Sanctity of Life
Yesterday in worship, I referred to previous sermon on the subject of abortion and offered to make it available for those who are interested. Below is the manuscript of that sermon as it was preached two years ago.
- Dr. Chris Cadenhead
A Christian Response to Abortion
Matthew 25:31-46
(with Luke 10, Acts 4, 1 Cor. 8)
January 21, 2018
The intersection between faith and politics is something we should always enter into with caution and care. If we don’t go there out of a spirit of love, we can do more harm than good, but sometimes we have to follow Jesus into places where our basic convictions cross paths with matters of public policy. That doesn’t mean we go out looking for a fight, nor does it mean we should expect to impose our spiritual convictions on other people. It does mean when our culture moves in directions that cause injustice or oppression or undue suffering on others, then the church has to be willing to speak up and offer an alternative vision of life.
If you look back over history, you will see many of the great social and public reforms that have occurred grew out of those kinds of encounters. For example, the culture of the Roman Empire largely despised the weak and the sick and the dying, but early Christians were determined to care for them. That emphasis eventually became one of major factors in the development of the modern hospital system.
In the 19th century, the institution of slavery was eventually abolished in Great Britain primarily because of the unyielding efforts of William Wilberforce, who was motivated by his Christian conviction to use his leverage as a member of parliament to overturn something that was demonstrably evil.
In the 20th century, the Civil Rights movement challenged the unjust and oppressive system of laws that continued to treat persons of color as inferior and undeserving of equal treatment. That movement was motivated largely by a Christian vision of life. Never forget that Dr. King, the leading voice of that movement, was, above everything else, a Baptist preacher.
To be sure, there have been plenty of times when Christians have gotten it wrong. We’ve sometimes been guilty of promoting injustice in the name of God, which ought to bring us to our knees in a spirit of humility and repentance. But that doesn’t change the fact that at critical moments in history, Christians have been willing to carry their convictions into the public sphere to challenge injustice and to alleviate human suffering.
This is one of those moments. Today many churches around the country are observing Sanctity of Life Sunday. We recall that it was on January 22, 1973 – 45 years ago tomorrow – that the US Supreme Court handed down its infamous decision in Roe vs. Wade, a decision that legalized abortion in America. According to the Guttmacher Institute, which is a public policy advocacy group previously affiliated with Planned Parenthood, since that Supreme Court decision, there have been over 59,000,000 abortions in the United States. I don’t care what political party you align with, that number ought to take our breath away. That is 59,000,000 human beings who never got a chance to live life.
To give that number historical context, Hitler is estimated to have been responsible for the murder of 6,000,000 Jews. Joseph Stalin is estimated to be responsible for the murder of almost 3,000,000 of his own Russian people. Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge is believed to have eliminated as many as 3,000,000 people in the killing fields of Cambodia. The Rwandan genocide of 1994 resulted in the deaths of as many as 1,000,000 in only 100 days. But if you had all those numbers together, they pale in comparison to the number of unborn children whose lives were taken from them before they ever had a chance to live them.
Abortion is, of course, a complicated subject. It invokes so many issues and evokes so many emotions that it is hard at times to even talk about it, much less suggest what to do about it, but the complexity of the matter is not an excuse for inaction and indecision. If we are followers of Jesus Christ, then there should be a clear conviction in our hearts and minds that God cares deeply and passionately about the least among us. If you look at who Jesus associated with during his earthly ministry, he spent most of his time with the kinds of people polite society said weren’t worth the trouble. These were the ones who, it was believed, could be cast aside and ignored. It’s hard to imagine a category of people who could be more easily cast aside than the unborn. They don’t have the ability to speak for themselves. They don’t have any control over what happens to them. They are completely at the mercy of others. Surely, our faith in Jesus ought to force us to stop and think deeply about how we should respond to such people. That’s why we began with the reading from Matthew 25. Jesus said that whatsoever we do to the least of those among us, we are actually doing to him. When we neglect those who are most vulnerable, especially for those cannot even care for themselves, we are neglecting Jesus himself.
