LCMS Convention Workbook St. Louis, Missouri — 1981, Page 407

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THEOLOGICAL DOCUMENTS

the purpose of raising him up to the glory of etemal service and worship as a
person belonging to a community of redeemed saints

2. Life and Death in View of Redemption

God Himself has arranged for a super-victory over death by way of
redemption. God the Creator chose to be the Redeemer by having His Son
become incarnate in order to overcome the contradiction between what is and
what ought to be. He did so by way of suffering and death. followed by His
resurrection and exaltation.

In accomplishing this task of redemption Jesus Christ offers to all people not
only a paradigm for meaningful suffering but also the opportunity to share in
His distress (cf. Col. 1:24). By such identification men and women can tran-
scend the agony. pain and decrepitude which attend life and are usually the
lot of those very individuals whom others might be ternpted to exterminate by
way of “death with dignity.” The suffering endured by God's saints can be
tumed into personal Good Fridays. By virtue of Jesus’ own suffering these
dark days will tum into the Easter of glorification for all those who love God.
Euthanasia, mercy killing. as a way out of such human hurt, may well be a way
of circumventing or negating God's will for His children. After all, our Lord did
not suffer in order that His followers might escape such an ordeal but that they
might leam from Him what pain and illness mean by way of God's dealings
with His children.

This thought is exhibited in a document that is known as the Christian
Affirmation of Life. adopted by the Board of Directors of the Catholic Hospital
Association in 1974. It reads as follows:

1 believe that Jesus Christ lived. suffered and died for me, and that His
suffering. death and resurrection prefigure and make possible the death-
resurrection process which | now anticipate.

But there is another side to all this. Suffering is an intrusion into human life.
It “operates under another law.’ as H. Richard Niebuhr once put it. for. in the
last analysis, man was not brought into being for the purpose of enduring
infirmity and anguish. He was made to live. even to live fully. It was sin that
brought on death with its attendant vultures that feed on life, defacing and
devouring it. Redemption is the story of the way God has dealt, and is still
dealing, with this issue. offering the blessings of etemal life

Does not the prospect of everlasting bliss encourage abbreviating the
course of the individual's existence here on earth so that he or she might more
quickly reach his or her final destiny? The assurance of life hereafter offers no
excuse for ending life at will by euthanasia. God is Life and sent His Son into
the world to be the Source of life (John 1:4).

The healing miracles of Jesus, particularly His raising of some persons from
the dead. must be seen in this light. They indicate that illness and consequent
death are strangers to God's primary intent for humankind. His purpose is to
bring people to glory unending. As a foreshadowing of that destiny, Jesus
healed a certain number of people to make the point that everlasting life could

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that, in a patient's relationship to God, the Spirit has been given the special
task of formulating and articulating “‘sighs too deep for words’ (Rom. 8:26) in
such a way as to serve the purposes of intercession at the throne of grace.
(This activity on the part of God’s Spirit may help to account for the fact that
after they have come out of their unconscious state, some persons have been
able to remember certain phrases from prayers said for them at their bedside
by pastors or members of the family. They can recall such acts of kindness
even though, at the time, there was no perceptible hint of comprehension.)
Intentionally to bring about the death of an individual so engaged in commu-
nion with the heavenly Father would constitute a blasphemous intrusion into a
sacred relationship prevailing quite beyond the farthest reaches of human
knowledge and personal awareness.

The presence of the Spirit must also be taken into account for a fuller
appreciation of the possibilities available to the patient suffering from those
various infirmities which attend old age. Even an invalid, totally bedfast, can
pray, and that is like the lifting up of holy hands at the evening sacrifice. Rather
than considering such a person to be useless and an unnecessary burden, he
or she ought to be thought of as precious in the sight of God, so valuable, in
fact, that our heavenly Father was willing to arrange for his or her redemption
in Jesus Christ and for a life in the Spirit that is ready to give expression to
God's presence in a petition like the one that has become known as ‘‘A Prayer
in Bed.” It reads as follows:

Dear Lord, one day

I shall He thus and pray

Stretched out upon my bed,

Within a few days or hours

Of being dead,

And I shall seek

Then for the words to speak

And scarce shall find them,

Being very weak,

There shall hardly be strength

To say the words, if they be found, at length.

Take then my now clear prayer,

Make it apply when shadowy words shall flee,

When the body, busy and dying,

May eclipse the soul.

