Facing death, telling truth

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MYRNA BROWN, HOST: It’s Friday, May 1st. Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It!

Good morning, I’m Myrna Brown.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. It’s Culture Friday, John Stonestreet is here. He’s President of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast. 

John, good morning.

JOHN STONESTREET: Good morning.

EICHER: Well John, we’ve talked about former Senator Ben Sasse probably around the time that he received his terminal cancer diagnosis. 

But I’d like to talk today about the way, and I'll borrow from John Piper on this, the way that Sasse is not wasting his cancer. He’s been doing interview after interview in all kinds of different secular venues where the name of God really doesn’t get a lot of mention. And this past weekend I thought was extraordinary. He was on 60 Minutes, and I like the way James Wood put it in WORLD Opinions.

He said that Sasse is not just enduring this cancer. He is treating it almost as a calling, not just to live well, but to die well, and to bear witness in the way that he faces death. 

Listen to this: 

SASSE: “Death is wicked. Death is evil. Death is not how it’s supposed to be. And me getting a cancer diagnosis, again, is pretty small on the grand scheme of things—but it’s a touch of grace, because it forces me to tell the truth. And the lie I want to tell myself is that I’m the center of everything and I’m going to be around forever, and I can work harder and store up enough that I can atone for my own brokenness. I can’t.”

Yeah. Isn’t that exactly the conversation about death that our culture is missing right now?

STONESTREET: Yeah, I don’t think he’s treating it almost as a calling, I think Sasse is understanding it as a calling. 

And I don’t think that’s just a calling that is on him or on a certain number of people who die. I think anyone who dies in Christ understands that it is not us who holds the keys to life and death, it’s not us that make these decisions. And so therefore we embrace this in an act of obedience.

I’m struck with what my longtime pastor has often told me that he tells people as they walk into the season of death, is that their family will have all kinds of memories of them, but what they will learn most about their faith will come in those days, those days of dying.

I’m also struck, though, when it comes to Sasse, the contrast—because our culture has sold us (and I mean this on a legislative level, on a policy level, particularly if we think about Canada and medical aid in dying) that always is sold with this phrase, "death with dignity." And embedded in that very misleading nomenclature is that because there is a demand for death with dignity, there’s no such thing as dying with dignity. So that has to be kind of autonomously managed.

And I think what Ben Sasse is showing the world right now, in a rich and profound way, is that there is such a thing as dying with dignity. There is such a thing as meaning in suffering and pain, and there is such a thing as the alternatives not being kind of either life or death, but that death can be redeemed. Dying can be redeemed in the ultimate source of life that is Christ Jesus.

There’s just an aesthetic beauty, despite the woundedness of Sasse’s own body and his face as he does these interviews. There’s a beauty in it. There’s a meaning in it. There’s a richness in it that clearly our culture is absolutely starving for. So that, to me, is such a remarkable contrast that we are seeing in, as you put it, interview after interview after interview.

EICHER: Right, and the end of this particular interview is powerful: It marries theology and personal life very well. The interviewer, Scott Pelley, says, “Are you really at peace with this?” and Sasse replies by talking about what he’s going to miss from this life, and this is where he really starts to come apart, because it relates to his kids and what he's going to miss in the life of his kids. 

But again, he turns that conversation back into his confidence in God.

Listen to the question Pelley asks here and the answer Ben Sasse gives. A little beat pause, and then that iconic stopwatch sound. Just an incredible ending.

PELLEY: And God, you believe, has a plan?

SASSE: Absolutely. There are no maverick molecules in the universe.

Wow, wow! That's amazing.

STONESTREET: Yeah, it was. I mean, you wonder if whoever was producing this program, if there's someone who believes the same thing and wanted to add that kind of impact. It's kind of like when you had the voice of God at just the right moment.

Listen, it reminds me of Lewis, you know, when asked what the most important philosophical statement of all time was, he said, “In the beginning God,” because that means the entire universe is a different place. And that means how we understand suffering, how we understand disease, how we understand loss, how we understand leaving our kids behind too early, not being able to witness, much less walk with them in key moments of who they are, that that still is not out of control. That there is a plan.

And Christians can say that in a trivial way, but it's always interesting to me when someone who's in a place like Sasse says it, because now you know it's not just kind of the trivial Romans 8:28 bomb that Job's friends are throwing over the wall you know, into his suffering. It's the one who's suffering who's saying, "yet even if he slay me, I'll still trust him." There's my King James background for you. 

That's a framing of how we think about all of life and the world, including death.

BROWN: It’s okay to say thee and thou sometimes, John. I know you saw this next story because you wrote a Breakpoint article on it; that's how I first saw it.