By the way, that same ethic applies equally to every other category of people who are vulnerable and in need. We dare not get haughty and sanctimonious about abortion if we are going to turn a blind eye to the migrant, to the refugee, to the poor, to the sick, to the person of a different race or of a different religion. Jesus doesn’t give us the option of loving some and despising others. But for now, the issue before us is abortion.
This morning I want to briefly explore a Christian response to abortion. I don’t assume that non-believers will necessarily accept what I am saying to you today. We will have to find thoughtful and creative ways to engage our non-Christian neighbors on this issue, but before we can do that, we need to make sure our own thinking is clear and biblically sound. To that end, I want to very briefly call attention to three passages of Scripture that can help shape how we respond to the issue of abortion. At first glance, none of them seem to speak directly to the issue, but they all contribute to the way we see and understand life.
First, let’s consider the parable of the Good Samaritan that Jesus tells in Luke 10. It’s easy to remember the broad outlines of the story – a Jewish man is robbed and beaten and left for dead by the side of the road. First a priest and then a Levite passed by an ignored him, but then a hated Samaritan stopped to show compassion to the man, taking him to an inn and paying for his care.
What is easier to overlook is what prompted Jesus to tell the story in the first place. Here’s how Luke’s gospel sets it up:
“On one occasion an expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. ‘Teacher,’ he asked, ‘what must I do to inherit eternal life?’
‘What is written in the Law?’ he replied. ‘How do you read it?’
He answered, ‘Love the Lord your God will all your heart and will all your soul and will all your strength and will all your mind,’ and ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’
‘You have answered correctly,’ Jesus replied. ‘Do this and you will live.’
But he wanted to justify himself, so he asked Jesus, ‘And who is my neighbor?’” (Luke 10:25-29)
The reason for the question is simple. The man wanted to put limits on his obligations to love. If he could figure out who his neighbor was and who his neighbor wasn’t, then he could safely decide who was entitled to his compassion and who wasn’t. But Jesus reshaped the question in two ways. First, the hated Samaritan is now included in the category of neighbor, even though the Jewish scholar would have preferred that such a person be excluded. Second, over and against the way the question was asked, Jesus defined the neighbor as one who shows mercy rather the one who receives mercy.
What does this have to do with abortion? We are called to become neighbors to those who are vulnerable and helpless. To limit our compassion on the basis of who we believe is or is not entitled to it is to disobey Jesus. That is not a decision we get to make. Yet, that is exactly what we do when we attempt to define an unborn fetus as a nonperson. The debate over when life begins is simply an effort to put limits on the reach of our love and mercy. If we can convince ourselves that certain categories of people are outside the scope of our moral concern, then we can free ourselves from that obligation, which is exactly what the religious scholar was trying to do. In telling the Parable of the Good Samaritan, Jesus calls us to go beyond the categories of who is in and who is out. He calls us to provide life-sustaining care to anyone who needs it – including the unborn child.
The second passage of Scripture we will look at is the description of the Jerusalem church in Acts 4:32-35. Here’s what it says:
“All the believers were one in heart and mind. No one claimed that any of their possessions was their own, but they shared everything they had. With great power the apostles continued to testify to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus. And God’s grace was so powerfully at work in them all that there were no needy persons among them. For from time to time those who owned land or houses sold them, brought the money from the sales and put it at the apostles’ feet, and it was distributed to anyone who had need. (Acts 32:32-35)”
Here’s the notable thing about that passage. The early church was profoundly shaped by the power of the resurrection of Jesus, and one of the clearest signs of that power was the generosity and sacrifice by which they cared for the needy among them. They took a sense of shared ownership of one another’s burdens and gave freely to help meet one another’s financial burdens.
One of the justifications that is sometimes given for abortion is that a crisis pregnancy presents an unsustainable financial burden on the mother or the family. Therefore, she needs to have the ability to end the pregnancy so that she and the child can be spared from the crippling effects of economic hardship. In another words, abortion is almost characterized as an act of compassion. Let’s be clear that it isn’t. That argument is just one of the many ways that the culture of death tries to express itself.
