6-12-2016 Bioethics Part 61

The speaker begins by thanking the audience for their participation in a study on death and dying. They mention that this study has been going on for a year and a half and has led them to pursue further education in the field. The speaker then poses the question of what can be done with a dead body, specifically whether it should be burned or buried. They discuss arguments for both options, starting with burial. They mention biblical examples of people being buried and argue that burial honors the body and is a theological act. They caution against deriving moral obligations solely from biblical examples and highlight the subjective nature of interpreting verses about honoring the body. Let's pray and get started. I thank you for this morning and for your Church and pray that as we consider for the very last time Some of the most pressing and difficult issues in life that you would give us Wisdom and discernment in Jesus name. Amen So for the past few months You guys are in for a ride this morning, by the way, welcome but uh Just gonna tell you now just buckle up. Here we go The past few months we've been taking time to look at carefully the issue of death and dying These have not been easy months Easy months Less easy for some than others dying is always going to be awful No matter who is doing it and how it is really done Especially if we're the ones doing the dying this week ends our study in bioethics Which is rather strange and hard to imagine. We started over a year and a half ago and When we started it was Really nothing more than a fascination of mine and something that I saw as supremely relevant and necessary For the church in the time and place in which we live. I Want to thank all of you for your patience and for your participation It is due in no small part to your participation in This study and also your encouragement as we've done this study That I am now pursuing graduate and soon-to-be postgraduate work in the field so in ending this magnificent and almost always awkward study in Sunday school We are going to ask as the concluding question of our time in bioethics Just what the heck can you do with a dead body? right The question really to put simply is to burn or to bury Going to assume for the purposes of This study that we all here agree that when a person dies Their body is in some sense No longer quote-unquote them we will get into arguments in the Preceding moments whether or not you're a Christian this morning. We all believe that the body of a person is significantly different Once that body the person in that body has died Right. I don't know. I actually like to see a show of hands outside of an open casket That doesn't count how many people have actually been in the presence near presence of a dead human body Hand raised. All right that Thank you. That is Telling just in case you did not see a third of people in here Have close experience with a dead body, which is rather odd It is normal in the United States today But that is rather strange considering that people die all around you all the time yet We are kept at a rather arm's length from death I will also be assuming for the purposes of our time together this morning that the word dead means all the way dead under any kind of Rubric or any kind of definition of death as we saw a couple months ago Actually defining what it means for you to be dead is not nearly as easy as you think it is Especially today, especially when we talk about Things like organ transplantation and stuff like that and also people who are in advanced stages of dementia Or Alzheimer's that it is not clear when somebody is actually dead today But for now, we're talking about dead dead everybody looking at this thing like there's no Functional vital sign of life all the way dead that kind of person If you'd like to refresh yourself on why defining death is hard then go back and study what we studied before Essentially Again, I want to answer the question to burn or to bury are they both? This is the question permissible for Christians Must we only pursue one or the other? I will try to bring a little clarity to you I will try to bring a little clarity this morning. My goal is to proceed on three points number one The argument for burial number two The argument for cremation and number three should be very short It'll be very clear by the time we get done probably my position and why it should be yours as well Number one the argument for burial Let's begin by you telling me with some reasons are Or might be or might even be yours. And if you're scared, it's okay. It could be a friend of yours What the position for burial? Is or ought to be Great Since you are going to be risen in a body You should not disgrace your body Which is a polemical argument that not burying a body is disgracing it, but we'll get to that. Thank you Who's his who's his oh great Great so we're back to the disgrace idea. You're made in God's image. So not burying a body Burying a body is disgracing that image good Jesus was buried great. Like what else do I need to say? Like let's just pray right Jesus was buried. So over It's always the trump card right? Just if you can get to Jesus you win Anybody else Anybody else Those are pretty good reasons. All right, let's let's walk through some of those number one Abraham Moses Jesus and to the best of our knowledge Almost every single other person that we know of that died in the