What the Bible Says About Suicide

Someone asked me this question a few weeks ago.  I think I remember who it was, but I'm not entirely sure. 

There are some people who in the Bible who die of suicide.  I don't think it says anything of much significance about them.  The events are recorded; actions and a few words.  That's it.

Here's what I understand from the Bible about suicide:


"I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live" (Deuteronomy 30:19).

This choice might be more difficult than you know.  And if it slips from your fingers . . .

⁷"Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there. If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast. ¹¹If I say, 'Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light around me become night,' even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day, for darkness is as light to you" (Psalm 139:7-12).

Jesus instructs:

"Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted" (Matthew 5:3-4).

Have you known someone more impoverished in spirit than the one who has so lost sight of his or her belovedness that death seems preferable to life?  And if you know his or her survivors, you surely know that we mourn.

Paul insists:

"I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Romans 8:38-39).

And, in the end and in the beginning, when there is a new heaven and a new earth:

"God will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more" (Revelation 21:4).

That's what I think the Bible says about suicide. 

A This 'n That Kind of Week

Yesterday ~ Monday ~ I had a lovely brunch with a seminary friend, a chaplain at a Presbyterian Retirement Center.  Lots of talk about aging and spirituality, about trying to help our older folks, and their adult children as well.

I planned Sunday's worship ~ an entire service filled with Taize' music, which we've been learning for the past month ~ and spent a lot of time reading and staring into space, as this week's sermon is going nowhere fast.

And I worked on two retreats, one for my own church, set for a month from now, and one for an ecumenical group of women in Dearborn the next week-end, thanks to an invitation from RevGal Terri.

 

Today ~ lunch with a large group of women from my own church, and home visits to three older ladies. I learned a bit more about the terrors of being almost 93 and having just suffered a fourth heart attack from a delightful woman who just wants to leave her son's house and go home. I also got to know yet another woman in the church who has lost a son ~ that makes at least three of us ~ in this case, a 23-year-old in a work accident 35 years ago.  That particular lady told me that she is delighting in the anticipation of the birth of a great-great grandchild this spring!  She has five surviving children, eleven grandchildren, and eleven great-grandchildren.  She also told me some of the consequences of her son's death as far as her friendships of the past 35 years are concerned.  Ay-yep.

 

Tonight ~ Bible study at church, which presents challenges untold. Some weeks ago I finally figured out the foundational one: For many of my congregants, the Bible is the Big Book of Answers.  For me, it's the Big Book of Questions.  They're always hoping for definitive answers to life's dilemmas; I'm always seeing yet another question lurking in the corner.  Makes for an intriguing dialectic.

 

Tomorrow ~ lunch with one of the Methodist pastors here.  This seems to be the Week of Lunches.   And a visit to a new mother.  OK, I admit it; I have an ulterior motive.  A year and a half, and I have yet to baptize a baby.  Maybe this baby would like to join me at the font?

 

That's my week so far. How's yours?

Beginning Bible Study

Tonight at my church we begin a yearlong overview of the Bible.  

We're using a very, very basic set of texts called The Old Testament and The New Testament from Scratch.  All these books offer is the most basic summary of what's in the Bible.  They don't contain any of the pertinent critical methods for studying the Bible and they aren't formational types of study ~ none of the depth of the Methodist Disciple Series or the Presbyterian Kerygma series.

They represent a beginning.

To give my congregation credit, several of our members have been wading through a fairly dry study of the Gospel of Mark in Sunday School since January. I suggested that we try a study of the lectionary gospel text for the year, and offered some suggestions; the class teacher made the final selection.  I might have chosen otherwise had I realized (a) that no one would read during the week; that we would read aloud together from our little study book each Sunday, a couple of pages at a time, discussing each question posed as we went, so that it would take us until October to complete a book of less than 80 pages and (b) that no one had the kind of familiarity with the gospels that would enable them to approach one of them topically rather than chronologically.

But, as I say, I truly have to give my folks a lot of credit for making their way through unfamiliar material in an unfamiliar way, and getting into some excellent discussions along the way. 

Tonight we'll be introducing ourselves and talking a bit about our own connections to the Bible: how we were introduced to it, how we study it, how we spend time with it.  I'm pretty sure what kinds of things most of the class will say -- and they do vary widely.  Some people are intensely curious and deeply thoughtful, but have had little exposure to the world of Biblical scholarship, and others have a few favorite verses and stories with which they pray.

