Archive: July 2020

The Burden of Moral Agency
Pentecost VIII (O. T. 17); July 26, 2020
Luke 1:39-45 and Jeremiah 1:4-10

When I invited you to suggest topics for summer preaching, I was sort of expecting some light-hearted stories and ideas. You know, it’s summer; think “beach reading.” This week and next I have challenging and important things to consider with you, thanks to thoughtful members of our church. The shorthand description of today’s question is “abortion,” but the question posed had more depth than that. The two Scripture readings posed the question; I propose to ponder those readings with you in the light of the question, and ponder a few more portions of Scripture in the light of that question.

I want to start by suggesting to you that the question of abortion is really four types of questions. It is a moral question: What is the right thing to do? It is a biological question: When does human life begin? It is a legal question: What is the role of government in regulating abortion? And it is a theological question: What is my responsibility to the will of God? As I ponder with you all these Scriptures, let’s keep these four questions in mind. This may be a rambling journey, so stay with me.

My questioner called attention to Jeremiah 1:5: “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations.” God had a mission for Jeremiah, even before Jeremiah was born. The implied question is, “What if Jeremiah’s mother had had an abortion? What would that have done to the purposes of God?” Because people of God always want to be aligned with the will of God, it is an excellent question. Consider all the other ways the purposes of God could have been thwarted. Many pregnancies end spontaneously, sometimes even before the woman knows she is pregnant; some of you may have had that experience. That could have happened. Infant mortality was very high in the ancient world; in some cultures they didn’t even name their children until they were two years old, because of the likelihood they wouldn’t make it that long. So the question is whether the will of God is still accomplished, even if human beings make the wrong choice or something random happens to interfere. Remember what Mordecai said to Esther as I told that story a few weeks ago: if you fail to intervene, the people will still be saved. But perhaps you were supposed to have been the one to do it. We believe – and I hope that we are right! – that God’s ultimate will is accomplished; our joy and well-being are tied into cooperating with God’s will.

My questioner also called attention to the story I read you, when Elizabeth’s son “leapt in the womb” when Mary, pregnant with Jesus, came in. Does that not imply that John and Jesus were both already someone, since Elizabeth interpreted that to mean that John recognized Jesus? Yes, frankly, it does imply that. Now, John and Jesus are both special cases in the story of God, so I don’t know that it’s fair to draw a general conclusion from this specific incident. But the story is challenging, isn’t it? At this point, Mary is newly pregnant and Elizabeth is six months along. At the very least, we should affirm that at this point it is clear who these boys are going to be; Elizabeth’s unborn child, six months along, seems to be recognize Mary by her greeting, aware of Whose Mother she is going to be.

Another Scripture, then I’ll make a comment and then share some more Scripture. In Psalm 139, the poet says:

It was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
Wonderful are your works; that I know very well.
My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret,
Intricately woven in the depths of the earth.
Your eyes beheld my unformed substance.
In your book were written all the days that were formed for me,
When none of them as yet existed. (13-16)

Again, the poet looks back to before birth as the time of being shaped by God, and that God already has the poet’s life laid out in advance, what all the days are to bring.

Does God plan our lives and we really have no choice in what we do? That doesn’t feel quite right, does it? When I make a choice, I feel subjectively as though I truly had the freedom to choose. Philosophers who have discussed freedom and determinism and fate and the will of God have suggested that, although how we feel is not absolutely reliable, we should pay attention to how the situation seems to us. So, despite the poet’s suggestion that God had already written the book before the main character is even born, I suspect that we have a lot of freedom to choose our own way. Poetry is important, but it isn’t an absolute source for doctrine or decision-making.

Here’s another thing from Scripture: In Genesis 2, God takes the dust of the earth and shapes it into a human creature. Then it says that God “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being” (v. 7). Here the suggestion is that, whatever God may know or decide about what our life will be, you and I don’t actually begin to exist as living beings until we begin to breathe. Remember something from another recent sermon: ruach is breath and wind and spirit. When we begin to breathe, says Genesis, we have and are spirit.

