This is a pro-life article by your pastor. I wanted all of you to get my Life message, since I just had two of last eight weekend Masses for which to preach—and those homilies did only include a part of this full message. This “Biblically Speaking” message below is packed with Bible verses that magnify our God of Life, Who calls to us “choose life” in His Name, as His own children of light now. “You are children of the light and of the day, not of the night, nor darkness. Do not go asleep on your Faith but be vigilant and moved by God’s Spirit.”1st Th.5:5
We hear in our Sunday Scriptures some Life Affirming Messages, especially of God’s eyes being on those new to the world, in the womb. The Scriptures (30th Sunday C) say that God is paying attention to each life on the earth, and he dearly hears cries from the poor or lowly. Who else would be “lower” than the vulnerable child in the womb, hoping for life? In today’s world, the odds are not good they’ll be respected as a life to be born among us. Yet Sirach says today how cries from suffering ones on earth do get a priority from You, O God: “Their cries pierce the crowd to reach your God in Heaven.” Thank you, Lord, that you hear the children! Psalm 34 says: “The Lord hears the cry of the poor…. the lowly will be heard and be glad, the Lord listens to their plea, to those broken…He will save.” We need to hear that from You, O God, for many lowly children have been lost among us, or actually taken from us. They should be living among us in the USA, 65 million more people if we had not had them taken away in abortion or abortive measures. The epistle, as a celebration of a full and long life, is about St. Paul being glad to reach his point in life, as to say:”I have lived the full life to the end, like a drink being consumed to its finish, or like a long race nearing its cross of the finish line.” Bless you, Lord, for long lives! The Gospel lesson, then, is about how our attitude in life as about other’s lives makes a big difference: The Lord Jesus tells a parable of a haughty man in the front seat of the Temple who looked down on the humble man in the back, who had their head bowed down, saying: “Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner.” God likes the humble life-attitude better than of the proud one in his parable story. To those who have arrogantly disdained the child in the womb, and had their lives ended, God speaks that they are disdained by Him, and that the unconsidered, disrespected ones “in the back” will be exalted up. Thanks for that Word, Lord.
BIBLICALLY SPEAKING ABOUT OUR LIFE IN THE GOD OF LIFE.
IT’S A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH. This message of mine has to deal with life as at the outset for humanity. The message will address the wrong choice of abortion. There are choices being made today to abort babies in the womb—that’s death. This message, though, is all about life! It’s a matter of life and death.
I know that there are some cultural, economical, political, and other societal reasons put forth for the choice of abortion or abortive means to end a life in the womb—this message won’t deal with them here. I just want to instead bombard you with the Word of God on the matter, which ought to be one’s starting point of choice about life and death decisions. We have a God of Life over us. We must acknowledge that as our outset of any decisions we make in this world.
If you follow The Lord of Life, then you are not to be for such death—like we note going on in the tens of millions chosen for death to come to a womb. Choose life.
It’s hard enough, in the broken-down condition of humanity, with childbirth still have so many difficulties with it, with some babies in miscarriages and such—in areas past our control—to add on a rampage of so many countless more babies who don’t make it into our world, just due to our free choice not to welcome them.
One of my most pained experiences with a couple this past year was to counsel them through the experience of an emergency baby situation, of one who did not make it. They lovingly mourned the babe’s loss in an infant burial we did. So, I include that story to show that my position for life is not a callous one to the challenges of couples going on in the world today…
I want to go through Scripture with you about our respect life point of view, and I want to ask you to take on a very personal point of view in this Scripture walk. Put yourself in the place of that threatened child for abortion who will be wiped out. You have to see things that way. You wouldn’t be accepting any excuses for abortion if it were you on the line of decision. But, actually, I want you to see that it is you. We are not really pretending anything here. Doesn’t the most elementary Bible verse say: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you?” The Golden Rule of the Hebrew Testament has been told by Jesus as still applicable to life. He said so in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew or Luke’s version). So then, why can’t all so-called believers in The Lord get this “due unto others” easy point?
What would you not want to have done unto you? Here’s an answer: You wouldn’t want to have your life taken away from you—right?! Certainly not at the start—your birth–right?! Then, do not violently take not the lives of others away, even their human rights in the mother’s womb. Don’t. Don’t advocate others doing it either! Not by action, not by vote, not by silent indifference! This world exists under the God of Life. You know Him, don’t you? Why would you so offend Him, then? Here’s a stark fact: No one who has ever consented or supported an abortion has in fact themselves been aborted. They were granted what never was dared to be done to them. (Killing.) Rather, they received life. But they’ll have it done to others, even approve of its action. How ungodly! How do you live with that?
