Ben Sasse on Life, Cancer, and the Gospel

This transcript has been lightly edited from an automated transcription for clarity and readability. While we've worked to preserve each speaker's words faithfully, errors may remain.

1. 00:00

   Michael Horton

   Give him comfort in the truths of the gospel that he holds so dearly and shares so widely with other people. Be with Missy and the kids during this difficult time, and pray that you would help relieve Ben's pain and difficulties today. Be with Dan as he leads this conversation, and we pray it would be a benefit to your people, in Jesus' name, amen.

2. 00:34

   Dan Bryant

   Hello, I'm Dan Bryant, and we want to welcome you to this conversation. I have had the very good fortune for thirty-three years now to call (Michael Horton)(Michael Horton)Michael Horton) and Ben Sasse very close friends, and it is a delight to be able to have this conversation. I am ostensibly the moderator of this conversation.

3. 00:58

   Michael Horton

   So it could go downhill really quickly.

4. 01:00

   Dan Bryant

   So we have Mike involved and Ben involved, so the idea of me moderating is a little bit suspect, but we're going to try to enjoy our conversation, and you're going to try to be well-behaved, Dr. Michael Scott Horton.

5. 01:15

   Ben Sasse

   Thirty-three years. That sounds long, and it feels like it's been way longer.

6. 01:20

   Michael Horton

   Wow. I don't know how to interpret that, but it's over half of our life.

7. 01:25

   Dan Bryant

   Did you have to put such a fine point on it?

8. 01:29

   Michael Horton

   That's pretty— that's a milestone.

9. 01:31

   Dan Bryant

   So we are delighted to have this conversation, and I'm privileged to moderate. So, Ben, we will return to the topic of your cancer over the course of this conversation.

10. 01:42

    Ben Sasse

    Just to bore the listeners.

11. 01:44

    Dan Bryant

    Well, at the outset—

12. 01:45

    Michael Horton

    No, there are a lot of people who want to hear the update.

13. 01:48

    Dan Bryant

    Yeah, yeah. Would you give us the update? Obviously, in December you were diagnosed with stage 4 pancreatic cancer. You let friends and those who care about you know just before Christmas. You've been involved in a treatment program since then. How are you doing? How goes the treatment?

14. 02:08

    Ben Sasse

    Thanks, cancer's nasty, but everybody has some experience with it. I think forty percent of Americans will be diagnosed with cancer at some point. Seven weeks ago we were diagnosed, and it turns out I have about five kinds of cancer now, but it started as pancreatic, which has the worst death rate of any cancer because the pancreas isn't very important — so it becomes a place where that stealthy disease can hide and start to metastasize. The reason pancreatic cancer has less than a three percent survival rate is because people don't know they have it until it's already metastasized; you don't become symptomatic in the pancreas usually because the pancreas isn't very important. So for about seven weeks I'd been going through some weird abdominal stuff and we couldn't figure out what was wrong. I'm an idiot, and I do triathlons, and I often train in stupid ways — I wear a forty-five-pound weight vest a lot, which is fine for slow ruck races and quasi-jogs, but it turns out you shouldn't wear your rucksack on a bike.

15. Ben Sasse

    And I'd been doing that for a while, which makes no sense now when you say it in public. I don't know what I was thinking, but it meant that when I had all this weird stuff happening in my back and my abdomen, I thought I'd just pulled a bunch of muscles. So it took a few weeks to get diagnosed. But once we got diagnosed, we knew the probability of a relatively near-term death is pretty high. So, A: to live is Christ, to die is gain. We felt amazingly blessed that Melissa, my wife, and I were immediately at peace about all this. But because one of our three kids is still at home — our girls are twenty-four and twenty-two, my son's fourteen — it felt like we had an obligation to try to fight a little bit.

16. Ben Sasse

    Because we all know we're on the clock, we have a death sentence. And once you know you're going to die sooner, it feels kind of weird to spend tons of energy on different kinds of treatment stuff. But when you've got a kid living at the house, you feel like you've got to fight, to give him some extra dad slaps upside the head and hugs. So we're way post-surgical, because when I pushed my docs, they were trying to tiptoe around stuff. I said, I'm tough enough — I'm not the toughest guy on earth, but sort of farm-kid tough. I can take a little bit of pain, and I can take blunt talk. I said, please, just be blunt. Tell me what we know. And they tiptoed again. I said, please, tell me some facts. And they said, I'll give you a fact: Ben Sasse's torso is chock-full of tumors. I said, well, that was a fact — that was blunt. So we're way post-surgical, which in a weird way is kind of a blessing, as opposed to having a ten percent chance that surgery could be of any use.