Two more; please indulge me. A phrase that is associated with this conversation is “Choose life,” which comes from Deuteronomy (30:19). I won’t read the whole passage to you, but will summarize it. Moses is speaking to the people, and he tells them they have a choice between following the ways of God and not following them. He says that the ways of God are the way of life; to turn from the ways of God is the way of death. So, “choose life, so that you and your descendants may live.” So to “choose life” means to choose to follow the Torah, the teachings of God. What does the Torah say? It says, “Keep the Sabbath. Do not oppress the foreigners among you. Do not harvest to the edge of your field.” It does not say, “Do not abort a pregnancy.”

So, before I turn to the last piece of Scripture and conclude this, let me summarize my thinking. When does human life begin? Life is ongoing, a process of becoming. There is no single “moment” when a human life begins. My life, for example, has roots that go back millennia, into the dark recesses of human evolution. When did “I” begin? Maybe, as Genesis suggests, when I started to breathe. Maybe, as Romans suggests, when I was baptized and became a new person in Christ. Maybe when I began to form memories that I retain.  I don’t know. I can say, however, that the popular notion that it began when my Dad’s sperm fertilized my Mom’s egg is derived not from biology nor from the Bible, but from Roman Catholic dogma about something they call “ensoulment.” We’re not Roman Catholic; we don’t have to accept their way of thinking. And for those who talk about the “moment of conception,” they need to attend to their biology: there is no “moment of conception;” conception is a process. I don’t think it’s possible to answer the question when any particular life begins, much less when human life begins. But that said, the Bible is clear that God has purposes in mind for each of us, and part of our responsibility as human beings is to strive to cooperate with God’s purposes.

It is also clear from the Bible that human life is precious, and we should never be quick to dispose of it. Even if the life we are talking about is potential life, a life that has not yet really begun, dispensing of it should not be easy. Whenever life begins and whenever a particular life begins, even in potential it is precious. The Jesus who was not yet gave joy to the John who, though farther along, still was not yet. Even in potential, life is precious.

But now the last piece of Scripture for today, from Paul’s letter to the Galatians. “Those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live by the Spirit, let us also be guided by the Spirit” (5:24-25). The argument of the book of Galatians is that people who belong to God should not be constrained by any particular set of rules, but instead should be guided in doing right by the Holy Spirit. In other words: you are a moral agent, you have the capacity and responsibility to make moral decisions. Do so, guided by the Spirit.

The book the Men’s Book Club recently read[1] included the thoughts of a character who said that people never ask the government to prohibit something because they themselves have trouble with it; it’s always because they want the government to force other people to do something they think is good for them. We don’t ask, “Please outlaw abortion so that I’m not tempted to have one” but, “Please outlaw abortion to stop those people from doing it.” The message of Paul in Galatians is that we should be hesitant to ask the government to make decisions for us that are ours to make. In other words, in response to the moral question I posed at the beginning, the right thing to do depends on a number of factors, and you have the responsibility to decide what is the right thing for you to do in these circumstances. If you are confronted by the need to make a decision – about whether to have an abortion, for example, but also about what to do with respect to your own or someone else’s medical care – you have the burden of deciding. But since you are a child of God, do not carry that burden alone. Include others as part of your guidance: friends you trust, family members, your pastor and other spiritual leaders, the witness of the Holy Spirit within you.

The answers to the questions I posed at the beginning of this sermon are not absolute. Except that yes, you and I have an absolute responsibility to try to live conformed to the will of God. But likewise, we are free most of the time to discern what God’s will is. With freedom comes responsibility, the burden of having to make a choice. But with freedom in Jesus Christ also comes assurance: that whether we choose well or choose poorly, we are people of God, we are children of God, we are loved by God, who started calling out to us in love long before we were anything at all.

Robert A. Keefer
Presbyterian Church of the Master; Omaha, Nebraska

[1] Robert A. Heinlein, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

What Did Ezekiel See?
Pentecost VII (O. T. 16); July 19, 2020
Ezekiel 1:4-14

I remember learning the song in elementary school music class:

Ezekiel saw the wheel way up in the middle of the air,
Ezekiel saw the wheel way in the middle of the air.
Now, the little wheel runs by faith and the big wheel runs by the grace of God.
Ezekiel saw the wheel way in the middle of the air.

It’s an American folk song, with its roots in African-American tradition. It’s one of the many examples of African-American spirituals capturing the rich tradition of the prophets.