Insert excuse for abortion here—if you support it. The come back from the Word: Why won’t you live the Golden Rule? You are the one on the line of decision; choose what you’d have done unto you!
‘Abortion, anyone? Would you have preferred that you were in the number of the millions chosen for extraction in these past decades? Make it personal: You’d be gone –because of a physical and/or a chemical abortion—gone! And not even noted as someone worthy noting that was here, as the abortion process does. Imagine the man in today’s Luke 18 parable, proudly sitting up in front, who wants nothing to do with you, there back with “the lowly” and “undesirables?” What does Jesus teach in the parable?
Pro-lifers acknowledge the lowly, suffering children. I think we live positively to the Luke 18 message. Even more, we take co-responsibility for the children’s abortions, and we pray like the humble man in the parable: ‘Lord, have mercy on us, this poor, sinning generation of child-eliminators. We plead guilty. Lord, if so many tens of thousands of children have come upon us, due to consequences of normally irresponsible sexual activity in our peoples, and we wonder, then, why hasn’t our government and churches provided an unpresented huge number of caring outreaches to them—instead of accepting mostly a cruel elimination solution as ‘best’?!? Why didn’t I do more? Lord, have mercy on me. I am taking it to confession, Lord.
Let’s review how the Bible celebrates our God of Life. Let’s see how death is an affront to God. Take what God’s Word says to us: “I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. Choose life, says The Lord.” Deut. 30:19.
Choose Life, says The Lord. Here’s the whole verse: “I call heaven and earth today to witness this day: I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. Choose life, then, that you and your descendants may live.”
God lays out His Holy Law to Moses, for applying to his people, and Jesus The Word reaffirms it. It’s really of what the Sermon on the Mount and Christ’ teaching has told us. God the Word is incarnate now, so God is with us, and the One Who is Emmanuel even became a child.
You are a Bible believer. Then follow the Word. Choose life, not death. Romans 3:23 says “sin and its wages is death.” St. Paul tells the Church there (and now) that “once you were servants of sin, with things to be ashamed of, but now you have become servants of God, to live in the fruits of holiness. Don’t you know that the wages of sin is death?” (vs. 20-23). He then writes the godly alternative in Romans 3:23b: “Take the Gift of God of life and Christ Jesus!”
Abortion is a deadly sin. The Catholic Church defines abortion as a grave offense and a mortal sin. For almost two hundred years now, with the discovery of the human ovum, a mistaken passed-along biology of Aristotle (of not always claiming life as beginning at conception) was discredited. Scientists understood that the union of sperm and egg at conception produces a new living being that is distinct from both mother and father. Modern genetics keeps this conclusion ever clear.
Inherit human rights, a pillar principle in America’s founding for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, ought to be applied in dignity to human persons at birth.
Here’s a continuing fact: Humankind is in the bad way of choosing sin and death—and yet Jesus taught that there is a Way to Life, but it is become the Narrow Way. Jesus IS the Choice. He is the Narrow Way. Read Matthew 7:13 and John 10:9, as Jesus uses these as titles of Himself. Meaning, the narrow way is the less traversed or worn path, or the less-chosen one. Yet God’s way is the straight path. Jesus is the Way and the Straight Path to the Father. In Life Matters—it’s a narrow way!
Yet Life and its adherence to Divine Law, as all in the love of God–this is not popular in the world, so a broad way is the other choice to succumb to sin and death. But Bible readers know that the God of Life speaks to us: God says: “I AM the God of the living…the God of Abraham to Isaac to Jacob…so love the Lord your God, obey My Voice and hold fast to Me.” That’s Dueteronomy 30:20. It is Basic Believing 101. God is in the bringing of life to us from age to age.
Abortion holds no part to this plan—it brings death. We serve the God of Life. Choose life.
The below in the box section is only included for this printed message.
A true look at abortion. The abortionist puts the clamps on the fetus and pulls it forth from the womb of life… or puts the poison chemical into the womb of life to end the child’s existence in silent screams… that’s still the way of a half-million abortions are done… or now the abortion ads say: Just take the pill for “a safe and effective way to end a pregnancy.” Oh really?! So, then: Here’s an important question of response: Is it safe for the conceived child in this process?! I think not!! Imagine you’re the child. Abortion by the pill—or actually, pills—is done this way, so I am told: The first pill that is taken is mifepristone, RU-486, and it is this which blocks progesterone—the hormone that is necessary for supporting a pregnancy, and without it the development of the embryo stops and the lining of your uterus thins, which prevents the embryo from remaining implanted. (Yes, if you will personalize this, please… the embryo child in there is you who is prevented from further implanting. You are prevented from further welcome in the womb. You are sent out to die.) The second medication, misoprostol, is taken 24 to 48 after taking mifepristone. Misoprostol causes the muscles in mom’s uterus to contract the same way they do during a female period, a miscarriage, or childbirth. These contractions cause the uterus to expel the pregnancy—that is, the life of the child that was in there. Make that expelled one you.
