Below, for your consideration and reflection, is the sermon from Bethel's February 15, 2004 Sunday Morning worship service.  If you would like to read sermons from previous services, please click HERE.

The latest sermon will be posted here as soon as it is received – usually by Tuesday or Wednesday following the Sunday that it was presented.

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Friday was the first time I had ever come face-to-face with the horror of suicide. I have known people who have had relatives who committed suicide and who have come to me to talk about their pain. I know that it happens and that it has happened in the families of some of you. But never had I paid a visit to someone hours after the individual had discovered the worst nightmare that there is for a parent, or for anyone who loves someone else deeply. I couldn’t begin to find words to express to you the sheer terror and shock on the face of my friend, Sam Jones, Friday morning when Melanie and I went over to his house after getting word that his almost 16 year old son, Clint, had killed himself sometime early Friday morning.

After trying for some hours to finish up the sermon I had planned to deliver today, I felt led, instead, to talk with you about some of the thoughts and feelings I have had over the last 48 hours. I certainly mean no disrespect to Sam or to his daughter, Taylor, and to their ongoing devastating experience of grief. I suspect that Sam is pretty widely known in the community. He runs the Appalachian Tree Experts and has done some tree trimming here at Bethel. Over the past several years, the Sherrods have had various contacts with the family. Clint played the tuba in the Roane County High School Band; he was an aspiring guitarist, and Caleb had encouraged him many times to keep pursuing his dreams of being a guitarist in a rock band; Melanie coached Taylor in AYSO soccer; last summer Sam let me borrow one his cherry pickers so that I could work on painting the high places at my house. The first year we lived here, Taylor and our daughter Eden were back and forth at each other’s house for sleepovers.

If you know Sam, you know that he is a very gregarious, extroverted person who tends to bare his soul quite freely. And so, by my talking about the horror of his loss today, I don’t mean to intrude on the privacy of his grief, but I do think that, given the person who he is, he will not hide his feelings from others in the future. And in this case, that will probably be a good thing.

But, therefore, I do think this has become a kind of “teachable moment” when we, in the church, can talk about the unspeakable, what so often we either never have to confront or which we only whisper about or keep closed up as a keleton in our family closets.

Suicide. Any way you say it, it comes out the same. A very hard word to even speak aloud.

Sam spoke of his anguish to me Friday morning as we stood with others in his driveway and as he tried to absorb what had happened. He said that which I know I’d be thinking if I were in his place, he said: “I’d gladly give my life up right now to have him back.” But he also said, that somehow Clint’s death would be easier to deal with if it had been by an accident – getting hit by a car, a terminal disease – something really beyond anyone’s immediate ability to control or to prevent. I might be thinking that, too.

But, what he was saying, and what we all would feel at some level if this happened to us, is that there is something very unnatural about suicide – we can’t even begin to wrap our minds around why someone would do this to himself. How could they not consider the devastating consequences and pain this would leave on the lives of others? What could actually be so bad that it could bring someone to the point of doing this to himself?

I talked with Zak Williamson Friday afternoon in the band room. He is the director of the band program. He had his own overwhelming emotions to deal with. But he said, “I can’t glorify this. This is not right.” Some of the students, just caught up in the emotional turmoil of getting the news, had come to him and said, will we have a special moment at the Spring Concert for Clint as we did when Mandy Smith died last year – another Roane County student who died suddenly from a heart valve malfunction and dropped dead on a Sunday afternoon at Food City. And so, there was a time to commemorate her at that Spring Concert last year. But what Zak was saying to me is that we have to be careful about doing anything that says that what Clint did is an acceptable action.

But how do you live now in the ambiguity of the very human impulse and need to remember and commemorate loss, but without somehow indicating that what has happened is alright or acceptable?

It is not my place to speculate on why Clint took his own life. I certainly acknowledge that we all would want to understand the “why” so that we can make better efforts to prevent this from happening again. But, at the same time, to dwell on certain details is not necessary. An almost 16 year old teenager is dead, and at some level, the life of every person here has been diminished, even though most of you didn’t even know him.

The ripple of such an untimely and unconscionable loss is, I believe, at some mysterious level, felt by the whole creation because it is just not the way God intends for life to be in this good, redeemed world in which we live. Just why it has happened, I cannot answer. No amount of theological intelligence could ever rationalize this or make it seem, somehow, justifiable.

But I believe that there are some themes we should talk about. My gut instinct is that talking is the very first key when there has been a suicide in the family or school or community. That is, not letting a conspiracy of silence rule the day, but giving voice to anger and rage, to a sense of helplessness and despair – the rawest but often most honest of human emotions. That’s what we heard in Lamentations earlier.