Bible and we read about what happened in the post-death Was buried. This is absolutely true Just to be clear there are no overt positive references to cremation in the Bible I would also say there are also no overtly negative examples of creation in the Bible For example, I do not buy for a single instance The Acts of for example people sacrificing their children to Molech as being an argument against creation or cremation In Joshua 7 those who were caught stealing from the city of Jericho were to be burned alive that is also not an argument against cremation or God's condemnation for the Moabites burning the king's bones to ashes in the book of Amos is also not a argument against cremation they are Examples of people doing things and radical disobedience to God that end in cremation Kind of depending on how you define it. Some of them are just sacrificing people alive These passages and passages like them aren't really about the wrongness of cremation The evils that we are done we do to other people as an act of disobedience to God now also We have Jesus was buried. Okay. Other people were buried. That is true. It's absolutely true. However Big question and we've seen this from the beginning of our time in Biola The question is and it's a very important question is can you derive? ought from is No, thank goodness. Yes, that's right You cannot derive what you ought to do just because some people in the Bible do that thing Why is that particularly true when it comes to the Bible? Any ideas when there's lots of answers to this Culturally it's different. Okay You can't make something supernatural happen give me example that Jesus Jesus ascending to heaven you can say look Jesus ascended to heaven I mean if you have faith you can ascend to heaven why cuz Jesus ascended to heaven people go you're crazy You are a crazy person, right? Nobody in the right minds believes that kind of stuff. You cannot just go. Oh and rise to heaven Good that's a positive example of something nice happening to somebody what else can we say look it happened the Bible therefore I Can't pay through the head. There we go. I knew something was weird. Thank you, Brian Can't was something weird look. Hey, if I get upset about somebody who's not worshiping God correctly I can drive a tent peg to the head that happens book of Judges. So what's up now? I have proof text right or I don't like homosexuals. So I'm a stone him to death I don't know why cuz that's up at the Bible or you know what I really love to Do whatever I don't care what it is You can finally find some kind of text of the Bible say it's there had happened in time therefore You know, we can do it today. Let's go take a weird one, right? Some people come to the early church and they give some money they go. There you go. Give her money The Apostles take those people aside and go why'd you lie to the Holy Spirit? Y'all are dead. Boom. They fall dead That could be used and I've heard this used in a church for say if y'all don't give From the heart you better be careful because y'all just might die in front all of us Right now that is a motivation to see people open up their wallets and give something. I'll be doing that today I'm just saying that story exists in the Bible and it might happen to you Just kidding People are buried in the Bible But while that is interesting and we should not take that it like into consideration I'm not saying we shouldn't take that into consideration all it is not proof that that's what everybody must do There's also this idea that burying honors the body The idea is here is that we treat the body with care when we bury it We are creating God's image as Tim said as told to us in Genesis chapter 1 and also in dwelt by the Holy Spirit and Thus what we are matters For example, yes Right good. Yeah, that's some wrong proof testing. Yeah honor God with your body So the idea is like what we should do is put you in a really expensive box on the ground cool um Not what that verse is talking about at all So we should probably leave it to the side Although it is interesting and just so you all know remember that what that means is very subjective Because I am sure that honoring God with your body means a number of things that you do not currently do and number of things That you do currently do Suspiciously don't get on that list They might be on your neighbor's list, but they're definitely not on your list. Okay, it is true However, that verse like every other verse in the Bible only makes sense in the context in which it's found So and we're not doing a study at first Corinthians this morning I recommend it to you But I think that if you were to look into what it means to honor God with your body It would be much more profound than you might initially think Corpses are still named when we put them in the ground, right? They are in the Bible as well. They put Jesus's body in the cave. It is not just a body in the cave It is Jesus's body. So the argument goes that burial honors The dead it seems disrespectful to cremate somebody at least initially This leads into the next point which we kind of touched on that burial is a theological act It's probably to my mind the strongest argument for the practice The first idea is that matter matters. Okay, what we are this Stuff matters one of the main reasons why the Lord's Supper or communion is so important It is an affirmation of a number of things one of them being Goodness of the