An evangelical church in greater Vancouver recently did a three-week exploration of the biblical teaching on social justice. The speaker for the first week concentrated on the needs of the world's poor. In the second week I explored the topic from the point of view of the requirements that justice places on those in positions of governance. In the third week I turned my attention to crisis pregnancies. The text that was read before the sermon was Luke 7:36-50 where a woman considered to be an outcast from polite society interrupts a dinner party given by Simon the Pharisee to wash Jesus' feet with her tears and to wipe them with her hair. Jesus accepts her love at the same time as he is being criticized by his host for his willingness to associate with her. This is the sermon.
A. INTRODUCTION
Good morning. After a professional career spent mostly in post-secondary teaching and administration, research and publishing, and in municipal politics, I have in my elder statesman years become a full-time consultant.
Much to my surprise, the Abbotsford Right to Life Society approached me about a contract as Director of Education and Development. So much for billing at $1000 per day!
As a follow up to last week’s sermon on biblical justice, I plan to spend my 20 minutes today dealing with a pro-life issue from a justice perspective. My focus, I want to say up front, will be on women in crisis pregnancies and the church’s responsibility towards them.
I should probably also say at the beginning that I have no idea what position this church or its denomination holds on life matters, no one asked me to preach on this subject, and that I am speaking only for myself.
But first--
B. THE UNSERMON – WHAT I WON’T BE DISCUSSING TODAY
1. Let me begin by saying that it is not my intention to concentrate at any length on the more common focus that life is sacred from conception, making abortion an unacceptable option for those who hold to this belief.
While there is no explicit reference in Scripture to abortion, there is no question that this is the traditional Christian position, whether Catholic, Protestant or Orthodox. It is my position as well. Time does not permit an examination of the relevant biblical passages, nor of the understanding of biblical interpreters in the 2000 years since the time of Jesus that our faith teaches the sanctity of life even in the womb.
In modern times there are those Christians but who have argued that we should view this teaching differently. One could debate their opinions of what the texts mean or their position on the authority of Scripture. But that is not my objective. It would be better done in a small group discussion format.
In a way it is almost irrelevant to do so. While climbing on to the back of a moral high horse affords a wonderful view of some non-existent perfect world, it removes the saint from the realities of everyday life with which one must deal if one is really a follower of Christ and lover of all humanity.
For to a large extent, while we may think that we have won the theological battle, we have lost the pragmatic war. In the U.S., where 1.3 million abortions are performed each year, over half are obtained by women who are members of Roman Catholic and evangelical Protestant churches, all churches that hold to traditional pro-life positions. 1% of these abortions are done in instances of either rape or incest, and 3% because of issues related to the mother’s health. The rest are obtained as a means of birth control.
Are we to condemn, even shun, these women for breaking with our theology? I grew up in a fundamentalist environment with just that kind of thinking, but it does not square with the example Jesus left for us when he was accused of wasting all his time hanging out with those whom polite society disapproved of (as we heard in this morning’s scripture reading).
2. Neither, as passionately as I feel about the subject, am I going to talk about the personhood of the unborn child at any length. As you know, at various times in recent history African-Americans, women, Jews and First Nations people have been considered non-persons in some sense. In Abraham Lincoln’s time, for instance, black slaves were defined by the U.S. Supreme Court as two-thirds of a person for purposes of the U.S. Constitution and could therefore be denied life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
In Canada, a fetus is not a person until she or he has fully emerged from the mother’s womb. For that reason, doctors can even perform what are called partial-birth abortions where the baby in partially removed from the mother’s body and destroyed. Thousands of them have been done, although they were recently banned in the United States after much controversy.
As another example of what it means to be a non-person, if a pregnant woman is killed, as happened recently in Toronto, and the unborn baby also dies, the murderer is charged with only one murder, not two.
While obviously a justice issue, an examination of this matter awaits another time.
If I am not planning to explore any of these obvious areas at any length, what’s left for today? Lots!
C. THE SERMON AT LAST
As Jet made clear two week ago, and hopefully I did as well last week, biblical justice goes beyond a sort of dispassionate fairness to actually seeking out and championing the needs of the marginalized, the exploitable, the poor—those in the least position to fend for themselves. While pro-life discussions typically center on the unborn baby (and rightly so in the proper context), I want to focus on the women who carry these little ones.
How should women in crisis pregnancies be viewed by the church and society? How can we champion their cause?
1. Stats tell us a little
A good place to start is to ask ourselves, what makes women seek abortions in the first place. There are approximately 30 abortions for every 100 live births in Canada, with women in their 20s comprising the largest group who obtain them. About 33,000 Canadian teens become pregnant each year, and 18,000 of them abort. Abortions can be obtained fairly easily. Our public Medicare system pays for the vast majority of them. A 14-year old does not need to obtain parental permission to go ahead with the surgery. Her parents very often do not even know.
