All Saints by the Lake, Dorval
December 11, 2022
Amir Farsoud, who considered MAiD when he faced homelessness as well as chronic pain, in his apartment.
Please note, more than usually heavy topics will be broached in this sermon, including mental illness and suicide.
During my first year of seminary, I gradually slid into a deep pit of anxiety and depression. It’s a cliché to have a spiritual crisis upon beginning seminary, but mine was very real and very serious. By February of that year, I was barely eating or sleeping, and could see no reason to continue living and many reasons not to. I never actually attempted suicide or even made a serious plan, but the emotions were intense and extremely painful.
There were three things, really, that kept me from seriously trying to end my life: sheer physical cowardice; the knowledge of what it would do to my family and friends; and the deep desire – even though I don’t actually believe this – not to find out that Dante was right about suicides and I would spend eternity stuck inside a bleeding tree in the sixth circle of hell.
If this had been 2022 instead of 2002, though, and if I had lived in Canada instead of the US, I might be dead.
In just a few months, the standards for medical aid in dying will be significantly loosened, and it will be possible for patients to seek MAiD even if their affliction has no purely physical component and if death is not otherwise foreseeable.
I fully understand the impulse to alleviate intolerable pain when death is inevitable and imminent, even if the dose of painkillers necessary to do so ends up being the immediate cause of that death. But this expansion of the provisions for medical aid in dying shows that those who argued it was a slippery slope were, unfortunately, all too correct.
If I had been able, at age 23 and in a state of intense emotional suffering, to go to a doctor, fill out some forms, and receive a lethal dose of medication without fear of somehow messing it up and inflicting unbearable physical pain on myself, it’s very possible that I would, in my disordered state of thinking, have done so. I would have left my parents, sisters, fiancé, and other loved ones permanently traumatized. I would have missed out on twenty years of life since then that have been by no means stress-free, but have been infinitely richer, more worthwhile, and more joyful than I was able to imagine while in the throes of crisis. And, obviously, at least one human soul currently alive today simply would not exist.
And that’s not the worst of it. There have been at least two stories prominently featured in the news in the past year or so, of people who were facing severe chronic illness, homelessness, and lack of social support, who began the MAiD process not because they were actively dying, but because their lives were unbearable and they could not figure out how to get the resources they needed to live. Thankfully, in both of these widely publicized cases, an online crowdfunder was created, tens of thousands of dollars were raised, and neither individual is currently in imminent danger. But the fact that they even considered assisted suicide as a way out of their situations – and the fact that the system was willing to cooperate and provide that, instead of giving the what they needed to live – is profoundly disturbing. And who knows how many people who weren’t featured in the news are in similar situations?
This is, to use archaic and outmoded theological language, wicked and sinful. It is unacceptable for a society that is quite capable of providing a decent, dignified life for every citizen, to offer them instead a lethal injection when their chronic health conditions, mental illness, addiction, or other difficulties instead make them inconvenient and unproductive. Every single human being is a beloved, unique, and irreplaceable child of God. As John Donne preached, “Any man’s death diminishes me,” and how much more are we diminished when we, as a society not only allow people to suffer and die of neglect, but actually participate in ending their lives.
Why am I talking about this today, on Advent III, when perhaps we might prefer to be joyfully preparing for Christmas? Because it’s right there in the reading from Isaiah (and in the echo of that reading in the Gospel).
Strengthen the weak hands, and make firm the feeble knees. Say to those who are of a fearful heart, ‘Be strong, do not fear! Here is your God. He will come with vengeance, with terrible recompense. He will come and save you.’ Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy.
It’s so obvious it feels ridiculous to say it, but – God wants the anxious and fearful, the depressed and the disabled, to live. God wants them to flourish. God wants them to be given everything they need to have abundant life.
The God of the prophets reserves his most vicious condemnations for systems in which the rich, powerful, and comfortable abuse and oppress the widow, the orphan, and the friendless. And Jesus – reasonably enough, being God – picks up right where the prophets leave off. As evidence that he is indeed the Messiah, the one who is to come, he offers the fulfillment of precisely this prophecy of Isaiah. The blind received their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.
The God who became incarnate in Jesus is in the business of raising the dead, not killing the living. People are people, not units of productivity that can be quietly written off when they represent a negative on the balance sheet. And so we, as Christians, must issue a loud and unmistakable “No!” in the face of the evil represented by the expansion of the Medical Aid in Dying law. We must work tirelessly for a society where the hungry are fed, the homeless are housed, the sick are cared for, and those who see no hope for the future are held and helped until they regain the joy in life that is the birthright of every child of God.
It took me many years to climb fully back out of the pit of despair into which I sank during that first awful year of seminary. It took therapy, and medication, and prayer, and the steadfast support of those who loved me, and getting involved in community action to address the problems in the world that had set off my anxiety and depression in the first place, and a whole lot of just plain growing up. It was hard and complex work. But I am so grateful that I, and those around me, did that work.
And that is the work of God – hard, slow, uncertain, but deeply necessary and ultimately joyful. Work that brings healing, and growth, and abundant life for all.
And the ransomed of the LORD shall return, and come to Zion with singing; everlasting joy shall be upon their heads; they shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.
Amen.
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