East Tallassee UMC

June 26, 1994

 

A time to kill and a time to heal.  A time to break down and a time to build up.  A time to weep and a time to laugh.  A time to mourn and a time to dance.  A time to cast away stones and a time to gather stones together.  A time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing.  A time to seek and a time to leave.  A time to keep and a time to cast away.  A time to rend and a time to sew.  A time to keep silent and a time to speak.  A time to love and a time to hate.  A time for war and a time for peace.  What gain has the worker from his toil?

It seems that death is a given in this life, and I want to explore that with you. In talking with you on this subject, I am drawing from a larger context that I have been exploring for several years.  You may have seen where I have taught a class or two down at Huntingdon dealing with the relationship between law and religion.  And my remarks this morning fit into that context of the relationships between law and morality and religion.  And I say at the front end that I don’t think that in the absence of morality there is any law.  I think that the motive force for law comes from morality.  And I don’t think that without religion there is any real morality.  So I think that these concepts are inextricably woven together.

Now, Hollis was with me during the last couple of weeks at a time when I dealt with cases that involve death.  There were two beautiful young men–one black and one white–whose bodies were penetrated by bullets; and we were dealing with the person who pulled the trigger.  And this has become a common place of my experience over the last twelve years.  What I want to convey to you about that is the ultimate reality of what we were dealing with.  Of course, we only had pictures, but we were dealing with people who had lived and who had died.  They weren’t here anymore.  Their families had had to pray and place them in a casket and bury them in the ground.  And we explore today some of the meaning of that.

A couple of years ago, I was assigned by the Chief Justice to try a capital murder case up in Limestone County.  Now, you of course know the significance of a capital murder case…that means that the person that did the killing could be put to death.  I believe in capital punishment and think that anyone who tries to find an argument against capital punishment in the Bible has to search awfully, awfully hard to do so and has to almost twist the meaning of the Scripture to do so.  I don’t have any embarrassment in approaching capital murder cases.  But trying a capital murder case is a very unique sort of experience.  You go into the courtroom and when the purpose is announced, there is quiet.  I’ll say there’s a deathly quiet.  There is a brooding presence about those proceedings.  And so here I am in a North Alabama county where I don’t know a soul other than Curtis Coleman who happened to be my preacher years ago.  He was teaching at Athens State University and of course I called him because I needed some friendly contact there.

I was staying over at a motel, and every morning, I would get up a go over to Hardee’s and eat a sausage biscuit and drink a cup of coffee.  Well, the first morning, I went over there and they charged me a dollar a sixty-nine cents for my coffee and biscuit.  And the next morning, they charged a dollar and nine cents.  I was going to say something about it, being the honest person that I am, until I looked down and saw that senior citizen’s discount on there.  I’m not sure I was qualified for it, but I didn’t even ask about.  I figured that if I looked that old, it was time for me to accept that with grace and go on about my business.

During the very same case, I was up there behind the bench trying to read the small print on some of the things that I was supposed to read,  and I noticed that my arms had got too short, and so I called Betty and asked her to make an appointment for me to go to the eye doctor.

Well, you say why in the world are you telling us all about that?  We know you try capital murder cases occasionally.  There’s a point in it.  Because, you see, that represents my own gradual process of growing older and the fact that we all do that.  I have probably dealt with thirteen or fourteen other capital murder cases in my life, and in fact I have one that y’all might be interested in now.  Hardee’s seems to enter my life in a lot of different ways.  I got my sausage biscuit at Hardee’s in Limestone County, and the latest capital murder cases here in our county involves the killing of someone who worked at Hardee’s here in Tallassee.  I am dealing with that case.  When you turn on the television, it’s so interesting to watch O.J. go down the interstate that you almost forget that in the background of that entire production there lie two corpses.  I have had lots of experience in various ways with death, and maybe that’s why I am thinking about it this morning.  I have been a pall bearer more times than I could possibly count and remember, and in most of those instances the people who were buried meant a great deal to me.  That doesn’t happen quite as often now that I have become a senior citizen and perhaps closer to Jordan than I was at an earlier time in my life.

