9-6-2015 Bioethics Part 23

The speaker begins by praying for wisdom in discussing the topic of abortion. They highlight the importance of acknowledging individual responsibility and considering the real people involved in the issue. They question the argument that a woman can do whatever she wants with her body, pointing out that we all have limitations on what we can do with our bodies. They emphasize the need to approach the topic with kindness and understanding rather than judgment. The speaker connects the concept of redemption to the issue of abortion, stating that Christians should not be selfish and should live out their convictions. They discuss the importance of hospitality and serving strangers, and how it applies to the issue of abortion. They encourage the church to be a training ground for interacting with women considering abortion. The speaker acknowledges that there are various reasons why women consider abortion, and that it is important to engage with them on an individual level. They suggest t All right, let's pray and get started. God, we thank you for this morning and pray that as we look at this difficult topic again that you would give us wisdom as we seek to honor you in what we do and what we say and how we think and how we live, in Jesus' name, Amen. Last week we started looking at the difficult topic of abortion. As I stated from the beginning of our time last week, this is one of those kinds of things that's way too easy to talk about in the abstract. So essentially we talk about it as what should someone else over there do about this thing that exists in society as if it were just a concept or just a phrase or just a part of life. We don't think about the fact that individuals are a part of this and that we ourselves as individuals have responsibilities. What we're trying to figure out here in this time is what should you and I do in response to human persons like ourselves contemplating the tragic end, at least in the people who are seeking to have abortions minds, understandable and maybe even in their minds inevitable choice to kill another human person. When we start asking those kinds of questions, we have to squirm a little bit because this is going to probably cost us something. The first thing we looked at was just kind of the ordinary person on the street argument for abortion. What is that argument? One that we hear most commonly for why women should be able to have abortions. My body, I can do with it whatever I want, it doesn't matter, you can't tell me what I can't and can't do with my body. Now what are some problems with that, I labeled it the privacy argument, what are some problems with that argument? Or is that legitimate? Oh okay, so right, so if it was just their body, it wouldn't be a problem. Yeah there's times that we ask for it and times that we expect it without even asking, such as when, house is on fire, we're in a terrible car accident or something of that nature. Also, it's true that you and I are not allowed to use our bodies to do anything we want. For example, I cannot harm you with my body because it's what I desire to do with my body. I cannot do whatever I want with my body. There might be a very large number of things that I'm allowed to do with my body, but the argument can't go, I can do whatever I want. We also saw that you and I are going to have a very hard time fighting against things like the privacy argument if we ourselves live in radically individualistic and private ways. Alright, is it an easy thing to tell a woman in a kind, loving and gentle way that she ought to go through with a pregnancy that, in the moment, she does not want? Is that an easy thing to do? No, not even close. It is only the flippant, the foolish, and the absolutely uncaring that think that, you know what, you just need to do what's right. Now that might be a true sentiment, but it's not loving towards the person that's seeking to have an abortion. If we live only for ourselves, as if the only duties that we have towards other people are the ones we decide to take upon ourselves, then it will make no sense when we tell other people that they have duties towards other people, whether they want to do those things or not. Christians are not allowed to be selfish in any single area of their life. It is not the 11th commandment, be selfish whenever you want it, for I am selfish and I am the God who redeemed you out of Israel just because I kind of wanted to. As Braley taught us last week, you and I are redeemed by God. What is that concept of redemption briefly stated? Braley can't answer. Thought back. Good. In the case of redemption, when it comes to the way that Paul is using it, what are we redeemed from? Yes, the power of slavery to sin and death, and what are we redeemed to? Freedom in Christ. There we go. You and I are actually the slaves of God and of Jesus Christ. We are not simply free from sin. We are free from sin and we are free for God. So that inherently rules out any kind of selfishness we could imagine up for ourselves. If we want to be taken seriously, you and I have to live each and every day as if our convictions that we say out loud are actually true. We saw that, in a sense, the opposite of abortion is? Tim said the flourishing of life, which is true, is expressed through the practice of hospitality. What is a good definition of hospitality? In your own words, or in your own mind? Giving towards others in a non-selfish manner. Yeah, that's pretty good. We saw that this particularly applies to the stranger. It does not apply to the friends or family. That is not to say that love shown towards friends and family is wrong, but friends and family are easy to love. Friendship entails time spent together. Hospitality is something else. It doesn't mean that we neglect our friends and family, but we serve the stranger alongside them. So, we closed briefly looking at the importance of being hospitable towards those who are seeking to have abortions, or those who perform abortions. We know that we're not