Life Issues

Pastor Burcham’s Sermon

Sunday, July 12, 2009

Grace, mercy and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ. Amen.

Carol’s story could be the story of any of thousands of women. She wrote this, “My story begins in 1982. I was dating Mike. I was finally a mature woman of 22, very capable of making my own decisions and taking care of myself or so I thought. We fell in love and within a few months, I was pregnant.” From that moment on, Carol’s life will be forever changed. No matter what decisions she makes, no matter what choices she has, no matter what direction she goes, from that moment on, her life is forever going to be different.

Because Carol, like millions of other people, is faced with a life issue. Her life issue is an unplanned pregnancy. On the other end of the spectrum are folks who are dealing with debilitating diseases that take down the quality of life further and further and further to the point where, in our society, in our culture, there are certain choices you have. There are certain decisions you are able to make.

But, unfortunately, all of those choices and all of those decisions are not based on the Word of God. They are either based on the emotions of the moment or they’re based upon the rationale and the thinking of this world. How else can you explain some of the inconsistencies of what we have going on in our society? We are horrified at child abuse and yet we promote the right of taking the life of an unborn child. We spend millions of dollars on suicide prevention and yet we pass laws so that physicians can assist you taking your own life. We have groups that rally around the banner of the right to choose and yet they are vehemently opposed to bumper stickers that say “Choose Life.”

Life issues. In our culture, in our society, there are many choices. There are many decisions. Not all of them are in line with God’s Word. It’s certainly a hot topic for us. It has been for I don’t know how many years and it will continue to be into the foreseeable future. It’s a topic which will affect each and every one of us if it has not already. Consider just the simple statistic that every day, 3,000 abortions take place, that life issue, that decision is made. They say that for every person who has an abortion, ten people are affected. You have the mother, the father, the child, grandparents on either side and siblings. On an average, ten people. That means 13,000 people a day are affected in one way or another by this life issue. Statistically speaking, that means some of you have been affected one way or another by that life issue or you will be in the future.

We as God’s people need to come to His Word for some clear guidance and direction. Certainly, we cannot cover the whole gamut of things dealing with life issues. But as I studied this and I contemplated and prayed about it, there are three main things that seem to really rise to the top for me. Two of them are just really hot topics, the third one, unfortunately, I think is a forgotten one.

We have to deal with life, just the questions around life. When does life begin? Quality of life? We have to talk about choices. What really are the choices that God has given to us? And the one I fear that we forget about and we don’t talk about is we have to talk about healing. We have to talk about healing of those who have made choices that they regret, who’ve made life issue decisions that they feel guilty about. How do they heal? How do they heal?

Life. It’s a basic question. It had to be on the mind of Carol in her story. When does life begin? It’s been debated and debated probably for 20, 30, 40, 50 years, I don’t know, but we keep going on and on again. When does life begin? Because that seems to be the issue. That certainly would be the issue for Carol when she finds out that she’s pregnant. What’s going on inside of her? Is this considered a human being? Is this a life which is growing inside of her or is it something else? And at one point does it become a life? At what point does it become a human being?

God’s Word, in my opinion, is clear on the matter. We just read responsively Psalm 139. The Psalmist says this about himself, he is talking to God, “You created my inmost being. You knit me together in my mother’s womb. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place. Your eyes saw my unformed body.” The Psalmist says that God and God alone had created him, that God designed him to be the person that he was, that he knit him together in his mother’s womb, that before his body was even formed, he acknowledges that he was a human being, that he was alive in God’s sight.

