Death By Suicide, Euthanasia and One’s Right to Die
Order of Service - Script
for Sunday: January 22, 2023
January 22, 2022:
Death By Suicide, Euthanasia and One’s Right to Die
Birth, Life, and Death are great mysteries. We have the right to more decisions regarding all three than we often believe.
NIUU, Jeanie Donaldson, Pastor Fred
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Prelude: Jeanie Donaldson
“Peace Like a River” arranged by Jon Jeffrey Grier
Welcome and Announcements:
All Growing, All Learning, All Loved
By Rachael Hayes
Good morning! Welcome to you, old friends and new, young and old. You are an essential part of our celebration today. Whether today is your first or your thousandth Sunday in our midst, we are stronger because you are with us. We are one people of many beliefs, many origins, [sexualities, and genders]. We are all growing, all learning, all loved. Just as you are, you are welcome here. And so…
Come into this circle of love and compassion,
Come into this community where we can dream and
Believe in those dreams—
Welcome to North Idaho Unitarian Universalists where we accept, we support, we transform: Ourselves, Our Community. Our world.
Lighting the Chalice:
To Carry the Light Forward
By Greg Ward (altered by Fred)
If we are lucky, we will all get a chance during our life to know someone who becomes for us an exemplar of living. And if we are really lucky, we will recognize how they ended up passing on some of their goodness to us. If we are lucky.
But one thing is certain. No one – not one of us – entering this world can escape the cost of living. The price we pay is this: To live in this world we must accept that someday we will have to die. To love what is alive, we must accept having to lose what we’ve made precious through our care. To be fully and fiercely human, we must accept having to be breakable and sometimes broken.
When we stop to notice how their life gave us a path and a little light to see by it encourages us to help carry that light forward. Though each of us carries forth in this world a small flame, we know that the ability of that light to brighten the world depends upon the many others who learn to walk with it in their hearts. We light this chalice today remembering the lives and living of the bright lights of those who have gone before us into that which awaits us on the other side of life and death.
Opening Words:
The Bright Thread of Hope
By Gretchen Haley
Sunlight streams through a rounded window.
There is too much beauty
in this world
to give up
on it
yet,
and it is always too soon
to surrender
to cynicism.
Bring your doubt,
your skepticism
your downright confusion
even your bitterness -
but in the midst of all these,
in the center,
wrap your tender fingers
around that still
"bright thread
of hope,"
feel in your heart that
still steady hunger for
something more,
the vision
we glimpse
every day
in the rising sun
across the foothills
the light
that spreads across
the face
of the one we love
the look of knowing
all there is to know
and still
loving life, loving us
just as it is, just as we are.
For this hour
we come to
celebrate, to praise, to give thanks
to refuse to give up
to steady ourselves
keepers of hope
brave builders of
this still-possible
world.
Come, let us worship together.
Hymn #100 “I’ve Got Peace Like a River”
I’ve got peace like a river…
I’ve got joy like a fountain…
I’ve got love like an ocean…
I’ve got pain like an arrow…
I’ve got tears like the raindrops…
I’ve got strength like a mountain…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKagcyj9eio
Covenant:
Love is the spirit of this church, and service its law
This is our great covenant:
To dwell together in peace,
To seek truth in love,
And to help one another.
Joys and Concerns (with lighting of candles of caring)
Story:
Higgins: a Drop With a Dream
By Christopher Buice
Once upon a time there was a drop of water named Higgins.
Higgins was no ordinary drop of water. He was a drop with a dream.
Higgins lived in a valley where it had not rained in a very long time, so all the lovely green grass was turning brown, all the beautiful flowers were wilting, and all the trees were starting to droop.
Higgins had a dream that one day the valley would be a beautiful place again. But what could he do? After all, he was only a drop of water.
One day Higgins decided to travel and tell others about his dream. All the other drops listened very politely, but no one believed that his dream would come true. "Higgins," said one, "get your head out of the clouds. You can't spend your whole life dreaming."
Higgins decided that he had to do something to make his dream come true. So he began to think and think and think. One day, as he was walking by a rusty old bucket, he got an idea.
"If enough of us drops of water got together in this bucket," Higgins thought, "there would be enough water to sprinkle on a few flowers to help them grow and become beautiful again!"
Eagerly, Higgins told everyone his great idea. But everyone thought he was being foolish. "That Higgins is nothing but a dreamer," they said.
Higgins decided he had to do something to convince the others that he was right. So he said to them, "I don't know about you, but I'm getting into the bucket! I hope some of you will join me. Then there might be enough water to help at least some flowers grow beautiful again."
So Higgins ran as hard as he could, hopped way up in the air, and landed with a kerplunk in the bottom of the bucket.
