Sermon: Ethics and Ambiguity

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Ethics and Ambiguity

By Charles Rush

July 26, 2009^[i]

is not easy to teach our kids morals is it? Each of us have our own challenges and being a Minister has a special set believe it or not. I can't always be direct with the kids because if I did, I'm afraid they would think I was just a moralist and not simply moral, self-righteous and a prig.

With all my kids, maybe even more so with the girls, when they are young, I had a pep talk that I gave them on the way to the soccer games. “Okay sweetie, let's review the rules #1 Never pass the ball when you might be able to score and look good #2 It's not important how you play the game, win at all costs #3 If the ref is looking the other way, kick your opponent as hard as you can. If she falls down, kick her again.”

The response is always the same. The kids will say “Dad… hello… did you get that from the bible?… I don't think so. Dad… you're a Minister.”

It was one year ago, this Sunday that our church voted to be accepting of gay people and to bless gay unions. I promised, at the request of many of you, that I would not say anything on the subject for the next year. Just for the record, I haven't. I'm not going to talk about it this morning, except for one thing about that discussion and vote that I was proud of our Church. A goodly number of you said last year that this was no big deal, that we should just pass it, be done with it, next subject. This sermon is not for you. Another very small group, said that they could not accept homosexuals under any circumstances, and most of them were gone before we ever even came to a vote. This sermon is not for them either, obviously.

No, what impressed me was watching those of you in the middle struggle with an issue that you were not all that clear about. You wished you had more information about homosexual development. You wish you understood better the issues that surrounded gay families. You were not clear about what the future would hold for the next generation if we bless gay unions because the evidence is not in yet, obviously. You found yourself caught between competing values- maybe the value of tolerance and genuine concern about upholding the sanctity of marriage and the family. During the discussion, perhaps you found your head and your gut wrestling with one another, your head telling you to be accepting and open but your gut not going along. In other words, the situation was ambiguous and you weren't altogether clear, but you voted anyway, hoping for more light in the future- but you went with your convictions and that is the point. Most voted yes, some voted no- how you voted is not the point. I was asked to talk to most of the families that were on the fence and most of the conversations Julie and I had with folks in the congregation, just before the vote, were those folks that were genuinely on the fence and were struggling. And the struggle of this middle group is what I found impressive and inspiring.

The most challenging ethical decisions that we make are the ones we have to make when things are not so clear, when we find ourselves with a mix of competing values, when we don't have as much information was we wished we had. There is that moment of real personal vulnerability just before you decide. You are about to expose your character. As it turns out, and who would have thought, we are more embarrassed about revealing our character than we are our nudity. It is easier to streak than to speak.

The majority of us are likely to face just such a situation when we have to determine how to honor our parents in the midst of their dying. I got a call from a good friend, a pulmonologist in North Carolina just this week. He was treating a patient that was 80 years old. He had worked in the coal mines all his life and had a weakened heart and weakened lungs as a result.

One of his daughters had been attending him for the last 7 years, another lived near by. The man distrusted physicians and probably had only seen a doctor once or twice in his life. He had emphezyma as a treating problem and was having difficulty with his breath. He had made it clear that he didn't want to “be hooked up to no machine” in his words. After being checked into the hospital, it was determined that he was also having some failure in his major organs, the liver and kidney, in particular. The doctors met with the girls to explain his situation.

They asked a lot of questions about their father's long term prospects for health which could not be answered unless his condition stabilized and the team could run more tests. The problem was that his condition would not stabilize unless they intubated him for a few days to relieve the stress on his deteriorating lungs. After consultation, the daughters decided to over ride their father's express wishes and have him hooked up to a ventilator for 48 hours to see if his situation would stabilize. He continued to deteriorate. Meanwhile, they called their other sister in Washington state, who had been on the West coast for the past 10 years and she made plans to fly home. The two daughters decided to have their father removed from the ventilator, honoring his wishes. The other daughter shows up and is irate that the most aggressive treatment is not being pursued. She galvanizes the extended family. The doctor agreed to meet with the whole family to discuss the situation, some 25 of them, and he was calling me for a little feed back and reminder of what to think about.

If you have not faced a situation like this, you will. It is the most challenging moral dilemma because there is no clear cut answer to the situation. It is not only moral, it is also spiritual and emotional. You can abstract one of them out. God, the family, your conscience, your father's wishes- all of them are woven into one fabric. There are only competing values and unresolved issues from the past. Hold that image for just a minute.