Even more directly to that comes from Psalm 51. David is lamenting the fact of his sin but in that, we get an insight into when life begins. “Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time that my mother conceived me.” From God’s point of word, life begins at conception. But not everyone believes that.
I was reading a website this week. It said the top ten myths of anti-abortionists. So I should find out what are the ten myths. One of the myths is that life begins at conception, they say. In fact, they state you really can’t talk about conception as being the time of life, that it’s really irrelevant to talk about that fact. Because you can say the two cells that come together, they were alive to begin with so you can’t really talk about conception and here’s where I quote, “It’s more relevant to discuss when sentience or self awareness begins. In 2000, the British House of Lords established the Commission of Inquiry into fetal sentience which estimated that higher level brain activity development begins to commence at or about 23 weeks.” I don’t know what that means. You read it and it sounds very scientific and it sounds very logical but did you see all the qualifiers in that? It’s estimated, at or about. So which is it? And it talks about higher level of brain activity. Well, what is considered a higher level of brain activity? Where do you draw the line that says, “Up to this point, it’s not,” but “After this point, yeah, it is?” And the best we can say is that we can “estimate” and say “at or about” or we can think that maybe it’s around here.

You can either go with “at or about” or the “estimates” of some line that is drawn that says from here on out, there is self awareness or you can come back to God’s Word which keeps it very simple. Life begins at conception.

The other issue around life is quality of life. So we’ll go to the other end of the spectrum. There’s a lot of talk about quality of life these days because God has blessed us so much in the medical field that we’re living longer and longer and longer but some are saying, “We have quantity but do we have quality.” And all of us would like to have a good quality of life. And so the issue really comes up when that quality of life starts to diminish. You have some debilitating disease that’s eating away at your body and pretty soon you say, “At what point is the quality of life so low that maybe instead of prolonging it, we should just end it?” At what point do you stop being useful to yourself or to anyone else? And the quality of life has gotten to such a point that maybe we should just call it quits now instead of going any further?

Now although that’s mainly an end-of-life issue, it actually has spilled back over into the beginning-of-life issues because if you’re pregnant these days, the doctors will offer you a test. The test will be on the baby inside of you and the test will reveal whether it has any severe handicaps or disabilities. And if you have severe handicaps and disabilities, well, then you have a choice to make in our world. You have a choice to make in our society. If the quality of life of this baby is going to be so low, then maybe you should end it before it even begins. And maybe that’s the more compassionate thing to do because the quality of life just won’t be there.

I believe God’s Word speaks about the quality of life as well. It comes at it from this way. I’m going to go back to Psalm 139. The Psalmist says, “All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.” The Psalmist recognizes that all of his days have been laid out in front of God. Nothing surprises God. He has them all written out, not in some fatalistic way, that on Day 23 this is going to happen, there’s nothing you can do about it, but that God has plans for his life from beginning to end. God has plans for your life from beginning to end. God has plans for every baby that’s growing in the womb. God has plans for every woman who is lying in the hospital. God has plans for every man who is in hospice. For each day of their life, God has laid out, God has ordained plans for that life. And whether you can see those plans is irrelevant. It’s irrelevant. God has them laid out. God knows what He wants to accomplish in every life. And in a real sense, it doesn’t matter whether you or I can see it or whether you and I can understand it.

I couldn’t see it in Keith. Keith is a man that I ministered to when I was just two years in the ministry. He was okay when I first met him but he went downhill fast. He was getting eaten up alive by cancer all over his body. Finally, it got to the point that he was in the hospital and the only thing keeping him alive was life support. In our eyes, there was no quality of life. The family had a very gut-wrenching and hard decision to make. The doctor says, “All you’re doing is prolonging his death. You can remove the life support system and let nature take its course.” This is an issue in which God’s Word is silent. God’s Word says we are not to cause death but it says nothing about prolonging the death process. And so it is within our Christian liberty, after prayer and gut-wrenching decision, maybe it’s best to take the artificial means away and let the person go.