And there he sat . . . JUST A DROP IN THE BUCKET.
For a long time Higgins was very lonely. It seemed like no one else was going to join him. But after a while some of the other drops could see that the grass was dying and the flowers were wilting and the trees were drooping. They all agreed that something must be done.
Suddenly, one drop shouted, "I'm going in the bucket with Higgins!" And he leaped through the air and landed— kerplunk —in the bucket.
Then two other drops yelled, "Wait for us!" And they hopped through the air and landed in the bucket. Then ten drops jumped through the air into the bucket. Then thirty. Then fifty! And then hundreds of drops came from all around just to hop in the bucket!
Soon, the bucket was completely full of water. But there were still more drops that wanted to join, so they found another bucket and hopped in. Before long, there were two buckets of water—then three—then four—then ten—and then hundreds—and then thousands of buckets of water!
Along came a powerful breeze that blew over all the buckets, and all the water flowed together to make a mighty stream. Everywhere the water flowed, the grass turned green again and the flowers bloomed and the trees stood tall and straight once more.
All this happened because Higgins had a dream and his dream came true. Because he knew that although he was just a drop in the bucket, enough drops in the bucket make a bucketful, and when there are enough buckets with the wind behind them, then justice will roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.
Meditation:
Meditation on Broken Hearts
Let us enter into a time of meditation, contemplation, and prayer.
Feel the earth beneath your feet as it supports you.
Feel the love of this community as it surrounds and enfolds you.
Feel your breath as it flows in and out of your body.
Listen to your heartbeat.
Listen to your heart . . .
And how is it with your heart?
Does your heart feel whole, shielded by intellect, cocooned by reason, closed to feeling?
Or is it broken, fragile to the touch, brimming with the pain of loss? Or has your heart been broken and healed so many times
that it now lies open to the world,
knowing that true growth comes not without pain,
that tears may wear down barriers,
that we may carry the hearts of others
even when our own is too heavy for us to bear.
None of us has an unblemished heart, not one.
For such perfection can be found only in death,
and we who are alive still have much to heal.
So let us give thanks for the broken places in our hearts,
and in our lives.
For it is only through such brokenness that we may truly touch one another
and only through touching one another that the world may be healed.
Let us then give thanks for the brokenness that we share.
Song by Blood Sweat and Tears
And when I die:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=la9Iy0RTvCI
Sermon:
First of all in my sermon for today I want to wish for all of us a Happy Lunar New Year.
This occasion is also known as the Chinese New Year, and today is New Year’s Day on the “Lunisolar” (combined lunar and solar) calendar.
Besides Chinese culture, numerous other cultures also celebrate the new year on the lunar calendar today, including Vietnamese and Korean communities.
The new year celebration represents a new beginning among many of life’s mysteries.
A new beginning can be good or bad, depending on one’s point of view.
The greatest mysteries of life are beginnings and endings: life itself, birth, and death.
We don’t know where we are coming from or where we are going; hence birth and death are mysteries.
Our deeply materialistic culture is not fond of mysteries.
Perhaps with the perspective of a longer period of time, we can see that our culture has had a strong aversion to the whole subject of death and dying.
So our culture has a hard time thinking about the mystery of life itself at its beginning and its end.
Even though death is a universal part of human experience, it seems difficult to address it in polite society.
That can be tragic, because we may find ourselves without the caring support we need, just when we need it most.
The importance of caring for each other is often the most important single factor of positive decision making for us all.
Caring is equally important with all three of the mysteries that we are considering today: birth, life, and death.
Slogans are all too often used instead of genuine caring: Perhaps my least favorite of those is “right to life”.
Those words really mean “right to forced birth”.
The term pro-life often means the exact opposite of what it seems to say.
That is, a so-called pro-life position may cause more harm than good to living human beings and to life itself.
Ironically, the word, “life” appears with both slogans, in right to life and in pro-life.
In reality, neither has much to do with life.
Both have more to do with control, especially the control of women.
The right to choose one’s own way of life has to include the right to decide when and whether to give birth.
Surely a fetus has rights, too, but those rights cannot take away the rights of another person whose life could be threatened by enforcing the rights of the unborn.
Birth is a beautiful thing in many cases.
Beauty in those cases is by no means guaranteed to all, and the rights to make our own choices must not be limited by desires or needs of those who are not directly involved.
It’s my opinion that the life, freedom, and choices of a person being called upon to bring life into the world greatly outweigh the so-called right to life.
Likewise, and for similar reasons, there is a right to die that cannot be taken away from the dying by those with strong opinions about religion and a narrow view of ethics.