2. Culture tells us more
Those are the statistics. But what are the reasons? Some indications can be gleaned from such facts as these:
- 75% of women who abort are single. We live in a society that not only permits, but often rewards, promiscuity. Can you imagine that at one time we considered it insulting to say that a person was ‘easy’ or ’fast’. What we once viewed as sluttish behaviour is now more or less the norm, particularly as social relationships are depicted in the media. Ever watch Friends? People who have not had intercourse are looked on with amusement and pity—such as was depicted in the movie The 40 Year Old Virgin. My wife had a 13-year old middle school student who actually passed out gag business cards to her male classmates calling herself a sex expert. Of course, it is the women who pay the price for this societal permissiveness. And it is the young women and girls who feel the strong pressure to conform. At the same time we are experiencing a significant breakdown in the traditional family structure. Combine lack of a supportive family structure with rampant sexual permissiveness, and an abortion boom is predictable.
- We also live in a culture, or sometimes a sub-culture, that views some lives as worth less than others. In the 1960s, when I was in high school and university, we argued that everyone was of equal worth and that no one should be afforded special privileges or be denied anything that others could access. But we have gone back to an older view that certain types of life are deemed to be lacking in worth. In Hitler’s Germany, this category included Jews, gypsies and homosexuals. In today’s Canada, it is the physically and mentally challenged, those who are unwanted, and in some sub-cultures, females. So we find that 90% of fetuses diagnosed with Down Syndrome are aborted. In the East Indian sub-culture, and others as well, women abort female fetuses in disproportionately large numbers. And politicians actually campaign on the slogan “Every child a wanted child”, as if that were a guarantee of any social good. Are we really content with a culture that diminishes human worth on the basis of handicap, gender, or unwantedness? Is life so cheap?
- What is it like for a female growing up in a society with such values as these? No wonder the abortion rate has risen as it has.
But while I’ve probably outlined a pretty good preaching agenda, as well as a number of important issues for youth groups to address, we still haven’t gotten to the meat of today’s focus—biblical justice and the crisis pregnancy.
3. Who put the crisis in crisis pregnancy?
We are told that most women obtain abortions to please, or placate, someone else. Obtaining an abortion is seldom a fully independent choice. As much as society talks about a woman’s right to choose, the choice is often taken out of her hands. Or to put it another way, while a woman may ultimately make the decision, it is often with a strong element of coercion.
But before I get to that, I want to take a quick look back on an earlier chapter in my chequered career.
I once hosted an open-line radio show in Sudbury, ON. It was aimed at young people (ages 14-22), although over half of the audience was adult (the young people's parents listened in large numbers). I used to get high-schoolers calling in to complain about their dad or mom. One of the things that I used to do with such callers was to ask them to do a role play with me. First I would set the scene, along such lines as these:
MGS (my good self): What does your father do for a living?
CYC (complaining young caller): He works for INCO. He's a miner.
MGS: Does he like his job?
CYC: Not very much. Who would?
MGS: How does he feel when he gets home from work?
CYC: I never thought about it. Pretty tired, I guess. Bummed out. [Sorry, that's how we talked in the 1970s.]
MGS: OK, you play the tired-out, unfulfilled father coming home from another lousy, hard day of work, and I'll play the 15-year old son who intercepts him at the door to complain about..... (whatever the issue was that the caller had raised).
It's amazing the effect this had on the caller's perspective. I wish that many of my pro-life friends would do the same with respect to the way they approach their task of addressing what they feel is a huge moral wrong. Put yourself in the shoes of:
- The fourteen year old girl who got high, had sex with three different guys at a party, is now pregnant, has no idea who the father is, and is afraid to tell her parents. [I'm not making this up. I had just such a call from a girl on my open-line show. Of course, it was the "girl's friend" who called on her behalf.]
- The sixteen year old who wants to keep the baby but doesn't know how she will ever complete high school now if she has an infant to care for. [It was just this common scenario that led my school board to start our New Beginnings program at one of our high schools, providing both daycare for the young moms so that they could go to school, and parenting skills classes for these children having children as well. You may not be surprised to learn that there were those who accused us of doing nothing more than encouraging teenagers to get pregnant. Such is the life of the school board trustee.]
In fact, I’m going to go off-script here for a moment and recount a story from a school board meeting held to deal with the unfounded rumour that we were going to cancel the New Beginnings programme. A large number of people, including many who had benefited from the programme gathered to urge the Board to keep it going. One of the spokespeople was a young woman who identified herself as a former runaway who ended up on the street and sold her body to make a living. She became pregnant and decided that she had to change something in order to keep her baby. Somehow she ended up in Abbotsford and enrolled in New Beginnings. "I was able to finish high school and keep my baby," she said, her voice trembling with emotion. "You mustn't let the programme die." It's the only time in 21 years that I cried at a school board meeting.
But back to my list of people whose shoes we all need to walk in.
