July 10th: "This Is the Sermon About Abortion"

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First United Presbyterian Church

“This Is the Sermon About Abortion”

Rev. Amy Morgan

July 10, 2022

Judges 11:29-40

29 Then the Spirit of the LORD came upon Jephthah.  He passed through Gilead and Manasseh, and he passed through Mizpah of Gilead, and from Mizpah of Gilead to the Ammonites.  30 And Jephthah made a vow to the LORD and said, “If you will for certain give the Ammonites into my hand, 31 then whoever comes out from the doors of my house to meet me upon my peaceful return from the Ammonites will be the LORD’s, and I will offer him up for a burnt offering.”  32 Then Jephthah crossed over to the Ammonites to wage war with them, and the LORD gave them into his hand.  33 And he smote them from Aroer as far as Minith - twenty towns - and as far as Abel-keramim; an exceedingly great slaughter.  So the Ammonites surrendered themselves to the Israelites.  34 Then Jephthah came into Mitzpah, to his house.  And behold!, his daughter was coming out to meet him with a tambourine and with dancing.  She was an only child; he had no other son or daughter.  35 And when he saw her he tore his garments and said, “Alas! My daughter, you have indeed brought me very low, and you have become like those that trouble me.  For I have opened my mouth to the LORD and I cannot retract.  36 Then she said to him, “Father, you have opened your mouth to the LORD.  Do to me according to what has gone out from your mouth now that the LORD has done for you vengeance on your enemies, the Ammonites.”  37 And she said to her father, “Let this thing be done to me.  Leave me alone two months.  Let me go down the mountains and let me weep over my virginity, I and my companions.”  38 And he said, “Go,” and he sent her for two months.  She went, she and her companions, and she wept over her virginity upon the mountains.  39 When at the end of two months she returned to her father, he did to her according to his vow which he had made. And she had not known a man.  And it became a custom in Israel 40 every year for the daughters of Israel to go to mourn the daughter of Jephthah the Gileadite four days a year.

For those of you who get and read our weekly email, you’ve been prepped for today. If you’re a visitor, or not on our email list, or maybe forgot to read it this Wednesday, today’s sermon will bring the Word of God to bear on our current national concern with abortion. As I said in the email, I do not intend to endorse any political position or policy, but I do recognize that this is a tender issue for many of us and that there may be implications for our communal life that develop from this sermon. I also want to re-emphasize that we are going to be talking about difficult things, including graphic violence, and that this topic may bring up strong emotions for some of us. I am always happy to have a follow-up conversation about any sermon and to provide pastoral care when something touches a nerve. 

I’ve been asked, but really never expected, to preach about abortion in the past. So far, I’ve not waded too far into these waters from the pulpit. But today my sermon is titled, “This is the sermon about abortion.” The title is meant to be a little tongue-in-cheek, however, because I don’t really intend to preach about abortion. I make an effort not to preach about anything other than the Word of God. That’s my job. Not to tell you what to think or feel or how to vote. My calling, the calling you all extended to me, is to bring the Word of God to bear on our lives and the world we live in. So today, that has to include abortion. It can’t be avoided without being negligent to that calling. 

In an effort to ensure that I am bringing the Word of God to bear on the subject of abortion, and not the other way around, the text I chose, this passage from Judges, is the segment of scripture I have studied more thoroughly than any other. The translation I read this morning is my own rendering from the Hebrew. I spent days and nights examining not just this passage, but the whole book of Judges and numerous scholarly papers and commentaries on this text. This is because this was the text given for my examination for ordination to ministry. In other words, I had to pass the test of this text to become a minister. 

When I wrote my examination on this text, we were given the option of developing a sermon outline or a lesson plan for a class out of the study we’d done. At the time, I couldn’t fathom what I would preach about this terrible text, what truth and hope it could speak into the life of a congregation. This text definitely never comes up in the lectionary. So I wrote a lesson plan that blandly invited folks to explore the role of God in the violence of the Old Testament. 

But as I thought about the moment we are in as a nation, I saw the implications of this text in a whole new way. I finally knew what this text has to say to the church and to our society. So here we go. 

Jephthah is a complicated character. He’s not good, he’s not bad. He’s had a difficult life. The son of a prostitute, he was kicked out of his house by his father’s wife and spent part of his young adulthood collecting outlaws and raiding the countryside. But then he’s asked to return to his clan to lead them in battle against the Ammonites, and he is highly successful. He is set as a judge over Israel for six years, the shortest span of any judge. 

