Shalom Aleichem...
Reflections is a weekly Christian Teaching Ministry. Each week we will talk about the Bible and lessons we can put to use in our daily life. We will try to, on a weekly basis, provide to you stories, thoughts, and just easy ways to live your life on a straight path.
THIS WEEK'S TEACHING....October 14, 2019
We continue this week, in our series on end of life.
I’d like to read you a tremendous story of God’s view for those who are dying. This comes from Presbyterian Today, April 2000:
“I’ve never seen an angel. The closest I’ve come is the time when someone cleaned two feet of snow from my driveway. But I do know someone who has actually seen an angel–four angels to be exact. I take him at his word. Let me tell you about my son.
“Several years ago, three weeks after Bram’s sixth birthday, I started his bedtime breathing treatments, a routine part of the daily battle with asthma. About one minute into the treatment, Bram had a clear choking noise and called out, Mommy!” My mouth was open to yell at him to quit screwing around and be quiet and go to sleep. With a deeper wisdom, I knew something was terribly wrong, and my feet were running even as I gathered breath to scold. I scooped him up in my arms and ran into the family room. My husband looked at me with a smile on his face. I said, “He’s in respiratory failure. We’ve got to go now.” Ken’s feet too were moving before the expression on his face caught up. By some grace bigger than comprehension, the car was parked facing out at the end of the driveway. Ken somehow kept the wheel. We made it up the unplowed road to the hospital, and I ran in, paper work mailed in before, dangling bare feet. He was hooked up to monitors within seconds, and all of them were flashing and beeping. His oxygen level was 28. The doctors pulled us aside and began the speech, “We are going to do everything we can for him, blah, blah...Just step out into the waiting room for a few minutes while we...”
“Ken and I sat beside each other staring straight ahead. The helicopters were grounded due to the blizzard. Because of the snow, the chief anesthesiologist was still at the hospital. An ambulance crew was hanging out in the break room. The roads were officially impassable, and the crew volunteered to enter into the jaws of hell and drive him to the children’s hospital in Pittsburgh. Even though he was currently stable, the great fear was that once the steroids wore off, the rebound paroxysmal spasms might carry him away. They sedated him to keep him one level above death, and the anesthesiologist volunteered to ride in the ambulance to guard the precarious balance. This meant there was no room for either Ken nor I.
“Ken and I drove home wordless. I tried to say something in the car. I remembered the old spiritual, “When I get to Heaven, I’m going to put on my shoes...” and I thought, “Oh my God, I forgot his shoes.” Normally, it is a one-and-one-half-hour trip to children’s hospital. This time it took three hours. When we got there, Ken dropped me at the door and went to park. I did not run in like some frantic, crazy mother. I plodded in. It was the longest distance I’d ever walked. A technician looked at my slab of a face and walked with me to the Emergency Room and there was my son, jabbering away, elated that he had pulled his first all-nighter. He was glad to see me, but he really wanted to see his dad. He needed to pee. They were going to make him go in a bottle and all the nurses were female, and that mortified him. Bram and I held hands and watched the sun rise.
“I finally said, “Bram, I have never been so scared in my entire life. What was it like for you?” He said, “You know, every night my daddy prays that there be four angels with flaming swords around the four corners of my bed and the four corners of the house to keep me safe. The first time my daddy prayed last night, it didn’t work. So when they pulled me onto the bed in the ambulance, I prayed it again. I prayed it all by myself for the first time. I closed my eyes and kind of fell asleep, and then I opened them and they were there. One of them held the bed, one of them held the IV bottle so it wouldn’t bang from side to side, one of them held my head on her lap, and she sang a story. The biggest one took his flaming sword and cut a pathway down my airpipe so I could breathe. I saw them Mom. They were there.”
Do we ever doubt God’s promise to be there for us?
The fourth option, taking one’s life directly, is not a good option for several reasons. One is because it treats death as a friend, and in scripture death is always understood an an enemy. I Corinthians 15:25, “The last enemy to be destroyed is death.” Death is something that we naturally run away from, and we should continue to do so. It also makes life’s value based upon its usefulness to us or to others.
Pope John Paul wrote an encyclic called the “Gospel of Life.” He states, “When the prevailing tendency is to value life only to the extent that it brings pleasure and well-being, suffering seems like an unbearable set-back, something from which one must be freed at all costs. Death is considered senseless if it suddenly interrupts a life still open to a future of new and interesting experiences, but it becomes a rightful liberation once life is held to be no longer meaningful but is filled with pain and inexorable doom to even greater suffering. Furthermore, when one denies or neglects his fundamental relationship to God, man thinks he is his own rule and measure with the right to demand that society should guarantee him the ways and means for deciding what to do with his life in full and complete autonomy.”
Scripture puts the basis for a person’s life, not upon one’s experiences in life, but upon the fact that God created us in his image and that God gave his life for us. We have intrinsic value regardless of our experiences.