That’s what the family decided. The young doctor walked into the room, a little bit too self confident for me. I might even say he was a little cocky. He says, “He won’t last 20 minutes. I just want you to be prepared. It’s going to go fast. If you’re going to have family, have them here.” We’re all holed up around the bed and we prayed and we cried, 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 18, 35, 60, 90. Two hours later, Keith was going stronger than when he was on the life support system. It wasn’t 20 minutes; it was 20 days. Keith never regained consciousness. It’s easy for you and I to look and to say, “Why? Why was that drug out? Why were those 20 days put in there?” But as I looked back and I saw what God did with that family and how it helped them with that gut-wrenching decision, I saw a young doctor come in dumbfounded at what was going on and finally having to say freely, “I can’t explain it. This has to be an act of God.” When I saw nurses crying by his bedside and holding his hand, when I saw congregational members being just encouraged by the faithfulness of this family, I would dare say that God accomplished more in the last 20 days of Keith’s life than he did in the previous two years of his life. Now you can’t see it at the time but just because we can’t see it doesn’t mean that God doesn’t have plans for every day of our life, from beginning to end. We may not think it’s quality but God does.

And that really leads us to the second thing and that’s choice. Because in our world, in our society, we have choices. We have choices about quality of life and we have choices about life itself. But for us in this country, when we start talking about choice, hey, now that’s a word we like. We talk about freedom. We talk about controlling our own destiny. That’s what our country is built upon, right? Standing on our own. Being free. Free to choose. So those should invoke positive emotions to us, good emotions in us.

I want you to hear, once again, from Carol’s story. “Carol was worried that Mike was only going to marry her because she was pregnant. So they were on their way to South Dakota and, on that long trip in the car, she started to wonder and said, ‘Maybe I should throw a test balloon out there.’” Because she was just feeling a little bit insecure, to make sure that Mike really loved her for who she was. So she did this, “So I casually said, ‘There’s one option that we haven’t discussed. I could get an abortion.’ I fully expected him to say, ‘No way!’ It’s not what he said. Instead he just kind of froze dumbfounded. Then the words that came out of his mouth that have been spoon-fed to him by a supposedly enlightened society that we live in, ‘It’s your body. It’s your choice.’ I was stunned. Did I hear that right? He’s not only not stepping up to the plate, he’s leaving it all up to me. I was scared to death. Those six little words carried so much power and brought down so much fear into my life.” Is that what those words are supposed to do? I thought those were liberating words, choice, freedom, your own destiny, your own body. It’s not how Carol saw it. She felt the weight of the world come down on her shoulder. Why is that?

Maybe it’s because of the inconsistency of the thinking of our society. You see, on the one side, society says it’s your body, it’s your choice. You can do with it what you want. And yet, this same society says maybe that’s not exactly true. You see, friends, I can’t leave here this morning, go home and pump my body full of narcotics until I explode. It’s my body, it’s my choice, shouldn’t it be my freedom? But the law says I can’t do that. Maybe it’s the inconsistencies that were getting Carol.

Maybe it was the fact that she was given the choice that she shouldn’t even be given because as much as we might like freedom, as much as we want choices in this world, some things, God says, “You’re not supposed to chose.” There are some things that God says you don’t have a choice in. God and God alone has the right to choose. And God and God alone has the right to choose of who lives and who dies. He reserves that right for Himself. Only God has the wisdom, the knowledge, the breath of all of history, the compassion, the grace to decide when a person lives and when a person dies. God has all of their days ordained for them and we are not to intervene. We are not to step in and put in our own agenda. God is clear on this point. There’s no fuzziness about it. God says, “You shall not kill. You shall not take the life of another human being.” God reserves that choice, that decision for Himself.

We’ve been given choices in our world that should not be our choice. And those choices have led to the last point and that is healing. Because many, many people have made life issue choices that they shouldn’t have made and now they have to live with it. Of all the stories I read, every one of the women felt they had really no choice. You see, they were promised something. They were promised a solution, a solution to a problem, the ending of an issue in their life. Held out on the banner was, “Once this is over, you can put it behind you.” It’s one of the biggest lies of our society because it doesn’t happen.