+ *Miff-Uh-PRISS-Tone // *MY-so-PROS-tol (Here, in this step, you are expelled. Medically speaking, but also literally, totally.) Light to heavy bleeding, and cramping, fatigue, pain and nausea, fever and chills will happen to the mother in the process next—so the abortion procedure explains, but they always leave out the other person involved in this abortion. What happens to them?! (To the baby after expulsion, which I remind you in this story is you, life on earth is ended for you. No funeral, no burial, of course. No name, no identity, no trace of you. At least, according to the world, that’s all there is for you. Nada. The world cares not an iota about it, too! You are a blob of flesh that’s gone.
*Actually, when it’s a miscarriage of a tiny life, of a baby life that can’t make it, often the parents are calling it their child, with a personal mourning of them. Even they’ll name the child. I’ve attended to parents with child-losses in these situations. This past year I stood beside the tiny grave of a lost child, by the parents and a grandparent of a baby who helplessly died. There was great love and loss felt on that day, and tears from Heaven, for as Sunday’s Psalm 34 speaks: The Lord hears the cry of the poor…of the brokenhearted too. The Sirach 35 reading of this 30th Sunday Mass declares how “the prayer of the lowly pierces the clouds up to the Most High.” I can’t think of anyone more lowly than the soul of a child who won’t see any days of earth with us.” Godspeed to the child. So the Church know these situations, too.
But the aborted are given discarded distance and indifference from our godless society to you, the aborted child, only God knows and sees and cares for you, and joined by pro-life prayer warriors and penitent believers mourning these deaths.
What, rather, does Our Lord give to the ones who falls as victims in these deaths? Jesus says: “I AM the Door or Gate.” He gives love not indifference!!
We can rejoice that Our Lord is the Choice and Way into the Everlasting, and He knows us and can call any of His chosen elect into eternal life. He is the Door to the Everlasting. Death just becomes a door to freedom for our ‘victims’ to death.
Proverbs 12:28 says: “The way of righteousness is life.” We can know that not only the little ones get into Heaven by Jesus, by those who cared about the little ones will do so, too, because of “way of righteousness” living. In John 14:6, Jesus taught: “I Am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.” When you choose The I AM, in Jesus, you choose life. When you choose life, you choose The I Am, who is Jesus. Maybe this Life Fact is just too simple to be believed?!
Psalm 139 is a beautiful Psalm of the God of Life. I especially enjoy hearing it put to the First Person perspective: “For I created your inmost being; I knit you together in your mother’s womb. You are fearfully and wonderfully made, and all My works are wonderful. Know it fully well: Your frame was not hidden from Me, in the secret place where you were woven together. My eyes saw you unformed.”
Isn’t that a beautiful Word of Life from our God? It’s Psalm 139, verses 13-16. But how could it ever square with most of the abortive acts taken place in our modern society? In the end of the Psalm, I like to take the perspective of a child praying back to the God of Life Who spoke it to them. The child victim got aborted, but pray. “Search it, O God. Search me and know me and my situation, and my heart made for you. See if there is anything offensive or abhorrent of me (as the world saw) and please lead me in the way everlasting.” That’s the final line of Psalm 139. I almost feel like adding a modern extra line: In My Mercy, child, I will help you forgive the ones who did it to you. I will send my Spirit to them to inspire an act of repentance and a way of reparation; that you can be reconciled.’
If you have ever come to one of my December 27th Christmas Octave weekday Masses through the years, then you’d know that its Feast of the Holy Innocents is a moving day for me as I pray for the aborted of our modern age, and join them to the Bethlehem Massacre Martyrs of Jesus’ infancy, when Herod’s rampage came to the shepherd town. It’s an unusual day of the Christmas Octave, and needed!
