God is Pro-Life
In response to multiple requests, I decided to post a sermon I gave on abortion last year! I write out every single word when I write talks…so it’s going to read the way I intended to deliver it. Please feel free to use this for your own purposes, but please provide a tag/link back when doing so :) Email or DM with questions, but I reserve the right to not argue back and forth bc your girl is TOO TIRED right now! So without further ado…
“God is Pro-Life”
Sermon delivered at Trinity United Presbyterian Church College Group in September of 2020.
Oh hey...you have to listen to a pregnant lady talk about abortion for the next 25 minutes. How are you feeling? Nervous? I am nervous. Please just know first and foremost this is NOT a well-strategized attempt to emotionally manipulate you regarding the hot button issue of abortion. But for real: the reason I am here talking about this issue is multi-layered.
1) I am the most pregnant person here (I think) so I am the most qualified.
2) This is one of the biggest issues of recent decades, but specifically for this election, as well as the confirmation of a new supreme court justice. You can get stressed out and put your head in the sand, but you quite literally cannot escape the fact that you need to form a robust, and I HOPE Biblically sound standpoint.
3) Abortion is, itself, profoundly theological. The fact that it exists, what it asserts about human life, what it posits about GOD, what it means to be an embodied soul -- your outlook on all of these things is intimately related to how you will vote.
Valid perspectives
Here is one more thing I REALLY want to hammer home throughout this talk: people have really valid reasons and--often more importantly-- personal circumstances that govern their views on abortion. So much so that we are usually talking completely past each other. Pro-lifers condemn all pro-choice people as being ok with murder, when in actuality, many people who believe in a woman’s right to choose truly believe that life does not begin with conception.
Likewise, pro-choicers will speak of pro-lifers as if they are intent on subjugating the bodies of women to the patriarchy, when in actuality, most pro-life people TRULY believe that we are talking about ending a human life. For them, we are trying to make legislature for something like murder, or drunk driving, or stealing from little old ladies...the issue of choice has a very different implication when you acknowledge two lives. It is not just a “religious view” at that point.
These are two very simplified versions of the discussion but nonetheless, I want ya’ll to acknowledge with me that there are other perspectives that are likely informed by different priorities. And I haven’t even GOTTEN to the part about personal experience.
Equally personal and ideological! GENTLENESS
And that’s really the last thing I want to be really clear about: you know someone. Your mom, your aunt, your friend, your sister -- you know someone who has been through this and she has gone through it mostly alone. And she probably will never stop fighting the shame. I was speaking to a SMALL group of women at this church yesterday morning, just asking for prayer over this talk, and 2/4 of them - 2 people you would never ever ever guess if you tried -- pulled me aside to let me know that they had chosen to have an abortion when they were younger. And that so many of these “debates” and “discussions” and “truth bombs” -- regardless of how effective or true the argument -- plunge them right back into a shame cycle, into struggling to believe that they could ever be seen as worthy before a holy God.
Lord have MERCY to the highest degree if we are ever the reason someone questions God’s grace and forgiveness and restoration in their life. You can speak truth with self-control and compassion. If you are not mature enough to do that, you don’t need to go to small group tonight! Not to be mean. But I am serious.
Regardless, as it always does, the Word of God gives us a lot of direction about how we should think about and respond to human life, as well as to human pain.
Dive into Genesis 16 // Hagar and Ishamel
We’re going to start in Genesis 16. Let’s talk about Hagar and Ishmael. I will set the scene for you -- just a chapter before in Genesis 15, God famously promises Abram as many descendants as there are stars. This is the beginning of the Abrahamic covenant, where God promises this little nobody in Canaan a legacy he couldn’t have dreamt for himself if he tried -- God promises that Abraham’s descendents will have this land as their own, and that He will make them strong and sustain them. God takes complete responsibility for bringing this plan about. In a nutshell.
So let’s remember that. Because now we get into Genesis 16…I am going to be jumping around a bit, but it’s really important to me that we read this text, so just do your best to follow along if you have your Bible. Starting in verse 1.
