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 20th 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 2nd 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?
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