Pregnant Through Rape-What Should We Think?

I wasn't sure if I was going to "go here".  But I don't know how I can't.

“...even when life begins in that horrible situation of rape, that is something God intended to happen.”  So said Richard Mourdock in a debate for the Senate.  He lost.

"First of all, from what I understand from doctors [pregnancy from rape] is really rare. If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. Let's assume that maybe that didn't work, or something. I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be on the rapist and not attacking the child."  So said Todd Akin to a reporter in his run for the Senate.  He lost.

I don't know how to express my anger at what they said.  I am so disgusted.  Yet at the same time, I believe these gentlemen are being honest about their feelings and their positions on the question of abortion.  I don't admire them for that.  I expect honesty from those people that would seek votes.  I know, how naive am I?  But I expect it.  And they received the results that I would expect for making comments like that, they lost.

Consider their words.  First, Mr. Mourdock: God intends for a life to begin in rape, even the "horrible situation" of rape.  So, God intends the rape, God intends the rapist, God intends the attack, God intends the life of the woman to be shredded, God intends all of that.  The abstract phrase says something like "God authors evil".  But this puts the intention of God for the most horrible crime to happen to my wife or my daughter?

I am a pastor and I tell you no God I believe in works that way.

Now, Mr Akin.  Legitimate rape?  And the female body has ways to try and shut the whole process down?  What are you talking about?  The victim committing suicide?  Or maybe a d & c?  I read that and I come away with the twisted perception that Mr. Akin is putting the responsibility for the pregnancy and the rape back on the woman.  It was somehow "legitimate", she can "fix it". 

I am a man and I tell you that "no" means "no".  The moment the man ignores that, the crime has begun-inside marriage, outside marriage, wherever.  And, insult to injury, the woman is raped and she is responsible for birth control too?  Really?  Can such ignorance really exist?

You want a better perspective?  You want a more pastoral perspective?  Andrew Solomon spoke extensively about the children born to women who have been raped in an interview with Terry Gross on NPR's program "Fresh Air" as part of a discussion of his book "Far From the Tree".  You can find the interview at http://www.npr.org/programs/fresh-air/.  I heard the interview on Nov. 12.  

As a member of my church, I am called upon to take time for my neighbor, to pray for my neighbor, to serve my neighbor.  Andrew Solomon gives insight on what that is like far more

What Do You Remember from School?

I went to a Christian High School out on the west coast.  (Pacific Northwest, so West Coast, not 'left coast' in California).  And something happened there at recess and lunch time and between classes that would be absolutely intolerable in any high school today.  40-75% of the student body at any given point would troop out the back doors of the school into the 'smoke hole' located in the woods behind the school to light up on cigarettes.

Grades 8-12, Christian kids, from a bunch of churches around the area, smoked, maybe up to a pack a day.  And it was okay.  And teachers who smoked had duty out there in the smoke hole.  When I graduated, grade 12, there was finally a move afoot to phase out the smoking and the smoke hole, from the incoming 8th grade class and up, year by year.

I remember my senior high trip to the capital city.  Big attraction was a smoke shop.  Turkish cigarettes were the rage, if I remember correctly.

I knew people who would get me alcohol, if I asked.  I knew who was having premarital sex.

Yah, Christian High School.

But there were a few things I wouldn't be able to tell you.  I wouldn't have been able to tell you where to get drugs.  I could not have told you who in our class might be the one who would bring a gun to school to shoot someone with.  That wasn't even in our focus.  There was low-level bullying, especially if you didn't smell like cigarettes...

And the strange thing is that our church Youth Groups-Young People Societies-did a pretty good job "churching" us.  There wasn't the decimation of young people that seems to occur all too often somewhere between the latter stages of high school and college.  There was some, of course, but not so bad.

So now, here we are a generation later.  More stuff, more availability of stuff, more tempting stuff, more needs for the church to do something in the lives of young people.  1 Corinthians 13, translated just before, the choice of so many weddings, is the bible's voice to the question of Love.  It is also the Scripture for Youth Sunday next week.

How does the culture of young people today stand against those verses?  More focus on that this week.

1 Corinthians 13: A translation for my youth

If I talk using really big and complicated words, or if I am talking in some weird religious "angel-speak", but I don't have love, I'm no different than your cel phone going off in the middle of class-noisy, disruptive, and not at all helpful.

If I prophecy-that is speak God's word about now and the future; if I figured out ALL God's mysteries; if God gave me the ability to know EVERYTHING; if my faith was so strong that I could knock a mountain over with a feather, BUT I don't have love, I am nothing-zero, nada, empty, done.

