Sermon, “Psalm 22: Standing By God in His Hour of Grieving. Living with the disabled and the question of stem cells”

Brian Brock, St. Andrews Cathedral, 14 May 2006

Correction:

A previous version of this sermon contained a reference to Dr. Robert McWilliam of the Royal Hospital for Sick Children in Glasgow. I would like to extend an apology for that previous version incorrectly summarizing Jonathan Lessware’s page nine article, “Doctor faces GMC hearing over claims he lied to death inquiry” in The Scotsman, 25 February, 2006. At the time, McWilliam had not been indicted but charged by the General Medical Council. The charge under investigation was not that he had been involved in writing “do not resuscitate” orders on the charts of a disabled child, but that he had lied about the case to the inquiry. His lawyers have informed me that he denies the allegation that he was the doctor who defended said action to parents on grounds that “you had to look at the cost,” and that he was subsequently cleared of all allegations of misconduct. (First posted 22/3/07, revised version posted 18/4/07.)

In the Name of God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. Amen.

In praying the first verse of the Psalm we sung today in his hour of deepest suffering, Jesus Christ established it as of special significance for the church in all times and places. He sung it as a standing invitation for us to sing with him the psalm that opens with the immortal line, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

I want to begin today by asking what it means that we have sung today the very song Jesus prayed on the cross. Was there some good reason for Christ to pray a prayer from Israel’s hymnbook rather than expressing his prayer in his own words? Almost 1600 years ago, from a pulpit in a cathedral like this one, in the slightly sunnier city of Carthage (now Tunisia), the great African bishop Augustine also wondered aloud about this question with his congregation, who had also just finished singing Psalm 22. He answered thus:

“For what other reason was this said than that we were there, for what other reason than that Christ’s body is the Church.”1 Christ took up the songs of Israel to make it clear that his death was a presentation of their fear, need and rebellion to the Father. For us to sing this song today, therefore, is a reciprocal gesture of praise of that divine work, and a mark of our willingness to let Christ take us into His life. The words of the psalm thus sustain a reciprocal identification in a way no spontaneous prayer could have. They draw our suffering into the sufferings of Christ on the cross.

This psalm, like all psalms, offers us the opportunity to come into tune with Christ’s working in the world by reminds us that we were there with Christ on the cross, just as he is here with us today. In these verses humanity is reminded of its place in the unfolding of this drama of the cross, either to mock, or cry out with God’s sufferings at the hands of a godless world. The modern German theologian and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer elaborated Augustine’s point this way: “‘Christians stand by God in his hour of grieving’; that is what distinguishes Christians from pagans. Jesus asked in Gethsemane, ‘Could you not watch with me one hour?’ That is a reversal of what the religious man expects from God. Man is summoned to share in God’s sufferings at the hands of a godless world.”2

If the church is the community sharing in Christ’s sufferings, it is at the same time witnessing to the new life He brings, His redeeming grace. This leads us further into Psalm 22, to the first verse we sang today, verse 24 (which I quote in a modified New International Version).

For he has not despised
nor disdained the suffering of the afflicted,
has not turned away his face,
but has listened to his cry for help.

Because Christ’s work is to raise up the poor and downtrodden, and because the church is that portion of the world which joyfully embraces this work of Christ, it must learn ever anew that it is not a church of power, but of weakness. Its only power is the power of the word of the Gospel, which sustains its ability to follow Christ’s works of love, his good-Samaritan-like deeds of care for the broken and needy.

We are often tempted today to look skeptically on such claims for the church, which seem all too rarely lived out. But the psalmist is confident not only that God rescues those in need, but that he is successfully raising up a church which obediently and joyfully collaborates in his outreach to “the least of these”. We sang these confident words ourselves moments ago, verses 25-30:

Of you is my praise in the thronged assembly,
I will perform my vows before all who fear him.
The poor will eat and be satisfied,
those who seek the Lord will praise him,

"May your heart live for ever."