surrounded by those kinds of people every day, but it's important to become the kind of people we need to be in order to both get to know and care for them when we do meet them. The church, as I explained last week, and we'll touch on this again this week, is the training ground for this. How is it that you and I, here today, with each other, can prepare for coming into contact with women who are going to be contemplating abortion? Or do we just go, I don't know, we just got to wait until we run into them? We're going to be praying about it, sure. What else? Yeah, all right, yeah, so knowing the arguments, like why would somebody want to do this, yeah. What else? In the ways that you and I actually interact with one another. Okay, finding situations where we come in contact with them, absolutely. There you go. Also just being honest with each other. Here, you and I, in the church, learn to live in truthful ways, and be truthful people. As a result, when somebody comes amongst us, by the grace of God, who is seeking help, you and I will be able to help. We can only receive broken people if we ourselves understand ourselves to be and communicate ourselves as broken people. If this is a place for only put-together people, then nobody who is ever broken will ever come here, nor should they. Women who desire to have abortions have such desires for all kinds of reasons. Some of those reasons might be very easy for you in particular to understand. It doesn't make it right, but you can go like, oh, I see where you're coming from. Some of the reasons that women might seek abortions might be totally foreign to you, and you have no idea why somebody would engage in that. Let's just think, what would be a reason why, again, it doesn't say that it's okay, but what would be a reason that you're like, oh, yeah, I understand why that would lead you to think about having an abortion. What would one of those things be for you personally? Rape? Women's health is at risk. We're actually going to talk about both of those things in just a minute. What else? Anything else? It's like, oh, yeah, I understand. How about just the simple fact that she's already got six kids? And the baby daddy ain't even around. Financial, right, so there's that one. Now what about some reasons that people do have that, like, don't really make any sense to you whatsoever, or at least reasons other people have had? Too much money? Okay. Yeah, I don't want the child to grow up in poverty, right, so better just to kill it. Yeah, a career, there's a good one, yeah, I just, I've got too much going on. Those would be kind of harder things to, except for you, maybe, maybe you identify with those strongly. Whatever the reasons are that somebody has for seeking an abortion, you and I have to be willing to engage with them on their level about why they would think about doing such a thing. We cannot simply say, abortion is wrong, therefore anybody who contemplates it is a big dummy. That's not the right way forward. The right way forward is to say, what is it that is, why are you, not like why are people, but why are you, the person who's in front of me, by the grace of God, why are you seeking to do this? And explain to me how you work all that out in your own brain. If their conscience isn't totally hardened, which it's probably not, then it's very possible that just by asking questions, you'll get them to talk themselves out of having an abortion. You don't even really have to make an argument. Because they'll realize, like, how selfish I am, if that's really a person, if there's even a possibility that that's a person, why would I do that? There's a lot, there's a really long way you can go down the road by just asking questions. Abortion is not wrong because women do not have good enough reasons to have them. Abortion is wrong because it is the murder of a person made in the image of God. However, before we can apply the truth of God to a particular situation, you have to understand what the situation is. It's a very basic thing. If you don't know what the situation is, you're just going to be saying general things to nobody, which is what most of us have a tendency to do. Now, before I talk about showing hospitality towards the potential victims of abortion, I want to ask a very, very controversial question that we need to get out of the way. And the question is simply this. Is abortion always wrong? Don't need you to answer out loud, we won't have a show of hands, we won't take a poll. However, I would be interested to see how many people's minds I'm about to change. My answer to that question, is abortion always wrong, is not necessarily. Now, you might be thinking, Jeremy, you just got done saying that abortion is wrong because it is the murder of a person made in the image of God. How could that action ever be the right action? I would like to say that there are a few extremely limited cases where it is at least hypothetically permissible, though never a morally good thing. Now, there's two in the pro-life camp, broadly speaking. There are some who say, under absolutely no circumstances whatsoever, no sir, doesn't matter, abortion is always wrong. There are others in the kind of pro-life camp that ordinarily, typically, historically, have given two categories for their kind of exemptions to the rule. Anybody know what those two categories are? Life of the mother. The other one? Yeah, rape or incest. So, rape or incest, the second one we'll talk about. The first one we'll talk about is essentially the which life matters question. Now, if you frame it that way, then it's wrong because both lives matter. However, the question is, who goes if one of them has to go? So, before I give you the thought experiment that I have come up with, could you please give me, maybe you can think of something, an on-the-fly thought experiment of a possible situation in which it's either the life of the mother or the life of the child. Cancer. Okay? Well, if the woman has cancer, does that inherently mean that it's the life of