If I give away everything that I have to help poor people, if I let myself get killed because of what I say I believe in, but I don't have love, I get NOTHING out of it.

To be a loving person is to do the following:
  Love is to Put up with all the crap dished out by other people.
        Love is Not only acting good toward other people, but thinking good about them too.
               Love is Not to be jealous of other people.
                      Love is Not to go "me first", ever.
               Love is Not behaving like some show off, know-it-all.
         Love is Not being full of yourself.
  Love is Not getting in someone else's face.
        Love is Not simply trying to get everything for yourself.
               Love is Not easily p****d...er...ticked off.
        Love does NOT keep score of the bad things that are done by others.

Love does NOT think it is cool when others do bad things, like dissing other people, like bullying other people, get the picture?
           Rather, Love knows that the TRUTH of the thing is cool-no matter the cost.

Love puts up with everything.
            Love believes everything.
                        Love hopes for everything.
                                      Love patiently lives through everything.

THE BOTTOM LINE: Love CAN'T fail-EVER.
     Remember the stuff about prophecies?  That is going to be eliminated.
                   Fancy words and weird religious angel-speak?  It is going to stop.
     Knowledge about everything?  It is also going to be eliminated.

Right now, we only have part of the story.  So, like, when someone prophecies and such, we only get part of the story.

But when love is made perfect, SNAP, we get the whole story, perfect and complete,
       and the part we got right now will be eliminated.

Another way to think about the love being made complete:
When I was a baby,
                 I talked baby talk-goo goo gah gah
                            I thought like a baby-in my head-goo goo gah gah
                 I figured things out like a baby.
But when I grew up, I ditched all the baby-stuff.  Does that make sense?

Let me try another one:
When the love is only in part, it is like trying to look into the bathroom mirror by the light of a small candle when the power has gone out, trying to pick out your reflection to do makeup or shave or whatever in the dim light.
BUT, when we get the lights back-when the love is complete-everything is clear.

                  It is like I said before, right now I only know a part of the story,
 but THEN I will know everything just like everything about me is going to be known.

        So right now we got three things, faith, hope, and love,
                       But LOVE is by far the greatest of the three.

What if UFO's look like airplanes?

I was walking home in the evening and I thought I was in an episode of the X-Files.  There was a light overhead, very bright, headed right toward me.  Then the light banked and the blinking lights of the wings, the full outline of the aircraft became evident, then the sound of the engines...

Okay, so it wasn't a UFO...or was it?  Here is my conspiracy.  If aliens were coming to spy on us and they could not by some cloaking technology keep us from seeing them, why not make their spaceships look like airplanes?  Makes sense, doesn't it? 

Works for the government, doesn't it?  Making the UFO's look like airplanes?

Okay Pastor...UFO's?  Do I believe in this stuff?  Well, supernatural is stock in trade for me.  Jesus, God, Holy Spirit...see where I am going?

Really?  Jesus and UFO's in the same sentence?  Well, have you read the first few chapters of Ezekiel?

So consider this:  Do you believe that angels walk among us?  The bible talks about people entertaining angels unawares.  How about something even cooler?  Angel-stuff, God-stuff walking around among us...even in us?

There is this thing we believe, that God so loved the world, that He sent His Son to dwell among us.  The promise continues, that after Jesus returned to the Heavenly Father, we were not left alone, but the Spirit of God, which came down upon Jesus at His baptism, comes down on each of us.

So next time you see an airplane...is it an airplane?  Or is there a UFO inside?  Or the next time you find yourself reaching beyond yourself to do for someone else.  Is that you?  Or is the Holy Spirit inside?

The Hurricane After the Sermon

The sermon last week was entitled "God's Presence Demands a Reponse", a fitting response to the power of prayer.  Then came Sandy.  The day after the storm, I drove into Perth Amboy to check the church.  And there, in the midst of the debris being cleaned off the streets, boats from the marina piled up onto Front St., power out in 85% of the city, 66% of the state, those words stood out from the church sign.

God's Presence Demands a Reponse.

A day without power makes one feel small, two days and it feels like something off the television.  There is a darkness without any lights out that is so different from the electric invasion of the night that we are used to.  Shades of dark blue and gray and black are the pallet, not the shadows of streetlamps giving glimpses of the day time in the pools of light they throw out.

For me, it was like God's presence moved into the technology that we so take for granted and, just for a moment or two, the tech was shoved aside for something more primal. 

We are a week from the election and, as always, it is so polarized, so ugly, so overwhelmingly negative these last few weeks...then a storm of epic proportions comes in and we, the people, left, right, donkey, elephant, we close ranks to care for one another.