All the ends of the earth will remember and return to the Lord,
all the families of nations bow down before him.
For dominion belongs to the Lord and he rules over the nations.

All who prosper on earth will bow before him,
all who go down to the dust will do reverence before him.

And those who are dead,
their descendants will serve him,
will proclaim his name to generations

The psalmist reminds us that the people of God express God’s welcome of the marginal and weak, and so discovers them not as weak, but as invaluable. It is that place where such a welcome has been institutionalized, given a concrete form. It is thus the place where the world is being trained about the meaning of the verse we sung today, “All the ends of the earth will remember and return to Yahweh.”

But the call to accept all the earth is a stumbling block to the unregenerate church. The church, when it becomes decadent, finds it easy to remember that Christ is victorious over nations, but conveniently forgets that this is accomplished precisely in the mode of continual and ongoing service. This forgetfulness takes the form of a reversion to a worldly logic, in which the powerful, rich and healthy are and flattered by a church that is afraid that God no longer answers their cry for help. A church which has lost faith in God and does not live as it sings, and falsifies itself when it sings this psalm, separating itself from Christ and so damning itself.

For he has not despised or disdained
the suffering of the afflicted,

Says verse 24

has not turned away his face,
but has listened to the cry for help.

Let me make a suggestion that may come as a surprise: I believe that God honors the church that follows his Samaritan heart by giving it concrete opportunities to express and enact that desire. It goes without saying that often we walk right by divine invitations without giving them a second glance. But the church that is soft-hearted enough to embrace any such invitations will be changed by its participation in Christ. His path inevitably leads into conflict with the world. This is the eternal lesson of the crucifixion: that the world does not wish to follow Christ but resists his way of life. Yes, the world is changed through this conflict, sometimes becoming more open and accepting, yet worldliness remains, that drift of humanity away from reliance on God’s help into trust in its own power. The drift into human self-reliance is marked by the rise of worries that caring for all those who need it will demand more emotional, financial and temporal investment than we can bear. The church is only able to discover such claims as lies as it learns that its own resources are inadequate for even the most basic task, and God wishes to give it all the strength it needs to love as he loves. As our Epistle today put it “let us love one another, because love is from God, and everyone who loves is a child of God and knows God.”3

God has no doubt offered this congregation many concrete opportunities to explore such a life of service. As a member of this church, and because the person I have in mind is close to my heart, I want to talk about one such gift, and in so doing draw out some of the ways that accepting such gifts changes us, inevitably bringing us into conflict with those who refuse to sing Psalm 22 with Christ.

I have in mind a young man in our congregation, who, though diminutive in stature, is recognizable for wearing hearing aids and glasses. (Too late I’ve realized that this doesn’t set him apart here. It would be hard to say if there are more hearing aids in this building on Sunday morning or in the hearing shop down the street. Has anyone considered asking a hearing aid manufacturer to donate to the choir tour?) I am of course making reference to my son, Adam, who you will have no doubt noticed, has Down’s syndrome.

Some may have noticed that Adam is a daddy’s boy, so I am usually designated wrangler. You may have also noticed that, with supervision, his own two legs carry him to the communion rail and back each Sunday. It’s a rather long walk, and he has short legs, so a gap often emerges in the procession. Then there’s those three big steps up to the communion rail which he needs a hand on both sides to navigate, a hand always lovingly offered by the vergers. The voice of reason in the back of our heads nags that this process would be much more smooth and efficient if I carried him. But my hunch is that doing so is not true to our psalm. Perhaps giving Adam space to co-operate with God’s love as mediated through his parents and the church is an invitation for him to throw his lot in with us. He too must actively embrace God’s love, and his disabilities do not exempt him from the common human temptation to rebel against grace. Insofar as he does not, choosing instead to say yes to God, that yes will take the form of his being with us. This will change us by demanding we put up with a little inefficiency in adjusting to his pace, recognize him as part of us by lending him the hand he needs along the way, and that saints in the crèche (like Christine) learn his idiosyncrasies.

