A Simple Sermon on Abortion (Given at My Church)

The sanctity of life is an acid test for the Christian church.  What is an acid test?  One way the acid test was used was to distinguish real precious metals from fake ones.  Take something that looks like gold and drip nitric acid on it.  If it holds up and is not degraded by the acid, the gold is real.  Our approach to the sanctity of life determines how we hold up to the acid test.  We will find out whether our faith is real as we deal with a culture that denigrates unborn life, especially imperfect life.

Before I get too deep into this issue, I want to pause for a moment to acknowledge that people in our congregation have likely  been touched by abortion.  When there have been over 40 million abortions since Roe v. Wade, the consequences touch many of us.  To any who fall into that category, I just want to say that my sympathy is with you, not against you.  All have sinned and our hope is in Christ. 

Let’s take a moment to consider a couple of references from the Bible on unborn life.  Consider Jeremiah 1:5 where the Lord says to Jeremiah:

Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations.

And then Psalm 139: 13-16:

For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb.  I praise you for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.  Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well.  My frame was not hidden from you when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth.  Your eyes saw my unformed substance . . .

It seems to me that one can infer from these passages that God knows human beings from the moment of our conception or even before.  This means that the unborn child is a person, not a mass of tissue, not a collection of parts waiting to be switched on. 

People have often focused on dividing lines like when we first draw breath, because our understanding of the unborn child has been so poor throughout human history.  We did not understand that the unborn child does breathe in a sense.  The child simply receives oxygen from the mother.  Another line that received attention, sometimes in the law, was the “animate” status of the fetus.  People argued that the child in the womb was not really alive until its movement could be detected by the mother or by someone placing a hand on her stomach.  Of course, now we know that the child is moving long before the mother or anyone else can feel it.  The ultrasound has unlocked the mysteries of the womb.

I will never forget when Ruth was pregnant with Andrew.  She was in private practice and had access to an ultrasound machine.  I would come over to the office after work to meet her for dinner and would find her in the ultrasound room lying on her back or side moving the sensor over her stomach and watching Andrew moving about and listening to his little heart beat.  Sometimes, she was excited and eager to tell me what she could see.  Other times, she was simply entranced, transported by the show her little man was putting on for her.  This was even in the very early stages of the pregnancy. 

What I’m trying to say is that Andrew was alive.  He lived inside his mother’s womb.  His life didn’t begin when he was born and people sucked out his nose and started sticking needles in him.  His life began in the womb.  And as all of you parents out there know, he was not much less dependent on her when he came out than when he was in.  In fact, during the late stages of pregnancy Ruth pointed out to me that Andrew would never be easier to care for than he was at that moment. 

For the sake of argument, let’s concede that Andrew was conceived and born into an ideal situation.  He had two well-educated parents with good careers ahead of them.  Both of us were committed to loving him.  But what if he hadn’t been?  What if his mother had been 15 years old and the father had been absent or unable to take on any responsibility?  Andrew would still have been a living baby inside of that fifteen year old.  He would still have been a person created and known by God.  Just because his circumstances would have been substantially less favorable, does that mean it would have been okay to kill him?  Because that is what we are saying when we support the idea of legalized abortion.  We are saying it is okay to kill a child who is alive. 

Someone out there says that’s just my opinion or that’s just a religious point of view.  No, it isn’t.  Pick up an embryology textbook.  Read about the life of the embryo and the fetus.  Accept the testimony of someone who has spent the time, as we had the rare privilege to do, watching a child develop in the womb.  The real life of a fetus is about as hard a scientific fact as you will find. 

I’m thankful for the birth and development of the fields of embryology and fetology.  We have finally reached the place where it has become ridiculous to refer to the unborn child as a “mass of tissue” or to compare the unwanted child to a tumor.  That time is over.  Some years ago, I was grateful for the honesty of the feminist Naomi Wolf, who called for an end to the charade.  Despite her support for abortion, she felt it harmed women to act as though abortion did not mean killing an unborn child.  The fact could no longer be resisted.  Better to acknowledge it and simply argue abortion is still a needed right for women.  What she did not say is that if you follow her logic, it means a person who is larger and in control of a smaller, dependent person has the right to end the dependent person’s life.

Wolf’s honesty has not carried the day, though.  The pro-choice movement sometimes shows disturbing similarities to totalitarian movements of the last century.  Just as the Germans who ran the concentration camps had to learn to speak in such a way as to shield their consciences from the horror of what they were doing, people who work in abortion clinics watch their words very carefully.  You don’t speak the truth because the truth is unspeakable. 

