The Miracle That is Ben Sasse

A few years ago I shared a speaking slate with Ben Sasse at an event called The Gathering, where people who take their faith and their giving seriously come together once a year to think about how those two things intersect.

I was there to lead the morning devotionals each day. Ben gave one of what I think of as the “smart person talks,” of which there were plenty, and of whom he was by a good margin the youngest. He was a sitting U.S. senator at the time, I was a pastor, and I don’t remember exactly how we got into conversation, but we did. What I remember is how unlike a politician he was up close. He was warm, funny, self-deprecating, and more theologically literate and spiritually serious than most.

We exchanged contact information and traded a few texts and emails after that. He suggested we get together sometime, and invited me to come visit him in Nebraska. Due to busy schedules that didn’t align at the time, our visit never materialized. But I’ve looked up to Ben ever since.

Last week Ross Douthat interviewed him for the New York Times. They discussed what Ben has been talking about a lot these days, which is that…

Ben is dying.

In December he was diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer. By the time the doctors found it, there were already tumors in his lymph system, his vascular system, his lungs, his liver, and his pancreas. Five kinds of cancer at once. They told him he had three or four months left. He’s about a hundred days in now, still breathing, still talking, and still laughing. His face in the Douthat interview is literally bleeding because the experimental drug he’s on, which has shrunk his tumor volume by seventy-six percent, has also stopped his body from being able to grow skin.

And still, watching him, you would almost not know what you were watching. You would think you were watching a free man who, despite appearances, is going to live forever and he knows it.

Because, well, he is.

I can’t tell you for certain what books or prayers or sermons are carrying Ben through all of this. I haven’t talked to or seen him in person since The Gathering. But I can tell you that watching him in that interview brought one particular passage to mind, and I’ll bet it has worked its way deep into him at some point, because what he is saying sounds so much like it.

The passage is the first question and answer of the Heidelberg Catechism, published in 1563 and taught to children and grieving adults ever since, especially in the Reformed tradition Ben comes out of. Most catechisms start with God’s attributes, or the purpose of humanity, or the nature of Scripture. Heidelberg starts somewhere else. It starts with comfort.

Q. What is your only comfort in life and in death?

A. That I am not my own, but belong—body and soul, in life and in death—to my faithful Savior, Jesus Christ. He has fully paid for all my sins with his precious blood, and has set me free from the tyranny of the devil. He also watches over me in such a way that not a hair can fall from my head without the will of my Father in heaven; in fact, all things must work together for my salvation. Because I belong to him, Christ, by his Holy Spirit, assures me of eternal life and makes me wholeheartedly willing and ready from now on to live for him.

The comfort Heidelberg promises you is not that God will keep you healthy. Not that life will make sense, or that the righteous will outlive the wicked, or that your prayers for healing will be answered the way you hope they’ll be. Not even the forgiveness of your sins, though of course that is a huge part of a Christian’s comfort.

What Heidelberg says about the source of your comfort, the only comfort you get in life and in death, is that you belong, body and soul. That you are not your own. That Christ, who bought you with his blood, is watching over you so carefully that not even a hair can fall from your head unless the Father in heaven intends it.

If you belong to him, then nothing that happens to you can un-belong you.

That is the whole point of Heidelberg #1. And that is a comfort most of us find hard to actually take hold of until something comes along and strips away all the other comforts we were leaning on instead.

When Douthat asked whether he was angry at God for not answering the prayers for healing, Ben said no. He said it swiftly and plainly, like a man who had already made peace with what Sheldon Vanauken called a severe mercy. In Ben’s own words…

“I wouldn’t want a sovereign God to defer to all of my prayers with a yes. I’m not omniscient. I don’t know what the weaving together of the tapestry of full redemption should look like, but I know going through the period of suffering that I’m going through is a benefit because it is a winnowing. I’m filled with dross. This suffering is not salvific, but it’s sanctifying, and I’m grateful for it.”

These are the words of a man who settled the comfort question long before he needed to settle it. He is not pretending the cancer is good. He is not performing to appear brave and strong in front of the cameras. He is just living out an answer to suffering and death that was given to him, and to all of us, centuries ago: We know that things must work together for good for those who love Christ and are called according to his purpose.

Even this.
Especially this.

