Life From Death
Stories
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Contents
"Life from Death" by Frank Ramirez
"This is Nuts" by C. David McKirachan
Life from Death
by Frank Ramirez
2 Corinthians 5:20b--6:10
We are treated as... dying, and see -- we are alive...(2 Corinthians 6:8-9)
She was raised in a shack that was part of the slave quarters on a rural Virginia tobacco plantation. As a child her hands were stained from harvesting that tobacco. As an adult she moved to Maryland to improve life for her children. She died far too young, at the age of 31, at one of the few hospitals that would take African Americans as patients (as long as they entered by a separate door from whites and were content with being treated in separate rooms).
And as part of a story that is hard to believe, cells from her body are alive today, and have been used to help cure polio, cancer, and other diseases.
Henrietta Lacks (1920-1951) is sometimes referred to as “The Immortal Henrietta Lacks,” and sometimes referred to simply as “He-La.” She was born Loretta Pleasant, and after her mother died four years later during childbirth, her father sent the chidlren to be raised by several different relatives. Loretta was raised by her grandfather, Tommy Lacks, and eventually married his son, her cousin. The couple had five children. Somewhere along the way, no one is sure how or why, she became known as Henrietta.
Between the birth of her second and third child Henrietta and her family had moved to Baltimore, seeking the possiblity of prosperity of employment with Bethlehem Steel. Not long after the birth of her fifth child she went to the hospital at Johns Hopkin because she’d felt an odd lump during that pregnancy. 1951 was a year of diagnosis, radiation treatments, numerous blood transfusions, and ultimately an agonizing death at the hospital from cervical cancer. She was buried in an unmarked grave. Her husband, like her father, sent the children to live with a relative. It seemed like Henrietta’s earthly story was over.
Only it wasn’t. Early in her treatment a sample of the cancer was taken from her body, without her permission. A cancer researcher at Johns Hopkin, George Otto Gey, received some cancer cells from the sample taken from Henrietta. Up until then human cells did not last more than a few days after the sample was taken.
Things were different with Henrietta’s cancer cells. They multiplied and prospered. Cells begat more cells, and soon these valuable cells were made available by Dr. Gey to any researchers who asked for them.
While Dr. Gey himself did not make any money off the commercialization of the He-La cells, (his wife Mary eventually had to create a separate checking account for her husband so he wouldn’t spend their grocery money on scientific equipment), the demand became so great that the manufacture of the cells was commercialized. Estimates vary widely, but it is tought there are at least twenty tons of these tiny cells used in labs around the world for medical research.
It was Dr. Gey’s habit to name each cell sample by using the first two letters of the donor’s first and last name. The cells from Henrietta Lacks became known as HeLa. HeLa became famous throughout the scientific world. Dr. Jonas Salk used the cells to test and perfect his polio vaciene. Hers were the first human cells to be cloned. They were used in AIDS research, cancer research, gene mapping, radiation research -- the list is endless. Over eleven thousand patents were taken out involving her cells. At one point nearly every cell line had been contaminated or eliminated by HeLa cells.
But if every scientist knew about HeLa, almost none knew about Henrietta Lacks. For a time her name was misreported as Helen Lane. In addition, her descendants knew nothing about what had been accomplished with their mother’s immortal cells.
Over time a few magazine articles appeared, allowing the public, and the family, to know what had been done. A best selling book, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (2009),” by Rebecca Sloot, opened the flood gates as scientists and the legal system began to grapple with the ethical issues that went with using an individual’s tissues for research without their permission -- or a share in any profits. Many of those issues are not settled to this day. Family members, however, now have some say in the use of HeLa cells, and meanwhile, the living cells taken from a woman long dead, continue to aid in medical research and medical breakthroughs.
And in a certain way the apostle Paul, writing to the Corinthian churches, makes it clear that despite his suffering (illustrated by an impressively long list), as well as his possibly impending death, can through Jesus, bring life!
Frank Ramirez is a native of Southern California and is the senior pastor of the Union Center Church of the Brethren near Nappanee, Indiana. Frank has served congregations in Los Angeles, California; Elkhart, Indiana; and Everett, Pennsylvania. He and his wife Jennie share three adult children, all married, and three grandchildren. He enjoys writing, reading, exercise, and theater..