All of the mysteries of life and death are far too complex to restrict the rights of choice from people who are intimately and personally involved in the process of living and dying.
We have more rights regarding life’s mysteries than are often recognized or permitted.
To say the least, at the approach of death, only the person who is facing death can decide how to experience the mystery.
Again, birth and death are both endings and beginnings in mystery.
There is no right of any other person to make decisions regarding the life and death of any other living person.
So there is a right to die.
Suicide is a crime in many states, but there is no universal law that can or should prohibit it.
So-called death with dignity laws may or may not truly protect the rights we have by nature regarding the ultimate mystery.
The concept of the Undiscovered Country as a way of approaching the meaning of death is powerful and useful to us at this point.
Shakespeare first spoke of death in those terms, and it’s a way to speak of the mystery that is our primary theme for today.
Calling death the Undiscovered Country places the emphasis where it belongs: on how little we know about it.
We do know some important things about the experience of death and dying and all that it means to those who care for the dying as well as to those who are approaching the experience of death.
The great Elizabeth Kübler-Ross wrote of the experience.
She said that it comes about in five stages, both for the dying and for their loved ones:
Denial
Anger
Bargaining
Depression
Acceptance
One of the ways many of us deal with death and dying is with humor.
Garrison Keillor is a great humorist of our time, and he is aging.
Here are some of his comments on the subject:
When you get old, you’ve heard as much bad news as you need to know and now that mortality is tapping at your door, you should cheer up and spend your twilight years hanging out with people you really really like and eating food you love and spending your children’s inheritance on nice hotels and not Airbnbs with other people’s underwear under the bed. When the big coronary hits, you don’t want to be in seat 21D squeezed in between college sophomores, you want to be up in First Class where you’re more likely to find a cardiologist who can hit your chest with the heel of his hand in a way that startles the ventricles into pumping again.
Garrison Keillor
We can better use humor to cope with our own impending death.
It’s much more difficult to try to use humor to deal with the death of our loved ones.
Those of us who survive the death of someone we care about deeply will have to face major changes in our lives, and many of those changes may be unwelcome.
Those who have passed beyond the threshold of death have entered the mystery, and there are only a few clues regarding their experience.
The Tibetan Book of the Dead provides one Buddhist view of life on the other side, although it is far from the only one.
Not all Buddhists look for life beyond death, and some of the adherents of other religions (for example Judaism) would agree.
Many UU’s do not believe in the afterlife, and most would say something to the effect of, “We can’t know, so why worry about it?”
Most importantly, we can give our love and care to one another while we are together in this life, and if we can continue the same beyond death, so much the better.
Our attitude about the mysteries need not determine our behavior.
We can care about people with whom we disagree.
Such an attitude would be a great blessing in our culture today!
We can all live like Higgins, the drop with a dream, eager to give of ourselves to help meet the needs of others.
If we show our willingness to do so, others just might join us, and together we can change the world for the better.
We measure the passage of time with clocks and calendars, whether 12 or 24 hour clocks and whether lunar or solar calendars or some combination.
Maybe we need to measure the passage of time by the opportunities to care for each other.
In all of life’s mysteries, in birth, in daily life, and in the approach of death itself, we will always need each other.
Amen
So let it be
Blessed be
Congregational Response
Offering Information
Charity of the Month: GAYT - Guest at Your Table
Current Theme: Hope, Courage, Action
The injustices and crises of the past year have underscored the importance of our shared goal—a world free from oppression, where all can realize their full human rights. They also have emphasized just how big a task that is.
To meet the enormous challenges of today and build a more just future, we need big ideas and bold change. We must fundamentally transform the way things are so that we do not perpetuate systemic inequities and repeat the harms of the past.
At the UU Service Committee, we believe that the transformational solutions we need come from communities most directly impacted by injustice. Join us for this year’s Guest at Your Table program to learn what UUSC partners are doing to address immediate injustices – as well as what they envision for the future. At this extraordinary juncture in history, we think their stories will offer inspiration and guidance on the path toward justice.
NIUU
P.O. Box 221
CDA ID 83816
Extinguishing the Chalice :
The Work We Share
By Krista Taves
It is our work, shared with each other in covenant,
That creates and sustains this beloved community.
We extinguish this chalice, but its light lives on
in the directions we have chosen today.
The light of this faith lives on in us, together,
in our hearts, minds, bodies and spirits.
Amen and Blessed Be.
Closing words:
The Truth That Makes Us Free
By Anonymous
May the truth that makes us free,
and the hope that never dies,
and the love that casts out all fear
lead us forward together,
'till the day breaks,
and the shadows flee away.
Closing Circle
posted by pastorfred at 9:16 AM
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