Ezekiel had a remarkable vision; I read you part of it. And from the midst of the amazing thing he saw, he heard the voice of God. He fell on his face, and the voice of God said to him, “Mortal, stand up! I have something to say to you.” And that was the beginning of his troubles.

What did he see? Did you have a picture in your mind as I read it to you? Did it look something like this? Goodness I had fun looking for images for Ezekiel’s wheel; one of the more interesting ones was a flying saucer, which responds to the question I was asked to consider for today’s sermon: ancient aliens. The fire in the midst of the wheel and the sparks flying among the living creatures have made some people think of a propulsion system for a spacecraft. Ezekiel, they claim, was visited by ancient aliens.

The History Channel, in particular, has given lots of coverage to the ideas of those who claim that humanity in ancient times was visited by aliens from another planet. Plus some of us remember Erich von Däniken’s work in the 1960s; he and the folks on the History Channel gather an impressive array of evidence to support their contention that aliens visited our ancestors. Now, you may be tempted to scoff, but I prefer to listen to people on their own terms, so let me summarize the evidence briefly and then respond as a preacher.

There seem to be two primary lines of evidence. One is the amazing accomplishments of our ancestors, feats of engineering that we imagine to be beyond the technology of their day. Consider the massive rocks of Stonehenge; how could such pieces be moved and erected into place? Consider the pyramids of Egypt and the Moai of Easter Island. Did human beings without modern construction equipment really build those? Or were they assisted by aliens with superior technology? Likewise, think about things that can be recognized only from the air, created by people who had no means of flying. When I lived in Ohio, I visited the Serpent Mound. It’s a massive earthwork; viewed from the air it looks like a serpent. But it was made in the eleventh century; the makers could never have seen it. So why did they make it? Or what of the Nazca lines in Peru? Now, they can be seen from nearby hills, but they are best seen from the air. And they are older than the Serpent Mound. Was their construction supervised by beings who were looking down on them from the air?

The second line of evidence are stories from the ancient world that are easily interpreted from a technological point of view. For example, Ezekiel’s wheels: a rocket described in the sixth century BC might seem to be what he wrote. The fire that destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah: might that not have been an atomic bomb? Van Däniken and the History Channel cite examples from other cultures, too, but these two from the Bible are enough to think about for today.

Personally, I hope that we are not the only people in the Universe. As the line goes from my favorite movie, Contact, “If it is only us, it would be an tremendous waste of space.” And one of my prayers is that First Contact will happen during my lifetime, even though there is a sizeable list of reasons for contact being unlikely. When one of you asked me to address this matter, I picked today to consider it, since tomorrow is the fifty-first anniversary of Neil Armstrong’s “one small step.” And I acknowledge the likelihood that if our ancestors met visiting aliens with advanced technology, they may be viewed as gods. As Arthur C. Clarke said, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” I do not dispute the possibility our ancestors were visited by aliens, but as a preacher I want to respond to the two lines of evidence I described.

First, I believe in letting the Bible’s stories stand as they are, without trying to explain them. The Bible’s sacred story teaches us about the encounter of human beings with the Living God; they no doubt have kernels of history within them and some are more factual than others. But in every case, leave the story alone. Whether we’re talking about Ezekiel’s vision or the feeding of the 5,000 in the wilderness or anything else, “what really happened” simply isn’t a concern. The stories are as they are and tell us what they do about God in the form in which they are. If Ezekiel saw a vision of living creatures and wheels and fire and this was how his senses interpreted the presence of the Living God, then leave it be. What is God like? What the Prophet saw is, well, frightening, and probably more accurate than the domesticated God modern American Christians seem to prefer.

Maybe you’ll like this response better; Pastor Cindy reminded me of it this week. Remember Occam’s Razor: when you have two explanations for the same phenomenon, the simpler explanation is more likely to be correct. Which is more likely: that the Prophet Ezekiel had a vision of the Living God, or that an alien spacecraft landed, the inhabitants spoke fluent Hebrew, and they pronounced judgment against the people for violating the ways of God? The Living God is quite bizarre enough for me; ancient aliens need not apply.

But what of Stonehenge and the pyramids and the Nazca lines and Serpent Mound? Don’t sell our ancestors short. Although why some of them were built is still a mystery, we have a pretty good idea of how they were built. Sure, it could have been done faster and with less effort with the help of Kiewit – or the Minbari equivalent – but our ancestors were capable of doing it. In my experience, human beings are capable of much more than we are willing to give ourselves credit for.