* * *
This is Nuts
by C. David McKirachan
Psalm 51:1-17
This is nuts.
There are things I’ve done leaving memories that make me wince. From any perspective they are ugly, leaving my best in the dust. The wince comes because I am embarrassed at being so idiotic and sad and sorry that I separated myself from the other person or people involved. The definition of sin. They leave me with a self that is less than I would prefer, a self that doesn’t hold others with a tender hand.
There are ultimately no excuses for these omissions or commissions. When I search for one, I am doing a lot of denying or deal making, if I would have... then it wouldn’t have been..., classic stepping stones on the pathway of grieving that finally lead to acceptance. An acceptance of what I’ve done.
Thus the winces.
But these moments are gone, left as painful memories. People are gone as well, beyond my ken, or beyond this mortal coil. Apologies are single hands trying to clap, silent parodies of sundered moments that could have been, might have been something other than a scar that hasn’t quite healed.
I have gone to individuals and asked their forgiveness. Sometimes people shake their heads and laugh, not even understanding my angst. Sometimes people have said it was no big deal, but I wonder. And some have given me the look and perhaps a shake, that leaves me in my separateness. But no matter the response, the event still has power.
I’ve wondered about that. And I’ve realized that it’s because the sin, the separation lives not so much between myself and another. It lives within me. The wound is here, in me.
There have been few people in my life that I trusted to forgive me, really forgive me. With most people I assume that they will make me pay, either by retaliation, or worse by walking away. These are not unreasonable responses to negative situations. In some ways they represent a much more sane approach to forming and maintaining relationships than forgiveness. If someone hurts us, or lets us down, it makes sense to reinforce our ego boundaries.
Scott Peck said that “Love is the will to extend oneself for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual wellbeing.” But when you extend and you get wacked, it’s sane to stop extending and protect the self. Thus we lose love. Such is life. There are few I trust to accept me, if I’m being the fool that I can be. And I would readily admit that the few I do trust tend to be a little nuts.
Thus the Psalmist has it right when they write, “Against thou and thou only have I sinned.”
Ultimately if we are to be anything but sad scorekeepers, weighing our relationships as we would balance sheets, debits and credits, if we are to be involved in grace whether we be on the receiving or the dispensing end, if we are to be involved in this in-sane business of love, we have to understand that this business of sin is ‘too much with us, late and soon.’ The human condition is one of imperfection and sometime ugliness. We are rarely living up to the potential within us or the possibilities of the moment. We live in fear of so many different things that we are always ready to strike or be struck.
And we live far from trust, grace, or love.
On this day the ashes of our lives are right there for us to see. They are made from last year’s palms, the celebrations of the folly of our expectations and demands that we want what we want, leaving the messes we’ve made out of the picture. And the palms are burned and ground to ash. And they mark us with the cross.
I’m Presbyterian and we don’t get into things like putting on ashes. But early on in my ministry I began distributing ashes on this day, and people came with an incredible sense of relief. They came without theological explanations, with nothing but a yearning to be forgiven. They came in the dimness of their souls, yearning for the light of the one that we can trust to be nuts enough to love us, even when we are unlovable.
Thus begins the journey to the cross. Thus we remember what He did to try to get it across to us that no matter who we are or whom we’ve hurt, He’s willing to forgive us. Thus He takes each ugly moment and all of that awful pain and fear onto his back, into his hands, and cries, “Father forgive them for they know not what they do.”
He’s nuts.
Thank God.
C. David McKirachan is pastor of the Presbyterian Church at Shrewsbury in central New Jersey. He also teaches at Monmouth University. Two of his books, I Happened Upon a Miracle and A Year of Wonder, have been published by Westminster John Knox Press. McKirachan was raised in a pastor's home and he is the brother of a pastor, and he has discovered his name indicates that he has druid roots. Storytelling seems to be a congenital disorder. He lives with his 21-year-old son Ben and his dog Sam.
*****************************************
StoryShare, March 1, 2017, issue.
Copyright 2017 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to the StoryShare service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons, in worship and classroom settings, in brief devotions, in radio spots, and as newsletter fillers. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to permissions@csspub.com or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., 5450 N. Dixie Highway, Lima, Ohio 45807.
