Catechism and Suicide..."Groan! Catechism? Really??"

So from the depths of personal, emotionally charged anger, I have had the privilege of some distance, some abstraction, some dispassionate consideration.  Some time to prepare my defense before the Almighty. 


According to my colleague, I am going to be put before the throne of heaven and charged with laxity in the governance of the people commended to my care.  So I had one of those moments so amazingly portrayed in the first Avengers movie.  Thor and Iron Man are facing off.  Thor has just drawn on all the lightning powers of his magical hammer and attempted to cook Iron Man to a nice well-done consistency.  The result, a 400% power increase, put this look on Tony's face as he then blasted Thor a good quarter mile off his feet.  I pray for forgiveness for my own arrogance in trying to find that same expression for myself.


When I am challenged, I go back to what I was raised on.  In this case, it is the Heidelberg Catechism, one of the three pillars of the Christian Reformed Church and one of the collected works in the Book of Confessions of the PCUSA.  I went back there after being challenged by a friend of mine to go look at the Roman Catholic Catechism.


Thank you Pam.


Heidelberg Catechism, Question and Answer 115: Q. Since no one in this life can obey the Ten Commandments perfectly, why does God want them preached so pointedly?


A. First, so that the longer we live the more we may come to know our sinfulness and the more eagerly look to Christ for forgiveness of sins and righteousness.

Second, so that we may never stop striving, and never stop praying to God for the grace of the Holy Spirit, to be renewed more and more after God’s image, until after this life we reach our goal:

perfection.

(http://www.crcna.org/welcome/beliefs/confessions/heidelberg-catechism)

Catechism of the Catholic Church; paragraph 2282: "If suicide is committed with the intention of setting an example, especially to the young, it also takes on the gravity of scandal. Voluntary co-operation in suicide is contrary to the moral law.  Grave psychological disturbances, anguish, or grave fear of hardship, suffering, or torture can diminish the responsibility of the one committing suicide."

(http://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p3s2c2a5.htm)

I wonder if John Calvin is doing spin-dizzies in his grave as I bring these together...

"The longer we live, the greater the importance of the 10 Commandments as better for us to recognize our sinfulness and the more eagerly we look to Christ.  But if we cannot eagerly took to Christ, through psychological disturbances, anguish, or grave fear of hardship, suffering, or torture, responsibility can be diminished for one who takes their own life. The Commandments are preached that we may never stop striving and never stop praying to the Lord for the grace of the Holy Spirit.  After this life, we reach our goal: perfection."

The Catholic Catechism is very specific in the condemnation of suicide and I stand with those condemnations.  But when somebody wants the pain to stop and they do not have the line to our Lord, except through us, actively or passively, our job is to strive and to never stop praying.

Standing Before God’s Throne: When I Was Told I Would Be Found Wanting

So a colleague in ministry and I got into it the other day.  We were exchanging views on one of the ‘mortal sins’, one of those things that traditionally sends a person straight to hell, do not pass go, do not collect $200.  He is definitely a black and white, heaven and hell kind of fellow while I tend to see shades of grey.  The discussion was "wrath of God" versus "mercy of God".

Well, at one point, he turns to me and basically tells me I am up the creek when I stand before the throne of grace.  I will have to defend my weak-kneed, lukewarm position, daring to water down what he perceives to be as the express and absolute command of God.  First, he pissed me off, pardon my language.  Then he got me to thinking.

It is one thing for me to defend my own life before the throne of grace.  There is a long string of darkness that will be brought into the light and I pray that the confessions of my soul here on earth will keep those events forgiven and forgotten from heaven.  But now I was being challenged on a whole different level.  He was challenging my standing before God as a shepherd, as someone responsible for the faith and guidance of others.

The issue we were talking about was suicide.  His position, life is gift from God, you take it by your own hand, one way ticket to the permanent fiery vacation.  There was no nuance, there was no consideration of the pain that a person might be in that leads to suicide, there was no consideration of being in one’s right mind, there was no consideration of the mercy of the Lord. 

He spoke with the authority he perceived he had from the bible and I was wrong, and God was going to get me for it.

That was the first time in a very long time that I was so glad to be a mainline Presbyterian pastor.  And not because we ‘don’t believe in hell’.

I was so very glad because I could stand in the Spirit and pray for the day when he stands before the throne of grace and has to explain his condemnation of a person in so much pain that they want life itself to end.  I pray that God has the mercy he is denying to those most in pain in our world. 

I know, it’s not nice to bash a fellow minister.  But do not tell me I am NOT doing God’s work.  It must be nice to have such black and white positions drawn out.  I say the Bible says this, stand on that side of the line and Jesus loves you, stand on the other side of the line and Jesus flushes you to hell.  Do this, you are good, do that, you are condemned.  Makes it simple.