I have seen a mother who claimed to be weak at the sight of blood deal very well with transfusions, when they were sustaining the life of her son. People who have claimed to be powerless have lost weight, dealt with addiction, or made other positive changes when they found they needed to for some larger reason. Human beings can be quite remarkable and capable; we don’t need alien assistance.

And there is a social justice implication to my assertion. In the face of systemic injustice, we have no excuse; we dare not say, “That’s the way things are and there’s nothing we can do.” Remember the very first Star Wars movie? Obi-wan Kenobi told Luke to get ready to go with him to Alderaan to fight the Empire; Luke replied, “It’s not that I like the Empire; I hate it, but there’s nothing I can do about it right now.” And, of course, the point of the whole series is that uniquely he, Luke Skywalker, could do quite a bit about it, far more than he knew.

We are living in a time of profound challenges to the public health and to human well-being in general. Somehow all that has made this just the right time to confront as well the racism that has plagued our society for four centuries. As much as I hope to meet aliens, we don’t need aliens to come show us what to do; among us we are discerning what to do. Our reading from Isaiah (64:1-4) gave me the hint of what we do need: faith and the grace of God. Remember the song:

Ezekiel saw the wheel way up in the middle of the air,
Ezekiel saw the wheel way in the middle of the air.
Now the little wheel runs by faith and the big wheel runs by the grace of God.
Ezekiel saw the wheel way in the middle of the air.

Robert A. Keefer
Presbyterian Church of the Master
Omaha, Nebraska

Discern the Spirits
Pentecost VI (O. T. 15); July 12, 2020
I Kings 3:5-9

In November 2008 a letter was being circulated, asking Christians to sign it and send it to Washington. It was attached to a message; the message claimed that Barack Obama was circulating a petition to get religious programming banned from television and radio. You may have heard about it; it was a reworking of a similar letter that James Dobson and others had promoted a few years earlier. Dobson’s email claimed that Madalyn Murry O’Hare, the famous atheist, was trying to get Christian programming banned from the airwaves and Christmas carols banned from public schools.

I remember that one of my church members was alarmed and shared the email with me. And at the time I remembered having seen exactly the same thing when I was a high school student and a coworker at the hardware store shared it with me. That was in 1975; it was fake then and it continued to be fake when it evolved from a letter circulated by mimeograph to one circulated by email thirty years later. But people believed it. People wanted to believe that there was a conspiracy to use the federal government to destroy Christianity and this letter fed their belief. This year there are those who claim that the restrictions on public worship are not a directed health measure but are part of “their” (whoever “they” are) plan to destroy Christianity. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

This week’s sermon responds to a request from one of you to preach about “discerning the spirits,” or the struggle to attend to the truth in a time when it is so easy to spread lies. If you have paid any attention, you know how rampant the falsehoods are. The simpler ones are the sort of thing I just described, when someone makes something up and other people believe it. Perhaps you know the wonderful satiric paper (now website) The Onion; sometimes one of their stories will get repeated as if it were real. For example, in 1998 they ran a story that the year’s homosexual recruitment drive was nearing its goal; Westboro Baptist Church used it as evidence that gay people were actively trying to make others gay. In 2010 The Onion said that a frustrated President Obama had sent the nation a rambling 75,000 word email and the website Fox Nation repeated it as a real news story.[1]

Well, it would be fun to go on, but I should probably make some sort of point. More sinister examples abound in the dark recesses of conspiracy theories, such as those that come from QAnon and Infowars. Do you remember when Alex Jones claimed that the Sandy Hook massacre had been staged by those who wanted to curtail Second Amendment rights? What sort of evil gets in the face of a man whose child has been shot to death and claims that the child never actually existed, and the grieving dad is playing us for fools? The sort of evil that is described in Psalm 12; we’ll get to that.

But the churchgoer who asked me to call this to your attention was particularly concerned with the vast amount of misinformation circulating around the novel coronavirus that causes COVID-19. Just this week, another person talked to me about a list of “I heard thats;” and no, it was not one of our church members. When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or other reputable health officials, try to tell us what we should know for the sake of everyone’s health and well-being, something in many of us wants to believe the shadowy figure who says, “Well, I heard that…;” words that contradict the official line.

