about the role of the culture in self harm. Durkheim opened an understanding of suicide based on science and research rather than on ancient prejudices and religious notions.

Durkheim believed society played a predominant role in suicide. It was not God’s fault; not the parent’s fault; not the fault of the deceased. He thought fault could be found in the societal relationships that created cultural forces, which exercised more influence on the decision to take one’s own life than any individual’s personal motivation.

We see it today in a broad swath of the culture. For example, as the agricultural economy worsens, America’s farmers have, according to the Centers for Disease Control or CDC, a rate of suicide 5 times that of any profession. We see 22 veterans kill themselves every day.

The elderly, 13% of the population account for 16% of all suicides.  The Suicide among middle-age whites jumped an alarming 40 percent in recent years. The CDC blames the opioid addiction crisis and economic pressures on the middle class. In Wyoming, approximately 80 percent of suicides are men; a quarter are men ages 45-64.

Medical debt is one reason people in this age group take their own lives, either because they don’t want to put their family savings as risk by getting medical care or because of the cost of the medical care they have received leaves them so deep in debt.

Economic suffering leads to self-harm. One researcher concluded that if you want to reduce the numbers of suicides, make sure people earn a living wage. There is a direct link between wages and suicide rates. Increasing the minimum wage reduces suicides according to a study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.  

In the United States and in Wyoming, suicide is a public health crisis, affecting some of the youngest. For the second decade in a row, the number of children in emergency rooms for suicidal behavior has doubled, and the median age is 13.

Suicide is the 2^nd leading cause of death among teens. LGBTQ kids take their own lives at a rate 3 times that of heterosexual kids, a number that skyrockets when those children are condemned by churches, rejected by family, and bullied by classmates.

Here’s more evidence that the cause of suicide has cultural roots. Two years ago, Netflix released a series entitled  13 Reasons Why depicting a teenager who decided to take her own life. Psychologists warned the program could lead to copycat suicides and it did.

The National Institutes of Health documented that in the month following the show's March 2017 debut, there was a 28.9% increase in suicide among Americans ages 10-17, greater than in any single month over the 5-year period researchers examined.

All of those numbers tell us Durkheim was right; suicide is not, as some of my clergy colleagues say, a part of God’s plan. It is part and parcel the failures and the sins of the larger culture.

Jesus understood that. If you look at the context for the teachings of Jesus, whether they came through the telling of parables or encounters in the temple or the streets such as when he taught that those without sin should throw the first stone or whenever he challenged harmful social norms, he always did it in the presences of a large number of people, often leaders from the community.

Jesus and later his disciples knew these were not simply lessons to be learned by individuals alone but lessons for the entire culture. It was not only those rich businessmen who were willing to profit from the slave girl. It was others as well. It was not just those picking up stones to kill that woman who believed what they believed. It was a common belief among the entire population and Jesus was teaching them all that it was wrong. Jesus always engaged not in changing individuals but in changing entire cultures. Jesus followers must engage themselves in dismantling cultural bombs in much the same way.

Jesus knew what we all need to learn. Behavior that is called out as unacceptable to an entire community will change more quickly than behavior that can be attributed to individuals alone.

Our prejudices and religious notions about self-harm are wrong-headed. Looking to the victims for solutions is not the solution. The community must stop looking at the problem of suicide through a smug-smudged window and start looking in the mirror. Then we will see what actually brings our brothers and sisters to that point where they believe their death is the only solution and that everyone around them would be better off if they were gone.

That which brings a person to the moment when they decide the solution is to take their own life begins earlier…much farther upstream in the culture-wide decision-making process with choices made by the community about whether we are our brother’s and sister’s keepers.  

It begins with Cain’s question and ends with a paraphrase of Elizabeth Warrens’. How should religion work and who should it work for?

This divorce was inevitable

We tried. But, this marriage just isn’t working out. We stayed together for the sake of the kids. Until now, we avoided divorce, but they are suffering. It’s not fair to them. We need to move on.

I believe even God wanted it to work. It did for years. Through thick and thin, each of us found a way to compromise. There were times we put the needs of the other above our own, but no more.

We’ve been through a lot together. Next month, we could have celebrated our 243^rd anniversary.

Remember the day we took our vows? July 4, 1776. Standing before one another and God, we said, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all people are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

A few years later, we renewed our vows, committed to “a more perfect” marriage, and worked together to “establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty” to ourselves, our children and our grandchildren.

As time passed, those vows gave way to selfish partisanship.

Along the way we recognized what we ignored for decades before consummating our union. Some of our children were women, others were people of color. Mea culpa. A privileged white male, I didn’t acknowledge that in the beginning. A few decades into our marriage, I could see that a union conceived in inequality could not endure half slave and half free. We nearly divorced then because you were willing to fight rather than change.

Like many abused spouses, I thought you could change over time. And you did, a little. You started listening to the women in the family in 1920. Our Native American children became citizens in 1924.

For years, we tried to sweep our feelings under the rug. Still, our children of color suffered alongside our poor children, those who were ill, and those who were different. But, we remembered our vows and we thought we could work it out. Along came a couple of World Wars. People went to work. Side by side. Men to war. Women in defense industries. Gays. Lesbians. White. Black. Brown. Butchers, bakers and candlestick makers. All reported. Some died. Some didn’t. The war ended.

Life resumed. We decided our children would now be equal. Separate but equal. Schools, jobs,  public swimming pools, restaurants, motels, colleges, military units, bathrooms. All of our children had one. The promises of equality were supposed to trickle down to everyone.

Then the marriage counselor told us to bring the entire family together as one. E Pluribus Unum, you know. Everyone was entitled to a place at the same dinner table. That seemed to be what Jesus was telling us, at least until you started attending that other church.

Our old friend Martin assured us the arc of our marriage was bent inevitably toward what was right. I believed him. You even quoted him.

I didn’t realize you were being unfaithful. I became concerned when I walked in and found you cuddling with Fox News and Rush Limbaugh. It became obvious when you started abusing our gay, adopted, and poor children.

I began worrying you might leave us for a Trump. Still, I never thought you’d be gleeful when your iniquitous new partner dissed a former POW or set out to destroy the foundations of our marriage. I couldn’t believe you would kidnap the neighbor’s children and lock them in cages. I thought we’d moved beyond racism, homophobia, and misogyny. I never thought you’d backslide so easily into your old ways.

After 243 years, do you still have to be told those things are wrong? We call ourselves united, but  no longer work together to secure “the blessings of liberty” to ourselves and our grandchildren. Sadly, the time has come to go our own way.

As Ray Charles would say, hit the road Jack.