57 Sermon Illustrations on Cancer

This story was written by Father John Powell, a retired professor at Loyola University in Chicago. Father Powell is advanced in years, but the story is still fresh in his mind and he confirmed that it is true, according to TruthOrFiction.com

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A TRUE STORY about an Atheist Theology Student Who Was Found by God

Some twelve years ago, I stood watching my university students file into the classroom for our first session in the Theology of Faith. That was the first day I first saw Tommy. My eyes and my mind both blinked. He was combing his long flaxen hair, which hung six inches below his shoulders.

It was the first time I had ever seen a boy with hair that long. I guess it was just coming into fashion then. I know in my mind that it isn’t what’s on your head but what’s in it that counts; but on that day I was unprepared and my emotions flipped.

I immediately filed Tommy under “S” for strange... very strange. Tommy turned out to be the “atheist in residence” in my Theology of Faith course. He constantly objected to, smirked at, or whined about the possibility of an unconditionally loving Father-God. We lived with each other in relative peace for one semester, although I admit he was for me at times a serious pain in the back pew.

When he came up at the end of the course to turn in his final exam, he asked in a slightly cynical tone: “Do you think I’ll ever find God?”

I decided instantly on a little shock therapy. “No!” I said very emphatically.

“Oh,” he responded, “I thought that was the product you were pushing.”

I let him get five steps from the classroom door and then called out: “Tommy! I don’t think you’ll ever find him, but I am absolutely certain that He will find you!” He shrugged a little and left my class and my life.

I felt slightly disappointed at the thought that he had missed my clever line: “He will find you!” At least I thought it was clever. Later I heard that Tommy had graduated and I was duly grateful.

Then a sad report, I heard that Tommy had terminal cancer. Before I could search him out, he came to see me. When he walked into my office, his body was very badly wasted, and the long hair had all fallen out as a result of chemotherapy. But his eyes were bright and his voice was firm, for the first time, I believe. “Tommy, I’ve thought about you so often. I hear you are sick!” I blurted out.

“Oh, yes, very sick. I have cancer in both lungs. It’s a matter of weeks.”

“Can you talk about it, Tom?”

“Sure, what would you like to know?”

“What’s it like to be only twenty-four and dying?”

“Well, it could be worse.”

“Like what?”

“Well, like being fifty and having no values or ideals, like being fifty and thinking that booze, seducing women, and making money are the real ‘biggies’ in life.”

I began to look through my mental file cabinet under “S” where I had filed Tommy as strange. (It seems as though everybody I try to reject by classification God sends back into my life to educate me.)

"But what I really came to see you about,” Tom said, “is something you said to me on the last day of class.” (He remembered!) He continued, “I asked you if you thought I would ever find God and you said, ‘No!’ which surprised me. Then you said, ‘But he will find you.’ I thought about that a lot, even though my search for God was hardly intense at that time. (My “clever” line. He thought about that a lot!) But when the doctors removed a lump from my groin and told me that it was malignant, then I got serious about locating God. And when the malignancy spread into my vital organs, I really began banging bloody fists against the bronze doors of heaven.

"But God did not come out. In fact, nothing happened. Did you ever try anything for a long time with great effort and with no success? You get psychologically glutted, fed up with trying. And then you quit.

"Well, one day I woke up, and instead of throwing a few more futile appeals over that high brick wall to a God who may be or may not be there, I just quit. I decided that I didn’t really care... about God, about an afterlife, or anything like that. I decided to spend what time I had left doing something more profitable. I thought about you and your class and I remembered something else you had said: ‘The essential sadness is to go through life without loving. But it would be almost equally sad to go through life and leave this world without ever telling those you loved that you had loved them.’ So I began with the hardest one: my Dad. He was reading the newspaper when I approached him.”

“Dad”...

“Yes, what?” he asked without lowering the newspaper.

“Dad, I would like to talk with you.”

“Well, talk.”

“I mean... It’s really important.”

The newspaper came down three slow inches. “What is it?”

“Dad, I love you. I just wanted you to know that.” Tom smiled at me and said with obvious satisfaction, as though he felt a warm and secret joy flowing inside of him: “The newspaper fluttered to the floor. Then my father did two things I could never remember him ever doing before. He cried and he hugged me.