I remember watching Al Gore talk about abortion on television once, but he never used the A-Word.  He kept going on and on about Choice.  Choice, Choice, Choice.  I thought, “The choice to do what?”  That way of talking aims to deceive everyone, including the speaker.  If you do it long enough, you will become hard and unfeeling and you will be less and less bothered.  Sin is like that.  That is how we become lost, by getting to the point where our conscience is nearly dead.  That is what we have today with those who fight to protect the right to an abortion at all costs and who memorialize a late term abortionist as some kind of great hero, even a saint.  They have become unfamiliar with the truth.

Sometimes, you can’t get away from the truth even if you try.  When I was in Georgia working in public policy, I was invited to attend an event at the capitol where women who had had abortions told their stories.  It was an intense afternoon.  Many women spoke, but one has stayed with me since that time.  Speaking through her tears, a young African-American woman talked about her abortion.  Her unborn son sometimes visited her in her dreams to ask her why she let him be killed.  I have rarely had such strong sympathy for another human being as I had for her that day. 

Listening to her and other women who have had abortions, I have heard them express their feeling of betrayal that this was an option for them.  At first, this may sound like an attempt to divert moral responsibility, but I think they are right.  When women choose abortion, they are usually confused and in distress.  Is it really that surprising that they sometimes feel they’ve been let down by their families, friends, and their community even as they struggle with their guilt?  After all, the result of our collective wisdom as a society is that this was a reasonable choice for them to make.

In explaining guilt, I think a story from Plato’s Republic is instructive.  It is the story of the Ring of Gyges.  There was once a man who happened to be present when a shift in the ground exposed a hidden crypt.  Inside the man found some alien objects, including the ring.  He put the ring on his finger and found that when he turned it in a particular direction, it rendered him invisible, invisible EVEN TO GOD.  And so, the man in the story uses his power of invisibility to seduce the queen, assassinate the king with her cooperation, and then take over the kingdom.  The point of the story was that if we could do evil without consequence we would.  And so one might think you could obtain an abortion in secret and no one would ever know.  In the story of the Ring of Gyges, the man is free from any consequence because this ring is so powerful it renders the user invisible even to God.  But we have no such power.  There is no such thing as the Ring of Gyges.  God knows us completely.  And we know it, too.  Nothing we do is invisible from God.  Our relationship with him is so intimate that no other relationship in our lives can approach it.  We know when we have grieved him and it troubles our conscience.

Let’s return to the scripture for a moment.  I was driven to the passage I’m going to mention by the work of Stanley Hauerwas.  He is a Methodist theologian at Duke University.  In reading his thoughts about abortion, I saw that he highlighted Matthew 25: 31-46.  Here is the passage:

The Final Judgment

31 “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne. 32 Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. 33 And he will place the sheep on his right, but the goats on the left. 34 Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. 35 For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, 36 I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.’ 37 Then the righteous will answer him, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you drink? 38 And when did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you?39 And when did we see you sick or in prison and visit you?’ 40 And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, [1] you did it to me.’

41 “Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels. 42 For I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink, 43 I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me.’ 44 Then they also will answer, saying, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to you?’ 45 Then he will answer them, saying, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’ 46 And these will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.”

To Hauerwas, this group of people referred to twice in this passage as “the least of these” absolutely includes the unborn who are the people in all the world who are the most powerless and the most vulnerable to abuse and death.  There may be some who think this interpretation of the verse is a stretch, but I don’t think so at all.  In fact, I can claim the example of the early church for this view of what the scripture means. 

I have called the sanctity of life an acid test because one of the distinguishing marks of the church throughout the ages has been its concern for the unborn and the newly born and its opposition to infanticide.  In thinking this point through, it is useful to remember the kind of world into which the Christian church was born.  The Greco-Roman world was not one that was kind to unborn life or even newly born life.  For that matter, that culture did not value life at all unless a person was somehow very important.  The world of the Roman empire was one in which men were forced to battle each other to the death in the gladiatorial games.  Others were thrown into the ring defenseless with bloodthirsty lions or tigers.  When children were born, they were only kept if the father wanted to keep them.  A child who was unfit for any reason, including being the wrong sex would be discarded.  There were places on the edge of the wildnerness where infants would be exposed to the elements or to the dangers of predatory animals.  It was also common for women to seek abortions by various grisly methods involving poison or crude surgical procedures.  But after the life, ministry, and resurrection of Jesus Christ and the founding of the Christian church, things began to change.  The Christians began to rescue the exposed infants and brought them into their families.  They argued against abortion and protested the gladiatorial games.  Despite the intense opposition they met from the world of that day and the persecution they experienced for their refusal to worship the emperor, it was their view that eventually prevailed.  Both the early Christian writings and the law of the Roman empire and the west for many centuries prohibited the practice of abortion and characterized it as an unjust killing of the unborn child.  The gladiatorial games were also outlawed.  The Christians sought to curb the tolerance of the empire for needless bloodshed and succeeded to an admirable degree.    

