As promised, I'm going to tackle the very difficult issue of abortion and the very real case of pregnancy secondary to forced intercourse like rape and incest. As I do, please know that I have not considered this in a vacuum; that is, this very situation is reported to be the reason for obtaining an abortion for at least 10,000 women per year (Guttmacher Institute Study, p. 297). This is a substantial number of women who have been violated and who are faced with this almost unimaginable situation. We need to consider this in anything we might say on the issue: real people have been hurt greatly in our broken and unredeemed world. The typical 'pro-life' response to this question is something akin to saying (yes, I present it as a caricature here) "Don't have an abortion now that you're pregnant because two wrongs don't make a right." This (somewhat callous) response is natural if one is working from the typical argument that the embryo or fetus is a person and shouldn't be terminated as a result because they are a) innocent and b) have rights. I talked a lot about why I think this isn't the foundational line of thinking we Christians should hold to, as a people called to faith, on the abortion issue. That goes for the issue in general, as discussed in my message over the weekend and in my post the other day, as well as for the issue in this specific context. Yet others, who are to be respected, make this a chief line of argumentation. This is understandable and works better in secular debate but misses (I think) the very gift we must offer women facing this circumstance. It also misses the best of what we are called to as a people of faith. The gift we have to offer - a great gift indeed - is best seen in retrospect. Not a retrospective look at how this has played out in any woman's life but rather how it worked out in one man's life. This man, who was a few years younger than me, was brutally tortured and then unjustly executed. To say that he was unjustly executed is an understatement; he was completely innocent of the crimes of which he was accused. Yet this man, while being tortured, held no anger in his heart against his torturers, but rather, sought their good. Of course I'm talking about Jesus, crucified on a cross. To be tortured on the cross was an unimaginable horror and yet, because of his trust in our Father, Jesus endured it and remarkable things happened as a result. The bible says that we were redeemed (Romans 3:23-25) because Jesus refused to cut short our Father's redemptive plan (Matthew 26:39; Romans 3:26). Not only that, but all of creation was redeemed because Jesus refused to go his own way (Colossians 1:20). And in a remarkable turn, even the very image of injustice itself - the cross - was redeemed from being a symbol of oppression, injustice, and pain and was transformed into the very picture of hope, justice, and salvation for billions of souls. All this happened through as Jesus trusted in His Father's power and love. Jesus endured that cross because of the hope and joy set before him - the hope of a redeeming Father on the other side (Hebrews 12:2). The gift that we have to offer any woman facing this situation is this hope. Hope in the redemptive power of our God beyond any circumstance, beyond any cross, beyond any wrong even rape or incest. The gift that we have to offer - and which we must offer - is hope in the God who can bring good into the world and into our lives even beyond a terrible evil that has occurred. I have read of women for whom such redemption has occurred either through the blessing their child became to them personally or to others through adoption. Perhaps this is the healing they needed, not the healing of forgetting the past, but the healing that comes as God changes the meaning of the past by working in the present to bring good from evil. As the people of Christ, we are not about what people shouldn't do but rather about the fact that there is good news to be found in Jesus. To offer only the former or even mostly the former is to fail in our call to be a blessing in our world. And the good news is that we know a God who redeems not only individuals but the broken pieces of our history, corporate and individual. It is to this God that we must point everyone. It is to this loving God which we must especially point those who've been trampled under by the feet of injustice. And then, in reflection of this redeeming God we must love those in need as he loves them, with a radical, self-sacrificing, healing love, expressed daily on behalf of another. There is no easy answer here. But the answer we have to give - Christ and the healing that comes through faith and trust in him even in this - we must give. To anything less is to cheat another human being from the hope we find so transforming.