the mother or the life of the child? Why? There you go. Okay? That's a big one. That's the one I came up with. You go to the doctor, you are three months pregnant, and the doctor says you have stage four brain cancer. The only way to get rid of this is through chemotherapy. That's it. Chemotherapy will inevitably kill your child. This isn't like a possible thing, like the chemotherapy is going to kill your child. However, without the chemotherapy, you are going to die. You leave that place, you get a second opinion, you get a third opinion, and it's very clear from all the medical expertise that you can find that you're going to die or your child is going to die. Now, the ordinary way that we approach this scenario is to say what? The idea is, it's not exactly wrong, but what is like your gut reaction to that thing? Somebody comes to you and says, Jeremy, I am trying to make a decision between my life and the life of my child because I've got this brain cancer, chemotherapy. What should I do? What is your gut reaction? Pray for healing. Okay, good. Yeah, so let's say that we've done that and that's off the table. Now we're actually on to the thing of where we actually got to make a decision. Abortion is wrong, save the life of a child. Right, that falls in the category, kind of the Christian virtue of doing what? Self-sacrifice, exactly. Lay down your life. I do it on the basis of Jesus having laid down his life for me, I lay down my life for the other, right? Even if I lay down my life for my enemy, which would be an even more powerful thing, it still isn't going to get me into heaven, according to Paul. However, it is like this virtuous action, for sure. However, should we say that in every single case in which it's either the life of the mother or the life of the child, we say it's the life of the mother because that child has to live? Is that what we say? Yes? Nailed it. Yep, it very much depends on the situation. Yes, Jake? Do we need assistance in the abortion in general? Yeah, so, yeah, that's a possibility at some point, but we're talking about very early on when you can't actually do that. So you could do that if it was, Jake, if she was like 30 weeks or something, they could remove the baby, and the baby would actually be viable or able to live on its own, although it would need lots of medical assistance. We're talking about even earlier than that where you can't, the baby's in this state where it cannot live on its own. You can't put it in another mom, no. Good thinking, though. That's one way of going about it, but that's not a possibility. So the thing is, is it's not, you don't just say self-sacrifice. We said earlier, when we were talking about children, I made the point that your children are not a way to display your virtue to the world. I can imagine very easily a possible world in which a woman is incredibly self-righteous and has no virtue whatsoever by just saying, look at me, I'm going to die for my child. Let's take it one step further and go down the possible line of, she has four children and a husband already, two children, doesn't matter the number of children, and she goes, I'm just going to die and leave my newborn child and my other two children to my husband. Is that hypothetically a possible decision, yes or no? Yes, absolutely. But it's not a flippant decision. And it's not a decision you should push, like, you just need to go ahead and die. God will figure it out, right? That's not exactly the appropriate response. The appropriate response is much prayer, seeking God's intervention, and if God, for whatever reason, decides that, nope, time is up, and I will not bring a miraculous healing, then you go, okay, let's think about this. Let's think about why one action or why the other. The whole point of thought experiments like this is to get us to realize that every single person is actually an individual person, and every case is an individual case, and there are no easy answers when it comes to hard questions. We have to be willing to be present, as I said last week, and actually spend time next to these people and go, why is it that you're taking the decision, you're taking either, to go ahead with the tragic reality of having the abortion, or going ahead with the tragic consequence of essentially committing suicide. Now, we're actually going to be talking about suicide later. This would be a passive way of doing that instead of an active. It would be refusing treatment. Yes? If you are now an idiot and you know that you're going to get a sickness, like a lung cancer or something, can you take it out and then your mom is going to be able to take care of you? I don't exactly understand that question, but we'll talk about it later for sure. It's a good thought. We'll think about that. Now the more difficult one. The situation of rape or incest. These kinds of cases were what moved the emotional appeal during Roe versus Wade days. This is what contributed largely to the shifting of the common thought of the people. There was two lines of attack when we were arguing for the legal permissibility of abortion in this country. The arguments were, on the first hand, if you don't have legal abortion, you'll essentially have butcher shops, and everybody's going to be getting abortions in the back alleys. Women were already getting abortions before Roe versus Wade, a lot of them, and it wasn't that, but that's for a different day. And the other argument is, and also, how would you possibly deny abortions to women who have been raped or been the victims of incest? The idea is that a victim must carry within her the evidence of her victimhood, then give birth to evidence of her victimhood, and live and raise the evidence of her victimhood for the rest of her life. And who would possibly want to go through with such a thing? However, as many people have pointed out, a crime against an innocent party, which in this case is the woman, does not give a rubber stamp approval to then commit a crime against an even more innocent party, which is