Despite this history, there are Christians today who will say we should leave behind this “political” issue of abortion and the sanctity of life.  They recommend that we focus on our proper sphere of influence which is preaching the word and saving souls.  I am always fascinated by this kind of argument.  And by fascinated, I think I really mean irritated.  First, why in the world can’t we preach the word AND fight against injustice AND protect the weakest among us?  Second, why wouldn’t we want to emulate the example of the early Christians?  Don’t we try to be like them?  Don’t Christians all over the world argue for the authenticity of their brand of the faith by claiming that they are MORE like the early church than anyone else?  Aren’t they the ones who have passed the acid test and have been tried like gold?  The demands of our Christian lives are as nothing compared to theirs.  If we cannot be troubled to speak for the unborn, I agree with Francis Schaeffer that the people of ages to come will be right to question whether anything we believed about our God was true.

Sometimes, we hide behind things like the separation of church and state.  Too many southern preachers hid behind that idea to avoid preaching against segregation.  At the end of it, they could make no larger claim than having been too cowardly to preach against a clear injustice.  There is no reason I can think of for a Christian today to say that yes we should have preached and worked against racism and segregation, but no, we should not work to protect the unborn.  You just can’t support that point of view. 

I imagine that for the most part, I am preaching to people who agree with what I am saying.  The problem is that we become numb to the horror of it.  This current battle has been going on for about 40 years now.  And we have not won it.  We have made progress, though.  The number of abortions per year has gone down.  No one can any longer be taken seriously when they refer to an unborn child as a mass of tissue.  We at least know what we are dealing with.  Perhaps more important has been the change in the church, itself.  For example, at Christian schools we have learned not to expel girls who get pregnant.  We care more about the unborn life she carries than we do about appearances.  It wasn’t always that way, was it?  How many Christian parents arranged abortions because they couldn’t bear the shame of a pregnancy out of wedlock or they couldn’t bear the shame for their daughter?  But what is shame compared to a human life? 

In point of fact, while the Catholic church never wavered in its opposition to abortion, even conservative protestants weren’t sure at first whether they supported Roe v. Wade.  The consistent witness of the Catholic church in this regard helps explain why the Christian church is closer today than at any time since the Reformation.  We are beginning to unite in defense of the unborn.

I will conclude by noting the emergence of a disturbing trend in American life.  Today, because we know so much more about the unborn child than ever before, we can learn things like whether the child has a possibility of having Down Syndrome or other genetic problems.  Would it shock you to hear that in situations where doctors tell patients their child might have Down Syndrome when they are born, nearly 90% arrange an abortion? 

A situation like that, of course, is another acid test.  If you are the parent, and make no mistake you are at that point a parent, are you willing to accept the responsibility God is giving you?  I don’t know whether Sarah Palin is a great governor or would make a great president, but it tells me something about her that she willingly gave birth to her Down Syndrome child even though she knew he would likely have the disorder.  She passed her acid test.  There is some true gold in that woman and her husband.

But people like Sarah Palin are a small minority.  Twenty years from now, there may be almost no people with Down Syndrome visible to us in our communities.  There will be no children with Down Syndrome just as there are no children with polio.  But the troubling difference is this.  We cured polio.  We have simply killed Down Syndrome.

We do it through doctors and genetic counseling and private decisions, but the basic logic of it is no different than that of the Third Reich.  Imperfect life is not worth preserving.  In the case of Nazi Germany, the government arranged for sterilization, abortion, and euthanasia to get rid of what they called “life without value.”  What you may not know is that the Nazi’s were not the only enthusiasts for eugenics.  It was popular all over the world.  American states had pro-eugenics laws on the books.  But after World War II, the nations recoiled at the culture of death in Nazi Germany.  The U.N. rushed to proclaim the need for the respect for life born and unborn. 

