Dying at Easter, How Does a Former Senator Contemplate Life?

What Does Dying Sasse Believe?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

Ben Sasse is dying. In fact, doctors thought the 54-year-old former U.S. Senator from Nebraska might already be dead by now after he was diagnosed before Christmas with stage four pancreatic cancer, beyond surgical help. Yet he gets to celebrate another festival of eternal life thanks to aggressive chemotherapy at the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, along with morphine to control pain.

During a round of media appearances, Sasse said he’d like to make it to the nation’s 250^th anniversary on July 4, or even the University of Nebraska football season opener September 5. But mainly he’s trying to postpone death because “our son [Breck] just turned 14, and he feels like he needs a dad for a little while longer. So I want to knock him upside the head and wrestle with him and tell him how much I love him, and tell him stuff I wish I had done differently in my life,” as he told NPR. Among the “stuff’ was too much career workaholism and too little family time and Sabbath rest.

As a devout Christian, Sasse inevitably has also been talking about death, and life, and life eternal. On that, there’s particular interest in an hour-long chat with longtime friends posted by the Sola Media ministry:

Truth about death

First, Sasse is philosophical about his own impending death, simply because each of us will die. “I think acknowledging mortality is just fundamental wisdom,” he explains. “Telling the truth about death is really important.” And biblical Ecclesiastes and Job “are right there telling us that these bodies are decaying.”

Then Sasse contemplates the essence of Christianity, “how Jesus did everything on the cross to fulfill he whole law. . . . I am in Adam a member of this race. Imago Dei – we were created glorious in God’s image and meant for fellowship with Him. And yet we’re part of this rebel clan of — everybody. And that’s not the end of the story. The new Adam came from heaven, laid down all of his prerogatives, and came and swept us up, raised us, and seated us in heavenly places.” Or, as he told The Wall Street Journal, “I’m in need of the grace that only Jesus Christ’s historical death and resurrection can provide.”

Speaking of heaven, “We know Jesus as the first fruits has already risen and he’s preparing a place for us, and it’s going to be great for us. But even more, it’ll be great to be free from sin, be around the adoration feast of the Lamb, praising Christ, the One who speaks, and saves.”

A varied career

Early in his career, Sasse was the executive director of Sola Media’s predecessor, the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, co-edited its 2004 “Here We Stand!“ anthology, and was editor of its highbrow Modern Reformation print magazine,  now online only at www.modernreformation.org/. In addition to service in the U.S. Senate,  Sasse has been a management consultant, assistant secretary of Health and Human Services, University of Texas professor (he has a Yale Ph.D. in American history), the turnaround president of Midland University and a more stormy stretch as president of the University of Florida.

Religiously, Sasse has roots in three conservative Protestant denominations. He was raised in the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod (he will be buried in a rural Nebraska Lutheran churchyard) and later joined the United Reformed Churches, then the Presbyterian Church in America.

Despite cancer’s toll on his energies, Sasse on February 19 launched a new podcast that with humor and defiance he titles “Not Dead Yet.”  Guests such as this week’s Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett discuss classic meaning-of-life questions with Sasse and co-host Chris Stirewalt of NewsNation and thedispatch.com.

What’s lost

To sense what’s lost when Ben Sasse dies, check out his 2017 commencement address at an important evangelical campus, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary: [Disclosure: The Guy was present because his daughter Elizabeth was graduating.] Video Begins at 5:10:

Instead of the usual cheery “Hallmark” sentiments accompanied by “Disney” music, Sasse said, he would describe for new pastors the difficult U.S. culture they and the people they minister to will experience in the coming generation. To begin, people will question “that there’s any fixed meaning in words, and that we actually have to understand texts,” the Bible for instance.

Then, Americans are losing “neighborliness” and “physical rootedness to actual known communities.” People already have far fewer close friends than formerly, and they change towns more often. Churches will be the places that must combat the resulting “mass loneliness.” Economically, instead of building a stable lifelong career focus, often with the same employer, many or most will need to be prepared to change jobs every few years, and even switch to entirely different fields. Family and friendships are vital, and people need “a theological framework to make sense of death and suffering, to understand your place in a fallen world.” Yet scholars have found that the single most important driver of personal happiness is “meaningful work” that answers the question “do I think somebody needs me?”

In sum, tomorrow’s Christian churches will need help with “a kind of disruption and disorientation in the nature of work, and in the nature of community, that people haven’t had to grapple with before.”

Added Easter note

Turning to a different topic: The Guy notes what a challenge the great festival is for pulpiteers. Attendance is high, and so are expectations, with the added burden that this is the only Christian message some may hear all year. But it’s beyond all that, says the Rev. Fleming Rutledge, author of the classic “The Crucifixion” (Eerdmans) and regarded as one of the Episcopal Church’s finest preachers. She tells Christianity Today magazine why “it’s so difficult to preach on Easter Day”: “It’s beyond imagination. There has never been anything like the Resurrection before, and there is never going to be anything like it again until the last trumpet. And we don’t know how to talk about something like that. The only thing we can do is to try to go in the pulpit and be amazed. Just be amazed.”