I pray Thee now, while pray | can:

Then look, in mercy look

Upon my weakness—look and heed

When there can be no prayer

Except my need!
Such praying is the activity of a life that is appreciated as being sacred because
it is intimately bound to God by His Spirit even when it is no longer possible to

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and did begin at the very moment of accepting Him as the embodiment of
God's kingdom. In this way people were offered what He Himself called a
more abundant life (John 10:10).

Even today an awareness of this divine intent offers the kind of motivation
that persuades people to pursue the art of healing as a way of implementing
the paradigm offered in the life and career of the Great Physician. This very
fact has created one of the major paradoxes of history: namely, that the
mightiest advances in medical care have been made in those cultures which
have come most heavily under the influence of the Christian religion with its
emphasis on the blessed hope of everlasting life. In fact, this progress has been
so steady and unexpected that medical technology itself has become one
element in what has been called the “‘terror of humanity.” It can create the
fear in people. as they grow older or become desperately ill, that they will be
kept alive by extraordinary means without regard to the fact that they are
persons rather than mere objects of medical experimentation and observa-
tion.

Contrary to the tenets of secularized medicine, the biblical revelation does
not view the skill of prolonging life as constituting either the ultimate purpose
or the last chapter of a person's life. Christian doctrine views the restoring
miracles of Jesus as reminders that they are penultimate actions, designed to
validate the expectation of the ultimate solution of all of life’s problems in the
resurrection of the dead, scheduled for the end of time. After all, the persons
whom Jesus healed and those whom He brought back from the dead were
“gathered to their fathers’ in due time, and now, with all the rest of humanity,
they await the sound of the last trumpet. Their experiences suggest that death
need not be understood in terms of discontinuity. Even as the person who
awakes from a night's slumber is the same one who went to sleep in the first
place, so the person who lies down to die is the very one to be awakened to
his eternal destiny in the resurrection of all people. Thoughts or actions asso-
ciated with euthanasia, as man's way of deciding when this present life should
end, may constitute the sin of lése majesté against the Sovereign in whose
hands alone lie the issues of life and death.

3. Life and Death in Light of Sanctification

Life is holy. This very conviction must take into account the consequences
flowing from the work of the Holy Spirit, with whom individuals are endowed
at Baptism. Of Him it is said that even now. during the time of our earthly
existence, He serves as the down payment of the age to come. Hence the
Nicene Creed speaks of Him as ‘the Lord and Giver of Life.””

In terms of life as response. the Spirit's presence is of incalculable signifi-
cance for an appreciation of what may go on in that dim region which lies
between life and death. In some instances it is impossible to determine by
ordinary means whether the patient has the capability of reacting to what goes
on around him. In such a situation it is of crucial importance to keep in mind

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say the desired words. Who, then, with any feeling for the sanctty of life
would want to cut short such holy conversation?

Cases of lingering and even painful illness provide the opportunity, instead,
for the kind of service on the part of those who are well that will exhibit their
care even by such everyday means as sick visitation. For of all the fears that
haunt the ill and the aged few are more debilitating than the prospect of being
left utterly alone with only the personal warmth and dedicated service of
medical personnel to attend them amid the gadgetry and impersonal
machines.

At this point the Christian community can render a number of valuable
services. The genera! prayer in the traditional order of the Sunday service calls
for special petitions on behalf of those who are lonely, afflicted and dying
Moreover, few tasks are more noble than that of regular visits to such as are ill
and feel forsaken. Visiting the sick is one of the items listed in Matthew 25 asa
ctiterton of judgment, especially when one of Christ’s own is involved (cf. v.
40). For when these persons profess that they cannot recall doing such a
thing, their heavenly King will say to them, ‘‘Verily I say to you, whatever you
did to one of my brothers here, however humble, you did for me.” An orga-
nized program of sick visitation within a congregation, therefore, comprises
one of the most eloquent testimonies to the Christian faith even, and perhaps
especially, to those who do not belong to the assembly of the faithful

The church, moreover, must never neglect to prepare the dying for their
joumey into the life before them by the use of the means of grace. While these
obviously do not work like magic, they do have a power that is sacramental.
They offer strength for that experience which each individual must face all
alone except for the One who has Himself gone ahead of us through the
valley of the shadow.

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