Sermon from November 14, 2004

On Election Day two weeks ago, "18,336,576 (Americans) in the Voting Age Population" were denied the right to vote. "They were denied because they were aborted between 1972 and 1986." (http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110005277) Nearly half of them were aborted by people who vote Democrat in elections (ibid). About 35% of them were aborted by people who vote Republican in elections (ibid).

In the 2000 election "260,962 (of these) Missing Voters" would likely have "been present to vote" (ibid) in Florida, and more than 150,000 of them came from families of Democrats. If they had been alive and had voted for Gore, he would have won Florida by 45,000 votes and would have been president.

Now, you understand, this is educated speculation. We can’t know what would have happened, but the speculation is based on sophisticated research by a strategic research and consulting firm named Wirthlin Worldwide. Last June, the Wall Street Journal published an article based on that research, which was called, "The Empty Cradle Will Rock." The author, Larry L. Eastland, drew this conclusion:

"As liberals and Democrats fervently seek new voters and supporters through events, fund-raisers, direct mail and every other form of communication available, they achieve results minuscule in comparison to the loss of voters they suffer from their own abortion policies. It is a grim irony lost on them, for which they will pay dearly in elections to come" (ibid).

This is all very interesting politically. My interest and (I hope to persuade you) your interest in this very practical consideration has a spiritual and biblical dimension that you don’t want to miss, and it is rooted deeply in the Christian doctrine of creation.

The Creator’s Intention
At the end of September, we considered an important passage in Mark 10:6-9 about the life of Jesus. According to that passage, people had asked Him to justify divorce. His response must have caught everyone off guard then; it can still stop people in their tracks. Listen! "But at the beginning of creation God 'made them male and female.''‘For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh.' So they are no longer two, but one. Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate." Note the following.

First, Jesus rooted His teaching in the doctrine of creation. "But at the beginning of creation God..." It is easy to say together, "I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth." Jesus was asking in effect, "Do you really believe that? If you do, have you considered its implications?" That brings me to a second observation.

"God 'made them male and female.'" With those words Jesus focused on a powerful reality, namely, the intentions of God as seen in what He created. Jesus saw the physical designs of creation as permanent indicators of God’s intentions. This crucial idea bears on everything from international politics to personal faith.

An atheistic, evolutionary view of human life says that the human body works the way it does as a result of natural selection to ensure the survival of the species. A creation view of human life says that the human body works the way it does as the result of a divine decision. Jesus’ point was that God the Creator had intentions about how creation should function, and we discover them in how nature is designed to work.

A Christian doctrine of creation teaches that God created us in His image, because He intended to be united in covenant love with humanity. That union with God doesn’t apply only to Sunday worship, but also to what we do everyday with God’s intentions for human life. We have talked briefly about how to do that in the laboratory. Today, we talk about how to do it in the bedroom, the conference room, and the polling booth as well.

The Mandate to Multiply
Genesis 1:28 says, God blessed them (Adam and Eve) and said to them, "Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it." We’ve talked about the human mandate to subdue and protect the earth. Now, we need to focus on the first commandment in the Bible: "Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth."

And how was that to happen? By making whoopee! Not very scientific, but you get my drift. But we need to get something else. God not only gives the mandate to increase in number and fill the earth, He also ordains the steps by which that can be achieved. He not only says, "Here’s the goal," He also says, "Here’s how you get there."

The love between a husband and wife is only one of those steps. It was also His purpose that filling the earth would always begin with the introduction of a sperm to an egg for a lifelong relationship and with the four or so stem cells that appear shortly after their union. Scientists call those first four or so stem cells totipotent cells. The name totipotent means that these cells have the power to develop into every type of cell in the adult body. When you look in the mirror, what you see came from those cells. That was God’s idea, He saw what He had made, and He said, "It is very good."

But these totipotent cells don’t look like human beings, and they don’t act like human beings. They look like four genetic marbles, and they seem only to pulse with their mysterious powers of life. Because they don’t look or act like human beings, some people say those cells are not yet human life, and that is how they justify abortion.

I suppose God could have created every human being like He created Adam and Eve, as full-grown adults, capable of reason and moral choice from day one. He chose instead for every other human life on the planet to emerge out of the process of mitosis in the secret places of a woman’s body.

Those tiny, powerful cells are not genetic "marbles," not just a collection of cells. “The critical difference between a collection of cells and a living organism is the ability of an organism to act in a coordinated manner for the continued health and maintenance of the body as a whole.” (Maureen Condic, First Things, May 2003, 52) From the moment of fertilization until the death of the body a hundred years later, human biological life is defined by this ability of the “organism to act in a coordinated manner for the continued health and maintenance of the body as a whole.”