Now don’t get me wrong, I believe that people are responsible for their actions.  I believe that hell exists and that there are people deliberately and flagrantly disobedient to our Lord Jesus that are headed in that direction.  But I also believe that mercy has a much higher place on the divine agenda than many of my fellow pastors seem to.  I think the strength of the mainline is that we have latched on to God’s mercy and question too many of the sacred cows of what people have traditionally thought is condemned in Scripture.    We stand in the middle of society and consider what the bible tells us and struggle with the changing reality around us.  (And that is the closest I have ever come to accepting post-modernism!) 

The great strength of being Presbyterian is that we operate by committee.  We put good people in a room and we listen to the gathered wisdom of the Spirit as filtered through each presence.  Lutherans and Methodists may do that too, but I am not one of them, so I do not know.  I have not come by my ‘loose morals’ on my own, but by the deep and intense communication, debate, and cooperation of my fellow Christians, Presbyterian and otherwise.  But the principle of the shared witness of the Spirit is something I was brought up with in the Reformed and Presbyterian tradition.

I was basically accused of loosening the authority of the Bible with my “mercy-talk”.  I don’t see it that way.  I think I was taking the authority of the Bible far more seriously because I don’t see cookie-cutter divisions between heaven and hell.  Life is far more complicated than that.  God is far more loving than that.

And if I have to stand before God some day and defend why I claimed God’s mercy over God’s punishment, I pray I have the grace to remember my church, my Presbyterian Church USA, that taught me about the extent of God’s mercy.

Peace.

The Lord has a way of Haunting Life with Scripture

So, this week, there are two ministries that I have a connection to that are winding down their work.  God's Army Ministry, which has been worshipping in our church for the last year and is running a Community Kitchen out of our Auditorium, is drawing their work to a close with us at the end of June.


The Middlesex County Long Term Recovery Group, in operation since the weeks after Hurricane Sandy, is also concluding its work this summer. 


And along comes John 3: 22-30, particularly verse 30, the "weight loss" verse.  John the Baptizer says, "He must increase, but I must decrease."  There is a changing of the guard.  John was the voice of one who cried out in the wilderness, "Make straight the path of the Lord."  Now the Lord has come down that path.


The increasing of the Lord Jesus, even when these ministries have completed their work, that is what the bible passage is telling me.  What it is going to end up looking like, I do not know.  But it is tugging at heart strings for me.

1968 and 2015

    
So NPR interviewed a couple of First Responders from the days after the death of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, drawing a parallel between what happened then to what is happening now.  It got me thinking.  Here are a couple of observations.


In 1968, our cities were a warzone.  One of the Responders likened walking through the streets of Baltimore and Washington D.C. after the riots like walking through the cities of Germany that were wiped out in the bombing campaigns of the Second World War.


In 2015, our cities are ‘thug-fests’.  Legitimate, necessary, desirable public protests are hijacked by looters and hooligans, more intent on busting into a CVS than expressing anger and grief to a nation.


1968 gave us riots of anger.  2015 gives us riots of hooliganism.  I see more parallels in 2015 to the soccer hooligans in the United Kingdom who are just out to cause trouble than parallels to 1968.


In 1968, the ‘information age’ put the war in Vietnam into our living rooms.  Every night, we saw the raw, unedited footage of our draftee army fighting a war that no one could explain our presence in to the satisfaction of a nation.


In 2015, the ‘information age’ puts the police actions of our nation into our living rooms.  Every night, we see the raw, unedited footage of our cops fighting a war on the thin blue line that no one can presently explain to the satisfaction of a nation.


In 1968 and 2015, violence sells.  The worst of the worst is what attracts viewers to our media outlets.  In 1968, hundreds and thousands of positive interactions between US soldiers and the Vietnamese went by the way, forgotten and uninteresting to the people at home.  In 2015, hundreds and thousands of positive interactions between US law enforcement and public go by the way, forgotten and uninteresting to us.


In 1968, the My Lai Massacre caught the attention of the nation, American soldiers doing horrible things.  They were caught, they were prosecuted.  Not everybody was.  In 2015, our police are catching the attention of the nation, doing some horrible, some questionable, some hard things, some inexplicable things.  Some were caught, some were prosecuted.  Not everybody was.


At the end of the day, we are the United States.  Sometimes we do it right, a lot of times we don’t.  But we are going to keep trying.






  

One Minute Sermon: Give it the Minute.

Wow....just wow.