The third contradiction has to do with the assumption that “It’s my life” which is reflected in what Pope John Paul said, and as a result if it’s my life, then it’s also my death. I will die the way that I want to. For the secular person, this is true because they are outside of God’s will and God’s word. But for the Christian, the model for us is I Corinthians 6:20: “You were bought at a price. Therefore, honor God with your body.” Romans 12:1 tells us that our bodies are living sacrifices to be given to him in sacrificial service.
This is the Biblical basis for the reason that the Church decided that everything except for the taking of your life intentionally is proper and appropriate for end-of-life issues.
When we are writing a living will or advanced directives, we will encounter certain terminology. One is “ordinary” versus “extraordinary means.” One problem with these terms is that they are slippery. What was considered extra-ordinary a few years ago is ordinary today. So, what is extraordinary and what is ordinary? C. Everett Koop writes a wonderful book called The Right to Live and The Right to Die, and he picks up on this. Perhaps an example would help to clarify the slipperiness of these definitions:
“If one were struck down by a car and had a serious head injury which rendered him unable to breathe and made him unable to respond, and if his bladder sphincter were in spasm so he could not urinate, he could be placed on a respirator. He could be fed intravenously or by a stomach tube. His urinary obstruction would be taken care of by the proper placement of a catheter. If it were assumed that he would recover in a matter of a few days, all of these things would be considered ordinary care. If, on the basis of superior knowledge of the neurosurgeon attending him at this time, it were known that there was essentially no way that he could be expected to recover, all of these things might be considered extraordinary care since without them his injuries would produce death.
“If one had an acute appendicitis and postoperatively developed a situation where his kidneys did not function, to put him on a dialysis machine would be an extraordinary act and might at times be considered to be extraordinary care. However, in a normal individual with a normal life expectancy of several decades ahead of him, it would not be considered extraordinary. On the other hand, if in a 93-year-old individual the same kidney shut-down took place as the result of a disease process that inevitably would take this person’s life, the institution of dialysis would be extraordinary and would definitely be thought of by any medically competent individual as providing extraordinary care.”
What is ordinary or extraordinary is defined by the moment, by the timing, the context and the history. There are so many factors that it is hard to make the blanket statement that something is ordinary or extraordinary.
The second problem with terminology is that one has to make these decisions near death. That’s the terminology–“near death.” But, who can predict what is “near death”? Medical World News from May 5, 1974, reported the case of a woman with myasthenia gravis who lived artificially for 652 days in intensive care and then made a remarkable recovery. Said the hospital representative at the Harvard General Hospital in Florence, CA, “She made us recognize that there is no such thing as an inordinate effort. She had such a tenacity for life that we felt that everything we did, no matter how extraordinary, was appropriate to this situation, and we could not have predicted that she would have recovered.”
Time and time again you find the same thing. The Karen Anne Quinlan case is the big one. They said she would absolutely die without the life support systems. They took her off, and she lived four more years. They can’t predict.
An Iowa police officer who was on life support for seven years made a full recovery. M. Scott Peck in his book tells us about his 81-year-old grandmother who, the day he was going to sign the paper to end her life, snapped out of it. He was absolutely certain that there was no life left that was useful, and she was soon to die, and he is an expert. She lived after this experience eight more years of wonderful productive life, and she saw six more great-grandchildren born into the family. You just can’t predict these things.
The best we can do is in the moment with much prayer and much discernment, asking God to reveal what to do.
What have we learned. We have learned that terms are slippery and complex. There are not easy answers. We also have discovered that there is a wide range of choices for the Christian as to the issues of termination of one’s life. I will address this again on August 18. We will look at the issue of pain, and on September 1 we will look at the issue of dignity. We fear pain and the loss of our dignity. What does God’s word have to say about this. Does God address these issues?
Is the only choice for me as a Christian a natural death? Is my only choice to suffer intractable illness and to lose my dignity? Is that the only Christian option? Many people after hearing this will say that this seems to be what I am saying, but it’s not. There are other, better solutions than killing onself. There are other, better options.
DID YOU EVER WONDER???
A lady in a faded gingham dress and her husband, dressed in a homespun threadbare suit, stepped off the train in Boston, and walked timidly without an appointment into the president's outer office. The secretary could tell in a moment that such backwoods, country hicks had no business at Harvard and probably didn't even deserve to be in Cambridge. She frowned.
"We want to see the president," the man said softly.
"He'll be busy all day," the secretary snapped.
"We'll wait," the lady replied.
For hours, the secretary ignored them, hoping that the couple would finally become discouraged and go away. They didn't. And the secretary grew frustrated and finally decided to disturb the president, even though it was a chore she always regretted to do. "Maybe if they just see you for a few minutes, they'll leave," she told him. And he sighed in exasperation and nodded. Someone of his importance obviously didn't have the time to spend with them, but he detested gingham dresses and homespun suits cluttering up his outer office. The president, stern-faced with dignity, strutted toward the couple.