physical world around us that what is here is not what we are just trying to escape from Many Christians hold on to some definitely a Unbiblical if not mildly heretical idea that what you are longing for in this life is to get out of here and get out of this and get somewhere else where you can essentially sit on a cloud and play a weird musical instrument and just kind of be at Peace with the world for the rest of all time Just we're clear like that. That's not found here found a lot of Eastern religions and stuff, but it's not found at all in the Bible What we are matters This makes burial Really senseless by the way, if what you are does not matter If you're just longing to be free of this and float away to somewhere Then I really don't understand why anybody would want to get buried because this is evil and wicked so we should just get away with It again, that's not my position. It's not my position because I don't believe it's the Bible's position However, if that's your position, and I don't know why the heck you'd bury anybody Really I think you'd like put the body on a large platform to be eaten by vultures, right? Because it's disgusting and we should not honor what is dead We should dishonor it because it's gross and we are just getting away from all of this, but nobody believes that so If we are going to believe that this matters then burying somebody is an act of that kind of idea That what we are matters and what is going to come back also matters For example 2nd Corinthians chapter 5 It's a good example of this 2nd Corinthians 5 beginning in verse 1 says this For we know that if a tent If a tent that is our earthly home is destroyed We have a building from God a house not made with hands eternal in the heavens for in this tent We groan longing to be going to put on our heavenly dwelling if indeed by putting it on we might not be found naked For while we are still in this tent we groan being burdened not that we would be unclothed, but that we would be further clothed So that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life He who has prepared us for this very thing is God who has given the Spirit as a guarantee It's a whole lot of confusion about what the Holy Spirit does One of the things the Holy Spirit does is in you is a guarantee of not Spirit floating somewhere but as this forever but perfected in the new heavens in the new earth for all time We don't want to be unclothed this Paul puts it but further clothed This body being that which we are clothed with The body matters. We are waiting for real and mortal bodies like that of Jesus Christ The second theological point is that burial mimics Jesus's pattern and thus hope for the resurrection Gets to Marge's point. We take a body we put it in the ground The idea that it's gonna come out of the ground our burial is like Jesus's now. Here's an unfair but true critique Nobody gets buried like Jesus anymore remember this is just Letter jot tittle then you better find a cave you better find a stone You better hope that stones gonna get rolled away and that you're gonna come out of that stone that cave Stone hasn't been rolled away Our burial is much different than Jesus's if you don't believe that then either you do not know about the burial of Jesus Or you have never been to a funeral No one is sure for God has not told us what the end will look like in detail however I can almost guarantee you that it will not look like the walking dead or some other kind of zombie show where people are climbing out of six foot deep holes to then just straggle around I Do agree that the symbolism is rich I Do not think that it is only the symbols that matter Add to this the fact that we often do not have a good grasp of what the symbols are think about this how many times do you go to a funeral and Essentially, it is either one way or the other it is either all happy happy. Joy. Joy remembrance of life or This is the worst day ever. We're just putting a dead body in the ground Rarely, is it explicitly? Communicated the theological Significance of putting that body in the ground and the form does not matter the symbols don't matter if you understand what the symbols are There's a great example of this Few months ago. I was at a church at an unknown part of the world that rhymes with Washington During that church service guy got up there. I started talking about new beginnings and God gives us new beginnings and this new year is a new beginning. Let's pray and we prayed and then some men walked forward and Some things were picked up by these men and those things were then distributed throughout the congregation Which are the people seated in chairs? the people in those chairs mysteriously took Something that looked like a piece of styrofoam and stuck it in their mouths and then passed the plate along and Then right behind that there was this mysterious tray of juice cups that didn't people partook of and then passed them along and then they went up to the front and The closing benediction was oh, I forgot I was up go Seahawks Now that is tragic on a number of levels one of the biggest ones being if I was not a Christian and I had arrived at church that day. I would have been like look This is already where we got people standing up sitting down singing songs. The guy up there is doing something I don't know what he's doing. He's opening the Bible a little bit He's not teaching out of it But he's you know doing that