Why Not Give Up?

The scriptures referred to are Philippians 1:21 and John 16:33.

I began writing this on the fourth night in row of sleeplessness I had this week. Actually I did get a little bit of sleep on the previous three nights, between the bone-rattling chills and the inexplicable feeling of being too hot. I say inexplicable because the whole time my temperature never reached 100. So you couldn't even call it a true fever. I also suffered whole body muscle cramps and headaches. My neck hurt as it did before I had surgery on it at least a decade ago. The last two days upon awakening for good, everything hurt. Literally. Everything I had ever broken or had surgery on hurt badly all at once. Usually my joints are polite, taking numbers and waiting in line for their turn to cause me pain in their particular part of the body. Well, they finally coordinated their efforts. But after taking my Excedrin and morning meds, things simmered down, although the lack of good sleep joined with my usual lack of energy from Chronic Fatigue to render me useless. The next morning however, along with everything hurting, my GERD decided to join in, feeling like a hot poker was going through my chest. So I broke down and went to urgent care as everyone told me to. And as I in turn told them would happen, blood was taken and an EKG done and everything was normal. Except it didn't feel that way. But science had spoken and I was released to go home to continue a life lived in medical ambiguity and suffer from things that unfortunately don't do well on tests. That night the GERD and a persistent ache in my shattered shin, the one being held together by a dozen plates and screws, kept me up. I resisted taking Excedrin (opiates don't work on me) because it has caffeine and caffeine doesn't give you energy so much as it blocks sleep. But by 4 am it was obvious I wasn't going to sleep anyway and so I took the Excedrin and the pain lessened and I ended typing the first 3 pages of my sermon.

To sleep your mind has to shut down conscious thought. But I couldn't sleep so my thoughts were swirling in my brain until they coalesced around a single question: “Why not give up?” Why not, when everything is going wrong, and foreseeably could get worse, just give up? A lot of people do. Along with rates of depression, anxiety, insomnia, and substance abuse, suicide rates are rising during the pandemic. The factors contributing to all this are economic stress, social isolation, decreased access to the community, barriers to mental health treatment, and illness. It doesn't help that our news is relentlessly downbeat, what with undeniable global warming, the extinction of 150 species of animals a day, racial tensions, and politics so toxic that our democracy, which has survived so long because of our tradition of peaceful transition from one administration to the next, is now threatened. In the face of so much that is bad, what can one person do? Why not give up? Isn't that logical?

The problem with logic is that people think it is a method of discerning truth. It isn't. It is a method of staying self-consistent. All logic is supposed to begin with unproven but self-evident truths. But if someone begins with a false premise, they can be perfectly logical as well as perfectly wrong. When I was working with psychiatric patients some had the most elaborate delusional systems, worked out in exquisite detail. Some of them were breathtaking in their self-consistency. The problem wasn't that their delusions contradicted themselves, it was that they contradicted reality. The great enemy of logic is reality. It just is, whether you think it's logical or not.

To give up is to assume certain things that are not self-evident. A big one is that we can predict the future. That's one area of magic condemned in the Bible and yet we continually make plans that are dependent on certain things happening over which we have no control. Or, as we have seen, certain things not happening, like a pandemic. I bet none of the business plans of the major companies now struggling had a Plan B entitled “What to do in case of a worldwide plague.” I once was required to do a 5 year plan for my church. By year 3 it began to feel like science fiction. After all, the reason I was required to do it was that the Great Recession hit, our income had dropped and we were asking for a reduction in our assessment to the diocese because nobody had factored an economic disaster into our previous plans. I finished up my 5 year plan with a final entry that read, “Warren Buffett joins the church and all our problems are solved.” I submitted that to the Diocesan Assessment Committee and when I spoke to them, not one person said, “Ha! Ha! Father Todd.” Nor did they say, “You're not taking this seriously.” Obviously they hadn't read the whole thing. Because who knows what will happen in 5 years?

A disaster could take place. But so could a good result. The US entered World War 2 at the very end of 1941 after Japan had destroyed or damaged 19 US Navy ships, including 8 battleships, and more that 300 aircraft. The Nazis and their allies occupied almost all of Europe and much of North Africa. Japan occupied the Philippines, Korea, many parts of southeast Asia and lots of islands in the South Pacific. Hitler had some of the best generals. Japanese soldiers were willing to die rather than surrender. And yet within 5 years of our entering the war, Germany, Italy and Japan had all been defeated. But at the time that was not a sure thing.

Yet when we give up it is because we think we can see the future and it is all bad. At the turn of the last century, juvenile diabetes was a death sentence. Not anymore. Heck, when I entered nursing 40 years ago, stage 4 lung cancer was a death sentence. Today, not necessarily. Things change and not all changes are for the worse.

We don't know the future for certain. It is true that you can often rely on probability. This can tell you what is likely to happen, provided you take into account all possible factors. If you smoke your odds of getting lung cancer are 15 to 30 times higher than someone who doesn't smoke. If you quit you can reduce the chances of dying of certain cancers by up to 40%. You may not be able to control the future but you can improve or worsen the odds by your behavior.