This churchly inclusion under the rule of Christ is quite different from the way secular society conceives Adam’s inclusion. In schools, children like Adam are often placed in regular classrooms on the principle of “inclusive education.” The reason often given is that “being involved with children with special needs and learning to accept them is a valuable social lesson for people of all ages.”4 But putting the case this way immediately invites the counter argument: “What if this social lesson is one that I as a parent don’t find a proper object of schooling, especially if it means my child is somehow slowed down in their education?”5 Modern society’s self-understanding as a contractual community has no resources to resolve this dilemma, a contradiction embedded the concept of inclusion. It entrenches the idea that “we,” the normal people, must include “them,” those with special needs. But as we have seen, the church rests on an entirely different idea—“they” are “us”. To the extend that we still think in terms of “inclusion” we have already consigned some of our members to the margins of what we take to be true and real. But in the body of Christ, there are no margins, only parts of a whole. Again, as our Epistle for today put it, “No-one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.”6

We can never tell beforehand what the practicalities of this “love being made complete in us” will be. It is undoubtedly a gift of grace that we only slowly learn the ways our acceptance of someone like Adam shows us how he is not taken to be a gift by the world. This realization is inevitably wrapped up with a growing and painful awareness that the world is not somewhere “out there”—rebellion lies much closer to home. To recognize Adam as a gift is to be prepared to be a community that speaks with him and for him in his uniqueness, and to confess that we are part of a society which does not always value such gifts. It is a Christian joy to praise God’s care for the weakest with the psalmist, and our duty of confess that we too consider the gods of health, wealth and happiness worthy of a few sacrifices.

This makes perfectly comprehensible the fact that most people would see some sense in removing those deemed to have a poor quality of life from life support if it was to save money. We live in a society in which “quality of life” and cost efficiency are supreme values, and on these calculations, Adam will always be a “waste”. To the extent that this church truly welcomes Adam, and he becomes a part of it, it will see such acts and social trends as what they are: the world’s crucifixion of Christ. As it resists them, it will participate in Christ’s crucifixion as by a world infuriated that its best wisdom is called into question.

Such blunt devaluations of life are relatively widely recognized and condemned by the church. But as the serpent knew so well, the more subtle temptations are the more powerful ones. Several weeks ago Rev. Atkinson opened up the question of whether Christians might, in good faith, support embryonic stem cell research. He also expressed a common opinion that this is a moral grey area, a zone of ambiguity not addressed by scripture, and in which we must rationally balance all the pros and cons. I believe that there are at least two biblical bright lines which can guide us here. The first I have already indicated with the question “How will we treat the least among us?” The second is “How will we treat our children?” On these questions I think at least a few observations are worth making.

It was suggested that there might be a difference in moral status between a two-day-old embryo and a born baby. Even if we were to say that God values both, this might allow us to say that he values the two-day embryo in a way that would make its use for its stem cells possible. We know the right question is being asked when the questioner assumes that God’s involvement with human life gives it its value. Furthermore, I think Psalm 22 has something to say on this topic. Listen to vv 9-10, as the Psalmist speaks to God:

It was you who drew me from the womb
and soothed me on my mother's breast.
from birth I was cast upon you,
from the womb I have belonged to you.

A close look at the Hebrew allows us to translate these verses this way: “You drew me forth into a secure place, You soothed me on my mother’s breast. I was in your hands even before my birth, you were my God even when I was in the womb.” This image of the intimacy of God’s involvement in creating each new life is even more concrete and earthy in the Psalm 139 and the book of Job. Job 10:8-12 pictures God as a potter making a vessel, a cheese maker tending the slowly ripening life in the womb, and a weaver knitting the embryo:

Your hands have framed me and fashioned me altogether;
Remember, I beg you, that you have fashioned me as clay.
Haven't you poured me out like milk,
And curdled me like cheese?

You have clothed me with skin and flesh,
And knit me together with bones and sinews.