For me, although I was sent to Sunday school on erratic and rare occasions as a child and attended a Catholic boarding school for grades 7-9, my real introduction to the Bible came in my 10th grade Old Testament class at Northfield (now Northfield Mount Hermon) School, when our teacher tossed a college text on each of our desks and wrote the letters J,E,D, and P on the board.  In the words of my classmate Barb who, like me, arrived in a large Protestant mainline church in adulthood only to discover that most of what we had learned  fifteen years before was routinely ignored in both sermons and adult classes, "Can you believe how fortunate we were?  That we were taken so seriously at the age of fifteen?"

That has not been the case for my church members.  And I am going to try hard to remember well Cindy's words of a couple of posts back:

"But what if we are called to speak the difficult or the challenging? Not the hurtful and spiteful, I'm not talking about that. I don't think of that as God's way (not in my universe of God)...but as Purple says about challenging foundational beliefs. What do we do when after careful scrutiny, reflection and spiritual direction we know that the next few steps are, indeed, going to challenge someone's foundational belief and that it is highly likely that there will be pain?"

Me, every time I learn about a new set of questions regarding Scripture, I am excited and challenged. Every time that new historical material, a new literary lens, a new possibility for interpretation emerges, I can hardly wait to read and discuss.

But I also know, from my own Disciple classes in the Methodist church twenty years ago, that there are people who simply cannot absorb the news that Moses did not write the first five books of the Bible.  That that news is, quite literally, painful for them ~ because it violates what was passed down by beloved grandparents and Sunday School teachers.  And that's only the first page.

So: Gently, gently; that's my mantra. 

Favorite Verses: Friday Five

For today's Friday Five, Songbird posts the following:

"Twenty years ago, I was on a Pastoral Search Committee, and one of the questions we asked the ten candidates we interviewed in the first round was to tell us their three favorite passages of scripture. I loved hearing the variety of verses quoted and even learned some that I didn't know, such as the last line of one of this week's lectionary passages:

He has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God? (Micah 6:8) 

For today's Friday Five, list your five favorite passages/verses from the Bible and tell us something about why you love them."

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1. I'll start with Micah 6:8.  It's probably the verse most frequently inscribed by adult mentors in the Bibles given to the young people confirmed in my home church each spring; it's the call that permeates our congregation.  Last week a former seminary classmate posted a new class assignment on FB: You have 15 minutes to preach your final sermon, the one that will sum up your ministry.  This is the verse that popped into my head as what I would choose as the text for such a sermon.  To be candid, though, insofar as I'm concerned, it entirely reflects aspiration rather than reality.

2.  Jeremiah 31:3: I have loved you with an everlasting love.  I've been thinking a lot recently about the two or three messages are becoming the ones that I preach over and over.  That's what one of my seminary professors says about preachers; that's what F. Scott Fitzgerald said about novelists: we all have a couple of things to say, and we spend our lives repeating them.  This is the first of my three. God has loved us from all time and loves us into all time.  

3.  Matthew 28:20: I am with you always, to the end of the age.  This is probably the verse that has been most in mind for me since my son died.  I have not cared that much, not at all really, about God's absence where I myself am concerned.  I have been persistently and consistently tormented about where God was for my child, my beautiful child who is gone. And so I try to remember that Jesus is always the most interested in and the most present to those most in need, most lost, most beset by feelings of having been abandoned.

4.  John 20:26-27: "A week later his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were shut, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe.” My faith having always been of the wintery rather than the summery variety, always one more characterized by doubt than  by assurance, Thomas is one of my favorite people in the Bible.  And Jesus' response to him ~ Jesus' willingness to do whatever it takes to overcome doubt and to send forth the doubter ~ is one of the ways that I know Jeremiah 31:3 and Matthew 28:20.

5.  Revelation 21:1-4.  Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “See, the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them as their God; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.”  The reasons are obvious.  I spent a lot of time on this one in the discussions and paper I wrote for my class on Miroslav Volf last spring, when I became engrossed in his thesis in The End of Memory ~ that the final end of true reconciliation for all of us in the eschaton will be that God will wipe away all tears and that the memory of what we have endured here will be no more.  There used to be a wonderful link to the Edgar Bainton setting on youtube that pictured the music (I find it difficult to follow the words in all four parts), but it's gone; here's another one:

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