Listen to what Carol said, “I don’t remember much after the procedure. I don’t think I got out of bed for three or four days. I just laid there remembering. I slowly got back into the swing of things. God created us humans with the ability to survive just about anything so I had to figure out how to survive. In order to do this, I forgot. I slipped into denial so deep, I really did forget. Well, 99% forgot. A tiny piece of me always knew. But for all practical purposes, I couldn’t remember. I was so deep in the denial, when the topic ever came up in the news or politics, I went stupid, didn’t hear, didn’t answer, totally ignored the conversation, just zoned out. Life went on like this for 13 years. In that time, I left the church. People walked all over me. It was okay. I deserved it. Mike was the same way. We were a mess. We never talked about it but we were both deeply affected by it and it spilled over into every area of our lives. Mike finally tired of the mess and decided to leave me.”

Carol’s story is nowhere near unique. In my years of ministry, I’ve had women of all different ages sit in my office and weep. Five years ago, ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty years ago, a life issue choice that now they have to live with. The promise was problem solved, issue resolved. But it isn’t. It’s a lie. It’s a lie. There’s a deep need for healing but we don’t talk about that. We don’t talk about that in society because, in society’s views, there shouldn’t be any pain. And we don’t talk about it here either because we don’t want to come face to face with it. The most haunting paragraph I have read in quite some time was one of the last entries of Carol. “Sometimes it feels like no one can understand your pain because you’re not supposed to have any. The feelings I had isolated me because I was too afraid to tell anyone. I didn’t know how they would react. If they were pro-choice, they wouldn’t expect me to feel any pain. If they were pro-life, then I must be the enemy.” Those words haunt me. If that’s the impression that we give to women who have had an abortion, that they’re the enemy, then we should hang our heads in shame. We should hang our heads in shame.

There is so much pain out there. There’s so much guilt and remorse and they have no place to turn. On the one side, they’ll tell you you’re not supposed to have any pain and is the impression on the other side that you’re the enemy? Ask yourself how you would react if a friend revealed to you that they had an abortion. Would you view them differently? Would you treat them differently?

Before we get too judgmental in our minds and say, “I can’t imagine and I can’t even fathom how that could happen,” before we wag the finger too much, let me remind you of something that Jesus said. Jesus says, “You have seen it written. Do not commit murder. Otherwise, you will come under judgment.” He says, “I tell you if you are angry with your brother, you have come under judgment.” So if you’ve never been angry with someone, you’re free to go. We all fall under judgment.

And if there’s one place that all of us should be able to come for healing, it should be to God’s church. If there’s one group of people who need to hear the love and the forgiveness of Jesus, it’s those who have made or encouraged others to make life issue decisions and choices that weren’t theirs to make. They need to hear that there’s a God in heaven who said, “I did not send my Son into the world to condemn the world but to save the world.” They need to hear that Jesus says, “I didn’t come into this world to accuse you of your sin. I came here to take on your sin.” They need to hear scripture that says, “While we were still yet sinners, Christ Jesus died for us.” You see, they need to hear there’s a God who loves them, who cares for them, a God who says, “No matter what you have done in your past, I love you. No matter what you might do in the future, I forgive you. I accept you where you are.” We need to hear those words of healing. We need to be able to share those words of healing. You know, the Catechism says there are two parts to confession, the one part is that we are to confess our sins. The second part is to believe the forgiveness that God offers. What can we do, church, to help people understand and believe the forgiveness that God has to offer? Because I guarantee you the guilt and the pain and the shame is out there. But God’s forgiveness is for all people. They are not the enemy. They are children of God who need to hear of His love and His grace.

Carol, right now, counsels other women who have had abortions. She shares with them the grace and the love and the forgiveness of God. She has had to deal with a life issue. Statistically speaking, each and every one of you, if not already, will deal with a life issue of one type or another. Instead of reacting with emotion, instead of making our decisions based upon this world, we come back to God’s Word for some clear direction and guidance. And all of us have fallen short of God’s Word and need to come to this same Word to hear His word of grace and forgiveness. Amen.

Copyright 2009 Gloria Dei Lutheran Church