But again, probability only tells you what is likely or unlikely to happen; it can't tell you what definitely will or won't happen. The odds of getting struck by lightning are 1 in 280 million. Though it can heat the surrounding air to 5 times the temperature of the sun, the odds of surviving being struck by lightning are a surprising 90%. But park ranger Roy Sullivan got struck by lightning not once or twice or 3 times but 7 times in 35 years. The odds of that happening are 4.15 in 100 followed by 30 zeroes. And he survived every time. Reality tends to go along with probability but it's not married to it.

Why not give up? For one thing, the future is not determined. There are probabilities but they are not absolute certainties. Things not only can change but are likely to and not necessarily for the worse. And while you can't control the future, you can improve the odds. And sometimes you have to take the advise of Anthony Greenbank, who prefaced his 1968 tome of worst case scenarios, The Book of Survival, with this sentence: “All the following advice presupposes that whoever faces catastrophe takes a deep breath and makes up his mind to have a really determined go at beating the odds.”

This is not the same as being a cockeyed optimist. It's not positive thinking or saying everything will turn out just as you wish. It's simply not forgetting that a favorable result is always a possibility.

But what about when there's a very strong probability that this life isn't going to provide you with a happy ending? In his letter to the church at Philippi Paul is in prison and facing martyrdom. He had survived being whipped, stoned and beaten but now the Emperor Nero would decide his fate, and he could either be acquitted or condemned to death. And he confesses to being torn between the two alternatives. To live for him is to work for Christ but to die is to be with Christ. He sees his predicament in a way few would: as a win-win proposition. “For to me, living is Christ and dying is gain.” (Philippians 1:21)

He's not talking suicide. He's saying he is willing to go along with whatever God gives him. 1600 years before a French theologian, mathematician and physicist articulated it, Paul anticipated Blaise Pascal's wager.

In his posthumously published notes, Pensees, Pascal points out that God either exists or he doesn't. And refusing to wager on which is true is not really an option because the outcomes are so radically different in their ultimate impact on us. If you base the way you live your life on the belief that God does exist, when you die you have everything to gain and nothing to lose. If you are right, you have eternal life; if you are wrong, you will never know that. Whereas the atheist will never get any vindication if he is right. He will be as ignorant of being right as a believer would be if he were wrong. But if you bet that there is no God and you are wrong, you lose everything.

But what do you gain living for God? Those who don't wish to believe in God say that all it gets you are rules that make your life less fun. And, yes, if you mean those rules will not allow you to get more stuff by cheating or stealing from others. They will not allow you to lie and deceive others to cover up your wrongs. They will not allow you to injure others to get back at injuries or perceived injuries done to you, nor if you simply want to hurt people. They will not let you do whatever you want to get whatever you want. If you are the kind of person who only lives for yourself, and doesn't care what that costs others, then, yes, they will not let you be that person. That person doesn't sound like much fun though. Nor are people going to stay friends for long with someone that dishonest, disloyal and sadistic.

Instead you gain a set of guidelines that will help you navigate the world for the good of all. You gain a community of like-minded people who care for you and will help you. You gain a set of beliefs that will help you interpret a confusing world. But that's true of any religion. Pascal's wager can only get you to see the importance of believing in God.

But there are gods who are so nonhuman as to have no emotions at all and are indifferent to us and our emotions and pain. And there are gods who are so absolutely just that their primary emotion towards us is anger over our sins. But there is one God who is Love, who created us out of love, whose justice derives from love and from whose love also comes mercy and grace. There is a God who loves us enough to become one of us and show us how to live and even when we gave him death does not hate us but turned his death into the ultimate gift of love and showed us that love is stronger than death and outlasts death. I choose that God.

Why? Because in Jesus I see hope. In Jesus I see a God who is not removed from pain and suffering and betrayal and injustice and death, but who has experienced it all firsthand...and overcome it all. And Jesus says if I follow him, though I may experience all those things, I too will overcome them.

But does it make sense to decide on the basis of hope? Yes. Because hope is essential to life and everything that is essential to life exists. We need food to live. Food exists. We need water to live. Water exists. We need air to live. Air exists. We need love to live a healthy life. Love exists. We need trust to live in healthy relationships. Trust exists. We need hope to continue to live. I have seen patients die when they lose hope. Why do people commit suicide? They lose hope. Hope is essential to life. Hope must exist.

But like food and love and trust, it has to be sought out and found.

Doctors have been able to diagnose diabetes since the time of ancient Greece. But they couldn't cure it. It was a death sentence. Yet doctors never gave up hope that a treatment must exist. And just under a century ago, in 1921, 3 scientists at the University of Toronto discovered insulin, and another purified it and on January 11, 1922 insulin was first used to treat diabetes. What they hoped for existed. It just had to be discovered.

Ebola, a disease that liquefies your insides, has a 75% death rate. It used to kill 3 quarters of the people who got it. It was incurable. Not anymore. Doctors never gave up hope on finding a treatment. Using drugs tested in 2014, scientists have been able to cut the death rate by 2/3s, down to 29%. Those treated as soon as they get sick have a death rate of as low as 6%. The cure they hoped for existed. It just had to be sought and found.

Why not give up? Because it is arrogant to believe I can predict the future and that it is all bad. Because it is a safe bet that God exists. And because hope is essential to life and therefore hope exists. And the God who gives me hope is the God of love I find in Jesus, who loves us enough to live and die for us and who rose again to demonstrate that love can overcome even death. I'm betting my life on Jesus. If I am wrong, I lose nothing I would not have lost anyway. If I am right, I gain him for eternity. And with him, everything else.