thing and then there's this guy who gets up and talks about new beginnings and then we pass this weird thing around Never once mentioning body blood Jesus Lord supper Eucharist Communion nothing just not so the form which could be incredibly rich depending on what you say about it is Incredibly empty same thing happens when we take a dead body and put it in the ground Take dead body put in the ground if you do not make it very explicit what you're doing and why you're doing it It doesn't matter. It's like look. This is weird. Nice box dead body hole in the ground Alright, I guess this is what we do. No humanity It is what you say it is not only what you do Remember that Besides that the symbolism of the resurrection in Christ as he rose from the dead is a rich theological concept This is true whether you have a body or you don't have one never forget that whether you're not you have a body the symbolism of resurrection from the dead is Rich and profound and if you must have a body in order for that to be rich and profound Then what problems do we run into as a church? Soldiers, why is that a problem? Ain't nobody You Realize that what we say matters and if everybody's got to get buried and by the way I I am NOT opposed this idea that like people ought to be buried or something like that. But if you must be buried Then a you're saying something profound about the person who died Well, they're sorry. I don't know. You're also saying something much more profound about God, which is he can only work in limited ways The reality is the people that get eaten by sharks Will come back in the resurrection if they trust on Christ for their salvation. How's that work Jeremy, man? I don't really know how gravity works or a whole bunch of other things So I ain't about to explain what God has not revealed to me But he can and he will And that is the hope of people who die in ways that don't even allow burial We gave away the end of my talk but no so like well you what what I what I what we can say up till this Point is only we can't be hard and fast that everybody must be buried Now you might say well, there are extraordinary Circumstances in which somebody not to be buried, but if we have the possibility to bury them we have to bury them okay, and that by the way is the vast majority opinion of Christians today not mine, but That would be the one Very few people believe that we must have a body and we must put it in the ground Then you can get by the way, if you ever meet anybody like that you go. Oh, yeah, you sure about that and they go Yeah, you go. Okay. Fine. How deep? What kind of boxes that would be Does have to have the concrete thing on top and underneath or no Right can just be on top or on the bottom The Can you have embalming fluids how much embalming fluids? It has to be you know, not that you have to get wrapped up in that There's this cool thing you get wrapped up in which is like this sheet kind of thing, but it's impregnated with mushroom spores so it decomposes your body like ten times faster than otherwise would that thing's cool, but Not pitching it or anything I'm just saying it's kind of cool Next burial gives us a place to return to a memorial Which is absolutely true Okay, take a body put in the ground It's been absurd amount of money. Just my personal opinion on a piece of Rock with some names on it. Okay, or not. You don't have that right take a stake And have you have anything you want have it there on the ground and you can return to that place and remember it There's a big one when we could be fostering really sick ideas about like here this person is this person's right here No, that person is not there. Their body is there the person is not there Doesn't have to be that way, but that's at least a possibility. But what else is true if I was cremated? I Was cremated I was cremated But what else is true if I was cremated You can even take my whole body and bury it there Here's what's interesting According to the state of Tennessee. I am technically allowed to be buried in my front yard depending on what state my body is in Okay, if I am a full body It would be illegal. My wife could get sent to prison for it If I am cremated I can be put in the yard all day long sprinkle amongst my tomato plants, which would be fantastic Or actually dug into the ground and box or something, right? But it's interesting the form in which your body is in makes it a little illegal Regardless, you can have that memorial that you could return to anywhere you want it Here's the last one and this is a very common one. The roots of burning are non-christian For Many ancient religions and ideologies the body was a prison to be freed from which is ironic because now that's a major Christian opinion But whatever that's for a different sermon of course, we as Christians believe in no such thing or at least we ought not to And we ought to reject the pagan ideology behind the practice But just because a practice has pagan roots does not mean that we ought not to celebrate that thing and If you believe that then you all I can almost guarantee are some of the most rampant pagan false god Worshiping human beings on the face of the planet. You might be thinking Jeremy, especially if you're new here This is this is strange and offensive, we'll just take one, all right Christmas trees, right raise your hand if you have a Christmas tree in your house, don't feel bad if you don't have a Christmas tree