17. Ben Sasse

    I have so many tumors there's no point in going through surgery to try to remove one here or there, because it won't add up to enough of a difference. So it kind of focused us on what we could try to do. The two best places on earth–and I’ll stop with this–for pancreatic cancer are Memorial Sloan Kettering in Manhattan and MD Anderson in Houston. In the first week after we were diagnosed, we went to both places for forty-eight hours and just stood in hallways and banged on doors — fortunate and blessed, fortunate in a Calvinistic sense, to know people who knew people and got to know some docs. And we said at each place we said, give us the story of what you would do to have a shot at living twelve months instead of three months. What do we do? And at both places they gave us treatment plans if we could get into a clinical trial. I want to thank a lot of Sola and White Horse friends for prayers, because I told a lot of people around Christmas that our number one prayer request was that I would be a good dad and husband during these waning days. Number two, that we would be tough and be able to honor and serve the staff we'd be around at the hospitals.

18. Ben Sasse

    But number three was, we have to get into one of these clinical trials. We got accepted on December 29th into a clinical trial in Houston, so MD Anderson is my hospital of choice. I'm hospitalized for a few days every week there, and we're in a super-aggressive clinical trial where I'm taking chemotherapy — a societally polite term for poisoning yourself. What's the maximum dose of poison you can put into the tumors without killing yourself? We're trying to shrink these tumors for awhile, and it seems to be going pretty great, except my liver and kidneys are having a little trouble keeping up with all the poison. I have trouble maintaining skin on my face, so I bleed a lot out of my face, and I throw up a lot, like everybody on chemo. But overall, very, very blessed with the team we have and what we're working through.

19. 06:55

    Dan Bryant

    Thanks for that, Ben. A lot of people know you as the former senator from Nebraska. Many might not know how far back you and Mike go.

20. 07:05

    Michael Horton

    And you're the one who got that ball rolling.

21. 07:08

    Dan Bryant

    I might've been a little involved, yes, but you actually were one of the first team members as White Horse Inn was finding its way, and you were involved with the magazine, Modern Reformation, and the radio show, White Horse Inn. How did you and Mike kick off this collaboration?

22. 07:28

    Ben Sasse

    There's the pop-culture game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon — I think there's two degrees of Dan Bryant. There are about a dozen guys in my life I still keep up with from the mid-'90s, and I think two-thirds of them are people you introduced me to. Summer of '92, I was in Czechoslovakia before the breakup, then studied at Oxford that fall, then lived on a train for a few months after. In that nine-ish-month run being out of the U.S., the time at Oxford created a lot of friendships that lasted — you and I never met there, but I knew of you and was bummed we didn't meet. When I got back, I got engaged the next year, and I realized, holy smokes, I have no sufficient catechetical foundation in my life to lead a household. I asked Dan's advice, and Dan said, I have an idea.

23. Ben Sasse

    You need some theology, and Mike needs some worldly wisdom. Why don't you go to Anaheim and see if Mike's folks will let you live with them for a while, and you can clean up Mike's books at CURE — Christians United for Reformation, one of the predecessor organizations to the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals and Sola Media. I asked for a little bit of structure for how the flow of Scripture works, and Mike said, how about three nights a week, we'll get together for maybe five hours. And how about, by the time you get there, you'll have done two thousand pages of Calvin reading, a couple books of the Bible, and three catechisms — one can be in English — and then we'll get together for a few hours. So we started doing that Monday, Wednesday, Friday night over pizza and really cheap beer. That's how it started.

24. 09:10

    Michael Horton

    And then he became executive director of the whole enchilada and editor-in-chief of Modern Reformation, and I've trusted his theological judgment ever since — to this day — and his practical, worldly wisdom too. It's been like having a little brother.

25. 09:29

    Dan Bryant

    Take just a moment, though. When this young buck first arrived out in Orange County, California, what did you make of him?

26. 09:37

    Michael Horton

    Oh, not much, honestly. It was when Melissa—

27. 09:41

    Ben Sasse

    He mostly liked me for my voice. He asked me to sing Methodist hymns to him in the evening.