But the time of moral outrage has subsided.  We have forgotten how far we are capable of falling.  So, today, individuals make the choice to rid the world of the Down Syndrome child rather than a government.  Has it become any more praiseworthy?

This idea doesn’t apply only to abortion.  It comes up every time you face something that interferes with your plans for yourself and every time you face some kind of moral gut check or an acid test, if you will.  What are you made of?  Is there some real gold there or are you masquerading as the real thing? 

The nature of most people is to want to flee when they find themselves in difficulty.  And so, the girl in trouble seeks an abortion.  The investment manager begins to engage in fraud to cover mistakes and poor judgments.  An executive participates in inflating the value of assets to make his firm’s bad stock look good.  I was reading about Bernie Madoff the other day.  When he was caught by investigators who discovered his fraud, he simply said, “I always knew this day would come.”  But of course, he failed the acid test.  He never confronted the problem when he could have done some good.  He hoped against hope that his failure would remain hidden.  The result was that his clients, who thought they had the real thing, were left with fool’s gold.

Let us be the kind of people who pass these tests when we are tried.  Let us support our friends and neighbors when their trials come.  Let us be a witness to God’s love for human beings born and unborn.  Let us pass the acid test.

Comments

[John Umland]

Great essay. It is frustrating that we have to say the same things over and over again, but the Lord is faithful. The gates of hell will not prevail.
God is good
jpu

[Benighted Savage]

Good sermon. When did you deliver it?

"What she did not say is that if you follow her logic, it means a person who is larger and in control of a smaller, dependent person has the right to end the dependent person’s life."

We have replaced the old Roman pater familias with a "mater familias."

"The pro-choice movement sometimes shows disturbing similarities to totalitarian movements of the last century. Just as the Germans who ran the concentration camps had to learn to speak in such a way as to shield their consciences from the horror of what they were doing, people who work in abortion clinics watch their words very carefully. You don’t speak the truth because the truth is unspeakable."

I'm sure that was part of the matter, but I gather the Nazis were "watching their words" more to grease the wheels of their killing machine than to salve their consciences. It's a lot easier to get someone off the train and into the gas chamber if an atmosphere of secrecy and uncertainty ensures that they don't really know what's going to happen to them at Chelmno or Sobibor. As for aborturaries, you don't speak the truth because it's bad for business. Instead, you attempt to lull a woman's conscience to sleep while fomenting her rebelliousness (e.g., against traditional notions of marriage, motherhood and femininity).

"Listening to her and other women who have had abortions, I have heard them express their feeling of betrayal that this was an option for them. At first, this may sound like an attempt to divert moral responsibility, but I think they are right."

It does sound like you're shifting attention away from the aborting mother's moral crime. I'm glad you sense this as a problem.

[Micah]

This is a powerful testimony. I would have liked to have heard it in person. Well done.

[Hunter Baker]

I gave it a couple of weeks ago at church. The pastor specifically requested that I take on this topic.

[Tragic Christian]

Wonderful sermon. Can't be said enough.

Yesterday, our family went to a pool party at our neighbors' house -- like us, they have a child with Down Syndrome, and like us, they are involved in a circle of mothers of Down Syndrome children. The pool party was for all the moms and their families. There was so much joy, laughter, and giggling in that pool and the play yard that it made the heart glad. And I had to reflect that, for every child like my daughter and their son and the other dozen or so other DS kids there, there were nine souls who were determined by someone bigger to be "inconvenient" or "imperfect" and never saw the light of day. Come, Lord Jesus!

[Beth]

Very well put. If this is a sermon delivered at your church, I think I would like your church. I left my previous denomination ( Methodist) because they officially endorse legalized abortion. I will never understand why the mainline churches succumbed to the prevailing culture on this one. It is truly tragic.

[Clint Mahoney]

This is one of the best sermons I've heard on Abortion. Thanks! It hits so many points people don't seem to ever consider. I'm reminded of the International Eugenics Conferences, the Virginia public health laws and Buck vs Bell. And we pretend that PP isn't about Eugenics anymore - I wonder whey they're scrambling to provide services to hispanics when sadly most Mexicans I'd known were Catholic and had large, close and [shocker] happy families. But as the great US "Americanizes" hispanics, we see them going down the same meat grinder white Americans and blacks have lemminged into - tossing our children in first thinking somehow we won't fall in as well. How ironic it all is.

Let's wake everyone up and speak out against abortion and for Christ - there's no wrong place to speak the truth!