I have even had the experience very recently of conducting a funeral.  Now, there’s an experience where the preachers earn their keep.  To stand near an open grave with a casket over it, and to talk about the Valley of the Shadow of Death and in my Father’s house are many mansions– it’s a lot easier to stand here and talk about it than it is to stand there and do it.  Especially when that person means a great deal to you.  I admire preachers.  I don’t know how they can possibly handle those situations.  I say that I don’t understand it, but really, I do understand it–even though I would have a difficult time doing it on a regular basis.  They are grounded in faith that transcends this mortal realm.

In the last two years, I have lost family members.  Aunt Irene was the first to die and then my Daddy and then Uncle R.V., and then Aunt Willie, and then Uncle Raymond.  I’ve lost five or six in the last two years, and that trip to the graveyard has become entirely too frequent.  The things that cause me to start thinking about death and start talking with you about death, however, have nothing to do with these personal experiences that I have had but have to do with a course of study in which I recently participated.  I told you earlier that my general area of interest and my witness to you comes from the area of the inter-relationship between law and morals and religion.  And you may wonder, well, he’s gotten way afield now.  I don’t think so.  I think that I’ll be able to bring it back into focus for you because I have been studying this week for a course that I am about to take.  I’m glad that the State encourages judges to continue to study and to learn as we carry out our duties.  We surely don’t know enough about things to ever stop applying just as much understanding as we possibly can about life and human nature, do we?

Included in the material that I was to study was a discussion of euthanasia.  Euthanasia.  Everybody knows what euthanasia is…mercy killing.  We were looking at the ethical and moral and legal problems associated with euthanasia.  It was interesting reading, and what they were talking about is whether with the consent of the person who is to die, the doctor ought to assist in the death of that person.  That is a very important issue in our world.  To put it in a very crass sense, we are talking about medical costs.  We are talking about society’s health care plan.  Eighty percent of the money that is spent on health care is spent during the last six months of the lives of the terminally ill.  Often this money is spent at a time when there is no quality of life.  Under these circumstances, it’s natural that someone begins to talk about “is there a simpler way…is there some other way we can approach this matter?”

We have long since passed the point in our society where we would force life on someone.  If a person can knowingly make the decision, a person does not have to accept medical support systems or heroic efforts.   It does not necessarily depend on that person being totally conscious.  Sometimes family members or surrogates are allowed to make that difficult decision for the person.  But beyond the matter of simply not accepting further treatment lies a more difficult ethical and moral and legal question:  since somebody has to pull the plug to remove life support, what’s the difference between that and giving the lethal injection to avoid all of the pain and suffering when there is no real hope of recovery.  Well, it was interesting to me to read the arguments pro and con.

They first talked about the difference being active assistance in allowing a person to die and assisting in allowing a person to commit suicide.  They talked about a person’s right of self-determination.  And then came the counter-argument.  There are two persons involved in making this decision to assist in death.  It’s not just one.  It’s not just the person who is going to die, but the doctor has to knowingly participate in that decision.  Is that right?  Is it appropriate for doctors to assist in bringing about death? There is a strong argument that doctors are in the business of preserving life.  Never under any circumstances should they kill.  I’ve given you these arguments not for the merits of the arguments but simply for you to begin to understand how law and morals and religion intersect in this important issue as in many other issues.  There is more to it than this.

I brought the book that I was reading from, because none of these arguments that were advanced said anything about religion other than this: 

“The ‘rights’ view of the wrongness of killing (that is a person’s right not to be killed) is not of course universally shared.  Many people’s moral views about killing have their origins in religious views that human life comes from God and cannot be justifiably destroyed or taken away either by the person whose life it is or by another.  But in a pluralistic society like our own with a strong commitment to freedom of religion, public policy should not be grounded on religious beliefs which many in that society reject.”

The idea that there is a correct moral answer to the question is rejected summarily.  The idea that religion even has a place in the debate is summarily rejected.  We’re free to believe whatever we wish, since it really makes no difference what we believe.

