We’ve reached the final installment of Rev. John A. Taylor’s sermons on heresy. Rev. Taylor, who served us as lead minister from 1964-1968, delivered these lectures not only to us on Sunday mornings but to the wider Champaign-Urbana community through radio programs on WILL. He tied these five pulpit addresses to the ages of man, which he defined as Birth, Growing Up, Marriage, Growing Old, and Death.

The pulpit address on Growing Old was a bi-partite screed on laziness and entitlement on the part of the aged and on the evils of “retirement homes.” He says, “These institutions are phenomenally successful and in exchange for your life’s savings they will provide you with years of irresponsibility.” Healthy old people who “buy into” them are “walking out on life.” And so forth. Before I leave this section, I want to point out that Jack Taylor was 34 years old when he wrote these sermons.

When, on the Sunday following his sermon on Growing Old, Rev. Taylor preached about Death, he reminded us that his definition of a heretic was one “who is a pioneer in existence, constantly seeking that which is more desirable, more responsible, and more humane.” The heretic is not willing to support “establishments,” and will “anger those who see him as a threat to their own security.” So, naturally, the heretic will not “abandon his heresy at the end.”

Here’s the complete paragraph where Rev. Taylor sets his thesis: “What the heretic is claiming in death is that a life without dignity is worse than no life at all. To live an active and affirmative life and to die suddenly and quietly is to die a heretic’s death. To live an active life, to build meaning on the frontier of existence and to choose and affirm death rather than to experience the degradation of dignity is a heretic’s death. What I am saying here is that if the heretic has examined all possibilities and still sees that the loss of his dignity is imminent, he will choose death. In short, the heretic will commit suicide rather than live a life which he cannot love.”

Rev. Taylor asked his congregants not to be frightened by the word suicide. He told them that the biblical King Saul, Socrates, Christian martyrs, and even Jesus of Nazareth “chose to die voluntarily rather than face the consequences which they believed would be denials of dignity.” He then spoke about the type of suicide more recognized now: “when a man gives up his life because he no longer chooses to live.” Here he began to speak about disease, and the loss of dignity due to an “incurable and agonizing illness, when every morsel of will is being broken under the constant pressure of pain, when the attitude of the suffering martyr has been crucified upon the cross of lingering destruction, a man should have the right to end it all.” 

But what about sin? What about “Providence alone will choose when a man shall die”? Rev. Taylor addressed that: “If Providence, if nature, had its way, many of us would be dead today. Medical science has interfered with the natural process to keep men alive. Should it not interfere to keep man dignified?” His conclusion for this portion of the sermon was that a chosen death can be a “ringing affirmation of man’s sense of dignity.”

Rev. Taylor’s final topic in this series of sermons were complaints about the funeral industry. He was appalled, he said, by morbidity and sentimentality, and “by open caskets, viewing rooms, massive cemeteries, extravagant floral arrangements, monstrous tombstones, and the massive assortment of euphemisms invented to evade the fact of death.” The heretic’s solution was organ donation, followed by “quick disposal, a service of remembrance.”