28. 09:45

    Michael Horton

    There you go — that was part of the whole catechesis. But it was when he married Melissa and brought her into the circle that showed me his judgment was superior. Melissa is an amazing human being, and the stuff she’s done — and did — at the beginning, when we were starting that church, Christ Reformed in Anaheim, and just down through the years — wonderful friendship with all of our families.

29. 10:24

    Dan Bryant

    Yeah, hear, hear.

30. 10:25

    Michael Horton

    Which I don't think you see much anymore. I think it's really hard for people to remain this close over thirty-three years. We're here for your daughter's wedding, Ben — you've been to every funeral. I've had a lot of funerals in my family; you've been to Mom's, Dad's, Gary's — my brother — gave a eulogy there. I feel like we're there at crucial times in each other's lives. Because life is short. This life is short, but we have eternity to hang on to, and that's what anchors us — so that this life is actually more precious than it would have been otherwise.

31. 11:08

    Ben Sasse

    Amen. And come a day earlier and stay a day late at those funerals too.

32. 11:12

    Michael Horton

    Right.

33. 11:13

    Dan Bryant

    I've had young friends approach me and ask about our friendships and this small community of guys — and now guys and their wives and children — clearly wanting more of that in their own lives. And it leads to the next question I wanted to ask you two.

34. 11:37

    Michael Horton

    Before you do — my kids too, they wanted to go to Oxford. I said, but why? Plenty of good schools here. We want to have friends like you have. That's pretty cool.

35. 11:49

    Dan Bryant

    Part of the answer, I think, when people ask, is that we were all becoming enamored with theology, with church history, with thinking about questions of deepest purpose and the Christian response to those questions. We were growing up theologically together. And at the core of that, for the two of you all along, has been this truth of the gospel. You've both lived through a period when the church has routinely confused or trivialized the meaning of the gospel, and yet for you two the gospel is central to how you think and how you live. Mike, Ben — the gospel: what is it, and why is it this anchor for how you engage life and pursue your callings?

36. 12:47

    Michael Horton

    God for us in Jesus Christ. That's the simplest definition, I think, of the gospel, and I've watched both of you over so many years live lives consistent with that gospel — and the people you’ve touched with that gospel the people who say, I don't know what it is about you, but there seems to be something authentic, something real. I'm so honored to have you guys as brothers.

37. 13:22

    Ben Sasse

    We'll definitely get back to how we're all on the clock, but knowing your death is impending sooner gives you an even greater ability to deny any of our righteous acts as righteous. The foolishness of our works becomes pretty apparent when you really look at the accounting of a life. We'll get back to that, but “God for us in Christ” is great shorthand. At two medium lengths, there's imputation and justification and sanctification, which will be completed and perfected at glorification. It's fun to talk to your kids and nephews and nieces about how Jesus did everything on the cross to fulfill the whole law — I fulfilled none of it, he fulfilled all of it, and he took away all of my sins.

38. Ben Sasse

    And I'm not just justified — I'm actually being made intrinsically righteous, though you can't see it yet, like little fruit and buds, but it will be accomplished. The gospel is all of that ordo salutis. We get to talk about what Jesus did for us positively, took away negatively, and what he's going to do. We were saved on a cross tree outside Jerusalem, we are being saved, and we will be saved completely — Genesis 3 and Romans 5. I am in Adam, a member of this rebellious race. Imago Dei — we were created glorious in God's image, 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 end of the story is the new Adam came from heaven, laid down all his prerogatives, and came and swept us—

39. 15:19

    Michael Horton

    Raised us and seated us in heavenly places. The weight of glory Paul talks about is so great, it's not even worth comparing the sufferings of this age of our lives right now to the weight of glory that will appear in us. This isn't a guy sitting in an ivory tower or a townhouse in Manhattan — this is a guy being run out routinely from city to city, stoned, shipwrecked, deprived, thrown into prison. And yet he can say — not that this is unimportant, this is insignificant at all — but glory is so great that this suffering right now will seem, in retrospect, like a light and momentary affliction. That can be said in the wrong way where you’re kind of like well, there-there now. This is just a momentary affliction. Or it can be seen as: no, no, no, it's horrible. It’s horrible. There are other passages that talk about suffering as horrible. The last enemy is death. But what it's really talking about is how inexhaustible the glory is.

