Sermon from May 11, 2008
The world and its desires pass away, but the man who does the will of God lives forever – 1 John 2:17. We are pulled by the ephemeral on one side and on the other side by the eternal.

The ephemeral – the world and its desires – passes away in the sense that it disappears and also in the sense that it grows stale and loses its hold on our imagination and allegiance. The loss of something we hoped was here to stay and the failure of something to hold our interest can cause us to grow restless, even fearful, and then to ease their souls we seek change.

As a result, the very promise of change, with no specific change in mind, promises relief from the anxiety and emptiness we feel in the face of loss. “We can’t go on like this. Anything but this! What are our options?”

Politicians learn quickly how to sense the anxiety and emptiness of their constituents, and they promise changes that will mend the sense of loss that gnaws away their happiness bite by bite.

Many a man, wizened by sad experience or wise from good experience, may find the promise of change hard to resist, may find it hard to dispel the illusion that this time something permanent will find a home in this impermanent world.

We can see this tension between the permanent and the impermanent as the gift of a wise God to keep alive in us the sense of wonder and discovery, or we can see it as part of the penalty for the sin by which disorder has entered into God’s creation. It’s not hard to see it both ways. It’s not hard to have it both ways.

The unusual circumstances that go into effect today at BVBC have placed the theme of change at the forefront of our minds. The presidential election of 2008 has placed the theme of change on the agenda for public discussion.

So, I have put that theme on my preaching agenda for May and June, beginning with the brief meditation with which this sermon has opened. I do not intend to comment on proposed political changes. I do not intend to reflect on the changes this congregation is now living with. Both national politics and church politics deserve our attention, and where appropriate, I hope to be part of both conversations.

But in this act of worship, where the praise of earth joins the praise of heaven, and the Book is opened, and the counsel of God comes to bear on human experience, I wish only to hear and help you to hear the Voice behind the voices.

In this time of change and rumor of change I’d like to address six unchanging foundation stones on which the human experience is built. They are as follows: 1) birth, which we consider today, Mother’s Day, 2) Jesus and 3) death, which we consider the next two Sundays. Then, in June we consider 4) work on June 15, Father’s Day, and then 5) the sacraments, communion and baptism, and, finally, the faith once for all delivered to the Church (Jude 3).

Birth
The first unchanging foundation stone on which the human experience is built is birth. As the world and its desires pass away, the human experience remains immutably anchored in the conception, birth and nurture of children. It’s all there in Genesis 1:28 – God blessed them (male and female) and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground.”

I noticed something curious in this verse that I had previously overlooked in my hasty readings of Genesis one. Why did God have to command something that would take place anyway just by letting nature take its course?

We Christians believe that nature did not just take its course, until the Lord God commanded it to take its course. An atheistic view of human life says that the human body works the way it does only as a result of natural selection to ensure the survival of the species. A creation view of human life says that the human body ultimately works the way it does as the result of God’s wisdom. In His wisdom He said: “Be fruitful and increase in number.” We also believe that His command pronounced His blessing on the process He had put in place. God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number.”

Conception, birth and nurture are His idea and His gift to man. The command to be fruitful and increase in number is the first commandment to man in the Bible. The command holds that privileged place, because every human birth casts a vote in favor of everything else. The future of the human undertaking depends on birth.

God has made us trustees of His creation. We must protect and conserve it. If we don’t, serious consequences follow for the environment and for human life. We have awakened to the fact that protecting the earth is just as important as subduing the earth. We are learning the hard way that protecting birth is more important than controlling birth. Disobeying God’s first commandment to man, like disobeying any commandment of God, trails behind it disorder and death.

We see evidence of this taking place in Europe. For example, “in Germany, as in Western Europe generally and in Italy most particularly, people are not having babies. . . . Having children is no longer considered a duty owed the future but is viewed as one of many possibilities to be taken into account in calculating personal satisfaction and securing one’s preferred way of life.” (Wolfhart Pannenberg, First Things, March 2003, 9)

George Weigel, a Christian intellectual, asks, “Why is Europe committing demographic suicide? Why does no Western European country have a replacement-level birthrate? Why will Spain’s population likely decline from 40 million to 31.3 million by the middle of the century? Why will 42 percent of Italians be over age sixty by 2050? What is happening when an entire continent, wealthier and healthier than ever before, declines to create the human future in the most elemental sense, by producing a next generation?” (First Things, February 2004, 20).

The first unchanging foundation stone on which the human experience is built is birth. As the world and its desires pass away, the human experience remains immutably anchored in the conception, birth and nurture of children.

Who Speaks for the Children?
Western Civilization finds itself in its demographic crisis, because many movers and shakers of our civilization have begun to lose their grip on the dignity and value of the person. Here’s an example. Peter Singer is Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University. On a website of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs), one question posed to Professor Singer is this: “If you had to save either a human being or a mouse from a fire, with no time to save them both, wouldn’t you save the human being?”