I turn now to the general evaluation of public policy on euthanasia.  Now we come to the point.  Public policy about euthanasia, public policy in the absence of religion!  Back in the days when Christianity was taking its form, the Romans put deformed babies out on the hillside to die.  There is nothing irrational about that.  If we look to our own rationality, it makes perfect sense not to be burdened with those deformed and defective children.  It makes perfect sense not to be bothered with the elderly…to go ahead and let them….  Among the Eskimos, the elderly just walk on out on the ice flow because their families can’t support them.  They don’t return.  The notion can even be romanticized.  All of that makes perfect sense in the absence of religion–especially Christianity. 

But somehow through the drumbeat of the ages there comes the message Thou shalt not kill.  And that commandment is revealed truth.  If we propose to adopt any form of euthanasia, we will turn loose of the truth that is revealed in that commandment

 

All morality is received and revealed truth.  Science cannot create a moral system–that’s what the Nazi’s tried to do.  There is a difference between removing life support so that nature takes a life, and simply killing somebody.  And if we ever release our grip on our belief–our deep conviction– that killing is wrong, then where, pray tell, does it stop?  And the very idea that a conscious decision by anybody is a self-determination.  Does that assume that a soul is just consciousness, that it does not penetrate into eternity… that there is no soul?

Let me relate from my own experience.  My mom and dad married in 1936, and they raised three sons.  Daddy died a year ago last December 19th.  As he approached his death, we didn’t know that he was going to die right then; but we knew he was going to die eventually.  I carried him in for a regular check-up on a Friday, and they put him in the hospital because they were going to need to adjust his medicine.  He was 82 years old.  I won’t say something went wrong, but he didn’t do well; and wound up in intensive care with kidneys failing, liver failing, and all of his systems shutting down.  We knew then that the end was coming soon.  My youngest son showed up on Sunday.  Daddy was slipping into and out of consciousness at that point in time.  He certainly could not be said to be rational.  Mike came in, and Daddy said, “Hi, Mike.”  And then he turned to me and he said, “I think that we are all here now.  Y’all go ahead and eat, and save me a place at the table by El.”  Ella is my mama.  There wasn’t any table.  Nobody was going to eat, but I’ll tell you this:  The same power that directs us in the Valley of the Shadow of Death is the one that prepares a table before us in the presence of our enemies.  And as my Daddy lay there with a tube through every aperture in his body, in a place where he didn’t want to be, I came to an understanding of the 23rd Psalm that will never be erased. It was one of the most deeply moving religious experience of my entire life.  I understand the communion table much better now.  I understand how it has one end in this world and one end in eternity where my Daddy’s soul was visiting.  It was from the first communion table that Jesus went to Gethsemane, where the sweat drops were like blood.

Now, before that time came, we could have already made the decision, you know, life is not worth living.  But I think that the greatest witness in my whole life came to me at a time after hope of continued existence in this vale of tears was gone.  We need to experience it all.

Sometimes, you try to write things to try to express your feelings; and I wrote something back then that I found at the house this week.  I set up a little studio at home recently.  When you move things around, you find things that you have forgotten about.  And I picked up this piece of paper that I had written back then; and here it is:

 

 The King of Terror stood at hand,

silently watching those of us

in whom light and life and flesh

was still firmly united.

 

His icy fingers touched and chilled us

to the bone.

Though we would follow

and eventually we must,

we must now turn back

as His black curtain

waves gently between us,

and he who lay at His mercy.

Lay at His mercy

with the black curtain

settling

ever more gently

and permanently. 

Until light no longer penetrated

and we could not see

Beyond the Black Veil

This was the way I expressed my sense of loss, desperate frustration and deep grief when my father lay dying.

There is no case for euthanasia in this world of ours.  There is no case for intentionally killing.  There is no stopping point.  There is nothing that makes it wrong other than our deep-seated revealed faith, and this is where law and morality and religion all interact.  Because, you see, it’s not death that is the great mystery.  It’s life.  Life is the mystery.  Who we are, why we are here, and our connection to whatever is meaningful in this universe–that is what is real, but totally unclear, except for the eyes of faith.