The police ruled it a
murder-suicide. Not like a “usual” one,
though, where an agitated party murders a loved one, then turns the gun on
themselves. Often sparked by an
assumption of infidelity.
No, the perpetrator in this
case felt aggrieved over something (does it really matter what?), so he went
out and found a complete stranger to murder.
Then, as the song says, “He turned his own cold hand.”
A mess, a tragedy, a crime,
a venal sin. Call it what you want, it
was hard to think of any good associated with it.
Unless you were the preacher
at the funeral for the perpetrator of this heinous act. “He was a loving father,” said the preacher
and “He’s in a better place now.” In
case that were too ambiguous, the preacher went on to specify that the “better
place” was heaven, in the arms of his (the perp’s) Lord.
It was just a few weeks
after another troubled person in our town had taken her own life. A teenager with no known conflicts, no note
left behind to explain things, decided death was better than life and brought
about her own end one afternoon while everyone was out of the house.
At that funeral, too, the
preacher—a different preacher from the other funeral—assured the audience that
the dead girl was “in a better place.”
You know what? Maybe she
was. The Bible speaks of an unforgivable
sin, but it’s not suicide. It’s the
blasphemy (or rejection) of the Holy Spirit.
Now, suicide might well be a sign of such a rejection. I tend to think that, most often, it is. That, for whatever reason or factors, a
person has decided that their life is not worth living and—by inference—God has
abandoned them.
I don’t believe God has abandoned them, but once a person
gets to that point in their thought processes, turning the ship around is not
an easy task. I also don’t think that
suicide is an absolute guarantee that the person has rejected the overtures of
God through his Holy Spirit. Maybe they
just forgot for a time, or acted in haste.
(Which, if that’s unforgivable then everything I have ever done because
I momentarily forgot or got cocky is going to be held against me, too.) Maybe it's the result of a chemical imbalance. That doesn’t make suicide right—and it
certainly isn’t “right” for anyone left behind—and, more than anything, this is
in the purview of God. But since he didn’t say, “Suicide is the unforgivable
sin” I’m sure not going to say it is.
On the other hand, I have a
hard time with declaring someone who has decided their gift from God wasn’t
worth keeping as automatically sitting in his mansion. (Again, it’s not up to me, [praise God!] but)
I think about the auditorium of high school kids at that second-mentioned
funeral who came away with the idea that, if life sucks, just end it and let
God take you to heaven. If that were the
way it worked, why didn’t God tell us all to off ourselves as soon as we came
up out of the baptismal waters?
Now, I have great sympathy
for those preachers. They were asked to
preside over a funeral—which is an event for the living; specifically, the
family—and bring comfort at a time when comfort seems impossible. The family is already sitting there
wondering, “What signs did I miss? Is
there something I could have done?”
Still, to tell everyone that everything’s fine, now, doesn’t seem like
the path of honesty, either.
Not too long after these two
events, a car filled with teenagers caught our attention. An inexperienced driver, with a car full of
hung-over, under-aged drinkers, plunged to the death of everyone inside. Horrible, horrible, thing. Lives lost, other lives shattered. But once again, we were told they were all in
a better place. In this case, because
they had all attended church while children.
No one in the car had been in church in some time, there was no visible
fruit of living for God in their lives, but because they once attended Sunday
School without actively setting fire to the sacraments, they’re in heaven.
We don’t want to think bad
of the dead, and there’s probably no way I can honestly end this blog without
coming out harsh to modern sensibilities … but what if all or some of the
people from the above-mentioned incidences are not in a better place?
There’s nothing we can do about it now—for their sakes, anyway—but what
about ours? I firmly believe in grace as
an undeserved and unearnable gift, but what if how we live after having
received grace—what if the fruit we produce, as Jesus put it—really does
matter? What if life—even a hard life—is
a gift from God that shouldn’t be thrown away?