40. 16:43

    Ben Sasse

    When we've been there ten thousand years, we still won't have gotten started. And the Paul who said that, who was being pursued and stoned, had also been the pursuer and the stoner. That's the depth of our union with Adam.

41. 17:01

    Michael Horton

    While he was stoning.

42. 17:06

    Dan Bryant

    So, Ben, maybe you've started answering this question already, but you were editor of this wonderful journal, Modern Reformation. You were director of the radio show White Horse Inn. These roles are clearly obvious springboards to the US Senate.

43. 17:21

    Michael Horton

    Yeah, well, he took a downward move, really, to the Senate.

44. 17:29

    Dan Bryant

    We just admire the way you mapped that career and can give that advice to others. Seriously — so you brought that theological grounding into your various callings: private, husband, father; public, the academy, politics, policy, public service. How would you say that grounding, that investment in becoming thoughtful theologically, informed your approach and made a difference?

45. 18:04

    Ben Sasse

    I don't mean to use the term ‘moderate’ about policy questions here — we don't care to talk on this show about anybody's policy preferences — but it's useful to be moderate in terms of how we think about worldly callings, to try to preserve institutions. God created the world and called it good, and we are embodied creatures. The culture mandate to be fruitful and multiply obviously means make babies and build families, but it also means to set up a really nice dinner, as you did last night for your daughter's wedding, and to have people come together and celebrate, and to do good work in snow removal. I remember one time when Mike was doing a kind of speed-read through a bunch of Old Testament texts in a sermon, and he dropped in that some of the lines of Cain and Esau were speedboat manufacturers, which I always thought was very funny. There's all sorts of things we need to do to live a human, embodied life and love our neighbor that are important but obviously not ultimate. It's super useful to think a framework for ordered liberty as a duty to love your neighbor—to try to maintain it—and to recognize that the glories of the American constitutional system and inheritance are really special — and yet we're not going to need those kinds of laws for coercion and restraint of evil in heaven.

46. Ben Sasse

    So these are not eternal things, they're temporal things. It's really nice to believe you can live a life of gratitude to God by trying to love your neighbor, do stuff, and serve in a public office — but not want it to be an idol. Right now we have a weird — I don't want to use the word Gnostic — but a weird kind of split, where most people are completely disengaged from public life, and the people who are engaged in public life pretend that whatever they're doing in their institutions and sectors is ultimate and transcendent. And it's a bunch of hooey. The United States Senate is a really important deliberative body — it doesn't deliberate much right now, but in theory it's a really important deliberative body. But it's not going to be there in heaven. And that's a pretty great way to be able to serve in the Senate — to say, let's do this with two cheers.

47. 20:34

    Michael Horton

    Yeah. Yeah.

48. 20:36

    Dan Bryant

    When you announced that you had cancer, Ben, you observed that confronting those kinds of brutal realities in the here and now requires an ability to deal with reality truly, and to have stiffer stuff to undergird the way you go through life. Moments like this crystallize the need for that. Mike, you've faced headwinds, you've been through challenges — what do you mean by stiffer stuff? What is that better undergirding you mentioned in your comment?

49. 21:21

    Ben Sasse

    Well, let's go to Mike on it. But I think acknowledging mortality is just fundamental wisdom. You can go through a lot of wisdom literature, a lot of the Psalter, but Ecclesiastes and Job are right there telling us that these bodies are decaying. It's not supposed to be this way, and we will have glorified bodies. Telling the truth about death is really important. And I don't want to go on my hobby horse about our culture being too always online, because in a weird way it's not really about the digital revolution — it's just an intensification, via the digital revolution, of generational segregation. But we're unbelievably blessed to live at a time in human history with some of the most interesting technology ever.

50. Ben Sasse

    But we're also just incredibly stupid people, in that most kids aren't raised around great-grandparents — they don't see death, they don't have to change diapers. The course of life is dependency, then a period of independence, then back to dependency. If you delude yourself into thinking at twenty-three years old that the glories of your skin and your biceps are going to last, it's a real shame that you don't have the opportunity to be around ninety-year-olds — maybe seventy-year-olds who can explain it, but ninety-year-olds who can model a little bit of dignity as they decline. The stiffer stuff, in my mind, is not Hallmark sentimentality, but honesty about the fact that I'm needy.

