2022-05-16
Brooke Strong
Sermon
We have been inundated, you and I, over these last two weeks, and in truth, much longer, by an ongoing and intense debate or discussion about a leaked U.S. Supreme Court decision that purports to overturn the law we know as Roe v. Wade. From two different angles variously known as “pro-life” and “pro-choice” we have heard vitriol and anguish and despair and disgust. And everyone who speaks seems entirely clear on the matter, as though there is no gray area, no unsettled question, not the slightest hint of doubt. Most of us have holed up in armed camps, vehemently attacking or defending, seldom, if ever, listening. The subject is almost invariably discussed from a standpoint of imagined clarity, and as if there is no need to pay attention to anyone else. All nuance seems to have vanished on the whole matter of what to do with an unplanned and unwanted pregnancy.
So as people of faith, where do we go with this? Is there any way to leave our fortified bunkers so we might talk more reflectively about some of the complex dimensions of this thorny and deeply mysterious subject? I want to try this morning to approach the issue not so much from a legal or political angle as from a personal and theological angle. And, if possible, I’d like to ratchet down some of the tone of the rhetoric. I’m not unaware of the stakes of the debate. I simply don’t know if any minds are ever changed when the rhetoric is as heated as it often gets when the subject of abortion is raised. Whatever I say this morning will inevitably be booed by some and cheered by others. But I’m wondering if we might all, for the moment, dial down the bombast just a little, and see if together we might seek some light. And I wonder, too, if we might do this with a sense that God walks with us—that, as this morning’s scripture passage so evocatively puts it, “the home of God is [right here] among [us] mortals” (Revelation 21:3)—even in this apparently withered and dessicated landscape.
So here’s how I want to open: I live somewhere in a murky place when it comes to the whole matter of how best to proceed when faced with an unplanned and unwanted pregnancy. And I want to begin by telling you a little about how Mary and I thought about this whole issue when we were at the point, early in our marriage, of having children.
When we got married, Mary and I were already in our early 30s. We had the good fortune of getting pregnant—and when I say “we,” I mean Mary—very soon after our wedding. Because our second child was to be born when Mary was 36, we were offered an amniocentesis, which is advised for later childbirths as a way of seeing whether there were what were then, and perhaps now, called “genetic abnormalities.” It was a way of checking on the health prospects of the fetus. We elected not to have the amniocentesis.
And here’s why: for us—and that is a phrase I intend to use over and over this morning—for us, we wanted this child no matter what might be “wrong” with the fetus. We would live with, and hope to accept, whatever child we received. We were not unaware of the challenges we might face. It’s just that we did not want to try to decide if this emerging life was going to “pass muster.” We knew we might end up with a baby with significant medical or genetic challenges. Our goal, though, was to be in a receiving posture, a stance of gratitude no matter what the specific gift itself was to be. For us—again that phrase—this was not something to try to control or manage, much less to perhaps reject. It was something for us to receive as pure gift.
And we came to this stance because there is something so deeply mysterious and marvelous about a human being coming to life. A sperm fertilizes an egg and the baffling beauty that is you and I comes into being. The magnificent grace of God took shape, in our case, in a tiny Alexander and a tiny Taylor, the dear children who are our offspring. And even if they had had significant health and genetic challenges, we decided, without knowing what either child would be like, that we wanted to keep and raise them. At the root, for us as parents, is that, no matter their shape and specifics, we were to be the recipients of unrepeatable gifts from God.
All of which is a long way of saying that Mary and I revere life, and we wanted not to try to make those incipient lives conform to some standard we had established for how those lives ought to take shape. It’s in this sense that Mary and I are what we might say is “for life.” I’m intentionally not using the phrase “pro-life” because it has echoes and connotations that do not suit the two of us. Mary and I are, though, deeply awed by the gift of life that comes from somewhere far beyond us. We treasure life that has come to us as sheer blessing. We want never to take that gift for granted. We want never to think that gift is ours to manipulate. It is overflowing grace, pure and simple, and the only proper response for us was and is to say thank you. We are “for life,” and we were and are incredibly grateful for the new lives that came to us in the persons of Alexander and Taylor. And our gratitude was given to God for having created lives, precisely as they were, that we could not possibly, in our wildest imaginations, have created ourselves. Gift. Grace. Life. All from God.
There is, of course, more to this picture, though. As much as we treasured the two specific lives we were given, we have not had to deal with the difficulties so many parents face of raising children when resources are slim and challenges gargantuan. And the bottom line—just as important as our reverence for life—is we could not possibly see our way to making their choices for them. The choices we made were our choices. We got to make them, and they worked for us. But they would not work for countless others. A good friend of mine who is Jewish says if she had conceived a child with Tay-Sachs disease, a disease that strikes Ashkenazi Jews much more commonly than it strikes others, she would unquestionably have ended that pregnancy because the few short years of that child’s agonized life would have been more than any of them could bear.
And all I can think, when I hear her say that, is how awful a world it would be if I insisted on making that choice for her. That’s a choice for her and her partner to make, not for me to impose on them. For her, to end that pregnancy would not be the slightest bit cavalier. It would not be a remotely casual decision. It would be made with a deep sense of reverence for life.