Genesis 16: 1- 16 // Now Sarai, Abram’s wife, bore him no children. She had an Egyptian slave-girl whose name was Hagar, 2 and Sarai said to Abram, “You see that the Lord has prevented me from bearing children; go in to my slave-girl; it may be that I shall obtain children by her.” And Abram listened to the voice of Sarai. 3 So, after Abram had lived ten years in the land of Canaan, Sarai, Abram’s wife, took Hagar the Egyptian, her slave-girl, and gave her to her husband Abram as a wife. 4 He went in to Hagar, and she conceived; and when she saw that she had conceived, she looked with contempt on her mistress. 5 Then Sarai said to Abram, “May the wrong done to me be on you! I gave my slave-girl to your embrace, and when she saw that she had conceived, she looked on me with contempt. May the Lord judge between you and me!” 6 But Abram said to Sarai, “Your slave-girl is in your power; do to her as you please.” Then Sarai dealt harshly with her, and she ran away from her. 7 The angel of the Lord found her by a spring of water in the wilderness, the spring on the way to Shur. 8 And he said, “Hagar, slave-girl of Sarai, where have you come from and where are you going?” She said, “I am running away from my mistress Sarai.” 9 The angel of the Lord said to her, “Return to your mistress, and submit to her.” 10 The angel of the Lord also said to her, “I will so greatly multiply your offspring that they cannot be counted for multitude.” 11 And the angel of the Lord said to her,
“Now you have conceived and shall bear a son;
you shall call him Ishmael,[a]
for the Lord has given heed to your affliction.
13 So [Hagar] named the Lord who spoke to her, “You are El-roi”; meaning the God who sees me --for she said, “Have I really seen God and remained alive after seeing him?”[c]....
15 Hagar bore Abram a son; and Abram named his son, whom Hagar bore, Ishmael. 16 Abram was eighty-six years old when Hagar bore him[e]Ishmael.
So this poor slave girl has just been raped. You can try to edge your way around that, but the reality of the situation is, that’s probably the right word for it. She didn’t have a choice in this matter. And then Sarai beats HER for the exact outcome that Sarai had wanted in the first place.
This is a tragedy. Abram is passive and indifferent to Sarai’s faithless plan, even though God JUST and I mean JUST given him assurance that He would make sure there was an heir. Sarai attempts to force God’s hand, manipulating Abram in the process, and is ultimately abusive when her awful plan works. Hagar, an Egpytian slave girl, was the recipient of that abuse and placed in an impossible situation by the depravity of other people. But God finds her and makes HER a promise too.
“This baby that you didn’t ask for? I have a plan for Him. He fits into this story.”
It’s uncomfortable that God asks Hagar to return to her abusers here. I have thoughts on this, that we don’t have time for. I do NOT think the moral of the story is to submit to any abuse; HERE, I think God is promising Hagar a future for herself and her just conceived baby if she will return to her impossible situation and trust Him.
So that’s the first point I want to stop on: the full arc of scripture affirms that God already has a future and purpose for human life even before conception. God knew Ishmael--a baby that did not conventionally fit into the “plan” God had just revealed to Abram --and He already had a story written for Him.
There are multiple other texts we can look to on this point:
About the prophet Jeremiah, God says: “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.” (Jeremiah 1:5)
And then there’s the passage you’ve probably most heard referenced when we discuss abortion. But just try to open your ears to its beauty. How stunning that this could be true:
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; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them. (Psalm 139:13-16).
We often get hung up on the question of when life begins. Is it the heartbeat? Is it when brain activity starts? When the fetus feels pain? When the fetus could survive on its own???
Here is my big question for you: what if you are wrong? There are many plenty more passages that reference God’s interest in babies in the womb, and more specifically, in conception. Biblically speaking, trying to splice out the exact moment that life starts to matter to God is somewhat of a fool’s errand. There is now an established trajectory -- a teleology -- to this fetus that
the Bible speaks about time and time again. We should exercise extreme caution and reverence when we attempt to legislate the details of something as mysterious and complex as life itself. If you truly believe that God is the sovereign Creator, if you are truly committed to obedience to Him, each and every Christian should take a VERY large pause before claiming certainty that when a “ball of cells” is not yet a human life.
God is not merely pro-life in the political sense, He IS life. John 10:10 is one of those passages that I will always come back to: The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly. Life from A-Z, from womb to tomb.
So let’s go back to Ishmael. Because though God spoke purpose over his life just after he was conceived, we also need to talk about what happened to Hagar once he was actually born. In Exodus 21, we start out by learning that Abraham and Sarah finally have their son, Isaac. God was faithful; God kept his promise. God blessed them. Does this amazing miracle finally make Sarah less vindictive, less insecure? Does it draw Abraham out of his passive indifference and into defense of the weak? It does not.
Hagar went back to Sarah and Abraham like God told her to, and at some point after some years, Sarah is upset by Ishmael’s very presence. Even though AGAIN, she’s the one that forced Hagar to have this baby! But she pressures Abraham to get rid of them. Abraham gets stressed out and he does it. He gives her some bread and a little water, and sends her into the wilderness.