For me, it was like God stepping down from on high and reminding us that elections are good, elections are necessary, elections are the foundation of the best form of government in history, but let us not forget who is really in charge, who can really pull a country together.

People died in the storm, that tragedy cannot be forgotten.  And to credit God with the storm is to set responsibility for those who died on Him as well.  But how about some perspective?  How many shootings?  How many homicides?  How many other ways that humans have to kill humans far outweigh this event? 

It is not my intention to lessen the impact of those who died in the storm, but neither is it my intention to lessen the deaths of any human beings.

All this from a sermon title.  Well, a sermon title is supposed to derive from a sermon.  A sermon is supposed to derive from the interpretation of God's Word.  This time, the Word was not spoken from the pages of Scripture but from the world created by a Word of command.

Scripture and the death of an officer in the Line of Duty

There has been a campaign going on to achieve the goal of keeping the number of officers killed in the line of duty under one hundred in a year.  We made it to October.  Arthur Lopez, a police officer on Long Island, was killed in a traffic stop on Tuesday, the 100th officer to die in the line this year according to an online law enforcement website.

**Need to correct something.  In the emotion of reading, I made a mistake.  The 100th officer to die in the line of duty occurred two days after Officer Lopez was shot.  It was an officer killed in a car crash in Prince George's County.  I apologize and can only say that I wasn't reading as clearly as I should have.**

I don't know what to say about that.  I am a chaplain for the police department of the city where my church is located.  I know that the loss of their first officer in the line of duty was part of the background that has led to this part of my ministry.  And I do not know how devastating it would be if this were one of ours.

What tends to push me to blog is when things coincide in ways that I cannot let stand still.

The death of Officer Lopez, finding out he was the one hundredth officer to fall, came right on the heels of my sermon prep for Sunday.

My text is 1 Samuel 2.  Plot synopsis: Elkanah has two wives, Penninah and Hannah.  Penninah bore him children, Hannah not.  He loved Hannah more, like she was a trophy wife.  She prayed and was given the gift of a child, called Samuel, whom she gave to the Lord.  The text for Sunday is her prayer of thanksgiving to God.  And I am sitting here trying to figure out how her prayer, so confident and so explicit of the powers of God, applies to our lives today.

Then, dodging the work and going to my emails, I came across the story on Officer Lopez.  Going back to the text, 1 Samuel 2:6, "the Lord kills and brings to life..."  Hannah prays this triumphantly to the power of God.  Now I am looking at the obit of a 29 year old cop and considering the same words and where God is in that officer's death.

Right now, it is just a raw struggle to pray about.  I will put down more when the Lord gives me something more.

Women and Men

Sometimes interesting things coincide.  I am reading "The Pastor", the memoir of Eugene Petersen.  His earliest recollection of ministry comes from his mom, who was a traveling preacher among the mining camps in the Rockies where they grew up.  She stopped when some man quoted Paul about women not teaching or having authority over men.  Oi.

Cut to Halloween 2012.  I am in a Costume Warehouse looking to complete the costuming of the family for the holiday.  Being late October in 2012, Christmas stuff is also on display (in a Costume Warehouse a week before Halloween...but that's another post).  There are the red and white furry costumes for a grand old Christmas time.

For the men, it is the classic St. Nick costume, red hat to trousers, white trim at the ankles and wrists, heck, white trim on the faces as well.  You see hands, eyes, a bit of the cheeks, rest guarenteed to be covered against the cold of the Yuletide sleighride.

And then there were the costumes for the ladies...  There is the classic image of Mrs. Claus, red plaid floor length dress, a jolly companion to Mr. Claus.  But in the Costume Warehouse, they were the Christmas bimbettes, not dressed for the cold but...what...the warm fire back home?  Same color scheme as Father Christmas, but shrunk in the dryer...then shrunk again...and maybe a third time as well.

It is a repeat of the two classic gender role heroes in the D.C. comicbook universe, Superman and Wonder Woman.  Supe had the long johns that covered neck to toes, Wonder Woman equipped with armored Victoria Secret.

As followers of Jesus, we should really have something to say about that, objectifying women, treating them as second class people though first class sex objects.  Maybe Paul's words about how in Christ there is neither Jew nor Gentile, male nor female, slave nor free, in other words, in Christ, there is the systematic dismantling of hierarchy based on race, gender or economy.

But way too many of us Jesus freaks like Paul's other stuff better, the sideline stuff, the specific stuff, the contextual stuff, women stay in the second class, no authority, no teaching men.  I used that argument myself.  But I was an obnoxious middle school kid in a Christian school with a pastor's wife as my homeroom teacher.

We need to speak up.  And we need to speak up strong!