51. 22:59

    Michael Horton

    Yeah. It's not only not sentimentality — I think stiffer stuff is also not stoic. It's not a stiff upper lip, keep-calm-and-carry-on. It's being able to fall, knowing you're going to fall into the arms of a God who chose you before the foundation of the world, sent his only begotten Son to redeem you, has justified you, is sanctifying you, and will glorify you — a God who loves you that much that he's going to see it through to the end. If we are faithless, he remains faithful, for he cannot deny himself. With that kind of ultimate security, we can face death. I think the reason we come up with all kinds of ways of avoiding death — most people don't even want to talk about it — is because we know in our gut that the sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. We know intuitively what Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15: we're judged, we're condemned. And a believer knows that death is actually one of the links in the chain of salvation — that this body must die because a seed has to go into the ground in order for a stalk to come up.

52. Michael Horton

    And that's the way it is with us. Until the whole of ourselves is buried in the ground, it can't be raised in that new condition — it has to die. It's like rebooting your laptop, not just reboot it but in order to change it in the twinkling of an eye, and raise it incorruptible. Christians die with a narrative of death that makes it not happy, not fun, not whatever — but also not stoic. It makes it the last enemy. It's an enemy, a real enemy. Jesus wailed at the tomb of Lazarus, his friend, even though he knew he'd raise him from the dead five minutes later. It's an enemy, no question about it. Death is not the portal to a happy Disneyland. Death is hard and painful, as we're seeing with our buddy here. But the good news is that doesn't have the last word, because it's the last enemy we'll ever have.

53. 25:53

    Ben Sasse

    Let's just underscore that — enemy, to be sure. But ‘last’ is pretty great, in that all the other stuff on this pilgrimage that we've had to contend with, there are none left.

54. 26:08

    Dan Bryant

    Let me ask both of you — you've touched on this, but I want to go deeper for a moment. Ben, you're facing death. Mike, you have known suffering, physical challenges, loss of family members. Many listening might well be thinking, how can I make that which ought to be primary in my life primary sooner and rightly have what should be peripheral be peripheral earlier in my life? I don't want to have to wait until I'm confronting death or disabling suffering. How do you think about embracing the challenge of having a life shaped primarily by that which ought to be primary?

55. 27:10

    Ben Sasse

    I'm only seven weeks into this, since my dated death sentence. But I knew Tim Keller relatively well and talked with him a handful of times as he was dying, ironically also of pancreatic cancer as well. One of the weird lines Tim would use is, I hate this, but I would never want to go back to the prayer life I had before pancreatic cancer — which I thought sounded pretty weird. Then I went through some pretty heavy stuff in the couple of weeks right before I was diagnosed — we don't need to get into the details — but I was in a lot of pain because I have a bunch of tumors that had grown in and around my spinal column. That tough pain was hard to make sense of, and it definitely shattered idols really fast. Lots of dumb stuff I cared too much about, that I was too self-reliant about, seemed really pointless. This was before I had a terminal diagnosis. I just didn't like anything. Nothing. I was having to shower five or six times a night, for at least fifteen or twenty minutes, as hot as I could get the water, to spray the center of my spinal cord and release the cramping that would shoot from my spine into the front of my abdomen.

56. Ben Sasse

    I didn't know I had pancreatic cancer yet, but I heard Tim's words in my head a bunch of times — that he wouldn't want to go back to his prayer life before that. And I felt then what a blessing it is to say, Lord, come quickly, maranatha. Thank you for all the things I used to cling to that now seem really trivial, because they're actually really trivial. They can be important ways to love your neighbor, but if you make them an idol, it's not a mixed good — it's unadulterated bad. In my handful of weeks before diagnosis, and seven weeks since, one of the things that's come clear — that I tell my kids a lot — is, man, I wish I had taken the Lord's Day more seriously more of my life, because it's a really good antidote to all those idolatries. God smashing idols for us is a blessing. Having a death sentence is a really good way — it's the old gallows humor. Nothing focuses the mind like an impending hanging. Knowing you're not going to live very long is tough, because things are weird — I want to coach my kids on things, but some of them are advice I want to give them is about something I want them to do eighteen months from now, and I'm not going to really be around to give that advice at that moment. This isn't the way it's supposed to be, but there's a real side benefit to not being deluded into thinking, boy, I'm going to build a really dang good building — I'm an architect, and thirty-six months from now we're going to look at this tower I built. That's not going to happen. That's a pretty healthy thing. I realized, wow, every Lord's Day should have done that for me in the past.

