Red Bison Faith: Akbaakuxshé: Seventh Sunday of Easter, June 2, 2019, "Faith and abortion"

Tuesday, July 9, 2019

Seventh Sunday of Easter, June 2, 2019, "Faith and abortion"

C Easter 7 NH BFC 2019

Gospel of Philip Gospel of Mary 10

June 2, 2019

Some of you may know Kayla Janowski as a member of our Justice Committee. Some of you may know that she was the leader and coordinator of Billings’ first protest in solidarity with Standing Rock. I got to know Kayla as an Americorps VISTA volunteer who worked with local faith leaders and faith communities to work on transitional housing in Billings. It was during that time I learned that she was a former lock-down defender on the basketball team at Vassar College. She is a young woman of tremendous wisdom and courage, perhaps first revealed in a memory she shared over Facebook. When she was just 2 years-old, her mother tried to get her to do something “normal.” Kayla’s mother recalled that Kayla responded by saying, “You’re not the boss of my body!” Kayla Janowski everyone!

“You’re not the boss of my body!” Our inability to honor and respect the individual sovereignty of human bodies is often strongly linked with our inability to honor and respect the obligations or rights we have to a peoples’ land. We are in that time.

Once again, I want to ask us to understand the Bible as a tool for discernment. It is not God. It is not the moon. Scripture can be the finger pointing to the moon. But in each age we are required to engage Scripture to discern what of it we shall bring forward and what we shall leave behind.

I decided to use two sacred writings not found in the Bible. In the passage from the Gospel of Mary, Peter, the mythological representation of the institutional church, is not happy with the wisdom that Mary of Magdala, the mythological representation of the divine feminine, shares with the disciples. Peter, along with his brother Andrew, seeks to silence Mary. In response, the apostle Levi says, “We should announce the good news as the Savior ordered, and not be laying down any rules or making laws.” This passage is a call from outside of the main tradition to be critical of Scripture, our own tradition, perhaps recognizing that the tradition is already bending away from its egalitarian roots, roots dug deep in a broader and deeper, compassionate love of God.

Unfortunately, the Bible makes patriarchy part of our tradition. We know that almost all or maybe all of Scripture was written by men, with their point of view, their interests, and their values holding sway. Therefore, Scripture requires a strong feminist critique to determine what truths we might glean out of its stories, teachings, hymns, poetic discourse, and morality for our communities. That necessary critique is important recognizing that something as important as abortion availability and practice are being decided by what those on the Religious Right are advocating on behalf of the unborn . . . for the Bible told them so.

Let’s be clear. The Bible says almost nothing about abortion. Really. Abortions have been performed throughout history but the Bible shares no reflection, prohibition, or punishment. There is an awkward Scripture passage taken from the book of Numbers, one of the first five books of the Bible, which describes how to have an abortion administered by the priest in cases of sexual infidelity.[1]

Way back in November of 1968, the orthodox publication, Christianity Today, devoted its whole monthly issue to debating the subject of contraception and abortion. It was conservative Christian biblical scholar, Bruce Watke, from Dallas Theological Seminary, who argued that the Bible gives no clear answer on the matter.[2]

The Scripture verses those from the Religious Right use to further their position are not about abortion. They are verses used, poetically, to describe God’s care or vocational destiny. God calls the prophet Jeremiah before he was formed in the womb.[3] God calls the apostle Paul before he was even born.[4] These are not verses about pregnant mothers. They are about knowing our divine call to a holy vocation lies waiting for us long before we can even know it ourselves. Psalm 139 comes closest by using a beautiful turn of phrase to talk about how God’s presence and thoughts for us are found even when we were knit together in our mother’s womb.[5] Again, that is not about abortion.[6] That is a wonderful poetic way of describing God’s love and presence for us while the psalmnist also worries and wonders if God is truly present while the wicked prosper.

The Bible says nothing about abortion. And verses that the Religious Right or Colonialist Christianity use are distorted out of context to be about abortion. As I shared in preaching about climate change several weeks earlier, I hope that not only helps you but also empowers you to then engage others with a faith rooted in a God who created women in Her image. We need minds and hearts changed. Lives are at stake.

The criticism the Bible demands of us does not allow us to make the Bible say what we want it to say. The Bible can function as a mirror which can distort us like a carnival mirror with its own prejudices but it can also show us, through ancient wisdom, how we have distorted ourselves in passing fad and fancy.