God does not just turn up and install a soul in something humans have made, but is personally involved in human life from the first moment. The prophet Jeremiah7 likens this involvement to a repetition of God’s formation of the first Adam from earth. Every child is a unique being created anew and formed by God like Adam. In this act God shares himself with each of us. In the moment of genetic combination God imparts something unique to each of us, an act which is without, and probably will always be without, scientific explanation (unless we take “random chance” to be a meaningful explanation). It is for this reason that scripture stresses that without this earthy, concrete, divine involvement, creation is nothing: formless and void.8 Scientific accounts of the events of conception must not displace our wonder and thanks that God creates ever anew, and that his creative work is a sharing of himself. No scientist yet has claimed to be able to create life from scratch: all science can do is proceed as an attempt to say “yes” or “no” to the life has God has invested his own labor in creating. Luther puts it well: if you can make one creature, you can make them all, if you can’t make them all, don’t pretend you can make any.9

This throws a rather comical light on the question of embryo experimentation and consumption, and here the parallel of the embryo’s life with God’s formation of Adam is helpful. Let us return to that moment in Eden as God is forming the man from the dust, but this time let’s let the molecular biologist ask his question: “You know, God, we could really do something great with that dirt you are working with there. Would you mind letting us have it? I mean, I know you are working on it, but you’ve not breathed a soul into it yet, so you’re not really invested in it, right?”

Let us be clear then about how this modern crucifixion of Christ takes place: We either explore humans in love, or look for reasons why “these particular humans are not real people”. But if we look at the biblical history of the people of God, what we find is a refusal to separate human being and agency: both are bestowals of God alone. A person is not reducible to an agent placed in a body, but persons are agents as bodies who have a history. Biography and materiality are two features of a unitary being called into existence by God’s voice and constituted for God’s service before his or her first act or thought.10 By thinking this question through in terms of the human-divine person of Christ, continues Oxford theologian Oliver O’Donovan, “the Christian thinkers of the patristic age learned that no qualitative term would ever do to express Christ’s individual identity, and so (by implication) that no simply qualitative term would ever do to express [human] identity as such.”11

O’Donovan, on christological grounds, sees that we are succumbing to temptation the moment we start to look for any empirical criterion which gives us leverage to judge whether a human life is worth preserving or ending. We can set up all kinds of tests to decide whether humans are worthy of respect or not, “but we cannot decide in this way whether or not any being is a person. We discern persons only by love, by discovering through interaction and commitment that this human being is irreplaceable… To discern my neighbour I have first to ‘prove’ neighbour to him. To perceive a brother or a sister, I have first to act in a brotherly way. To know a person, I have first to accept him as such in personal interaction. Quite different from this is all experimental knowledge, which is acquired by achieving a masterful distance on its object in testing and proof.”12

The way the world sees the embryo is this view from the distance, counting its days and determining its numbers of cells: Christ the good Samarian teaches us to wait on human beings with care and faith. So to look for some criterion making it permissible to use a human life is simply to look at the embryo in the wrong way.

But is not the willingness to use humans at all also part of the problem? This series began with the helpful challenge to discern what it means to be church today by listening to modernity while integrating its best insights with the wisdom of our tradition. One of the fundamental beliefs of moderns, most forcefully expressed by Kant, was the that persons are always ends, never means, meaning that persons should never be used at all. But this belief always fit rather uneasily with modernity’s similarly strong belief that we can and should overcome all human suffering. The two beliefs inevitably fell apart, and now modern humanity has decided that it will drop or redefine the prohibition of using others in favor of the drive to overcome suffering. This causes it to undermine its own best insights in asserting that “one can never use persons, but you can use certain human beings.” The church, I have suggested, can see such claims for what they are: the arguments of, as verse 16 of Psalm 22 puts it “A pack of dogs which surrounds me, a gang of villains closing in on me as if to hack off my hands and my feet.” This gives it the strength to confess before God that there may be some human suffering that we refuse to relieve because we know of no fittingly human way to do so.