“But now we come to the New Testament lesson, the puzzling lesson of the parable of the wheat and the tares. The man sowed a field of wheat and the enemy sowed tares among the wheat. And the servants, following the impulse of each one of us, asked if they should root out the tares so that the wheat could grow. This is a parable taken from agriculture to illustrate a point of morals, and it violates every principle of agriculture and of morals. After all, every farmer and every gardener makes ceaseless war against the tares. How else could the flowers and the wheat grow? And we have to make ceaseless war against evil within ourselves and in our neighbors, or how could there be any kind of decency in the world? Against all moral impulse we have this eschatological parable.

“'Nay,' said the householder. ‘Lest while you gather up the tares you root up also the wheat.' This suggestion is that a great deal of evil may come from the evil that evil people do, but certainly others comes from the premature judgments that we make about ourselves and about each other. ‘Let them grow together until the harvest.' These wonderful words suggest that while we have to judge, there is a judgment beyond our judgments, and there are fulfillments beyond our fulfillments (Reinhold Niebuhr).

How curiously love and self-love are mixed up in the world we live day in and day out. Consider the example that I used earlier about the child coming into the decision mix about what to do with Papa at the last minute, making judgments quite at odds with the rest of the family. How often, something like that happens in these situations.

We live our lives as adults, grow independent from our brothers and sisters but when our parents get gravely ill, part of us reverts back to children again. All these old issues from decades ago that have never really been resolved but just tabled for years, come back with a freshness we didn't think they could have. Nobody notices it directly, of course. What you notice is that your brother is really, really mad that he just found out that your Father appointed you the Executor of the estate. What you notice is that your sister is second-guessing decision that has been made while she was living in Washington State. What you notice is that she describes your decisions to another sibling by saying “He's always been like that”. We are not even fully aware of what is going on. We couldn't articulate it if we had to.

Part of it can be that we have unresolved guilt about living apart from our parents and really not having invested enough time with them heretofore. When they are on their dying bed, some subteranean emotions well up and we think, however irrational it might be, that if we can get them stabilized then spending some quality time now is going to make up for what we have been lacking in an important way.

Part of it can be that we have never really gotten what we needed from our parents and we have coped with that for many years, and found surrogate parents that have taken their place. But when our birth parents get seriously ill, we think, however irrational it might be in the situation, that if they can get stabilized, then they might bless us on their death bed, and the emptiness we have carried around for years might be filled.

Part of it can be that we have managed for years to insulate ourselves from the reality of death and our own mortality and in a way that we would be mortally embarrassed to articulate, our parent's grave illness fills us with a dread not only for their death but our impending death, and we find ourselves projecting, however irrational that might be, not what they want to have happen at the end of their life, but what we would want to happen to us if we were in their situation because somehow the real reality of death just never hit us in this way until it is our parents going through it. And part of what we are actually doing is tending for our projected selves, dealing with our fears about dying.

Part of it can be that we have been genuinely loved, we have been made to feel secure and good about ourselves, and all that solidity is caving way right in front of us, and we find ourselves not wanting to let go. We know that we should be mature and that real love let's people go. We know that we have been building our whole lives up to that moment, when can let people go, but when we actually get there, however irrational it might be, we don't want to let them go and we would just do anything to bring them back again.

Now, none of us can will these multiple layers away. None of us is exempt from them. We can't ever really separate out our stuff, from their stuff, from our sister's stuff, from the genuine stuff that just comes from going through the portals of death. We don't get to escape the ambiguity of these situations.

In fact, the most interesting parts of “human history are a mixture of wheat and tares. We must make provisional distinctions, but we must know that there are no final distinctions. “Let both grow together until the harvest.” From the point of view of biblical faith, we do not have to despair about this because we know that there is a mystery and meaning in God beyond our smallness and greatness, and a justice and love which completes our incompletions, which corrects our judgments, and which brings the whole story to a fulfillment beyond our power to fulfill any story” (Niebuhr).

I got a few phone calls after that vote from clergy in the area, who wanted to say that they were glad we finally raised the issue. They wanted to but they felt that they couldn't do it. Almost all of them all but said, Christ Church is different than our church. You guys can talk about this stuff, we can't talk about it. Of course, I understand that but part of me wants to say ‘what is the point of being safe… and boring?'

The most important thing that came out of that vote for me came from our teenagers. I was talking to a group of them about the vote. They all came. They listened. Some of them wanted to speak but they didn't. I was asking them what they thought about the subject. Some of them were still thinking it through, not entirely sure. Some of them thought the issue itself was no big deal but it was important in our town. Finally, one of them said, “we will never say that Christ Church didn't stand for anything.” You know what? That is a very good thing. Quite in spite of ourselves, quite in spite of our limited knowledge, we showed them that it is possible to take a stand, not knowing all the answers. If we keep this up as a congregation, we may get there yet. Amen.

^[i] A version of this sermon was preached by Rev. Rush on May 21, 2000