A person who is quickly becoming a teacher of mine, Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg out of Chicago, reflected on why Jewish people are so pro-choice. First, Jewish law allows for abortion. She writes

For the first 40 days of gestation, a fetus is considered “mere fluid” . . . , and the fetus is regarded as part of the mother for the duration of the pregnancy. It is not considered to have the status of personhood until birth . . .[7]

Rabbi Ruttenberg goes on to show that even in the most right-wing schools of Jewish legal thought, abortion and a mother’s choice is given authority. An important Israeli ultra-orthodox rabbi wrote in his treatise, “It is clear that in Jewish law an Israelite is not liable to capital punishment for feticide…. An Israelite woman was permitted to undergo a therapeutic abortion, even though her life was not at stake…. This permissive ruling applies even when there is no direct threat to the life of the mother, but merely a need to save her from great pain, which falls within the rubric of ‘great need.’”[8]

Ruttenberg goes on to state how ironic it is that many Christian people use the Scripture verses I mentioned from Jeremiah and the Psalms, Scriptures found in the Hebrew Scriptures, in the Old Testament, to prove that life begins at conception. But those Scripture passages, Rabbi Ruttenberg points out, are not in the form of Jewish legal code. They are in poetic form—meant to convey deeper meaning about vocation and care.

Finally, Rabbi Ruttenberg suggests that one of the ultimate reasons Jewish people are probably so pro-choice is because Jewish people know what it is like to be in a place where other people’s religious convictions are the ones that carry the day. As a result, the Jewish people have come to see truth with far more gray areas, much more complex—far different than Colonialist Christians who believe that faith is measured by exerting their will, being very clear on how well they know God’s viewpoint on truth and sin. With each passing empire, Jewish people have had to ask, “Will there be allowances made by those who make the rules and laws for how we Jews feel about the kinship and sovereignty with and over the land, the kinship and sovereignty we Jews have with and over our own bodies?”

That is a critical question which is developing a new ethic I hope will be included in future writing of the award-winning sexuality curriculum, “Our Whole Lives” we try to be about at our church. The ethic is one of “bodily autonomy.”

A father writes that he is the parent of a young son with Down’s syndrome. His worries and fears for his son and the extended disabled community include mandatory institutionalization, forced sterilization and other eugenic practices, involuntary surgery, mandatory drug regimes, denial of rights for disabled parents, protection for disabled children from violent caregivers and teachers, and lack of accommodation for non-typical bodies. In each of those potentially harmful situations, what is required is that the government refrain from coercing holy and divine disabled bodies and protecting holy and divine disabled bodies from private coercion.[9] Similar arguments might be made for the holy and divine bodies of LGBTQ+ people, the bodies of people of color, the bodies of the poor, and, of course, the holy and divine bodies of girls and women.

Incredibly, when we even seem to be having arguments in our country whether women have sovereignty over their bodies when it comes to sexual violence, genital mutilation, we know that we are somehow saying that a little over half of us were not made in the image of God, knit by Creator within our mother’s womb.

“You’re not the boss of my body!”

Rev. Courtney Stange-Treagar, the Pacific Northwest Conference Minister for Church Vitality makes it clear how bodily autonomy is an ethic we seemingly hold very dear:

Bodily autonomy is a human right. It means that each one of us have the right to give blood or not, donate a kidney or not, give our bodies after death to medical research or not. We might feel strongly that an individual should donate their blood or body parts, but we cannot force that decision. We most certainly don't advocate criminalizing that decision.

If your spouse or parent were dying and needing one of your kidneys to save their life, you might feel compelled to make that decision to save their life. It likely would be a very serious decision that you weigh very carefully. You might in the end decide to give your kidney or you might in the end decide that you don't have the ability to make that donation from your own body. All manner of responses might come from your friends and family, but you will not go to jail for this.

Why do we talk as though abortion is killing a baby, but refusing to donate a kidney isn't murder?[10]

Bodily autonomy is a human right.

There is one Scripture verse I am surprised has been little used in the midst of the abortion debate. In the Gospel of Matthew and in the extra-canonical Gospel of Thomas, Jesus says that it is not what goes into a person that defiles or corrupts a person.[11] It is what comes out. In other words, we are not to judge or discern as finished what remains interior but only as it is known outside the body. To me, that reading of Scripture seems as justifiable as quoting Jeremiah, the Psalms, or Galatians as proof of personhood. We are not held accountable for gestational thoughts but for words or actions made manifest outside of our body.

As people of faith, contrary to what we hear in the wider world, we are people who recognize that there are more colors to the rainbow than black and white. Faith opens us not to certainty but to deep questions, mystery, and recognizing that there are limits and boundaries to our own point of view, to our own decisions and bodily space. And that’s important on an issue of great passion on either side. We also recognize that when women lose a pregnancy, for whatever reason, we know that something is gone and may need to be grieved.

We know that. And it can be incredibly traumatic, even if that lost pregnancy is due to a choice made for abortion. There can be tremendous grief.

It is also to remember that the Religious Right has been so prolific, that Christian colonialism gets into us, infects us, all of us, such that some women who have abortions will go through tremendous guilt, regret, and deep pain. Out of care and love, we must extend ourselves.

Patriarchy may thread through our tradition as Christians but, at the heart of our tradition, we are to love God and love neighbor in a sometimes foggy and unclear path. We are the bosses of our own holy and divine bodies so that we may beautifully, clumsily, and sometimes awkwardly, love one another. Sometimes love is expressed through the open arms of an embrace. Sometimes love is expressed through proper boundaries that say, “I am the boss of my own body. And you get to be the boss of your own body.” Amen.