in your house That's fine. Okay, we got some Christmas trees, right? Not like currently but like at some point if you put a Christmas tree in your house, and you still have a Christmas tree in your house like congratulations, you're either Incredibly in love with Christmas trees or you're the laziest person on the face of the planet, right? I love Christmas trees, whatever. Here's the thing I love Christmas trees, whatever. Here's the thing Christmas trees have a very large pagan past Now, let me be clear if you put up a Christmas tree in your house to worship a false god Or because you think it has magical powers that thinks it brings winter to an end or because you think it will bless you somehow Then you and I should talk or if you come out of a pagan culture like that It's very possible that you should not have a Christmas tree in your home. Or are there any form of green foliage? But here's the thing You know Do we I mean, I'd be interested to talk to you afterwards I'm not gonna call you out if this is you, right? But if if you are the person who would at least hypothetically raise their hand and think of like, yeah I have a Christmas tree in my house to worship the pagan deity of X whatever X is Then we should totally talk afterwards. However, I am almost sure almost in this group There's not a single person who puts a Christian goes. I love worshipping false gods Yes, right. What are the Christmas tree for? Here's what Christmas tree is for. Because it smells nice unless you have a fake one Because it looks pretty because you put lights on it And because it's a convenient place to hang ugly things that your children make or people give you There are tokens of years gone by, right? I won't say the celebration of the holiday. That's what a Christmas tree is ordinarily. Now, you might be hearing you might be thinking Jeremy. I Just cannot put a Christmas tree up in my house Are you free as a Christian to not have a Christmas tree in your house? You darn well better believe it. Christmas trees are not a necessity at all Okay now remember if you say You don't have a Christmas tree That also means that you should not really be concerned if people call it Xmas because it's not a Christian holiday And you're opposed to that whole idea Because you don't think Christians have to have a Christmas tree in their house because it's not a Christian holiday, right? Make the connections That's that one's that's a side point. Just take it run with it. Um, I Love it for Christmas too. It's a convenient time of the year in which to remember the birth of Jesus Right, it's convenient Could we all start a new holiday on? July 5th That celebrated the birth of Jesus Christ You better believe it should every Sunday in some sense be a Christmas. You better believe it Because we should be celebrating the fact that God came to earth in the form Of a child Born of a virgin that should be something we celebrate every week. If you only celebrate the birth of Jesus once a year You're doing it wrong Here's the thing Saul plays into this whole idea that though it has pagan roots and though anybody know why we have Christmas on Christmas That's right exactly right because we conscripted Pagan holidays and said you know what? Oh you're celebrating this on this day You know what? We're gonna celebrate the birth of Jesus on your holiday. We're gonna take it over. That's why Okay, is that wrong? Not necessarily today. Are we all like yeah forget Christmas or forget the pagan holiday We don't take holidays and we don't take holidays that we celebrate me neither That's totally passed out of our collective memory this country we just go by we're gonna do December 25th The pagan roots of it do not shift The practice of it, it's not something we have to do It's something that many of us find convenient and kind of some more than anything. It's a family tradition Convenient time to remember the birth of Jesus Hopefully avoiding being rampant consumers, but here's the thing if the roots of it are wrong, then much of what you do in Celebration of almost anything is wrong. If that's the whole thing. Okay. Now if you are burning a body Because you believe in reincarnation You are burning a body because you believe you are Religiously obligated to because these two people were tied together on earth If you are burning there's all kinds of reasons that might be wrong to burn a body if it is in celebration of some kind of false idea, but Not necessarily an argument against burning a body In short the arguments for Christian burial are totally valid But not overwhelmingly conclusive. Let me give you arguments for cremation number one in the same way that Burial is a theological act cremation. I believe can also be a theological act looking forward to the new creation Lacking real concern for what is here and now and looking forward to what will be Saying I don't I don't have a particular desire to see all this preserved I am longing for what is coming afterwards and I believe in the resurrection life and the power of God to resurrect Whatever state I'm in be it in the body or a burned up box of ashes don't matter You might say that's not the strongest theological argument Neither is the one that Jesus got buried. Okay, and if matter matters and therefore my body matters Guess what ashes are still a thing I still exist. My body still exists. It's just in a smaller package than would otherwise be Yes Yeah Yeah, right