the child itself. And when I say innocent, I do not mean 100% innocent before God, I mean in this situation. Also, on top of that, research has very clearly shown that pregnancy from rape is extremely rare, that few women actually desire to have abortions after rape, next, that they are convinced to, oftentimes, by other people who make the argument for them and convince them to have abortions, oftentimes by other people who make the argument for them and convince them into it, which being in a fragile emotional state, they buy into very easily, and lastly, in cases where women keep the baby, almost always the feelings towards the baby increase in positive ways over time. So even at the beginning, they're kind of self-hating and, what is this thing? Over time, that tends to, almost every time, go away. Some have also persuasively argued, rightly, that to make abortion the default in incest and rape cases actually perpetuates both of those cycles. Anybody think of why? Yep. If we kind of just give, either the church or society, this rubber stamp approval to abortions in cases of rape and incest, then what we are saying is that the perpetrators of rape and incest really don't have to pay all that much for the crimes that they commit. They might have to serve some jail time. Maybe. However, if we just get rid of the children, then there is no moral accountability over time of, you must take care of your own problem. If we just get rid of it, that just goes away. So the question is, how could it be permissible in some cases? I think there are far fewer cases in which it's permissible here than in the case of life of the woman, life of the child. However, if the woman is suicidal or mentally unwell to begin with and only gets worse over time, using the child as the excuse, and we have both sought to care for her as the church, she sought expertise, help, and mental health field, and she is still just going down the tubes and it's going to be the life of both of them, then all I'm saying is that it's at least hypothetically possible that abortion might be a tragic option. What's the point? The same as before. You and I must be present with people in order to understand their situation and actually help them in their situation instead of being like Moses on the mountain and just shouting at everybody down at the bottom of the mountain, this is what you're supposed to do, you big dummy. That's easy. What's not so easy is actually spending time with people and getting to know what the situation is, both their own thoughts of the situation and what their kind of climate is in which they live. Any questions? Okay. Hospitality towards the victims of abortion, or the possible victims of abortion. Simply put, if you value the life of unborn persons and desire to see the practice stop, you must be willing to take the children otherwise sacrificed on the altar of abortion. You and I, not just you and I, human beings, but we have a particular pattern as Christians in this country, of getting involved deeply on moral issues in ways that cost us absolutely nothing. Or cost us next to nothing. I don't care if it's raining outside or snowing, It really doesn't cost you all that much to go down and picket at the abortion clinic. Is picketing at the abortion clinic wrong? Not inherently. It totally could be wrong. I think there's more self-righteous people at a picketing line at an abortion clinic than you could possibly imagine. However, I hope I'm wrong. However, the tone and the way that people speak about the women going into those places and the way that those people view themselves who go to those things oftentimes leads me to lament for the people who are actually going and quote-unquote praying for the salvation of babies. This propensity to not get involved in any way that costs us anything comes particularly true in anything that is either extremely costly or takes a lot of time or would take a lot of time should we get involved. You and I will picket. You and I will picket. You and I will picket. You and I will picket. You and I will picket. You and I will picket. You and I will picket. You and I will picket. You and I will picket. You and I will picket. You and I will picket. You and I will picket. You and I will picket. You and I will picket. You and I will go to rallies. You and I will even go and send money to organizations and lobbyists. And none of those things are inherently bad. However, as we've talked about before, it's very similar to putting money in the box in the back of this church. That also is not a wrong thing. It's something that we promise to do as members of the church here, to uphold the work of the ministry. However, way too often, that box in the back of the church becomes your conscience-cleansing box for your role in society. I will drop whatever I desire to put in there, and then I will live as if the rest of the crap I have is mine. Wrong. Your generosity towards the church should be one part of an overall scheme of generosity to the world around you. I cannot tell you the number of times where people go, Well, I give to my church so I'm a good person. It doesn't cost you anything. The reason why the church has four billion programs, including the funding of things like pregnancy resource centers and whatever else, is because the church itself, the people in it, are unwilling to get involved. So we'll do it for you. We'll be the clearinghouse. You give us money, and then we'll decide how it's distributed. Which is one big reason why our budget is so pared down. We will not give money to anybody, ever, for whatever reason. However, I greatly encourage you to do that all the time. All the time. You and I must be willing to have our own privacy interrupted, should we see practices we think abominable stop. Similar to what I shared last week, what can you and I do now, today, to begin preparing to be hospitable to these children? First and foremost, we must be people who welcome children, first and foremost, as the stranger we have the opportunity