Dr. Singer’s answer: “Yes, in almost all cases I would save the human being.  But not because the human being is human, that is, a member of the species Homo sapiens.  Species membership alone isn’t morally significant.” (<http://www.princeton.edu/~psinger/faq.html> accessed Monday, May 7, 2007) He has spoken bluntly the conviction that justifies abortion and the destruction of human embryos.

Dr. Singer is a very smart man, but let’s tell the truth about his last statement that “Species membership alone isn’t morally significant.” That is not science. It is a creed, an atheistic creed but a creed nonetheless. When people make creedal statements about the nature of man, they open the door for Christians to counter with creedal statements of their own. Here’s one:

            You created my inmost being;

                        you knit me together in my mother’s womb.

            I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;

                        your works are wonderful,

                        I know that full well.

            My frame was not hidden from you

                        when I was made in the secret place.

            When I was woven together in the depths of the earth,

                        your eyes saw my unformed body.

            All the days ordained for me

                        were written in your book

                        before one of them came to be – Psalm 139:13-16.

Grounded in this religious conviction about the origin of human life, I believe it belongs to public moral reasoning to ask, “Who speaks for children whose parents contemplate aborting them, or those eight to thirty-two-celled human lives whose stem cells researchers and lawmakers prize so highly?” For a moment I’d like to try.

The unborn would say to us, “Give us the same chance at life that you had. All of us are now what all of you once were. Leave us in mothers’ wombs, and watch what we can do. We will delight proud parents. We’ll play in the surf at Rehoboth Beach. We’ll graduate from Cape Henlopen or Concord or Wilmington Christian School. Can’t you see us cheering Penn State football, serving our country in uniform, saying ‘I do,’ farming, teaching, and homemaking? A few of us might become state legislators, scientists or pastors. Just let us live. We are not laboratory mice.”

Whether begotten in the natural course of things or in a Petrie dish, we should welcome these smallest of human beings in life and protect them in law.

The first unchanging foundation stone on which the human experience is built is birth. As the world and its desires pass away, the human experience remains immutably anchored in the conception, birth and nurture of children.

Who Speaks for Mothers?
The unborn child from conception to delivery is at the mercy of his mother. What is happening to mothers in the unprincipled pursuit of pleasure and power that offers itself to them as the path for a flourishing humanity?

Many years ago, a woman stood in my office shaking and weeping, as she told me about the abortion she had had many years earlier. She described the moment when she was being wheeled on her gurney to the operating room crying and saying, “I don’t want to have an abortion. I don’t want to have an abortion.” But her husband overwhelmed her objections and compelled her to follow through. It wasn’t what the embryo looked like or was capable of doing. The mother’s life was not at risk. There was no appeal to genetic defect. It was sheer choice. That has been true of nearly all the women I have spoken with over the years, who have told me about the abortion they had.

Articles I have read suggest that most women who have an abortion think it is a bad thing. They go ahead with it, because “unplanned motherhood . . . represents a threat so great to modern women that it is perceived as equivalent to a ‘death of self.’ While the woman may rationally understand this is not her own literal death, her emotional, subconscious reaction to carrying the child to term is that her life will be ‘over.’ This is because many young women of today have developed a self-identity that simply does not include being a mother. It may include going through college, getting a degree, obtaining a good job, even getting married someday; but the sudden intrusion of motherhood is perceived as a complete loss of control over their present and future selves. It shatters their sense of who they are and will become, and thereby paralyzes their ability to think more rationally or realistically.” (Paul Swope, First Things, November 1998, 31).

Their pressing issue is what makes a woman a fulfilled person, and motherhood is an unranked possibility. Once again, this is not science. This is a faith issue. Many women do not believe that motherhood will fulfill them as persons. It is not obvious to them that there is an advantage in carrying their unborn child to term. That is a lie that is vying for the soul of our nation, because it is vying for the souls of our women.

The Pastoral Center of Gravity
Ages ago, when the world was young, the wise discerned the intentions of God and His mandate for humanity: “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it.”

We have marked this day in our year to honor those women who carried us in their bodies and delivered us into the world, so that we are now more than six billion strong. We honor those women, who have nursed and nurtured their young toward maturity. We honor those women, who have nursed and nurtured their young, who will never reach maturity. We honor those women, who have chosen to live on less in order to be at home with their children. We honor those women, married and single, who out of economic necessity have gone to work outside their homes to provide for their children.

We honor those grandmothers, who assist their sons and daughters in the nurture of another generation and do so at a time when their own physical powers are less and at a sacrifice of personal liberty. We honor those grandmothers, who are the only mothers some children know.

We honor those women who under unimaginable pressures give up their children for adoption, sometimes refusing the pressure to have their child destroyed. We honor those women who would dearly love to have children and who can’t.

We are joined in a great civil dispute with those principalities and powers that would persuade women that they are less than women, if they are child-bearing women, when in truth they are never more a woman than when they bears their young. Only the Christian martyr ranks above a mother in the order of sacrifice.

We who honor them today and those we honor welcome relief from the pain and danger of child-bearing. At the same time we refuse the notion that the unborn or the processes of a woman’s body are just so much putty in the hands of social engineers. Either we conceive and bear and nurture children, or we perish. That doesn’t change.