Yeah, which is why the day what I'm going to say in roughly ten minutes is that it doesn't really matter and you shouldn't judge Your neighbor, right? This is what the reason that lies behind the act that matter or the reasons plural All of the theological significance of death can be held on to in cremation the resurrection the life Jesus his own burial his resurrection. It can all that the significance can be held on to even if somebody's cremated We don't have to have their body Again a practice is not bad because pagans did it Easter bunnies giving presents jack-o'-lanterns, etc. All fall under this practice They're not inherently wrong. So they might be Burial today also isn't what it used to be If you don't know this then you have not been to a burial recently or Are not familiar with the way Barrow used to be done. It used to be a very simple and very real event Today, there are tons of pressure Rules and options as one theologian puts it our modern funeral customs tend to Anesthetize us from the ugly reality of death with soft music plush carpets and expensive caskets Everything is done today to keep us at a distance from death There is a movement today thankfully and the United States in particular to move towards more quote-unquote green cemeteries Which avoid essentially the hyper? chemical niceness of Modern-day funerals the only problem is the funeral industry makes billions and billions and billions of dollars off of dead bodies being Preserved and caskets being sold that cost a lot of money So they are lobbying hard against the idea of a quote-unquote greener more natural kind of death Here's the next point Burning gets one to the same point as burial just quicker Okay, the 1662 Anglican Book of Common Prayer says this Anglican Book of Common Prayer says this some of the best parts in this book For as much as it hath pleased Almighty God of his great mercy to take unto himself the soul of our dear brother here departed Or sister we therefore commit his body to the ground earth to earth ashes to ashes dust to dust Ensure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life through our Lord Jesus Christ who shall change our vile body That it may be like unto his glorious body according to the mighty working whereby he is able to subdue all things to himself That is what we ought to be reading and funerals ashes to ashes dust to dust Right if you ever wondered where that came from came from right there Thomas Cranmer genius Your body will end up eventually eaten by bugs Decomposed dust and ashes. The only question is how long will it take you to get there? For some people it would take longer than others depending on all kinds of interesting things, by the way your body type Your body size what you ate what you were preserved with how much of it went into your body? How deep you were buried in the ground what you were surrounded with what kind of box you were in and most fascinatingly? What kind of soil you were buried in? Interestingly enough in England There was this profound theological movement to find the most acidic soil humanly possible in the country of England because your body would get to dust and ashes quicker Which is awesome The reason why was an interesting theological point the quicker I return to what man came from the quicker Maybe Jesus will return not exactly the strongest or most logical theological argument of all time, but at least it was interesting What this burial liturgy gets right is that we all get back to where Adam is Cremation just speeds up the process. Here's my last point Cremation is a wise use of resources Here's some quick statistics from a guy named Mark Harris who wrote a book Ironically titled grave matters each year a given 10 acre cemetery contains enough wood from the production of wooden caskets to rebuild over 40 homes and Enough formula in a formaldehyde water solution to fill a small backyard swimming pool each year the total quantity of metal buried in the United States from the production of metal caskets is Enough to rebuild the Golden Gate Bridge This does not even touch on the ecological humanitarian difficulties of preserving corpses Exposing those who do this work to toxic chemicals That keep them from bodies from smelling in order to make them look better for viewing Again, trying to keep us at a distance from death Now I know That we Christians today either swing one way or the other when it comes to the environment Usually in the God gave us dominion so we can do whatever the heck we want to it side But regardless of how much you believe in the preservation of you know, snowy owls or whatever You ought to believe that this world is All we got and that God has placed us here in order not only to use what is here But also to care for it what we do is what we have matters not only that but let me speak about costs for a minute Anybody know what the average funeral? Burial funeral cost the United States of America today average. Let me give a guess Eight to ten, there you go Now that is just to get the body in the box in the ground. That's it We're not talking about all the other expenses that go into it Tons and tons of money go into this This is no joke for many people the argument against this goes something like this when it comes To doing the right thing cost is no factor Or that money is no object when you're honoring the dead, which is an argument mainly from upper-middle-class white people, right? That's