- The nineteen-year-old woman whose boyfriend, having gotten her pregnant, now threatens to leave her if she doesn't abort. When a young woman in Winnipeg a few years ago refused to abort, her boyfriend actually killed her and the baby.
- The recent university grad who, having started on a promising career, finds that she is pregnant and will have to abort the career unless she aborts the baby because her company makes no allowance for her situation.
- The female member of a church who sees how unmarried mothers are treated.
How do these women feel when they see signs proclaiming, “Abortion is murder”? Read the rants of the many pro-life bloggers I get to read as part of my job? Sense their obvious hostility? Do they see any concern for the vulnerable, the needy, and the exploited that is supposed to be the hallmark of the Christian lifestyle? Or have these woman joined the ranks of the unwanted like the woman who washed Jesus feet with her tears? Will they likely turn to us for help?
The pro-choice people may have vacuous arguments, but they do withhold judgment. Jesus treated the Samaritan woman at the well (John 4:1-42), or the women "taken in adultery" (John 7:53 - 8:11) better than many pro-lifers treat such women as I've outlined above.
I am now going to give you the most amazing fact of all--the Protestant church has more or less washed its hands of the whole business. Some denominations, such as the Presbyterian Church of Canada, have simply proclaimed themselves as officially pro-choice, giving themselves the luxury of ignoring these difficulties. The evangelical Protestants have maintained a theoretical pro-life stance, which one would think would translate into a concern to address this great moral challenge and to deal with the human fall-out such as crisis pregnancies and the dividing of God’s creatures up into the wanted and the unwanted.
But I’ve learned the grim reality from actually working in the field. Pastors in Abbotsford, a seat of evangelicalism if there ever was one, have told me that such matters are simply not part of the church’s agenda. One pastor told me that we are just another special interest group like Love Abbotsford and Pray through Ramadan. At best, they see such issues as political only and none of their concern.
Ask yourselves--Is lobbying to make abortion illegal the answer? Or is it an easy solution to a vexing moral question while ignoring all of the fall-out? Being moralistic is not the same thing as properly addressing moral issues. Nor is it the same thing as doing justice.
I want to close with one last story, told to me by a long-time friend that Sharon and I visited this past summer. I will, of course, disguise some of the details to protect the innocent. I would happily expose the guilty.
The scene: A goodish sized, conservative evangelical church in small town Canada. The church shows a commitment to the well-being of young people in a number of ways, including the provision of various clubs and sports camps.
The church's pro-life position: The church supports a local pregnancy counseling agency, including the provision of church members who serve on its board, raise money and do some of the counseling.
The church's commitment to babies: The congregation is young and many babies are born every year. The church puts on elaborate and generous baby showers on these occasions. A class on parenting is offered as well.
Sounds pretty good so far. But what happens when the unmarried daughter of two of the church's members has a baby? Well--nothing. No shower, no support, no joy, no nothing! Just big time rejection.
Was the girl some kind of disgusting sinner that she should be treated this way? She is not a Christian herself, so was not violating her own principles in having premarital sex (not that she should have been rejected on that basis in any event). She did not resort to an abortion. 75% of abortions are performed on unmarried women, but this young lady made the life choice and kept hers. She did not flaunt her situation, actually staying away from the church while pregnant (and no wonder!).
One of the members, a devout evangelical with several adult children, sprang into action. She approached the teacher of the parenting class about holding a baby shower for the young woman in her home. The church leaders, some of whom were privately sympathetic, made it clear that the shower could not be held in the church but could go ahead as long as if was off-site. A number of supportive people attended, gave various gifts (including a generous amount of money), and generally made the girl feel appreciated.
But the official position of this alleged pro-life church was that the young woman would not realize the warmth and support of her parents’ home congregation because of having had a child out of wedlock. It makes me want to cry.
Should we as Christians promote the sanctity of life? By all means. Should we work to lower the abortion rate so that, in Hilary Clinton’s words, “the choice guaranteed under our constitution either does not ever have to be exercised or only in very rare circumstances”? Even the National Abortion Rights Action League wants to lower the abortion rate.
But what should distinguish us as individual Christians and as a church—some vague, if ever thought about at all, notion that it would probably be a good thing if there were no more abortions? That’s moral high horse thinking and completely useless in the cause of justice.
It’s time that we started to take our faith seriously. There are hundreds of thousands of crisis pregnancies in our city, province and country. How many churches are committed to aiding woman in this situation? Must they turn to the public school system, or to the government for help? Or simply abort? Have we no responsibility here?
The answers to this challenge are as individual as the people and churches that face it. There may be crisis pregnancy centres in your community that need financial help, personnel, and professional guidance. Perhaps one should be started here in the church building. Only you know what best meets the needs in your circumstances.
But what we don’t have is the luxury of pretending that it is someone else’s problem. It is time that the church’s agenda was broadened. We must add the crisis pregnancy to the list. In fact, it needs to be near the top. Justice demands no less.