This week we continued CRCC's 'Neglected' series with a message on the contentious issue of abortion. As I said at the beginning of the message (posted here soon) I know that there are those in our church who hold to what our society deems a pro-life position. I also know that there are others in our congregation who strongly support what our society deems to be a pro-choice position. But most importantly, I was aware as I entered into this topic that there were women in our midst for whom this was anything but theoretical; that is, I knew there were women in attendance who had faced this issue in their own lives and opted either to carry the child to term or elect to have an abortion. All this, the raw experiences and emotions in the room together with the varying opinions on the subject, made it all the more important in my mind to do my best to present a thoughtful, biblical position that would offer a chance to reframe the debate as it stands in our society. As it stands in our society the debate is really about personal rights. The two key words there are "personal" and "rights." That is, persons are deemed to have rights under our constitution. The abortion debate, in taking up this concept, focuses on two main issues in response:

• When does a person become a person (people vary in their answers) because only persons have rights?
• When two person's rights conflict, who's rights trump the other's?

These are the questions - as I understand it - that Roe v. Wade deals with. And they are fine, I suppose, from a secular perspective. But they don't reflect the foundational biblical lens through which I believe we should be looking as we seek to navigate this issue faithfully. In the first place, the question of when a person becomes a person has been answered differently by faithful Christians down through history. This is not because some people are shying away from the bible while others are holding to it, but rather because the biblical evidence on the issue of when exactly "personhood" begins is open to several valid lines of interpretation. Pillars like St. Jerome, St. Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas all thought that "ensoulment," or what we might today call 'personhood,' began at varying points after conception (here's an adequate and readily accessible overview). We will never, this side of heaven, come to unanimity on when personhood begins. Besides, whether or not a wombed child is a person isn't the most basic question, here, from a Christian's viewpoint. I don't believe that abortion is wrong on the basis that it is the killing of a person. Yep, you read that correctly (reread it carefully and notice that I don't say that it is right to kill a person at any stage of development; rather, I said that there is another more foundational reason that abortion is called a sin down through church history). More on that in a moment. But first, my second point is that as Christians we should really reconsider whether we really have 'rights' to do anything we want or not. While our government grants rights to us as its citizens the case can be made that Christians have willingly given up their own rights and instead have committed to following Jesus' lead in every aspect of our life, which includes how they use their bodies (e.g., see 1 Corinthians 6:13 with regard to sexuality and Philippians 1:20 with regard to life and death and everything in between). More radically, a case has been made by Stanley Hauerwas that as Christians it is not only Christ who has a say with what we do with our bodies, but other Christians as well (note: while I bristle at his language about the non-sacredness of life, I recommend this though-provoking article based upon a talk Hauerwas gave to his denominational leaders about abortion... it challenged, and shaped, my thinking on this issue). In light of this, I am pro-choice: every Christian has choice as to whether or not they will give to Christ his choice over how they use their body. Do we always? Certainly not, but this is the ideal.  Which gets us closer to the foundational reason why I believe abortion to be wrong. So what is wrong with abortion? Two things, I think. Foundationally, I believe abortion to be wrong because we are not, by making that choice, acting in faith: we are not trusting that God is at work in every pregnancy (not that he caused every pregnancy, but rather that he is soveriegnly at work in shaping every wombed child; see Psalm 139, which first about God and his handiwork and only second about when we might think life begins). So, in a sense, it is wrong because it is lacking faith, which is what every person is called to in relation to God. Tangentially, abortion points to the wrongness of how the church has been the church. We haven't even approached the call to radically love the other, to bear the burdens of the other, in the form of any woman facing this choice. The truth is that women with an adequate social, economic, and education foundation make the choice of an abortion far less frequently than those without such support (compare the projected decline in abortions using legislative vs/or economic means). I am convinced that we must as a church do a much better job supporting those who need our help: this includes not only the unborn but the women who carry them. We must stand for, not against, women in difficult circumstance. We must lobby for better support from our government on their behalf. But most importantly, we must be ready to offer 100% support, in the form of love, financial assistance, education, or housing, to any woman who has need in this area. More on this tomorrow when I begin to deal with the questions given to me after service... the first of which is this: "I understand that abortion is wrong for birth control methods, but what about in cases of rape or incest... is it really wrong then?"