And we talked all night, even though he had to go to work the next morning. It felt so good to be close to my father, to see his tears, to feel his hug, to hear him say that he loved me. “It was easier with my mother and little brother. They cried with me, too, and we hugged each other, and started saying real nice things to each other. We shared the things we had been keeping secret for so many years. I was only sorry about one thing: that I had waited so long. Here I was just beginning to open up to all the people I had actually been close to.

“Then, one day I turned around and God was there. He didn’t come to me when I pleaded with him. I guess I was like an animal trainer holding out a hoop, ‘C’mon, jump through.’ ‘C’mon, I’ll give you three days... three weeks.’ Apparently God does things in his own way and at his own hour. “But the important thing is that he was there. He found me. You were right. He found me even after I stopped looking for him.”

“Tommy,” I practically gasped, “I think you are saying something very important and much more universal than you realize. To me, at least, you are saying that the surest way to find God is not to make him a private possession, a problem solver, or an instant consolation in time of need, but rather by opening to love. You know, the Apostle John said that. He said God is love, and anyone who lives in love is living with God and God is living in him.’ Tom, could I ask you a favor? You know, when I had you in class you were a real pain. But (laughingly) you can make it all up to me now. Would you come into my present Theology of Faith course and tell them what you have just told me? If I told them the same thing it wouldn’t be half as effective as if you were to tell them.”

“Oooh... I was ready for you, but I don’t know if I’m ready for your class.”

“Tom, think about it. If and when you are ready, give me a call.” In a few days Tommy called, said he was ready for the class, that he wanted to do that for God and for me. So we scheduled a date. However, he never made it.

He had another appointment, far more important than the one with me and my class. Of course, his life was not really ended by his death, only changed.

He made the great step from faith into vision. He found a life far more beautiful than the eye of man has ever seen or the ear of man has ever heard or the mind of man has ever imagined.

Before he died, we talked one last time. “I’m not going to make it to your class,” he said.

“I know, Tom.”

“Will you tell them for me? Will you... tell the whole world for me?”

“I will, Tom. I’ll tell them. I’ll do my best.”

So, to all of you who have been kind enough to hear this simple statement about love, thank you for listening. And to you, Tommy, somewhere in the sunlit, verdant hills of heaven: “I told them, Tommy...as best I could.”

How many times have you heard, “There’s always hope.” Some would promptly reply, “You’re wrong,” when, in fact, they’re the ones who are wrong. When the Lord is part of the equation -- and He is for every truly born-again child of God -- there’s hope every single moment of every single day ... until, that is, the arrival of that day that Paul spoke of in Romans 8:18-25, when we no longer will need hope.

In those verses, the apostle wrote about “hope” of that day when “the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God” (verse 21). That is the day for which we “groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies” (verse 23b). But then Paul said that it is hope because it is something we do not yet have. “But hope that is seen is no hope at all,” he said. Then he asked, “Who hopes for what he already has?” (verse 24). Paul concluded by describing the incredible value of hope in verse 25: “But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.” What we can wait for patiently is that day when hope is no longer needed, because of the blessed reality we are experiencing.

So you see, there will be, indeed, for every believer a day when there will be no hope, and it doesn’t have to be one of those days when things finally get so bad that any optimism on your part is unrealistic. Paul linked that day, when all you hope for is fully realized, to the most amazing event of human history, which Christians around the world will be celebrating this weekend (and, actually, what the first Christians celebrated every Sunday, which they named the “Lord’s Day,” to commemorate Jesus’ resurrection.)

Paul wrote the church in Corinth, “And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost. If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men” (1 Corinthians 15:17-19). He then immediately affirmed the reality, “But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep” (verse 20). The historical fact of His resurrection guarantees our own. That makes hope a whole lot more than simply wishful thinking; that for which we hope is an absolute certainty.

I am certain that many of you find yourselves in situations that have been so difficult for so long, and you’ve hoped that they would get more bearable for so long, that you’re determined to do everything you can to refuse to even consider the possibility of things getting better because, frankly, you’re worn out from having your hopes dashed day after day after week after month after year.

Millions of families, including my own, were transported in time a couple of weeks ago back to that time when they -- like Elizabeth Edwards and her presidential candidate husband, John -- heard those ominous words “not curable but treatable.” That means that barring some medical breakthrough, the family member battling breast cancer will more than likely sooner rather than later breathe her last and slip into eternity, and all the finest physicians in the world can do is to try to prolong her life a matter of days or weeks or months and, hopefully, enhance the quality of her remaining days. Hope of survival beyond just a few years is virtually non-existent (though in my wife’s case, our doctors never dismissed the possibility, albeit extremely remote, of a miracle).