Later in the interview, Ben quotes my former boss and mentor Tim Keller, who also died of pancreatic cancer. Keller said he hated pancreatic cancer and would never wish it on anyone, but he wouldn’t trade it back for his “former ignorance.” Keller called it the prayer of pancreatic cancer. It’s the prayer that comes when you finally stop believing you can build a storehouse of protection big enough to keep yourself safe. When, as Ben put it, you admit you can’t keep the planets in orbit and can’t even grow skin on your own face.

Whatever else that is, it is exactly the kind of Christian life Heidelberg expects you to end up living if you are paying attention. Not a triumphalist life. Not a despairing one either. It is a life in which everything you were quietly relying on instead of Christ gets stripped away, a little at a time, until the only thing left holding you up is the one thing that was actually holding you up the whole time.

I know the word only in that catechism answer makes some people hesitate. We can accept Jesus as a comfort. What we resist is Jesus as the only comfort. But if you think carefully about the alternatives, it’s hard to keep resisting.

The comfort of health fails the moment your body turns on you. The comfort of success fails the moment the board meets without you. The comfort of family fails the moment the scary diagnosis is brought up for the first time at the dinner table. The comfort of reputation fails the moment somebody assassinates your character through gossip and slander.

Any comfort you can lose is by definition not an only comfort.

And Heidelberg knows that. It assumes that you will find this out for yourself sooner or later, possibly in an emergency room or a funeral home or a phone call you weren’t expecting, and it wants you to have somewhere solid to stand when you do.

Ben Sasse has had most of these comforts stripped from him all at once. His health is gone and the prognosis is terminal. His illustrious, fulfilling, and meaningful career is over. He will not, as he has openly grieved, walk his daughters down the aisle or coach his fourteen-year-old son through his late teens. These are not small losses, and Ben does not pretend they are. He told Douthat he felt a real heaviness about not being there for his boy at sixteen and for his girls at their weddings.

And still, Ben's prevailing reality is that he belongs, body and soul, to his faithful Savior Jesus Christ.

That’s what you see when you watch him. That’s why he can sit in front of a camera half-high on morphine with his face bleeding and talk about the first miracle of Jesus turning water into wine being, in his words, “a big-ass party,” and about how we get to approach the Almighty and call him Abba, Daddy, Father, and how that is going to be pretty glorious when we get to do it face to face. That’s why, when Douthat breaks down in tears at the end of the interview, Ben laughs and teases him for opening up a can of pansy ass.

A man who talks like that is not dying like a stoic. A stoic faces death alone and grits his teeth through it. Ben isn't doing that, and he isn't dying afraid either. He is smiling and at peace, because he isn't alone and doesn't have to grit anything. I dare say this is a miracle mightier than the healing of any physical disease. A heart that can look death in the face and talk about big-ass parties is already stepping into resurrection territory.

Most of us will never die of pancreatic cancer in our early to mid 50s. Most of us will die some other way, probably slower and messier and with less clarity about what’s happening to us. But every one of us, long before our time comes, will die a thousand smaller deaths along the way. A job that ends. A friendship that tanks. A body that starts to betray us. A reputation that fails to overcome the scrutiny and slander. A child who suffers. A marriage that struggles. And the question we will face in each of those smaller dyings is the same question Heidelberg puts to us on page one.

What is your only comfort in life and in death? What are you actually standing on?

If what you're standing on is yourself, if your comfort is that you are your own and that you've built thick enough walls to keep the wolves out, then every setback becomes a crisis and every ache, pain, and loss becomes a haunting dress rehearsal for the day you finally go poof.

You have nowhere to stand.

But if your comfort is that you belong to a faithful Savior who bought you with his own body and blood and who is watching over you so carefully that not a hair falls from your head apart from his will, then the losses are still real, the grief is still heavy, the tears are still tender and sacred, and death is still the wicked thief Ben has called it. But you grieve as someone who belongs. You suffer as someone who has been bought with a price. And when you finally die, you will die the same way Jesus died and rose, because he has already absorbed the sting of your dying into his own.

That is what Ben is showing us.

I wish I had made that visit to Nebraska. I wish I had sat across a table from Ben and asked him the kinds of things I am asking about and observing in him now from a distance. But I did get to be in the same room with him once, years ago, when neither of us knew what was coming, and I am grateful for it. He was gracious to me then, and he is teaching me still.

May God give us all what he has given Ben. Not the cancer, please God. But the freedom of belonging that makes even something as awful as terminal cancer, in the end, not terminal at all.

We are not our own. We belong to him.

Thanks be to God.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​