A man bouncing a baby on his lap and then asking the baby, who do you want, dada or pop? And to me, it sounds like the baby says 'mama.' 

Let's listen:

AUDIO: Who do you want, dada or pop? [mmm-ma-ma] [laughter] No mama! Do you want dada or pop? [whines ma] Nope. Do you want Dada or pop? [mmm-mmm] [mmm-mom] No way, José! I think, oh-oh-oh. There is no mama. [Cries] 

One thing I noticed in that short clip, there's a jump cut indicating some kind of edit was made, but I don't want to spend our time debating the veracity of this video. 

Millions have seen it, and I got to tell you, while watching it I wanted to cry and I wanted to punch someone at the same time, simultaneously.

What struck me, though, were the countless comments. The majority seemed outraged, calling it child abuse, indescribably evil. And even if the baby wasn't saying mama, the thought of just that exchange between that, that dude and this little baby, it just made people's blood boil.

So I guess my question is: what does it say about a culture that embraces same sex unions and then cries foul when the ramifications of those actions become too hard to swallow?

STONESTREET: Yeah, I didn’t want to comment on this just out of anger, although the anger is clearly there, because it’s hard to see someone essentially badger and torture, emotionally, a baby. But you have in this exchange everything that has happened in the wake of the sexual revolution.

The sexual revolution has always been about not tolerance, but enforcing affirmation. And you watch this and you’re like, why are these two people so committed to having a baby affirm, and not even accepting a baby’s lack of affirmation? The level of narcissism that’s embedded in this, it was just absolutely stunning.

And then turning around and putting it on social media underscored kind of where we’re at now, which is everyone else is expected to be okay with this. 

But let me be really clear: what was happening in this video was a verbal form of abuse. If this individual and this other man, who both have appropriated this term “parent” in this child’s life, had been super nice, what’s happening in the video is still cruel, because against the child’s will, you are basically saying this child doesn’t have a right to a mother.

See, that’s the thing. They lied. There is a mama! The mama’s not on camera. The mama’s not being featured, the mama’s being denied. The child is being kept at exactly the time when a child wants a mama most. So the level of pretending and appropriation is certainly ungrounded in reality and is the source of all kinds of confusion.

But what you have here is this cruelty, not only in the words, but in the act itself. 

And that myth, that myth that has been so damning and damaging in the history of the Western world—that we’ll do whatever we want, we’ll experiment with reality, we’ll change names like moms and dads and men and women, and we’ll pretend like sex doesn’t have consequences, and our new ideas about socially renovating our world around the things that we want, whether they’re real or not, that they won’t have consequences.

But the children have always been the disproportionate victims of the sexual revolution. And all of that is in this one video, which I think is why so many people viscerally reacted.

But you’ve got to dig below the surface. There’s so much going on here.

EICHER: Well John, hey before we go, and I hate to frame it quite this way, but these attempts on the life of this particular president of the United States are almost getting to the point of mundane, so many of them, three now. Where you kind of have to say, Well, what’s new here?

But I do think that there is something new here, John. Apparently, the kid who is accused in this failed attack came from a Christian home. And I don’t get the sense that he deconstructed his faith. I’m kind of waiting to hear him say that he was merely doing his Christian duty as he saw it. 

We haven’t heard that yet, but what do you think about this? I just didn’t see it coming.

STONESTREET: You know, it’s hard to make full conclusions about where a kid comes from in whatever way, right? I mean, we’ve had examples of this that are both the fault of the parents and not the fault of the parents. Parents can do everything right or try to do everything right to the best of their ability, and kids, you know, make their own decisions. That’s the thing about kids.

But look, there is at least a significant segment of the population that claim the name 'Christian' and have been trapped in a political illusion. The political illusion basically saying that all can be lost if the wrong person is in charge, and all will be right if our person is in charge. So the political illusion cuts both ways.

This is something that Jacques Lefèvre, the quirky French theologian, articulated so well. It’s basically when the State takes up more than it should, politics, that process, takes up more air out of the room culturally speaking, than it should. 

And the blame for that is almost always put on those who are Christian conservatives. But the political illusion is alive and well on both sides of the aisle. It has been used to justify a remarkable amount of violence. The math is just adding up on this. So to me, it's another example of the political illusion. 

And listen, I’ll say this: there are national magazines, there are colleges that have been historically identified as Christian, or even still claim to be Christian, who are examples of this political illusion from the left. I’m not saying that there’s no political illusion on the right, I’m just saying this is an example of a political illusion on the left, and that’s something that’s been overlooked.

BROWN: John Stonestreet is president of the Colson Center and host of the Breakpoint podcast. 

Thank you, John.

STONESTREET: Thank you both.

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