Biologically, these totipotent cells making their way down the oviducts to the safety and nurture of a woman’s womb are human life and nothing else, and to destroy them is to destroy the only God-ordained way by which humanity is fruitful and fills the earth. To destroy them is to defy the Creator’s intentions. Our Christian faith offers a poignant perspective on the Creator’s intentions.

We Christians confess that Jesus Christ was "conceived by the Holy Spirit" and "born of the Virgin Mary." We call this conception and birth the Incarnation. That big word simply means that God became a man. I could be sympathetic toward a person, who just cannot believe that. But I would like to point out that apart from the initial miracle, what Christians have believed for 2000 years conforms to what we understand scientifically about human conception and birth.

We believe that God became one of us. He didn’t do that by magically appearing in adult form. He joined His eternal self to the same process of mitosis in the secret places of a woman’s body by which the rest of us got here. Biologically, Jesus Christ began as a blastocyst, acting "in a coordinated manner for the continued health and maintenance of the body as a whole." God submitted to His own process.

The Courage of Conviction
Some people justify abortion by saying that the tiny embryo doesn’t look human and doesn’t act human. This way of talking is an attempt to give credibility to the most compelling reason for having an abortion: personal choice.

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 had an abortion.

The articles and studies I have read suggest that most women who have an abortion think it is a bad thing. That has made me want to understand better, if I can, why so many women go ahead with the abortion. I have learned several important motives. Here is a powerful one. Compassion requires that we pay careful attention.

"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. 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.

If the Church is to enter the faith dimension of this battle, the doctrine of creation will help us. God’s intention is for mankind to be fruitful, increase in number, and fill the earth. God’s intention is that this fruitfulness always begins as a bundle of totipotent cells, acting "in a coordinated manner for the continued health and maintenance of the body as a whole." And God’s intention is for this drama to unfold first in the secret places of a woman’s body. She is the chosen carrier of humanity’s future. That is her calling, and it merits sacrifices on her part and on the part of her husband to fulfill that calling.

This courage of conviction belongs not only to the immediate carriers of human life, but also to the rest of us, who speak on behalf of the unborn. We dare not "take refuge in slogans like: 'Who am I to be judgmental?' and the famous 'Personally, I’m opposed, but I can’t impose my opinions on others.'" (Mary Ann Glendon, First Things, June/July, 2003, 22). Why should we have to be silent about abortion but not about other issues such as capital punishment, the war in Iraq, the extinction of White Rhinos, or AIDS in Africa? The doctrine of creation is not a parlor game. It is a statement about the ultimate reality that governs human life. We have a mandate to speak and to act.

Disobeying the Mandate
At the end of October we learned an important lesson about being trustees of God’s creation. We must protect it, conserve it, guard it. If we don’t, there will be serious consequences to the environment and to humans as well. We have, fortunately, awakened to the fact that protecting the earth is just as important as subduing the earth. So, here is another question. Are there serious consequences, if we fail to be fruitful, to increase and to fill the earth? Well, it may have cost Al Gore the presidency.

Wolfhart Pannenberg is a professor of theology at the University of Munich. Last year he pointed to other, similar consequences that startled me. “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.” (First Things, March 2003, 9) 300,000 abortions a year in Germany contribute in no small part to that country’s population decline.

George Weigel is Senior Fellow of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington. He poses questions that follow up on Pannenberg’s startling statement. Weigel 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).

And guess who is filling the demographic gaps in Europe: Muslims from Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Turkey, the Middle East and Southern Asia. And they are having babies. Pannenberg writes, "It is foreseeable in the not too distant future . . . that in some of our larger cities Muslims will no longer be a tolerated minority but a majority, and will make political claims consonant with their majority status." (ibid, 10)

You can understand part of the reason Germany is reluctant to admit Turkey to the European Union. Already in the mosques of Hamburg, Berlin and Munich Imams raise their voice to declare that Islamic law is superior to German constitutional law. The growing crisis in Europe illustrates the truth that there are serious, national consequences, if we fail to be fruitful, to increase and to fill the earth. Abortion contributes mightily to Europe’s demographic slide.

For that reason and others it is appropriate for us to call abortion what it is: state-sanctioned violence against the innocent. It is our national sin. It is appropriate for the Church to say to the Supreme Court and to legislative bodies in this country, "Repent! Your actions are leading our country into the hands of the living God." For we know him who said, "It is mine to avenge; I will repay." It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. It’s time we said no to our perceived interests and said yes to the Creator’s intentions.