what that argument comes from Okay, who can take out enough money to kind of deal with the repercussions that come but you know Here's the thing very few of us. I want to ask for a show of hands I'm saying very few of you have money set aside for your own burial so that you will not burden your family members with that cost you are going to when you die and most of you are not going to see it coming and It is wrong and sick and terrible and disgusting to force not to allow but to force people to put themselves an extreme and sometimes Lifelong financial difficulty in order to do something just because it's a right thing to do. It's not a right thing to do It's a permissible option. It might even be a beneficial option This gets to my third point in closing. I Have done my best to keep my position close to my chest all the way along So this probably comes to shock to you when I say that I believe that both options are equally valid I Will go ahead and tell you most some of you know this I am getting cremated Absolutely in every single way. You shouldn't let that determine your own decision But go for it if there was some kind of option like that sheet with the mushroom spores in it, right? I can just get buried like wherever the heck I wanted to and it wouldn't cost tens of thousands of dollars to do it Then I might go that route now you might say listen, I want a mahogany cast that is bedazzled Right that has LED lights. They have a cross on it and dancing angels That's fine, right if in a good conscience you can do that good luck then go for it Because you nobody Legitimately has the right to tell you this is the way you must be buried because this is the reason because Because I am convinced and I have done a ridiculous amount of reading and I Sincerely appreciate the attempts of those who are opposed to my position to downplay and say Christians must be buried their argument Their arguments are as strong as the ones I laid out today for burial. They're there. There's something they're not conclusive So in Closing our study on bioethics we get to another point that ends up almost exactly where we ended every other point which for some of you has been a Just exercise in frustration for a year and a half And I'm glad that you have had to be frustrated for a year and a half When we started this year and a half ago I said some of you believe that this world is black and white and indeed there are certain things Limited number of things that are black and white But I am going to attempt to make this world a whole lot more gray than you ever thought possible And I think we've done that Is it not just because when it comes to things like in vitro fertilization or what to do with people who are massively depressed? What to do with people who have either? homosexual tendencies or in committed homosexual relationships or what to do with people who have advanced stages of dementia or what to do when people are plugged into life support and are Unrehabilitated It's not just because I want you to think about those things and feel weirdly about those things But because this plays out into every area of life The biggest area today would be politics Right just a pressing point what I have seen thankfully is it as a result of this study some of you are less vehemently Crazy than you would otherwise be because for a year and a half we've trained ourselves to think carefully about the position of others Positions that are some of the most Absolutely reprehensible positions. I'm not speaking politically That you might ever be able to imagine such as Infants up into the age of two are able to be euthanized because they are not able to live by themselves That position probably sounds crazy to you Until you think about it for about five minutes And unless you understand where that kind of position comes from then you will never be able to argue against it But we spent time next week we start the Heidelberg catechism a little bit different than you know palliative care options Just as important The whole way along what we have sought to do what we've sought to do even this morning is to try and understand the other Side and to see that there is real Christian freedom in these things and that we probably ought to be thinking harder about both the way that we live and The ways that we die than we currently do In order to be beneficial not only to ourselves But also to all human beings around us. Let's pray now. We thank you for this time We thank you for what we have learned thus far We know that in many ways we have only scratched the surface and The truth is is that most of us have forgotten more than we have learned Yet, I thank you For the ways that this congregation has been built and sanctified and made wise unto salvation Through looking at the topic of bioethics, and I pray that as we continue to have Opportunities Opportunities Either opportunities to speak with people around us or opportunities There are thrust upon us as a result of ourselves getting sick or being put in difficult Bioethical situations that you would give us wisdom That you would bring to remember the things that we've studied here You would help the ways that we have learned how to think here influence our decisions and the rest of life in order that we might be The best of all possible citizens of this world and The best possible citizens of the kingdom of God as long as we live in Christ's name we pray Amen