And this is true for countless women and men, people who, for any number of inscrutable reasons, find the thought of trying inadequately to raise a child they don’t feel equipped for to be a repugnant choice, a choice characterized far more by harm than by good. For me or any legal entity or anyone else to try to make that choice for them seems like the height of folly and arrogance. I can’t decide for you that you should have chemotherapy to fight your cancer or surgery to alleviate your back pain or an amputation to remove your leg. Only you can decide those things. And how much more so with a pregnancy.
Now some will say that a pregnancy is entirely different from any of those other examples because, they say, abortion is about choosing to end a life. In their eyes, abortion is murder, and it should not be left to the whim of the individual.
The trouble with that perspective is that it is not at all clear that all abortion is murder. As Christians, it’s entirely appropriate to ask when life begins. We would be remiss if we didn’t reflect on that fundamental question. The glaring problem is that different people, often of good will, come down in different places on when life begins.
The truth of the matter for me is that I really don’t know when life begins. An egg is a potential life. A sperm is a potential life. And a fertilized egg is another step in potential life. At some point in its development, that fertilized egg finally becomes an actual human life. It’s not at all obvious, though, at what precise point that happens.
One way of thinking about these gradations is by way of a thought experiment. If a house catches fire and we know a baby is inside, we would likely do anything to go inside and rescue that baby. If that same house catches fire, though, and we know a fertilized egg has been preserved in a freezer in the house, we would be far less likely to make heroic efforts to save that frozen fertilized egg. And that’s because we distinguish, in some gut way, between an actual human life and the fertilized egg that is a possible human life.
Several decades ago, the distinguished Roman Catholic ethicist—take note of the denomination—Daniel Maguire, wrote that “considering the fetus a person from conception on is a faith stance which imports enormous problems. For almost three weeks, the cells of the original mass (the morula) are undifferentiated. In this primitive state, twinning and recombination are biologically feasible. Since by no definition can persons split into two or recombine into one, the term ‘person’ does not fit this early cell growth.” All of which means that reasonable, faithful, moral people disagree on when a fertilized ovum becomes a person.
Another way for us to look at this question of the exact moment of life’s beginnings is to note that the Bible itself has no hard and fast guidance on the subject. The writers of the Bible clearly revere the gift of life. They don’t weigh in, though, on when precisely it begins. A brief look at the creation stories in Genesis may be an illuminating parallel on this score. It’s crucial to remember, first, that these creation stories are not at all literal, scientific accounts of the earth’s beginnings. They are figurative, metaphorical depictions of mysteries we can never fully plumb. That said, as is sometimes pointed out, those two biblical creation stories portray the act of creation as a kind of stepped process. In the Bible’s very first chapter, God first creates light and dark, then earth and sky, then land and sea, then vegetation, then day and night, then animals, and finally—finally—human beings. Creation is a process, and no one stage completes it. Similarly in the next creation story in the second chapter of Genesis, the creative process is also a gradual, stepped one. In that story, a single non-gendered human being finally yields two gendered human beings who are to be partners. In neither story is there an inarguably defined beginning of life. The act of God’s creating, in other words, is not so much like turning a light switch so that it’s suddenly on. Creation is, instead, a process that grows incrementally and eventually becomes a whole that is forever changing and adapting.
As we prepare to wrap up this morning, we are acutely conscious of the eternally unfinished nature of this conversation. We have all likely been exposed to countless perspectives on the subject, especially over the last two weeks. Here, in a nutshell, is what, from this Christian standpoint, we’re trying to do today. First, let us affirm that all of us value life. Most of us who favor honoring a woman’s autonomy find life to be a mesmerizingly beautiful and enchanted thing, and we treasure it beyond all measure. Life is precious to us.
Second, it’s important to note that many, if not most, of us acknowledge that abortion is, in some way, always a tragedy. As the novelist Margaret Atwood has written, “Nobody likes abortion, even when safe and legal. It’s not what any woman would choose for a happy time on Saturday night” (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/may/07/enforced-childbirth-is-slavery-margaret-atwood-on-the-right-to-abortion). Abortion usually happens because of a sense of desperation on the part of the mother or the couple. It is seen as tragic but necessary.
Third, we reiterate that no matter what our own personal values are in the face of pregnancy, we can’t know what that choice is like for any other mother, and that our place is to support others as they seek to make often grimly painful decisions that honor life in their own particular situations.
And lastly, and most important of all, all of these choices happen with God watching over and providing nurture and comfort. God gives us life. God attends to us in the sometimes impossibly obtuse decisions with which we are confronted. God embraces us in life and in death. That doesn’t by any means decide all the thorny questions that face us. It does, though, remind us that no challenge is so great that God cannot make of it something grace-filled and hopeful. Parched as we are for wisdom and hope, we take heart from the words of the risen Christ who is always with us: “To the thirsty I will give water as a gift from the spring of the water of life” (21:6). At the core of this, as of every challenge of life, is that there is nothing more crucial than that we love each other in the mess of our days and in the complexities of life and death decisions. God loves you and me. And we are bid to do the same. That is the glory in which we recline. May we live in that love.