But what if we as Christians lived in such a way that this argument was no longer valid? What if we were generous enough that we could help meet the financial burdens and provide for the practical needs of moms and families who face a crisis pregnancy? If we are, then we can offer a powerful alternative to the impulse to snuff out that child’s life. You see, Scripture tells us that the proper response to a crisis pregnancy is not abortion; its generosity. That’s where our love for neighbor gets its legs and starts walking around in the neighborhood.
That’s why we are sponsoring a diaper drive for the Blue Ridge Women’s center. It’s just one small way that we can give tangibly to help create an environment where every child and every family can get the help and support they need. When we give, we make it more possible and more likely that more families will choose life. And that is what the resurrection is all about.
The final passage we will look at is 1 Corinthians 8. On the surface this passage seems to be a thousand miles away from the issue of abortion, because it has to do with a question of whether it was right for Christians in the ancient world to eat meat that was sacrificed to idols. Often, the only meat available in the market was meat from an animal that had been sacrificed in a nearby temple to some idol or another. Was it wrong for believers to eat it? Paul’s basic answer to the question was no, it wasn’t wrong, because we know that the idol is nothing and has no power. Even if you eat meat that happens to have been sacrificed to an idol, you are still just eating meat.
However, Paul recognized that there might be circumstances in which his decision to eat that meat might be a stumbling block to a fellow believer, especially if that fellow believer was new to the faith. That fellow believer might be tempted to fall back under the control of that idol he had just quit worshipping. Under those circumstances, Paul said it was best not to eat the meat. Though he has the right to do so, he will choose not to exercise that right if it was in the best interest of his fellow believers. He says in 1 Cor. 8:13, “Therefore, if what I eat causes my brother or sister to fall into sin, I will never eat meat again, so that I will not cause them to fall.” In other words, the Bible teaches that sometimes we have to be willing to forego our rights for the sake of the kingdom of God. There comes a point at which my willingness to seek the good of others overrides my determination to get what I think I am entitled to have.
I share that passage with you because the abortion debate is often framed in terms of rights. We’ve got the mother’s right to choose pitted against the child’s right to live. The current legal system gets around that by arguing that the unborn child doesn’t yet have that right, but as Christians who live by the undeserved grace of God, we shouldn’t be thinking about life in terms of rights. It’s useful to talk about rights when we are in the legal sphere, but none of us has an inherent right to life. Life is a gift. We did not earn it; we did not choose it; we were simply given it. So, when we talk about the unborn in terms of rights, we run the risk of missing the fact that the unborn are actually a gift. And as a community of faith who lives by the gifts of God, we need to order our lives in such a way that we are always ready to receive that gift.
This means that we should do more than simply try to persuade a mother to forego her right to choose an abortion. It also means that we should forego our right not to be bothered by this child once he or she is born. We should be ready to receive and welcome children, even when doing so is challenging and difficult. Our first instinct might be to say that we have the right to live our lives without being bothered by other peoples’ problems, but the gospel calls us to a different way of life. The gospel calls us to lay aside our rights to convenience and comfort so that we can come alongside people in distress and help carry their burden. The way that looks may vary from one circumstance to another. For some it might mean the willingness to be foster parents or to pursue adoption. For others it might mean the willingness come along aside a friend or a coworker who is going through a challenging pregnancy. For others it might mean the willingness to volunteer in a ministry that advocates for the unborn. For someone here today it might mean the willingness to offer up that spare bedroom to someone who is pregnant and has nowhere else to turn. For all of us it might mean the willingness to give and to pray for those who are struggling to choose life in a world that constantly celebrates death.
Now, there is obviously a lot that has been left unsaid this morning. We haven’t talked about political strategies for how to change abortion laws in America. We haven’t talked about how to engage with our non-believing friends and neighbors who don’t share our spiritual convictions. We haven’t given a plan for how to respond to every crisis pregnancy. We haven’t talked about these things because there is only so much time. But I hope that what we have talked about begins to paint a clear and compelling picture for how we should think and respond as the people of God. We have a moral calling to respond to all life as the gift that it is. God is the author of life, and it is not our place to end it, even when that life to comes us in ways that are challenging or inconvenient. That is why we have to work to provide a clear-minded, Biblical, and loving alternative to the culture of death that is at work around us.