Genesis 21:15-21 // 15 When the water in the skin was gone, she cast the child under one of the bushes. 16 Then she went and sat down opposite him a good way off, about the distance of a bowshot; for she said, “Do not let me look on the death of the child.” And as she sat opposite him, she lifted up her voice and wept. 17 And God heard the voice of the boy; and the angel of God called to Hagar from heaven, and said to her, “What troubles you, Hagar? Do not be afraid; for God has heard the voice of the boy where
he is. 18 Come, lift up the boy and hold him fast with your hand, for I will make a great nation of him.” 19 Then God opened her eyes and she saw a well of water. She went, and filled the skin with water, and gave the boy a drink. 20 God was with the boy, and he grew up.
As God so very often does, He redeems the grotesque failure of human beings, He draws us out into the desert, and He speaks tenderly to us there (see Hosea 2:14). God got Hagar out of a toxic situation when the time was right, and He sustained her in His power. And not just that: He told Hagar that she had been seen and heard and reminds her of his promise that her son would be made into a great nation.
Sidenote: Do you KNOW how radical this text would have been when it was written? The idea that God was speaking directly to a woman? An Egpytian woman? A female Egyptian slave?????
God had a purpose for Ishmael in the womb, but God sustained him AND his mother throughout their lives. He was an advocate and a protector from the start to the end.
Here we see a single woman with an illegitimate child trying to survive in a foreign land that is not her home. It sounds a lot like a something we hear countless times in the Bible:
Deuteronomy 6:8 // He executes justice for the orphan and the widow, and shows His love for the alien by giving him food and clothing.
Or how about here? When we start getting into some economics:
(Deuteronomy 24:19)"When you reap your harvest in your field and have forgotten a sheaf in the field, you shall not go back to get it; it shall be for the alien, for the orphan, and for the widow, in order that the LORD your God may bless you in all the work of your hands.
If you are a Christian, being pro-life should be HOLISTIC: following after God’s heart, protecting and advocating for the best possible form of living for all people, all the time.
● It means fighting back a culture of death in all arenas, “far as the curse is found.” (1 Cor 15:22)
● So...it means despising violence (Psalm 11:5). It might even mean submitting your ideas about guns to God’s Word.
● It means rejecting any attempt to oppress other human beings, whether personal or structural, physical or ideological.
● It means actively caring for the alien, the orphan, the widow. Or, for shorthand: the disenfranchised.
So yes, I think God is pro-life, in the sense that God created all life and sustains all life and wants all of us to find fullness of life in Him. To claim anything short of that contradicts the Gospel itself.
But because I am irritated with how terms get co-opted for political P R campaigns, let me read one more passage to you, from Deuteronomy.
Deuteronomy 30:19 // This day I call the heavens and the earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live.
CHOOSE. LIFE.
The dichotomy between choice and life is a false one. Our bodily autonomy is completely subject to rule of Christ (1 Cor 16:19-20), as is everything else in our lives as believers. LIFE is not just a buzzword; it is the thing God desires for all humans to experience in fullness and abundance.
Ok….so how do I vote?
EASY: I made you a really clear lil checklist. So get ready, because i just made your ballot like SO EASY.
❏ You vote for whichever platform best honors and values the sanctity of human life.
❏ You vote for the candidate who despises violence.
❏ Who actively cares for the widow, orphan, and alien.
❏ Who fights against oppression.
❏ Who shows a deeper interest in serving women in impossible situations than in arguing with them about their options.
Hm. Maybe that candidate doesn’t exist. Maybe, like we have been saying all along, a Biblical ethic does not fit cleanly into the election of 2020. Maybe this is not our home, and we should not expect to feel ideologically satisfied by the options in front of us.
We will get into this more next week, but the Bible says we are like strangers and aliens here on earth. This is NOT our home.
I am not sure I am qualified to tell you how to vote in the way that most glorifies God, and that alone has gotten me in a lot of trouble with a lot of people this election. But if you leave here tonight feeling a little less at home with a version of pro-lifeism that only cares about human life until it’s born OR with the elevation of human choice over God-ordained life, I consider that a success.
Above all else, can we remember that our God who loves to give and restore life has already conquered death? If you have had an abortion, if you know someone who has and are struggling to love them well, if you know someone who is considering it: God always redeems us from death when we give Him our messy stories. Romans 8:1-2 // There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. 2 For the law of the Spirit[a] of life in Christ Jesus has set you[b] free from the law of sin and of death.
This isn’t the tack on at the end, this is the WHOLE MESSAGE! God wants full life for you NOW, regardless of past choices, as much as He ever did. He wants each and every one of us living life to the full. Just like He saw
Hagar in the desert and gave her a future, just like He saw Ishmael in her womb and promised him this crazy legacy...God is even now el-Roi, the God who SEES and always always always redeems.
Pray with me.