57. 30:21

    Michael Horton

    Yeah. Not even to be compared to what our buddy's going through, but for me, open-heart surgery was a time when I was told to say goodbye to my family — there was a good chance I wouldn't come out of it. So I was ready to see the face of Jesus. Instead—

58. 30:51

    Dan Bryant

    I remember the phone call with you in that time.

59. 30:55

    Michael Horton

    Yeah. And instead I saw a nurse standing over me, and I said, you're not Jesus. And that would've changed my theology — has theological ramifications. But I felt like, now I know how I'm going to die. I have always been afraid, not of death, but of the process of dying. I thought, if I could have this again, where I just go under and come out on the other side. But what you're going through — it feels like you're being dragged behind the horse.

60. 31:47

    Ben Sasse

    Just a bit of career advice for you — I think greeting cards are not in your future. Just imagine Mike writing a sympathy card: ‘Hey, thanks for trusting Jesus as you're being dragged behind the horse.’

61. 32:01

    Michael Horton

    They've never asked me.

62. 32:05

    Dan Bryant

    So, 1 Corinthians 15 is a passage that many make use of as it relates to apologetics — how the Christian faith is defended and explained. The passage reads, ‘If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins.’ That text is obviously enormously useful for apologetics, but it's clearly also important as it relates to a theology of life, a theology of death and dying. Say a little more, if you would — and Ben, you as well.

63. 32:46

    Michael Horton

    I think there are two parts to it. One is the apologetic for the resurrection of the body — if Christ is not raised, we won't be raised, because he was the first fruits, so we're the harvest. If he turned out to be rotting in some shallow grave in Palestine, so will we — and we're still in our sins. The second part of 1 Corinthians 15 is explaining to somebody Paul basically calls an idiot why we have to die. It's really interesting, because for Platonists — people who follow the philosophy of Plato — death is salvation, because your soul is finally liberated from your body. Why would you want to possibly have a body forever? That would be hell — to live forever with your body? No, escape from the body that’s salvation. Philo was a Jewish philosopher who was very influenced by Platonism.

64. Michael Horton

    And he argued on that basis that God first created the spiritual body — the archetype, the archetypal human, Adam — and then created the individual man Adam, who was embodied. What Paul does is say — undiscerning person, to put it a little more mildly — don't you know that the bodily comes first, then the spiritual? He flips it. He's not saying we're not going to have our — he's saying just the opposite of Philo the Jewish Platonist. He's saying actually our bodies will be raised spiritual — in other words, they will be raised incorruptible. This mortal body must put on immortality. It's not as if we're getting rid of this body. This body will be changed, not cast away. So I think he's going up pretty explicitly against Philo, who explicitly said the opposite.

65. 35:17

    Ben Sasse

    This is such a small footnote, but you and I both lived together in New Haven for a time, and there's a glorious old cemetery on Grove Street that has these stone columns — I don't know, 1850s or something, at the height of industrial pride about all the big stuff being built. So it looks like gearing, but it's old stonework.There's a big crossbar over the entrance to the cemetery, and it says, in all capital letters, ‘And the dead shall be raised.’ We ought to go to cemeteries a lot more.

66. 35:55

    Michael Horton

    Yeah.

67. 35:56

    Ben Sasse

    We ought to linger around the horror and the terrible brokenness of the consequences of Adam and our sins in Adam that corrupted this glorious creation that was good.

68. 36:11

    Michael Horton

    Yeah.

69. 36:11

    Ben Sasse

    And then we ought to also back up and look at the sign, and hear the singing at those gravesites that say, ‘and the dead shall be raised.’

70. 36:19

    Michael Horton

    Yeah. You think about those old churches — your old family church is one in Nebraska, where your grandfather built the pulpit and the altar, and graveyard outside. Once upon a time, that was normal — people would walk through the graveyard to get into church, which reminded you why you got dressed that morning.

71. 36:44

    Ben Sasse

    And reminds the preacher what to preach about, and what is trivial.