It's appropriate that Jephthah’s story falls smack in the middle of the book of Judges. And in order to understand the importance and implications of this story, we need to understand what is happening in the larger story. 

The book of Judges has this pattern to it. The Israelites do what is evil in the sight of the Lord. Then God gives them over to the hand of their enemies. Then the people cry out to God. And then God raises up a deliverer, a military leader, who defeats Israel’s enemies and then judges Israel, interpreting God’s will for the people to keep them on the right track and out of trouble. This cycle repeats again and again throughout Judges.  

Early in the book, a woman named Deborah is judge over Israel. She not only interprets God’s will for the people, she is such a commanding military leader that the head of Israel’s army refuses to go to war without her. That military conflict ends with a woman, Jael, stabbing a tent peg through the skull of the opposing army’s leader. 

This is the role of women in chapter 4 of Judges. 

By the time we get to chapter 11, God is fed up with this cycle of unfaithfulness and crying out to God. The people have once again started worshipping the gods and idols of their neighbors. And God sends the Ammonites to defeat and oppress the Israelites. When they cry out to God for help again, God says, “Enough already! Worship the gods you’ve chosen and let them deliver you. I’m over this.” 

But the Israelites put away the foreign gods they’d been worshipping, and God “could no longer bear to see Israel suffer.”

Jephthah is anointed to lead the Israelites into battle against the Ammonites. But Jephthah does something no other judge, no other leader has done. First, he tries diplomacy with the Ammonite king, reminding him of their ancient history and why they should be friends and not enemies. This fails, and so Jephthah prepares for battle. But then he does something else no other judge has done. Instead of trusting that God will deliver the Israelites, as God as done over and over again, he makes a bargain with God. He vows to sacrifice the first person who walks out of his house when he peacefully returns from war in exchange for victory. 

Some translations make Jephthah’s vow ambiguous, leaving open the possibility that Jephthah expected that maybe some livestock would come out to meet him and he would make an animal sacrifice. But the Hebrew is pretty clear. And since livestock were not expected to come dancing in celebration to meet returning heroes, there’s really no way to argue that Jephthah intended anything other than human sacrifice. 

Now, in the ancient near east, including in all the nations surrounding Israel, human sacrifice was pretty common. Most of the gods worshiped by Israel’s neighbors demanded human sacrifice in various ways and with some regularity. Some gods specifically demanded the sacrifice of children. The fact that Israel’s God abhorred human sacrifice was something that made them unique in that region. That was part of why it was such an atrocity for Israel to worship other gods. Because that meant they were worshiping gods that demanded human sacrifice. 

Jephthah’s vow is, first, totally unnecessary. No other judges needed to bargain with God for victory. They trusted God to be their deliverer, to be faithful to Israel. Jephthah’s vow illustrates his lack of faith in God and his desire to claim full credit for this victory. 

Second, this vow illustrates how little Jephthah understands about the God of Israel. He offers Yahweh the sacrifice desired by other gods, a sacrifice that is abhorrent to Yahweh. 

And when the time comes to fulfill his vow, Jephthah discovers that he must sacrifice his own daughter, his only child. 

Jephthah placed so little faith in God and such a high value on his personal victory that he sacrificed his own child in the bargain. 

And my friends, this is what we do. 

The lawyers who argued for “Jane Roe” in front of the Supreme Court, though they were self-avowed pro-choice feminists, never offered to help Norma McCorvey, the actual plaintiff in the case, obtain the abortion she sought. They needed to keep her pregnancy viable in order to keep their case viable. They won the case and sacrificed McCorvey’s opportunity for abortion care. 

And now that Roe v. Wade has been overturned, pro-life advocates may be celebrating their long-sought victory. But plenty of research from all over the world affirms that criminalizing abortion will not reduce abortions. It just makes them riskier. They won their case and will possibly sacrifice the health and even lives of their own daughters, wives, and sisters in the bargain. 

We have drawn up ideological battle lines and baptized our causes with righteousness. But instead of trusting victory to God, we have made bargains to sacrifice other people for our personal victories. 

Whether the victory we seek is reproductive justice or the rights of the unborn, women’s autonomy over their bodies or states’ rights, we have been fighting in this country, and continue to fight, ideological battles for dominance that ultimately result in bargaining other people’s lives away. We have trusted in our own ability to accomplish God’s ends instead of trusting in the God who is so faithful that, even in the face of our repeated unfaithfulness, God cannot bear to see us suffer. 