The anti-vaccine activist Judy Mikovits has created quite a following by claiming that the coronavirus was created in a lab, that it’s injected into people via flu vaccinations, and that wearing a mask could trigger an infection. Now, Facebook, Vimeo, Twitter, and YouTube try to suppress the misinformation she spreads, but her fans repost it and spread it, claiming they want to share the truth that our masters don’t want us to know. Because what she says suits their political agenda, they don’t consider the possibility that she is lying and that spreading these lies actually harms people.[2]

Which brings us to today’s readings from Scripture. I had Brenda read Psalm 12 to you, a rather pessimistic psalm – or maybe realistic, especially in our age – that claims that there are liars all around us, using their power to exploit the needy and the oppressed (v. 5). The poet calls upon God to destroy the power of flatterers and liars, those who build their personal power through deception.

Pray for God to promote truth and fair dealing among us. And, like Solomon, pray for wisdom. A huge chunk of the Old Testament is wisdom literature, and we tend not to give it a fair hearing. Wisdom is extolled throughout the Old Testament as a treasure highly to be valued and the greatest of God’s creations. To be wise is to be able to discern the spirits, to be able to sift out truth from falsehood, to be able to apply knowledge through experience.

And so we have in I Kings the picture of the great King Solomon, heir to his father’s empire, praying to God for wisdom. This is a story I learned as a boy. When Solomon ascended to the throne, God said to Solomon, “Ask of me what you will.” Solomon clearly was already wise, because he made a wise request. He could have asked for riches or long life or the defeat of his enemies, but instead he asked God for wisdom to govern well. A sense of what really matters leads to the desire for wisdom. His reputation for wise leadership spread abroad and he continues to be the standard against which we measure the wisdom of our own leaders. In one of the books attributed to him are these words:

The quiet words of the wise are more to be heeded
Than the shouting of a ruler among fools. (Ecclesiastes 9:17)

So my first encouragement to you is to pray for wisdom. Ask God to give you a discerning mind, one that is able to tell the difference between good advice and the nonsense shared on social media. Remember that social media is not the problem: the fake petition about religious programming goes back to 1975, before the Internet was invented. Social media only makes it easier for conspiracy theorists and Russian trolls and white nationalists (and so forth) to spread their lies and makes it all the more important for you and me to learn how to discern the spirits. Pray for wisdom.

And speak truth calmly and clearly when called for. This is hard. Usually when I hear racist trash talk or the ignorance of anti-vaxxers and others I remain silent and don’t challenge it. Goodness, if I were to try to respond to every instance of ignorance and misinformation in the newspaper’s “Public Pulse” I would be writing every day. But I’ll tell you of one recent instance, not to boast, but because I think it serves as an example of how to respond in such a situation.

I was riding in the funeral coach on the way to the cemetery and the funeral director was talking about the removal of statues of Confederate war heroes. He was saying how wrong it is to be destroying our history, that the statues are simple reminders of history and it does us no good to wipe out history. When he gave me a chance to respond, I calmly said that a statue is not merely a reminder of history: a statue is intended to honor someone for their actions. A paragraph or chapter in a history book is a reminder of history; a statue is an honor for deeds done. And the deeds of a Confederate war hero are treason against the United States in order to keep black persons in slavery. That is the deed for which they are honored; do we truly wish to continue to honor them for treason that was intended to keep black people enslaved?

He changed the subject.

Now, you may disagree with my conclusion, of course, but I affirm that I told the truth about the purpose of statues and the actions of those honored in those statues. Likewise, you may disagree with the need to wear a mask to the grocery store or to worship, but claiming that masks trigger infections is a lie and claiming that masks protect others from our exhalations is the truth. You do not need to shout at people, call them names, or question their motivations, but do speak the truth.

Follow Solomon’s example: pray for wisdom, discern the spirits, and calmly speak the truth.

Robert A. Keefer
Presbyterian Church of the Master
Omaha, Nebraska

[1] Material in the first three paragraphs from personal memory, Wikipedia (article on The Onion), and Snopes.com

[2] Information in this paragraph from Omaha World-Herald, Coronavirus conspiracy theory video shows challenges for big tech, June 14, 2020.