The lady told him, "We had a son that attended Harvard for one year. He loved Harvard. He was happy here. But about a year ago, he was accidentally killed. And my husband and I would like to erect a memorial to him, somewhere on campus". The president wasn't touched he was shocked.
"Madam," he said gruffly, "we can't put up a statue for every person who attended Harvard and died. If we did, this place would look like a cemetery."
"Oh, no," the lady explained quickly, "we don't want to erect a statue. We thought we would like to give a building to Harvard.
The president rolled his eyes. He glanced at the gingham dress and homespun suit, then exclaimed, "A building! Do you have any earthly idea how much a building costs? We have over seven and a half million dollars in the physical plant at Harvard." For a moment the lady was silent.
The president was pleased. He could get rid of them now.
The lady turned to her husband and said quietly, "Is that all it costs to start a University? Why don't we just start our own?" Her husband nodded. The president's face wilted in confusion and bewilderment.
Mr. and Mrs. Leland Stanford walked away, traveling to Palo Alto, California where they established the University that bears their name, a memorial to a son that Harvard no longer cared about!
BOOKS OF THE BIBLE...A TEACHING
Over the past several months, we have gone through the Books of the Bible in order to give you a short synopsis and overview of information you may someday need to know. I pray in some small way this has helped you in your study of Gods Word. This week we finish up this trip through the Bible with the Book of Revelation....
Who wrote the book?
The author of Revelation mentioned his name, John, four times throughout the book (Revelation 1:1, 4, 9; 22:8). Christians throughout history have given almost unanimous affirmation to the identity of the book’s author as John the apostle, who had been exiled to the island of Patmos by the authorities for preaching the gospel in Asia. Some traditions say that the Romans dropped John into a vat of boiling oil, but when the apostle did not die, they instead banished him to the barren rock of Patmos.
The title of the book, Revelation, comes from the Greek word for apocalypse and refers to an unveiling or a disclosure of something as yet unknown. This title is certainly appropriate for the book, a work so interested in making known the events of the future.
Where are we?
The apostle John wrote the book of Revelation around the year AD 95 from his exile on the island of Patmos. He addressed his work to seven Asian churches—Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, and Laodicea. Because John worked in Ephesus for so many of his later years, it would have been natural for him to communicate this vision to the churches under his immediate care and influence. Each of those seven churches received a message directed specifically to them (chapters 2 and 3) before John launched into his account of the future which he received in his vision from God.
Why is Revelation so important?
The book of Revelation provides the clearest biblical portrait of the events of the tribulation, dealing with the specifics of that terrible time (chapters 4–18). The tribulation will be a time of judgment, a time when those left on the earth after the rapture will suffer deeply for their nonbelief. John pictured this judgment as a series of twenty-one events—inaugurated by the breaking of seven seals, the blowing of seven trumpets, and the pouring out of seven bowls. This grand judgment on the sinfulness of humanity shows the seriousness with which God views sin—payment will be exacted from those not covered by the blood of Jesus Christ.
What's the big idea?While Revelation offers many details on the tribulation—even if they are often couched in the mystery of symbolic language—it is the final four chapters that dictate the overall message of the book. Revelation 19–22 portrays Christ’s future triumph over the forces of evil and His re-creation of the world for the redeemed. Ultimately, the book—and the world—end in a final victory for truth and goodness and beauty.
For the bulk of its sixty-six books, the Bible portrays a world deep in the throes of suffering. Human beings have had a problem with sin since the fall in Genesis 3, and verse after verse has recorded our problem in painstaking detail. The brilliance of Revelation is that it provides a final answer to this problem, a hope that Jesus will once and for all heal the wounds wrought by sin (Revelation 19), reign for a thousand years on earth (Revelation 20), and then re-create the world into a place that represents God’s original design (Revelation 21–22). The Bible’s narrative is a simple one: creation, fall, re-creation. Without the completion of the redeeming work of Jesus recorded in Revelation, we wouldn’t have the end of the story, leaving our hope for the future in serious doubt.
How do I apply this?
Usually when people mention the book of Revelation, they immediately think about judgment. And without a doubt, much judgment occurs in the book. However, Revelation does not end with judgment. Instead, it provides a striking bookend for the entire Bible, which begins in Paradise and ends in Paradise. More than judgment on the evildoers, Revelation is a book about hope for the faithful in Christ.
What pains or indignities have you suffered? What broken relationship have you wept over? Has death’s sword struck deep into your heart? Revelation promises a world where pain and tears and death pass away. Revelation reminds us that there is indeed hope beyond the momentary trials and struggles of this life. One day the darkness will pass away, and we will all dwell in perpetual light.
Come quickly, Lord Jesus! God be praised.
HAVE A SAFE AND BLESSED WEEK:)
Ho'omaikaʻi ka Pua iā kākou