72. 36:49

    Michael Horton

    Right. You're preparing people for death. That'll sound to a lot of people watching this like a morbid religion. But actually, when you are dying — and we all are, and we are all dying — when you are dying and you come to grips with that, hope is what you absolutely need. And to be reminded visually by that. Contrast that with never talking to your kids about death, trying to bubble-wrap people from having to discuss it — movie stars who are aging poorly, and yet saying, I don't talk about death, that's not in my vocabulary. Well, get it in your vocabulary.

73. 37:39

    Ben Sasse

    Yeah. We know where we're going, because we know Jesus is the first fruits, has already risen, and he's preparing a place for us. It's going to be great for us, but even more, it'll be great to be free from sin, around the Adoration Feast of the Lamb, praising Christ, the one who speaks and saves. But it's also been a blessing for me, going through this time, to know where I'm going in terms of the actual cemetery. We bought plots long ago, on St. Paul's Road, four miles north of Highway 30, in Washington County, Arlington, Nebraska — on the hillside at St. Paul's Lutheran Cemetery. We've owned grave plots for a long time, and I have lots of generations of family there. My wife, who has a big brain injury — she had a vertebral dissection that caused a bunch of strokes, and we've managed struggled through seizures for a lot of years — she almost died one time, on a January 25th.

74. Ben Sasse

    So we named that Death Day — as in, a reprieve from death, a gift God gave us that we've had so much more family life with Melissa. Every January 25th, when we're in Nebraska, she and I go up to the cemetery — it's always ugly-cold in January on that big hillside, iced over and everything — but we walk around all the plots, and it's a really good way to focus the mind. And, frankly, to get back to a moderate view of how you do this worldly life — you mentioned the aging Hollywood actress, but let's just linger on skin for a minute. How stupid, to be twenty-two or thirty-two and think the height of all that matters in life is perfect skincare. I don't want to be dismissive of the work of doctors who do skin work, because I was bleeding out of my face for a couple of weeks because of the aggressive chemo I'm on — the poison—that tries to keep the tumors from growing has also made it really hard for me to grow any skin. My face was falling off and I was bleeding all the time. It was pretty nasty, because I'm a stomach sleeper — I couldn't sleep on my stomach anymore because my face would clot against the pillow. So for a couple of weeks I had to sleep sitting up, on my back, and it was super uncomfortable because I was bleeding out my face all the time. I got to know the head of dermatology oncology at MD Anderson Houston, and Dr. Chon — she's pretty amazing and I'm incredibly grateful for her gifts. But I want my twenty-four- and twenty-two-year-old daughters, my fourteen-year-old son, or somebody's fourteen-year-old daughter struggling with acne and thinking it's the end of the world, to know — no, it's not the end of the world. But it's pretty amazing that doctors work in all these specialties, and that at the end of time, Jesus, the Great Physician, is going to heal every part of our body that's decaying and declining.

75. 40:45

    Dan Bryant

    Another way of thinking about the moderation you speak of, Ben, is this wonderful reality that the Christian life is one that is neither prone to or has this triumphalistic notion. Neither is it one of despairing, even in the midst of extraordinary suffering. So how do you think about living with real hope, grounded hope, real gratitude — because of the reason we get to be such a hopeful people — and yet doing it, Ben, to quote you, through gravelly voices, through tears? Say more.

76. 41:31

    Michael Horton

    Tom Oden — when we had Tom on — Methodist theologian — we were just laughing through the whole thing. He and Rod and Kim and I were just laughing. And he said, you know, only people who really understand grace can go back and look sin in the face. He said, do you notice we've been laughing so much through this whole interview? Really, only people who understand grace can really laugh, he said. I've been around, and the more you understand the gospel, the more you can laugh. There's been a lot of gallows humor in your family. Don't you think that ultimately it gives Satan a headache when he hears people laughing at death?

77. 42:35

    Ben Sasse

    Let's speak to that, and have a destination through it, to Dan's question — which might take us to some definitions of home and of pilgrimage. One of the reasons I think you're right about that, Mike, is that to laugh about things like this is to say, I'm too small to save, but I've got an Abba Father who's not too small to save. The end of this story is already known, and we're going to go through a veil of tears, but my fourteen-year-old son needs to simultaneously believe in our Heavenly Father and what he's going to accomplish. He needs a little bit of wisdom because, in God's providence, he's still got a dad around. He needs a little bit of wisdom from his dad during this time, and yet he still needs to spend a hundred and sixty-eight hours a week doing something. And I'm not very interesting right now. As a former recovering workaholic who's done a lot of stupid, idolatrous stuff in my life, it's really humbling to not have much to do every day.