"Life from Death" by Frank Ramirez
"This is Nuts" by C. David McKirachan
Life from Death
by Frank Ramirez
2 Corinthians 5:20b--6:10
We are treated as... dying, and see -- we are alive...(2 Corinthians 6:8-9)
She was raised in a shack that was part of the slave quarters on a rural Virginia tobacco plantation. As a child her hands were stained from harvesting that tobacco. As an adult she moved to Maryland to improve life for her children. She died far too young, at the age of 31, at one of the few hospitals that would take African Americans as patients (as long as they entered by a separate door from whites and were content with being treated in separate rooms).
And as part of a story that is hard to believe, cells from her body are alive today, and have been used to help cure polio, cancer, and other diseases.
Henrietta Lacks (1920-1951) is sometimes referred to as “The Immortal Henrietta Lacks,” and sometimes referred to simply as “He-La.” She was born Loretta Pleasant, and after her mother died four years later during childbirth, her father sent the chidlren to be raised by several different relatives. Loretta was raised by her grandfather, Tommy Lacks, and eventually married his son, her cousin. The couple had five children. Somewhere along the way, no one is sure how or why, she became known as Henrietta.
Between the birth of her second and third child Henrietta and her family had moved to Baltimore, seeking the possiblity of prosperity of employment with Bethlehem Steel. Not long after the birth of her fifth child she went to the hospital at Johns Hopkin because she’d felt an odd lump during that pregnancy. 1951 was a year of diagnosis, radiation treatments, numerous blood transfusions, and ultimately an agonizing death at the hospital from cervical cancer. She was buried in an unmarked grave. Her husband, like her father, sent the children to live with a relative. It seemed like Henrietta’s earthly story was over.
Only it wasn’t. Early in her treatment a sample of the cancer was taken from her body, without her permission. A cancer researcher at Johns Hopkin, George Otto Gey, received some cancer cells from the sample taken from Henrietta. Up until then human cells did not last more than a few days after the sample was taken.
Things were different with Henrietta’s cancer cells. They multiplied and prospered. Cells begat more cells, and soon these valuable cells were made available by Dr. Gey to any researchers who asked for them.
While Dr. Gey himself did not make any money off the commercialization of the He-La cells, (his wife Mary eventually had to create a separate checking account for her husband so he wouldn’t spend their grocery money on scientific equipment), the demand became so great that the manufacture of the cells was commercialized. Estimates vary widely, but it is tought there are at least twenty tons of these tiny cells used in labs around the world for medical research.
It was Dr. Gey’s habit to name each cell sample by using the first two letters of the donor’s first and last name. The cells from Henrietta Lacks became known as HeLa. HeLa became famous throughout the scientific world. Dr. Jonas Salk used the cells to test and perfect his polio vaciene. Hers were the first human cells to be cloned. They were used in AIDS research, cancer research, gene mapping, radiation research -- the list is endless. Over eleven thousand patents were taken out involving her cells. At one point nearly every cell line had been contaminated or eliminated by HeLa cells.
But if every scientist knew about HeLa, almost none knew about Henrietta Lacks. For a time her name was misreported as Helen Lane. In addition, her descendants knew nothing about what had been accomplished with their mother’s immortal cells.
Over time a few magazine articles appeared, allowing the public, and the family, to know what had been done. A best selling book, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (2009),” by Rebecca Sloot, opened the flood gates as scientists and the legal system began to grapple with the ethical issues that went with using an individual’s tissues for research without their permission -- or a share in any profits. Many of those issues are not settled to this day. Family members, however, now have some say in the use of HeLa cells, and meanwhile, the living cells taken from a woman long dead, continue to aid in medical research and medical breakthroughs.
And in a certain way the apostle Paul, writing to the Corinthian churches, makes it clear that despite his suffering (illustrated by an impressively long list), as well as his possibly impending death, can through Jesus, bring life!
Frank Ramirez is a native of Southern California and is the senior pastor of the Union Center Church of the Brethren near Nappanee, Indiana. Frank has served congregations in Los Angeles, California; Elkhart, Indiana; and Everett, Pennsylvania. He and his wife Jennie share three adult children, all married, and three grandchildren. He enjoys writing, reading, exercise, and theater..