I suspect that if you have experienced a suicide in your family, as I know that some of you have, the instinct is to want to find a way to act as if that death never happened. Why is that? Shame? Embarrassment? Guilt? Or, perhaps it is simply the fact that no one else wants to be disrespectful or insensitive by even mentioning it – I don’t know.

I know that at times like this, guilt is an especially major issue. Ultimately, we locate our origins in the story of Adam and Eve and the disobedience and rebellion of our primordial parents against God’s vision for human community. And because we are children of these first parents, guilt is a very powerful emotion, and it can be helpful; but sometimes it can also become obsessive and counterproductive. While we should always take responsibility for our actions, neither can we know the mind of someone else. In our moments of grief, we dwell excessively upon what we think we could have done, that is, what we think in retrospect could have done to prevent tragedy. As painful as that kind of remembering can be, it also reminds us that we are human, and that we do care deeply. But we can’t turn the clock back nor even if we could, can we be sure that our actions would have been different, for none of us can predict the future.

Any number of people, at varying levels, are feeling guilty about what they did or didn’t do in relation to Clint. Were they somehow responsible, not in the sense of condoning this, but responsible by not doing more to intervene or pick up on any warning signs? I heard that from Zak Williamson Friday afternoon when I was over in the band room. He really tries to be a kind of surrogate parent to all the band kids, noticing when there is a need, trying to encourage and help. But there are, what, over 120 students in the band program? Yet Zak wonders, what did I miss? What could I have done different? And if Zak feels that way, it is surely an emotion amplified many times over for Clint’s father. But just last week, Sam told me that he had told his son, “if there is ever anything you need to talk about, you know you can come to me.”

The “what ifs” are there; maybe they will always be there. For it is a cruel paradox that those who are close to a suicide victim are the victims, too. And often the person with suicidal tendencies doesn’t have the capacity to realize just how devastating suicide will be.

Quite honestly, one of the hardest things for my own children to deal with has been what has seemed like the absence of sadness from some of the other students. Now, I know that grief gets processed in different ways depending upon where we are developmentally and socially and a bunch of other factors as well. And I know it is impractical to think any one of us should necessarily feel a deep sense of sadness for someone whom you didn’t even know.

But I can’t help thinking back to the tragic death of Lucas LaBuy, an 8^th grade student at Cherokee Middle School, who was struck by a car and killed a little less than two years ago. I went and talked to all of the 8^th graders on that Monday morning following his death Saturday night. Because the family was unchurched, I led them through that time of devastating grief. Lucas was an athlete, he was popular, he had lots of friends. Everyone seemed to feel sadness.

Clint, on the other hand, maybe wasn’t as popular or successful in the eyes of his peers, yet does that in any way mean that his death is any less devastating or somehow less deserving of our grief and his life of our memory?

I believe that every death and every grief is unique. The person who says, “I know how you feel” usually speaks out of nervousness rather than truth. We really can’t know exactly how someone else feels.

In the midst of the shock Sam felt Friday morning, he shared very honestly his sense of outrage against God that this had happened. I encouraged him not to apologize for that, but to continue to plumb the depths of his feelings, whatever they will be. And I would say the same to you for whom death, or suicide as a particular kind of death, has brought ineffable pain and anguish to your life.

Because the issue of eternal salvation is one that is dear to people of faith everywhere, and because that issue, for some people, becomes clouded in the event that death is by suicide, I want to say to you that our particular Reformed tradition of the Christian faith values the mercy of God over against the judgment of God, God’s love over God’s anger, God’s wideness against the narrowness of some doorway to heaven.

We live in what is, by and large, a fundamentalist subculture. And because of that, there are notions about salvation that I believe finally don’t match up with either our reformed theological tradition, nor with the ethic of Jesus, nor finally with the eschatological purposes of God. There might be teenagers or adults who will want to pass judgment on what Clint has done to himself, or they may want to turn his death into a litmus test for how others, especially the vulnerable, should now get their lives right with Jesus.

I have seen that happen in the case of the other tragic deaths I mentioned of Mandy and Lucas. It is both insensitive and theologically misguided. If you find that someone insists on that sort of misinterpretation of the salvific purposes of God, I encourage you to remind them of the wide, wide mercy of God in Christ. And then if they persist, I encourage you to shake the dust off your sandals and walk away.

I believe that this is a time, not for quoting John 3:16 or John 14 ad nausem, but rather for hearing from the word of God from those little-read books of the Bible like Lamentations or the Psalms of lament from the Psalter.

And so I close with this reading.

Psalm 88