The cooler, more rational and scientific church member is now listening with furrowed brow. “This all seems a little overheated and hysterical, not to mention reactionary and anti-progress” they mutter. To them I ask:

What does it say about Adam and those like him that as an embryo he would have been discarded as unfit material to be used for stem cell transplants? Is it possible simultaneously value his life and the lives of those like him as members of our own body while having a production mindset in which his cells are damaged goods?

Is a society that routinely creates extra embryos (a problem in itself) better or worse than a society that sorts and discards many of those embryos on the basis of their genetic traits?

What will it look like on one hand to support the gearing up of industrial processes which would sort and discard disabled embryos as a matter of course and to not support a mother’s desire to abort a disabled fetus, or a doctor’s desire to end the life of that same child when he lies sick in hospital?

Those who oppose the church often see us more clearly on these issues than we see ourselves. When the Church of Scotland report came out in support of embryo research a few weeks ago it was hailed as groundbreaking and brave by normally implacable enemies of the church, who at the same time pointed out how much of a minority position in which the Church of Scotland threatens to put itself. Shelia McLean, Professor of Medical Ethics at Glasgow University commented that “the Church of Scotland is to be admired… for trying to make proposals about this type of thing rather than just condemning it like so many other faith groups.” From her perspective the use of embryos fits in well with her agenda to remove most of the legal controls from euthanasia, abortion, and the provision of in vitro fertilization. It might be tempting to see this as an unholy alliance between “them,” the Church of Scotland, and the secular liberalizers which “we” Anglicans can stay out of. But this view is soon undermined when we notice that Anglicans represent a large percentage of the Religion and Technology Project which authored the Church of Scotland report. Even if the synod of the Episcopal Church of Scotland does not come out in favor of embryo use, it has already played a critical role in the Kirk’s drift in this direction.

It turns out then that the church is not as separate from the world as it sometimes supposes. The rift in secular society between those who might sometimes allow, and those who would never use humans as means, is being reduplicated in the church—our church. We simultaneously accommodate ourselves to Adam, owning him as part of us and, schizophrenically, back legal, medical and political trends which call the worth of his life into question.

But the church is different from the world in one essential respect. Today we have sung Psalm 22 with Christ and to Christ, and so are able to bring our divisions before him, laying them out in the open in submission to his judgment and healing. We are part of a church which, perhaps better than many other parts of the church catholic, knows that it is not just the broken and torn world that is in need of repentance. I don’t know how God will respond to the squabbling and rifts of this community that gathers weekly around his body and blood. Neither can I say whether the Lord will judge and destroy or rejuvenate the Anglican Communion. But I do know that if it is to be rejuvenated its internal divisions will have to be exposed to the good physician for cauterization and healing. If people on both sides regularly worship together, then this becomes a real possibility. So I consider it a sign of grace that Dr. Atkinson and I worship together each week and can articulate and defend the division which exists within our church regarding embryo experimentation, and can do so as we worship with Adam, who can articulate none of the issues which so affect him. And it is certainly a sign of God’s care for us that he gives us the will to sing in unison the powerful words of Psalm 22, verses 22-23:

I will proclaim your name to my brothers,

in the congregation I will praise you:
"You who fear the Lord, praise him!

All you descendents of Jacob, honor him!
Revere him, all you descendents of Israel!"

Amen and Amen.

References

1 Augustine, Expositions, Exp. 2.3 of Psalm 21.

2 Letters and Papers from Prison enlarged edition, ed. Eberhard Bethge, (London: SCM Press, 1971), p. 361; cf. pp. 348-349.

3 1 John 4:7

4 Babies with Down’s Syndrome, 213.

5 Berube, Life as We Know It

6 I John 4:12

7 (1:5)

8 Gen 1, Gal. 5

9 Luther’s Works vol 15, p. 314.

10 Oliver O’Donovan, Begotten or Made? (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 52-53.

11 O’Donovan, Begotten or Made? 53-54.

12 O’Donovan, Begotten or Made? 59-60.