to show hospitality towards. Those of you who have known me for more than about three and a half minutes, know how incredibly difficult that is for me to say out loud. Because I don't like kids very much. Let me rephrase that. I have a hard time liking any kids, at all. Except my own, most of the time. Don't look at me like that. Because I do not like children, does that give me the right to not be hospitable towards them? Does that give me the right to not be hospitable towards them? Yes or no? No. What is the command of Jesus for His people? Huh? To be hospitable to strangers. What strangers? Any strangers. When the Pharisee asks, who is my neighbor? It's interesting that the example Jesus gives is of an offensive type of human being to the one He's telling the story to, a Samaritan. Who actually is the good guy at the end of the story. Jesus does not say, love your neighbor, as long as he, she is over the age of twelve. Because, you know, you really don't like kids. You and I have to be willing to accept our neighbor, first and foremost, as neighbor. I don't know why the church has such a hard time seeing children as neighbor. As the primary category of their existence. We often see them as property, or annoyances, or almost human beings, or any number of things. However, people don't view their own children as human beings created in the image of God. They treat them as something that must be controlled. It is my responsibility to make sure they make it in the world. All this kind of absolute nonsense. You and I must live in ways that make it manifestly clear that we need each other, and actually practice the hard task of being present and taking care of each other. Most of the people in our society, I don't know why, and I don't know where it comes from, see the raising of children as an individualistic endeavor. It is my job to raise my children. That statement is not wholly wrong. You are the most responsible person for your child. However, having lived in such a way, most of us also do less than a stellar job, and convince ourselves that everybody else is doing better than we are, and therefore we beat ourselves up about how good of a job we're doing raising our own children. As a result, our homes are truly closed, open only when we desire to the people we desire to open them to. So, to refresh our memories, not only do you and I live in incredibly individualistic ways personally, but our home life is also 100% privatized. I will open the door only when I desire to, only to the people I desire to, because this is my family. Now, it is true that some people are more private than others, absolutely. It does not mean that everybody needs to just go live in a commune somewhere, or that we all just kind of need to raise each other's children in some kind of crazy 1960s acid trip hippie kind of fashion. However, many of us are not prepared to care for our weakest neighbors. And one of the big reasons why is because we're not open to them. We don't really care. See, the problem doesn't lie in our programs, the problem doesn't lie in that we just don't have enough money, or we don't have powerful enough arguments. The problem lies right in the very dead center of each and every one of our hearts. Because we are not the kinds of people that we ought to be. We must be the kinds of people that are willing to be hospitable to all people. Now, this doesn't mean that each person needs to adopt 55 children. It doesn't mean that each person needs to have a family. It doesn't mean that we all need to just go out and save the world, because we can't, and it's not ours to save. What we can do is pray about changing our own hearts, or having God change them for us through the truth of his word. What we can do is to be repentant and do the hard work of doing what's right, and what we can do is remind ourselves of just why in the heck it is that we ought to be generous and hospitable in the first place. My prayer is that God would make us the kinds of people we ought to be. People who are redeemed by God, justified by Jesus, and sanctified by the Holy Spirit. People who seek to truly fight sin, who seek to see abortion ended, but who seek to see, in the midst of thinking about abortion, our own hearts changing about the matter before we seek to see change in anybody else. The question is, what is it that you and I can do for other people to make abortion a non-issue? We can't do it for everybody in the world. There will always be abortions, whether you legalize them or illegalize them. I don't know if that's a word. Whether you save children or don't save children. Whether you seek out moms who are in trouble or don't. Women will continue to get abortions. The question is, will you and I be the kinds of people we ought to be? Yes or no, simply put. The people who long to be hospitable, in whatever form that takes, toward whomever God generously puts in our way. Let's pray. It is so easy to speak about these things in very far-off and objective and clean and sanitized ways. To consider only the easy options and to never truly consider the state of our own hearts and what we ought to do as people. We are all more selfish than we could possibly imagine. And we pray that as we think about one of the truly great tragedies of our time, and we pray that as we think about one of the truly great tragedies in our own society and societies around the world, that we would be different. That we would not just say different things or support different organizations, but that we would be different kinds of people. For most of us, that is terrifying. The very idea of hospitality makes some of us sick to our stomachs. Out of fear, out of concern, and out of worry. We pray that you would help us to overcome fear, which is no virtue, with the virtues of faith and hope. Help us to be the kinds of people that you desire us to be. Knowing that it will not only be for our good to become those kinds of people, but also for the good of others. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.