* * *
This is Nuts
by C. David McKirachan
Psalm 51:1-17
This is nuts.
There are things I’ve done leaving memories that make me wince. From any perspective they are ugly, leaving my best in the dust. The wince comes because I am embarrassed at being so idiotic and sad and sorry that I separated myself from the other person or people involved. The definition of sin. They leave me with a self that is less than I would prefer, a self that doesn’t hold others with a tender hand.
There are ultimately no excuses for these omissions or commissions. When I search for one, I am doing a lot of denying or deal making, if I would have... then it wouldn’t have been..., classic stepping stones on the pathway of grieving that finally lead to acceptance. An acceptance of what I’ve done.
Thus the winces.
But these moments are gone, left as painful memories. People are gone as well, beyond my ken, or beyond this mortal coil. Apologies are single hands trying to clap, silent parodies of sundered moments that could have been, might have been something other than a scar that hasn’t quite healed.
I have gone to individuals and asked their forgiveness. Sometimes people shake their heads and laugh, not even understanding my angst. Sometimes people have said it was no big deal, but I wonder. And some have given me the look and perhaps a shake, that leaves me in my separateness. But no matter the response, the event still has power.
I’ve wondered about that. And I’ve realized that it’s because the sin, the separation lives not so much between myself and another. It lives within me. The wound is here, in me.
There have been few people in my life that I trusted to forgive me, really forgive me. With most people I assume that they will make me pay, either by retaliation, or worse by walking away. These are not unreasonable responses to negative situations. In some ways they represent a much more sane approach to forming and maintaining relationships than forgiveness. If someone hurts us, or lets us down, it makes sense to reinforce our ego boundaries.
Scott Peck said that “Love is the will to extend oneself for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual wellbeing.” But when you extend and you get wacked, it’s sane to stop extending and protect the self. Thus we lose love. Such is life. There are few I trust to accept me, if I’m being the fool that I can be. And I would readily admit that the few I do trust tend to be a little nuts.
Thus the Psalmist has it right when they write, “Against thou and thou only have I sinned.”
Ultimately if we are to be anything but sad scorekeepers, weighing our relationships as we would balance sheets, debits and credits, if we are to be involved in grace whether we be on the receiving or the dispensing end, if we are to be involved in this in-sane business of love, we have to understand that this business of sin is ‘too much with us, late and soon.’ The human condition is one of imperfection and sometime ugliness. We are rarely living up to the potential within us or the possibilities of the moment. We live in fear of so many different things that we are always ready to strike or be struck.
And we live far from trust, grace, or love.
On this day the ashes of our lives are right there for us to see. They are made from last year’s palms, the celebrations of the folly of our expectations and demands that we want what we want, leaving the messes we’ve made out of the picture. And the palms are burned and ground to ash. And they mark us with the cross.
I’m Presbyterian and we don’t get into things like putting on ashes. But early on in my ministry I began distributing ashes on this day, and people came with an incredible sense of relief. They came without theological explanations, with nothing but a yearning to be forgiven. They came in the dimness of their souls, yearning for the light of the one that we can trust to be nuts enough to love us, even when we are unlovable.
Thus begins the journey to the cross. Thus we remember what He did to try to get it across to us that no matter who we are or whom we’ve hurt, He’s willing to forgive us. Thus He takes each ugly moment and all of that awful pain and fear onto his back, into his hands, and cries, “Father forgive them for they know not what they do.”
He’s nuts.
Thank God.
C. David McKirachan is pastor of the Presbyterian Church at Shrewsbury in central New Jersey. He also teaches at Monmouth University. Two of his books, I Happened Upon a Miracle and A Year of Wonder, have been published by Westminster John Knox Press. McKirachan was raised in a pastor's home and he is the brother of a pastor, and he has discovered his name indicates that he has druid roots. Storytelling seems to be a congenital disorder. He lives with his 21-year-old son Ben and his dog Sam.
*****************************************
StoryShare, March 1, 2017, issue.
Copyright 2017 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to the StoryShare service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons, in worship and classroom settings, in brief devotions, in radio spots, and as newsletter fillers. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to permissions@csspub.com or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., 5450 N. Dixie Highway, Lima, Ohio 45807.