Oh boy, politics and the church... in the church! What a combination. Truth be told I was looking forward to studying this topic and after that, to sharing on this topic (posted here). As I mentioned in my sermon, I believe that politics can steal what should never be stolen: a part of our identity, at least a piece of our allegiance, and a whole lot of our hope. With regard to identity, we can pull from anywhere to define ourselves. This "anywhere" might be our roles within our family, our work, our education, our sports teams, or even our political party. Paul has a list of what he used to identify himself by in Philippians 3:3-6. After coming to Christ though, he seems to have come to the understanding that we must hold tentatively to those things that are not God-given (e.g., our job, our education, our religious zeal, our political registration) while we hold tenaciously to those things that are God-given, especially our relationship with Jesus Christ. He states this stronger than I do, but the principle is at work, nevertheless (see Philippians 3:7-8 where Paul calls his badges of honor skubalon...here's what it means...and says he defines himself by one thing...his relationship with and pursuit of Christ). This has implications for how we define ourselves, for our identity. We must define the Christian by their relationship with Christ, rather than their political party. Unfortunately, this isn't always the case as some (though perhaps not many) have trouble seeing how a person could really be a Christian and yet vote for candidate 'D' or candidate 'R' (depending upon the church culture one is in). If we do indeed fall into this trap of defining ourselves or someone else by any of these things - even by a political affiliation - we have an intrusion into our true identity, which is one thing only: followers of Christ. As I studied for this message, the key for me was a deeper understanding of Philippians 3:20, where Paul tells the citizens of Philippi, many of whom were also citizens of Rome, something remarkable. Whereas others may be citizens of this or that colony or empire, you Christians, Paul says, are first citizens of heaven. We need to keep in mind that this probably meant something different to the original readers of Philippians than it does on first blush to us. NT Wright sums up how these early Christians would have read Paul's words:

At once many modern Christians misunderstand what he means. We naturally suppose he means "and so we're waiting until we can go and live I heaven where we belong." But that's not what he says, and it's certainly not what he means. If someone in Philippi said, "We are citizens of Rome," they certainly wouldn't mean "so we're looking forward to going to live there." Being a colony works the other way round. The last thing the emperors wanted was a whole lot of colonists coming back to Rome. The capital was already overcrowded and underemployed. No: the task of the Roman citizen in a place like Philippi was to bring Roman culture and rule to northern Greece, to expand Roman influence there. [emphasis mine / quote from Paul for Everyone]

This being the case, what are we to understand? We are to understand that first and foremost our allegience is not to the nation of our origin but to the land of our Father. We are citizens of heaven and as such we must seek his will to be done on earth as it is in heaven. We are to expand his influence here! Now, as citizens of heaven - as people who's first allegiance is to our heavenly country - we must be better citizens of these United States. No, that's not strong enough: we should be exemplary citizens (see, for example, Romans 13:1-7, 1 Peter 2:13-17, and Titus 3:1). But politics tries to steal us away from this truth and make us first citizens of the United States instead of citizens of heaven. This is backward for the Christian: our first allegiance is to our heavenly home (and this makes us better here in the US)! Don't fall prey to this political intrusion into your life, sink into the truth of your citizenship! Finally, the most insidious of political intrusions is an intrusion into the fundamentals of our hope. Politics is great at generating hope in what this candidate or that or this party or that can do for us or for our nation or for our world. But our hope is found only in Christ, as Paul says in Philippians 3:20! Whereas those apart from Christ (Philippians 3:19) hope in the kingdoms of this world and their power, we believe the hope for the world is found nowhere else but in Jesus Christ. And we must never give this up, we must never allow this part of us - our hope - to be taken away! In the end, the danger of politics in the church is the danger that we will use it to define our identity or anothers and that it will steal our allegiance away from the Kingdom of Heaven and, if it succeeds there, that it will steal away our very hope. So, there are three truths we must never forget: We are followers of Christ, not any political party or politician. We are citizens of heaven first, and citizens of other lands second. We are people who hope only in Christ, not in any other leader this world has to offer!