Why I Hate Sanctity of Human Life Sunday (and Why I Love It Too)
— Wednesday, January 16th, 2013 —
As we approach next week’s fortieth anniversary of the infamous Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision, churches in my tradition will observe Sanctity of Human Life Sunday. I hate that we have to. Let me explain why.
Don’t get me wrong. I think it’s a joy to preach the whole counsel of God. And I love the truth of human dignity and the image of God in all persons. But it makes me sad.
I don’t hate Sanctity of Human Life Sunday because I think it, somehow, unbiblical. No, indeed. The entire canon throbs with God’s commitment to the fatherless and to the widows, his wrath at the shedding of innocent blood.
I don’t hate it because I think it’s inappropriate. Just as every Lord’s Day should be Easter, with the proclamation of the Resurrection of Jesus, and Christmas, with the announcement of the Incarnation, so every Lord’s Day should highlight the worth and dignity of human life.
I hate Sanctity of Human Life Sunday because I’m reminded that we have to say things to one another that human beings shouldn’t have to say. Mothers shouldn’t kill their children. Fathers shouldn’t abandon their babies. No human life is worthless, regardless of skin color, age, disability, economic status. The very fact that these things must be proclaimed is a reminder of the horrors of this present darkness.
One year on Sanctity of Human Life Sunday, as I opened the Bible to preach, I looked out and caught the eye of my sons. I prayed that their children wouldn’t have to hear a sermon against abortion and euthanasia. I prayed that my grandchildren and great-grandchildren would grow up in an age when abortion is, as the Feminists for Life organization put is some years ago, not just illegal but unthinkable.
I prayed for my (yet to be conceived but not yet to be conceived of) great-grandchildren that a Sanctity of Human Life Sunday would seem as unnecessary to them as a Reality of Gravity Emphasis Sunday.
I hate Sanctity of Human Life Sunday because I’m reminded that as I’m preaching there are babies warmly nestled in wombs who won’t be there tomorrow. I’m reminded that there are children, maybe even blocks from my pulpit, who’ll be slapped, punched, and burned with cigarettes before nightfall. I’m reminded that there are elderly men and women languishing away in loneliness, their lives pronounced to be a waste.
But I also love Sanctity of Human Life Sunday when I think about the fact that in our churches there are ex-orphans all around, adopted into loving families. I love to reflect on the men and women who serve every week in pregnancy centers for women in crisis. And I love to see men and women who have aborted babies find their sins forgiven, even this sin, and their consciences cleansed by Christ.
We’ll always need Christmas. We’ll always need Easter. But I hope, please Lord, someday soon, that Sanctity of Human Life Day is unnecessary.
A version of this article originally ran on January 18, 2009.
10 Responses to “Why I Hate Sanctity of Human Life Sunday (and Why I Love It Too)”
Trackbacks
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Thank You Dr. Moore for this vantage on SOLS. May it truly come to pass that this designate on the church calendar is removed as the church and then our society full embraces the totality of our Lord’s decree of LIFE!
Over 3 years ago myself & my in-laws took my daughter to get an abortion- against her will. I could tell you the horrors of the clinic itself or some of the stories I heard while there but I won’t. I could tell you the awful circumstances of her pregnancy but I won’t. It’s the only thing I knew to do for my daughter & her future at the time. The emotional & spiritual ramifications are just now coming to light. My daughter has just been put on antidepressants, I think of this child at least a hundred times a day (since the day it happened) & we walk around like nothing happened yet it’s always hanging over our heads. Satan truly does come to kill, steal & destroy. The day before she told me she was pregnant I would have told you that I don’t believe in abortion. I still don’t. Yet I was a party to it. I can’t explain it but it can destroy a family even years later. To anyone reading this & contemplating abortion, DON’T DO IT. Find a way to work it out. You won’t regret it.
There is also something sad about how many pastors have largely relegated the abortion “issue” to be preached about on this day alone. For… it seems strange that abortion could be left alone the reast of the year. Regardless of what text is being exegeted, we must come to realize that abortion is a blatant attack on the image of God and a violent and hateful act against our neighbor.
Abortion isn’t wrong because it is a violation of the “right to life.” It is wrong because it is a violation of the law and grace of God. And its prevelance in our culture ought to cause us to consider whether the churches in our land have lost their saltiness and ceased to shine their light.
Every abortion that occurs is a direct defilement of the two commandments which we have been given to keep and to teach throughout the world. As Francis Schaeffer remarked a long time ago, the abortion clinics in our culture should have signs outside of them saing open by permission of the churches in this city. American Churches are drowning in the bloodguilt of their own apathy and inaction. We have made a day of penance for our sin of ommission. And we call it Sanctity of Life Sunday so that we can trick ourselves into believeing that we are doing everything we can.
But we should read the first chapter of Isaish and the fifth chapter of Amos and weep and mourn the state of our nation and admit our guilt as the light bearers within it.
-Russell Hunter
A//A
(This isn’t to say that nobody is doing anything… this is to say that we live in a time of mega churches, huge conferences, popular orthodox and conservative theology, spiritual best sellers, and child-sacrifice is being practiced in our midst while we rush to do so many other important religious things like the pharisee and levite in Luke 10)