Illustrations for Sermons and Teaching

1. In 1989 couple in Michigan brought their previously healthy four-year-old boy to their pediatrician. The child had persistent headaches, a rapid heartbeat, intermittent low-grade fevers, irritability, a marked personality change, insomnia, soreness of the palms and soles of his feet, and, soon was unable to walk.  The physician suspected mercury poisoning and informed the local Department of Health.  The public health officials found that the toddler's home had been painted with paint that had mercury added to it to increase shelf life and make the paint more mildew resistant.  The boy was hospitalized for four months to eliminate the mercury from his body, and at the end could walk again.  A year later, mercury was banned as an additive to paints in the U.S.
2. Several years ago in Oregon, a couple bringing their 12 week old infant in for a routine check-up were told by their physician that their daughter was showing symptoms of cerebral palsy.  Over the next few months, the symptoms steadily worsened, despite treatment and physical therapy.  Then the parents told their physician that their home had been sprayed with the commonly used insecticide diazinon.  Measurements in the home found that unacceptably high levels of the insecticide had been used, and it was found in high levels in the infant's blood, though the parents showed no symptoms from the pesticide. When, at the physician's request, the parents moved their infant from the home, all cerebral palsy symptoms promptly stopped.  On December 5, 2000, after years of study and analysis, EPA announced an agreement with the manufacturer to phase out indoor use of diazinon this year (2001) because of its threat to children's health.
3. One Saturday morning right before I was to go over to a friend's house to go on an outing she called and said we would have to do something indoors. It was a bright, sunshiny day - and that was the problem.  When sunlight interacts with air pollution it creates smog.  My friend has asthma.  
4. Years ago when I was a Chaplain Intern one of my wards was the Oncology or cancer ward. There was a young teenage boy there dying of bone cancer. Several months before I started visiting him his parents decided to take a chance and not have his leg amputated. It turned out to be the wrong choice.  His mother asked me to pray for healing.  I did.  After the prayer she looked at her son, and then said to me, with a look of desperate hopefulness, "He looks better."  He died about a week later. For reasons that are unknown, several forms of childhood cancers have risen sharply in the last 15 years: brain tumors are up more than 30%, leukemia is up 10%, and testicular cancer is up 60%.
5. Cancer is now the second leading cause of childhood death. Like those of Jesus' day, if this boy's mother had heard that he was passing by, she would have begged him to heal her boy (Mk. 3:9-10; 6:53-56). Even if her boy had died before Jesus reached him, no doubt he would have raised him from the dead (Lk. 7:11-15).
6. According to historian David Herbert Donald, during the Springfield years when Abraham Lincoln could he looked after his young boys Willie and Tad.  This practice was so unusual that Springfield gossips called him "hen-pecked."  Lincoln often brought the boys with him to his law office, where his partner Herndon found them a nuisance: "Had they pooped in Lincoln's hat and rubbed it on his boots, he would have laughed and thought it smart."
   
   There was a motto in the White House during the Lincoln years, "Let the children have a good time."  Willie and Tad would scatter Lincoln's papers and climb on the furniture and make a mess of things.  It didn't bother Lincoln at all. He just would keep writing whatever document he needed to write. The kids were allowed to run through the house into Cabinet meetings.  At State Dinners they were present, throwing strawberries around.  On one occasion Tad harnessed Nanko the pet goat up to a chair and drove triumphantly through the East Room where a reception was in progress.  As dignified matrons held up their hoop skirts, Nanko the goat pulled the gleeful Tad around the room. When Tad opened fire with a toy cannon on one of his father's cabinet meetings, Lincoln just laughed.  Lincoln called Willie and Tad "my blessed fellows."
   
   Willy, Tad's older brother, was more serious. When Tad smashed a mirror with his ball, Willy Lincoln gave him a lecture: "That mirror does not belong to Pa," he said, "it belongs to the United States Government."
   
   As historian Doris Kearns Goodwin has remarked, Willy always seemed even as a young child, wiser and older than his years. He was exceptionally sensitive toward the feelings of others. Everyone said he had the gentlest, sweetest temperament.  Willy seemed to combine the best traits of both of his parents, having the soul, the spirit, the intellect and the thoughtfulness of his father, but having a certain kind of natural exuberance and an ability to enjoy life that his mother had at her best.  The child Lincoln was closest to was Willy. He loved having him sit on his lap and read to him.  There seemed to be a very deep connection between Lincoln and Willy.
   
   But in early February 1862, Willie Lincoln contracted typhoid fever, caused by pollution in the White House water system.  At five in the afternoon on February 20, Willy Lincoln died of typhoid. "The President lifted the cover from the face of his child," a friend remembered, "and gazed at it long and earnestly, murmuring, 'It is hard, hard to have him die.'" "`Willy', he said, "`was too good for this world, but then we loved him so.'" Tad had also contracted typhoid, but barely survived.
   
   According to historian David Herbert Donald, long after Willie's burial the President repeatedly shut himself in a room so that he could weep alone. When sleep came he had happy dreams of being with Willie.  Some time after Willie was buried Lincoln recited to an aide lines from Shakespeare's King John, where the character Constance laments for her son: "And, father cardinal, I have heard you say that we shall see and know our friends in heaven.  If that be true, I shall see my boy again." After reciting the lines, Lincoln wept.
   
   In Jesus' day people begged to touch the hem of his cloak to be healed (Mk. 6:56). Our greatest President, the man who called the nation to be touched "by the better angels of our nature," who proclaimed to the nation in the Second Inaugural address, "With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds ...," this same man would have begged Jesus to heal his beloved son Willie.
   
   Today standard public health practices in this country, in many respects an outgrowth of the Civil War, have nearly eliminated typhoid fever from the U.S. This is not the case worldwide, where it affects about 12.5 million persons each year. But unlike the Lincoln's, today parents in poorer countries face not only traditional public health threats like typhoid, their children are also exposed to industrial pollution. One in five children do not live to see their fifth birthday - mostly because of avoidable environmental health threats.  This results in 11 million childhood deaths a year.