Thankfully, when we traveled that road a few years ago, we still had the hope of heaven for my beautiful wife and the hope that a full and meaningful life would still be possible for a 48-year-old man who was single for the first time in his adult life and two lovely young adult women who could no longer spend time with their mother. I am happy to report that all those hopes have been realized in our lives and, I know, in the lives of countless others who know the Risen Christ personally.

As long as we have breath, we have hope in Jesus; it is only when we breathe our last that things are hopeless -- but it is then that we need no hope, because all we could ever hope for will be fully realized in our Risen Savior.

Hallelujah! He is risen!

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John Loudat is editor of the Baptist New Mexican, the newsjournal of the Baptist Convention of New Mexico.

Rebecca McLaughlin is a Christian writer who is being treated for cancer. She wrote:

My guess is most of us are more afraid of physical sickness than some nebulous spiritual kind. Right now, as I await my diagnosis, it’s tempting to feel like the most important question is, “Do I have cancer?” But if Jesus is the Son of God, it’s not. Our most important sickness is spiritual. We’re all terminally ill. Without a doctor sent by God himself, there is no hope.

A dying person’s last words are often, and perhaps too easily, held out as the key to understanding all that went before, and so it has been with Elizabeth Edwards.

Her final public message, posted on Facebook, was characteristically eloquent, to the point, and full of grace -- that last word being one that Edwards herself often invoked, and one that was often applied to her, especially as she bore up under so many trials, the last of them the cancer that claimed her life on Tuesday.

But the opening line of her public farewell was especially notable for its careful phrasing (Edwards, who did post-graduate work in literature, was, after all, a student of the novelist Henry James) about matters of the soul:

“You all know that I have been sustained throughout my life by three saving graces -- my family, my friends, and a faith in the power of resilience and hope,” Edwards wrote.

That she seemed to carefully evade a mention of God or Jesus or things eternal and Christian was striking, and it struck some as “odd,” in the words of “American Power” blogger and neocon Donald Douglas.

“I can’t say what it is -- spiritual or otherwise -- that animates her sense of grace, but it’s not God,” Douglas wrote before proceeding to add some even less graceful conjecture.

“Being anti-religion is cool, so Edwards’ non-theological theology gets props from the neo-communists,” he said. “Still, at her death bed and giving what most folks are calling a final goodbye, Elizabeth Edwards couldn’t find it somewhere down deep to ask for His blessings as she prepares for the hereafter? I guess that nihilism I’ve been discussing reaches up higher into the hard-left precincts than I thought.”

Douglas drew some sharp critiques in the comments on his post but also strong support, and even in the report on the faith angle at Christianity Today -- the leading mainstream evangelical publication -- some commenters rued Edwards’ apparent lack of orthodox Christian faith.

But a closer look at the faith of Elizabeth Edwards offers a more nuanced view, and one that might elicit more charity from those who would judge her at her death.

What seems clear above all is that Edwards’ late-in-life spirituality was forged by the flames of unspeakable heartache, from the death of her 16-year-old son, Wade, in a car accident in 1996 to the faithlessness of her husband, John Edwards, who ran for president in 2008 and thrust his wife into the public spotlight while he betrayed her with a private affair. And of course, there was the cancer that since 2004 ravaged her body and also shaped her theology.

As Adele M. Stan recounted in a July 2007 profile of Edwards for the liberal journal the American Prospect, Edwards told audiences that she “grew up in the Christian tradition” and attended a Methodist church with her husband, but that during her early years as a child in Japan -- her father was a Navy pilot, so the family moved around -- “I grew up with Shintos and Buddhists.”

That Eastern influence seemed to emerge as Edwards faced her illness:

“I have, I think, somewhat of an odd version of God,” Edwards explained to an audience of women bloggers when asked how her beliefs inform her politics. “I do not have an intervening God. I don’t think I can pray to him -- or her -- to cure me of cancer.”