78. Ben Sasse

    I have sixteen hours a day of sleep. I have tumors in my spine that the doctors insist I treat with a certain amount of morphine for a bunch of secondary and tertiary reasons for this treatment plan. So I'm on so much morphine that I fall asleep all the time. I'm not useful, I'm not interesting, I don't want to talk about cancer anymore, I don't want people to constantly ask how I'm doing. It's like the seventh doctor and fifth resident and fourth nurse today asking me how my bowels are doing. I frankly don't really want to talk about it, and I don't care very much. But my fourteen-year-old has to love his dad, and he has to be around me a bit. So gallows humor is actually a little bit of work we get to do in common, to say, this isn't the end — and yet we still have time to pass here together. He's going to have to get his homework done and talk to me a little and then do more homework. I think it's the distinction between pilgrimage and home — it's not wrong to yearn for home. It's right to yearn for home.

79. Ben Sasse

    We're eventually going to go home. What's stupid is to think that the bridge we're living on any given day is actually our home — what a dumb, trivial palace this is. It reminds me of the Lewis passage about how you thought you were going to do a little small addition to this house, and all of a sudden the Lord of the manor comes and starts tearing off wings and throwing up towers, and this hurts a lot. It turns out our vision for what home, and what the dinner-table feast, was going to look like was way too small.

80. 45:20

    Michael Horton

    That's great. That's great.

81. 45:22

    Dan Bryant

    You two introduced me wonderfully, some thirty-ish years ago, to the Heidelberg Catechism. The extraordinary framing of Heidelberg, of course, is unpacking the reality of man's guilt, then unpacking the wonder of grace — God's grace toward guilty man — and then, thirdly, those who've known such extraordinary grace and favor being turned into a people of gratitude, who live with growing gratitude as we reckon with the unbelievable reality of God's goodness, favor, and kindness to us — his grace — in the context of what we deserve because of our guilt. Guilt, grace, gratitude. It does seem to me that gratitude is the stuff of laughter — gratitude is the stuff of being freed up to not be owned by our suffering, but to see through it, and to have confidence in the God who has taken us from what our guilt, what our sins deserve, through such unmerited favor, so that as his children we get to be these pilgrims, these pilgrims heading home. There's a freedom, there's a joy, there's an invitation to humor, even in the midst of real struggle.

82. 46:55

    Ben Sasse

    That's so good. Pilgrims en route, heading home. I think both kinds of meals are appropriate here. We get to have–in our three congregations–the Lord's Supper every Sunday in our three congregations, so I get three super-crystallized versions of the gospel every Sunday. You get to confess your sins and hear it announced that you're absolved, I’m forgiven — it's like an injection of the gospel. You get to hear the Scripture explained in the sermon. Unfolding what's going on in the text, and you get to come to the table with empty hands. I don't bring anything except my sin to the table. I get the body and the blood, I get the bread and the wine. It's not a full meal — it's just a little in-breaking, for a second, that hits all five senses. Normally at church we only get the organ of the ear, but all of a sudden, for a minute, you also get to smell it, see it, touch it, and taste it. The gospel hits all five senses for just that minute, just that second — but it's a foretaste of heaven.

83. Ben Sasse

    That's also true of this-worldly meals. I think about even how great last night's dinner was for Caroline and Ethan's friends celebrating them, or how great it is when our families have been together on vacation — or my family now, during this hard time, a night ago or a week from now, when we have a meal together. It's not going to be a sinless meal — we're going to be rude, interrupt each other, be self-absorbed, ask a question that seems like we're concerned about the other person but we're really asking so somebody will flip the question back to me, because I'm ready to talk now. Enough about you, more about me. And even the best meals we have are still so tainted and broken — but all of that dross will be gone. We're going to be around the table with our Lord, and he's going to be the center, and we're going to be sinless, and we're not going to be trying to put ourselves on the throne, because there'll be so much more joy for us in him being on the throne. And us, who would have been willing to be servants or slaves at that feast — we're going to be sons and daughters. And that'll be the perfection of both of those meals.