Can we hear that? God cannot bear to see humanity suffer. God is faithful in coming to our aid. God calls and equips us to relieve the suffering of our fellow human beings. 

And what do we do? We circumvent God’s work, we bargain with God to make the victory our own, and we make vows that God finds abhorrent because they only increase human suffering. 

Because here’s the honest truth. Abortion is born out of suffering. What no one in this polarized environment is willing to acknowledge is that no one wants an abortion. No little girl dreams of growing up and having an abortion someday. No woman hopes that she can experience the shame and difficulty and expense and excruciating decision of getting an abortion. A quarter of all women in this country who get abortions are Catholic. They admittedly belong to a faith tradition that believes strongly that abortion is murder. Another 13 percent of them are conservative evangelicals. One of these women wrote in a journal at a Texas abortion clinic that she knew what she was doing was a sin against God, but she knew she had to do it and hoped she wouldn’t burn in hell for it. 

Women are willing to risk hellfire to get an abortion. Now that is desperation. Not desire. Abortion is born out of suffering. 

This suffering stems from the fact that we do not live in a society where every pregnancy can result in the joyful welcoming of a child into the world. Because we do not live in a society where the burden of pregnancy and child-bearing and child raising is shared equally by both sexes. We do not live in a society where everyone has equal access to quality health care before, during, and after pregnancy. We do not live in a society free from domestic violence, rape, and incest. We do live in a society with the highest maternal mortality rate among industrialized nations. We do live in a society where one-quarter of unmarried mothers live below the poverty line and one-third of all people living in poverty are children. We live in a society where there is so much suffering, and abortion is the symptom, not the cause. 

And so we do live in a society where abortion will continue, no matter what the law says. We do live in a society where abortion will go underground, will be unregulated, will be more costly, and will result in more suffering and death. This is not my political opinion. There is lots and lots of research on this from this country and all around the world from countries with varying laws about abortion. 

So if we want to know where this is leading us, we can keep reading the book of Judges. At the end of this book, a Levite is travelling with his concubine and when he stops overnight to rest, a group of men from the town come banging down the door of the house where he is staying, demanding that the host let them rape the man. The host refuses, but to placate the crowd, the Levite tosses his concubine out to them, and they rape her to death. The Levite takes her home and cuts her up into 12 pieces and sends them out to all the tribes of Israel. 

This is the role of women at the end of Judges. 

In the final chapters of Judges, there is a refrain that gets repeated several times. “In those days there was no king in Israel; all the people did what was right in their own eyes.” There was no authority other than an individual’s personal autonomy. But the people with the power to assert their autonomy were men. Those men fought and won wars, raped and slaughtered women and children, kidnapped virgin girls to be their wives. They did what was right in their own eyes. They baptized their desires with self-righteousness. 

And what did God do about it?

The strange thing about the book of Judges is that God almost never speaks. Anointings and military victories are attributed to God. The narrator claims God sees and feels, punishes and saves, directs and chooses. But the voice of God is rarely quoted directly. Throughout the cyclical decline of Israel, everyone thinks God is on their side, but no one is really listening to God. 

In due time, God became so frustrated with this situation that God, with a woman’s courageous consent, became a fragile baby, with a divinely-appointed man to support the child. God acquired a human voice, to speak directly to us about God’s faithfulness, God’s love, God’s reign on earth. 

And those who listened to that voice, who heard the message of Jesus Christ, and who were faithful to that message, bore fruit and grew in love. Jesus, the firstborn of all creation, came to reconcile all things to God. Jesus holds together all things, making it possible to live in a very different world from the one we now find ourselves in. 

Everyone wants to live in a world without abortion. But we have to ask ourselves if we are bargaining with God for self-righteous victory or if we are faithfully following Christ’s call to participate in the reign of God on earth. Those are two very different things. 

Will we be like Jephthah and sacrifice our daughters? Or will we follow Jesus and work for a world that truly welcomes children, that truly supports orphans and widows, that truly heals the sick and feeds the hungry, that truly embraces outcasts and sinners, that never forces a woman to choose hellfire over hell on earth? 

As Christ-followers, we are not bound by categories of pro-life or pro-choice. We are freed, and called, to work for the flourishing of all life. We are freed, and called, to choose the well-being of our neighbor over our own desires. We are freed, and called, to trust in God’s steadfast love and faithfulness, and to bear good fruit in the world. 

To God be all glory forever and ever. Amen.