Edwards, according to Stan, laughed after describing God as “her” -- hardly a heresy and certainly understandable given her audience -- and continued on:

“I appreciate other people’s prayers for that [a cure for her cancer], but I believe that we are given a set of guidelines, and that we are obligated to live our lives with a view to those guidelines. And I don’t believe that we should live our lives that way for some promise of eternal life, but because that’s what’s right. We should do those things because that’s what’s right.”

Stan thought Edwards sounded a bit like John Lennon singing “Imagine,” essentially arguing that there is nothing beyond ourselves and this moment, so make the best of it.

Yet Edwards clearly seemed far more engaged with the dilemmas of God and evil -- and grace -- than such a narrow reading allows.

In a moving interview with Larry King in May 2009, for example, she spoke frankly about the death of her son and the religious questions it raised and the recalibrations it forced her to make.

In the weeks and months after Wade’s death, she told King, “I had this idea that God was going to find some way to turn back time and he was going to be alive.” She continued to ask herself, as many do, whether she had done something wrong -- did she not teach him well enough, not get him a safe enough car? And then when cancer struck, and her husband’s affair was revealed, she agonized about the possibility of her own cosmic cooperation in it all.

“And I have to recognize with each of these things, they just happen,” she told King. “You didn’t have to do something wrong to justify them.”

But she added, “You still sort of wonder: Is there some grand plan where you’ve done something someplace else?”

Edwards said she had to move on from such magical and negative thinking, and she quoted a line from the Bill Moyers PBS special on the Book of Genesis, to the effect that “You get the God you have, not the God you want.”

“The God I wanted was going to intervene. He was going to turn time back. The God I wanted was -- I was going to pray for good health and he was going to give it to me,” she said. “Why in this complicated world, with so much grief and pain around us throughout the world, I could still believe that, I don’t know. But I did. And then I realized that the God that I have was going to promise me salvation if I lived in the right way and he was going to promise me understanding. That’s what I’m sort of asking for ... let me understand why I was tested.”

Such openness to doubt and, in particular, to the persistence of suffering runs counter to powerful currents of American Christianity that stress the blessings (mostly material) that will flow to those who believe (and donate), as well as to the premium so many Christians place on voicing a confident and undiluted conviction, no matter what the reality.

For instance, compare the testimony of Elizabeth Edwards to that of her husband, who frequently touted his faith -- as it seems every candidate for office must -- which he said came “roaring back” after the death of Wade. Edwards alternately cited Jesus to reprove Americans for not caring for the poor and for his (albeit reluctant) opposition to gay marriage.

John Edwards, who was raised a devout Southern Baptist and is now a Methodist, told Beliefnet in 2007 that his Christian faith also helped him deal with Elizabeth’s cancer.

“It’s important in my case to have a personal relationship with the Lord, so that I pray daily and I feel that relationship all the time,” he said. “And when I’m faced with difficult decisions, which I regularly am, I very often go to Him in prayer.”

This was at the time Edwards was having an affair with a campaign videographer, Rielle Hunter, who would soon bear their child.

The testimony of Elizabeth Edwards, by contrast, seems much more human, but is also orthodox in channeling the Stoic philosophy that influenced early Christians along with the biblical tradition of lamentation, from the Psalmist whose words are echoed in the cry of Jesus dying on the Cross: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

And Elizabeth Edwards’ view that Christians should take care of others not out of a self-interested salvation but out of selflessness and love of God is also about as mainstream as you can get, since it was the command of Jesus himself.

Moreover, Edwards seemed increasingly embedded in what might be described as the “communion of saints,” relying on those around her to provide the spiritual support she so badly needed and desired.

“Connections have enriched and sustained me; they have strengthened me by holding me up when I needed it, and they have strengthened me by letting me hold up my end when it was needed,” she wrote in her 2006 memoir, “Saving Graces.”

That communal sense of the faith is also characteristic of American believers, as demonstrated by an extensive study released Tuesday, the same day Edwards passed away. The surveys showed that across all creeds, religious people were more satisfied than non-religious people and that the satisfaction was tied to the number of close friends people said they had in their religious congregation rather than factors like individual prayer, strength of belief, or subjective feelings of God’s love or presence.

Whatever Elizabeth Edwards believed at the hour of her death is known only to God, and is beyond the scope of our ability to judge or to affect. But her honesty in posing hard questions that most leave unasked -- or simply gloss over with biblical bromides -- seems like a legacy equal to the joys and griefs of her life.