Reflections on Paul's "Untimely Birth"

“Last of all, as to one untimely born, the risen Lord also appeared to me.”

I don’t think I’ve ever tried to preach the gospel in the context of abortion before, but today is an appropriate day to do so for several reasons.

First of all, the word that Paul uses to describe himself in his first letter to the Corinthians this morning has been translated as ‘an untimely birth.’ This Greek word was used and can also be translated as a miscarriage, or a deliberate abortion. And according to Paul’s own testimony, he certainly understood that what happened to him on the road to Damascus was a deliberate, and in some sense, a violent and unnatural act of God, and not an accident or merely an internal, psychological event.

I think where our trouble may come in, and why the translators avoid the more violent and destructive word, ‘abortion’, is because that word does mean that a life has been terminated in one way or another, either deliberately or spontaneously, and the moral character of deliberate abortions may indeed fall under the judgment of God and therefore require repentance and forgiveness. Our own denomination, meeting and deliberating in General Convention, has resolved that abortions are not a means of birth control and may only be considered when the life of the mother or the child is at stake.

In the case of Paul, he is asserting that God himself deliberately put his former life as a zealous Pharisee to death on the road to Damascus even as he called him to a new and larger life, a life as an apostle of the risen Christ.
Consider what we are doing when we baptize an infant, and you may begin to understand why some Christians resist such a practice as untimely or unnatural, forcing something that should wait for a later date, a more natural kind of conversion and rebirth, and not something done deliberately without the child’s consent. The words we use are not so dramatic, but every time an infant is baptized, his or her natural life, just begin, is being ritually and symbolically put to death, buried with Christ, in an untimely manner, before their former, natural life, the life given to them by their parents, has run its course, in order that the child might be raised to the new life of grace in Christ sooner rather than later and join the risen life and fellowship of Christ with those of us who have also made the deliberate choice to end our former lives prematurely in our own baptisms.

We must be very careful not to equate the spiritual character of the potential mother and father, who may use abortion for indiscriminate birth control, and the actual parents and godparents who, out of the most holy of motives, ask God, through his Church, to take the life of their child sooner rather than later, in order that their child may have more life, abundant life, even if the cost of that new and larger life requires that one’s present life be lost and laid down sacramentally in baptism and in daily acts of self-denial and selfless love.

I think the story of Joseph and his brothers is relevant at this point. When Joseph was finally reunited with his brothers, who thought they had successfully aborted his life years earlier by selling him into slavery, he declared to them, “You meant it – that is, your decision first to murder me out of jealousy, and then to sell me into slavery – you meant it for evil, but God meant it for good.” My point is this: while it is no doubt true that we human beings are capable of the most selfish of actions, God’s hands are not tied, even if our own consciences and lives are bound by the consequences of our selfishness. What may look like the end for Paul, the Pharisee, is just the beginning for Paul, the least of all the apostles, thanks be to God in Christ.

And this is true because Christ is not only the Lord of life but the conqueror of death. Jesus told the apostles who had been with him and followed him and developed a more natural form of discipleship, who were in the spiritual womb with Jesus, so to speak, for the full term, until his passion, death and resurrection: “I can lay my life down, and I can pick it up again.” By God’s grace we are able to do the same. Sometimes we must act deliberately and violently: “If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. If your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out.”

The second reason that this seems like a good day to address this subject is because of all the controversy that has swirled around the Super Bowl ad paid for by Focus on the Family, a Christian right-to-life advocacy group, featuring Heisman Trophy winner Tim Tebow and his mother, who had to make a decision when Tim was still in her womb, whether or not to terminate his biological life even before he was born into this world. Had she made the decision to end Tim’s life prematurely, for whatever reason, I want to repeat that God’s hands are not tied. As we heard last week in reference to the prophet Jeremiah, “Before you were born I knew you.” And this is also true for you and me. It is not the length of this mortal life that matters so much as it is the nature of the immortal life which we will all inherit, leading either to eternal life with God or eternal death in our separation from God. No one wants to end that potential or actual separation more than God himself, who sent his Son into the world to die for us while we were yet sinners, while we were deliberately aborting the life of the only human being who has ever lived a fully natural life as well as making it possible for us to enter a fully abundant, supernatural life.

The third reason for addressing this subject today is the fact in today’s gospel, Peter is overwhelmed by the catch of fish that he receives at Jesus’ invitation. He understands that he is in the very presence of God. Just as the lives of all those fish have now ended prematurely, in an untimely manner, when Peter and his fellow fishermen hauled them into the boat with their net, so does Peter realize that Jesus has caught him completely and taken him forever out of his former life into whatever life he may now discover in following him.

I have no idea how much longer those fish would have lived in the Sea of Galilee if they had not been caught. I believe that great school of fish was attracted to Jesus no less than the crowd of humans was drawn to Jesus because they knew in a way that fish can know that the very one who created them was nearby in a boat, just as my cat has learned to respond to the voice and the touch of me and my wife as a domesticated animal can.

Part of the miracle of childbirth is the fact that over the course of nine months millions of years of evolution are miraculously condensed and recreated in the womb. In a sense, each of us knows what it is like to be a fish, because we passed that way, if ever so briefly and tangentially, in our mother’s womb, on our way toward human birth. Do you remember what happened when Mary visited Elizabeth shortly after the Holy Spirit overshadowed Mary and Jesus was conceived in her womb? John the Baptist, still three months away from his due date, nonetheless leapt in Elizabeth’s womb because he was responding to the presence of the very Son of God, who was nonetheless at the earliest stages of fetal development, dare I even say even less biologically complex than a fish.

The astounding and mind-boggling truth is that there is no place where God cannot or has not gone. He went into Gideon’s cave in order to bring new life to his chosen people. He entered the dark, murderous, fire-breathing chambers of Paul’s heart. He entered the womb of Mary, the faithful and submissive virgin. His voice, as we see in today’s gospel, can draw all creatures to him. Jesus can call out Lazarus from the tomb four days after he has died and he can enter into his own tomb and descend into hell in order to redeem everything and everyone he has made, even those who have deliberately terminated a pregnancy and are sorry and ask for forgiveness, wanting more than anything else to be reunited with God and the person whose natural life they cut short.

So let us thank God that he has made all of creation to respond to him and be drawn to him and be caught by him even as he seeks us out and finds us, wherever we may be, even in the depths of our own sin, giving us the grace to lay down our lives in order to receive the even fuller life that is ours through him, which no one else has the power to finally and forever take away, calling us to join him in fishing and catching men and women, infants and children, introducing them to Jesus, who is the Resurrection and the Life. AMEN.