Preaching on the Violent Jesus

Jesus drove the moneychangers out of the temple.  That is my passage from John tomorrow.  I have heard more commentary on this passage regarding the fact that John places it early in his gospel account versus the Synoptic gospels that place the story near the end of their gospels, as a trigger event for his final arrest.  More pages have been devoted to the possibility that Jesus did it twice in an attempt to harmonize the gospels, rather than deal with a Violent Jesus.


We do not want to deal with the fact that Jesus committed violence, against property and against the persons of the moneychangers in the temple.  And, since by presumption, Jesus was without sin, he committed violence without being sinful.  In John, the disciples would remember the Old Testament quote, "Zeal for his house consumed him" as the reason for the Violent Jesus.


"But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security."  That is us.  This is the line in the Declaration of Independence that justified the use of violence by the colonial governments against the government of England.  Funny I should be reminded of that from the movie "National Treasure".


There was a line across which a response of violence would be provoked.  That happened to Jesus.  It could happen to us.  For some, it is an expected response. 


We train up Peace Officers and War Officers, our police and our military, to proceed violently when the need arises.  They act in the name of the state, justified and protected when their actions are justifiable.  It is a tremendous responsibility.  The roots of that responsibility are found in Jesus himself.


With the Violent Jesus, one might look at the merits of the case.  It was not permissible to give money to the temple that was tainted with images of other deities, including that of the Emperor.  The Jews looked to the Law of Moses to protect the Temple from the influences of other religions, even from their money.  But the Jews who pilgrimaged to Jerusalem had only the money of their hometowns.  Thus, the moneychangers were present to exchange their currencies for what was permissible in the temple.  On the face of it, a very workable solution.


But the extortion that resulted, the entire Temple environment was dominated by these moneychangers, living off the backs of the pilgrims.  They and the purveyors of sacrificial beasts for Temple sacrifice.  The Temple had become a place of this religious commerce, and crooked commerce at that.  The injustice of this perverted worship of God drove Jesus to violent ends. 


Did it stop the practices?  No.  In fact, the demonstration of the Violent Jesus is a contributing factor to Jesus' final arrest and execution.  But what it showed the world, the willingness to put your life on the line for what is truly important, such a lesson of power.  And amazingly, the great leaders who have followed the lessons of Jesus, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, they have changed their nations without resorting to violence.


What is the line you are willing to cross to become a Person of Violence?  Have you truly considered where that line lies?  Are you justified as the Violent Jesus was?  Are you willing to pay the price, as Jesus did? 

A Failure of Training

It is the nightmare scenario.  In this case, it was a 73 year old volunteer reserve deputy.  He was going for his taser and he drew his service weapon.  He was going for his taser and he shot a suspect, killing him during an arrest.  He was going for his taser, seeking to protect the public and enforce the laws and a man is dead.  That is the face this volunteer reserve deputy is going to carry around in his head and in his sleep for the rest of his life.


This is not Ferguson, Missouri, nor Staten Island, New York, and certainly not North Charleston, South Carolina.  Tulsa, Oklahoma is something worse. 


It is worse because, from what I can see, it is not a racially motivated shooting.  Criminal intent, race hatred, a human hunting culture, a bully-boy police department, they are not in play here.  Yes, a lot of people will try to bring them into play.  And maybe there are details I do not know that make it appropriate for them to be in play.  But I haven't seen them.


The reason this is worse is because an officer was trying to do his job and the power of life and death that he is entrusted with led to an incident of failure.  There are a lot of reasons that might be drawn upon to cite for this incidence of failure.  There was a failure in his training that he was unable to distinguish between the two weapons in a moment of high stress.  There will be questions of the legitimacy of being able to train a 73 year old adequately in the stresses and needs of law enforcement.  Even if such training is deemed to be legitimate, there will be intense scrutiny of a volunteer officer of his age being utilized in the higher stakes and stresses of a 'drug bust'.


It is worse because this is not a bad man hiding behind the authority of law enforcement.  And the court of public perception will not be able to accuse him of such, not as it has accused those other officers, not unless there is something we have not yet seen.


It is worse because the system that is designed to bring justice and enforce the law and protect the citizens of the United States broke down. It is the nightmare scenario for every officer and every police force that seeks to legitimately serve and protect the public.  It is the nightmare scenario for every citizen.  It is the nightmare scenario because it could have been fixed in the training, but it was not, not until someone paid the ultimate price.


It is akin to Columbine, when police training was designed around hostage taking and not the active shooter, when the cops created a perimeter and did not intervene, when they stood still and children died, because that is what they were trained to do-then.


So pray for the family of Eric Harris, a life tragically cut short.  But pray also for Reserve Deputy Robert Bates, who will be living that moment for the rest of his life.  Pray that he will not choose the barrel of his gun to silence the pain.