Life Choosing is named in Scripture as the Narrow Way; so, then, what is the broad way? In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus taught: “Enter through the Narrow Gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the way that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the way that leads to life and only a few find it.” Mt. 7:13-14. Destruction of the worst kind is a killing of people. It’s going down Broad Way for sure, right now. Pro-Lifers, which are supposed to be all Catholics (speaking spiritually here), mourn what is going on in society. Fewer and fewer people want to cherish protect and defend human life. What is going on that is this maddening? The young generations are almost deaf and blind to it, it is such the lie going on. The way of destruction of life keeps pounding along in popularity, as in abortive methods to stop children’s delivery into our world. Now it’s going the way of the abortive pill.
Yet it is also true that many wise young people today can see through the lies done and the acts that took so many of the fellow people away from the start of life. These survivors of the death culture want to see a turn to the life culture, and why shouldn’t they? Our God is a God of Life.
The local stories that the Columbia Pregnancy Director just told our Parish Council last month were sobering and sad. Even not so many grown adult and so-called Christians are in opposition to abortion or abortive means being used, not any longer, as they’ve been swept away to the Devil’s lies. Thus, the wise young adults and teens hear a new updated understanding of verse John 10:10a when Jesus said: “The thief comes only to steal, kill and destroy.” It seems they now see how the evil one has slipped through a window like the Louvre thieves last week—all too easily.” This thief of John 10:10a is not interested in jewels, though, he is after humanity. He hates it. ‘Wants to kill it. His work is seen with all the abortion clinics and abortion pills being used to end pregnancies of green-lighted, sexually active youth, young adults and some adults. It’s a crying shame.
Yet to the Hope of Hopes for us, John 10:10b has Jesus saying: “I have come that they might have life, and have it abundantly.” God is a God of Life.
Jesus said on the Cross: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” I have been on the receiving end of hearing confessions of people who’ve had abortions and have seen the light, saying: I did not know what I was doing by that. I was breaking even the fundamental 5th commandment most grievously, but pretending I was not.
The God of Mercy IS ready to pardon and absolve His repentant sinners. For all the Church members who are in grief for this serious sin upon our land, we pray the Confetior a little more deeply and personally: “We have greatly sinned. Through our fault, through our fault, through our most grievous fault? (Abortion.—the US bishops call it that—most grievous.) There are good numbers of people praying in reparation to God within our adoration times of the Blessed Sacrament in this parish and others—but surely not enough to show a deep mourning prayer for what’s going on in abortion America. It takes faith to do that.
Leave beside all the excuses and political side dives and finger pointing and blame. That’s all of the devil’s side: He is a liar. Deceiver. Accuser of the brethren. He is of anti-Christ methods. He is trying to encourage replacements to the Church and of Christ Crucified for a self-adoring, irresponsible, arrogant, and lost community.
So it’s up to prophets and priests and pro-life voices to call it out.
Jesus is the Child of Bethlehem come among us. The world under Herod tried to kill him off right away; the world under Pilate did kill him on the Cross in 33 a.d.
“Whatever you do to the least of Mine, that you do unto Me.” Says Jesus. He says He is in the child that gets aborted or ended, by the millions in today’s society. Check out the context of His words in Matthew 25.
Just to pour it on….with just one more proclamation of God’s Word of Life.
In Acts 3:13, we have a verse of a sermon by St. Peter, our first pope, who gave it to a fellow Jewish audience. “The God of Life: The God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of our fathers, has glorified his servant Jesus. You handed him over to be killed, and you disowned him before Pilate, though he had decided to let him go. You disowned the Holy and Righteous One and chose a murderer (Barabbas) to be released to you. You killed the author of life, but God raised him from the dead. We are witnesses of this.”
Peter in this account was able to convict a lot of hearts that day, In Acts 4:4 it indicates about five thousand men believed upon Peter’s and John’s message there. I would hope that the Word would have such impact today to the modern hearers. Peter and John suffered for giving that message. Acts 4:1-3, 5-12 says how the unbelieving priests and captain of the temple guard and the Sadducees became greatly disturbed at their message, and seized Peter and John, and put them in jail. The next day Annas and Caiphas, and others interrogated Peter and John and brought in the man the apostles healed in Jesus’ Name. Peter testified to them, ‘this man was healed in Jesus’ Name, for Jesus lives. God raised Jesus from the dead. Jesus is the stone you builders rejected, which is become the cornerstone of new life and salvation. Only in Jesus is one saved.” Peter did not back down, did he?
Yes, as the First Church preached, our God is a God of Life. Jesus is Risen. Jesus is Life. Jesus is Salvation. We must be saved in Him. Let’s keep the message going.
So, are we on the side of The Lord of Life? Of the One Who saves lives? Yes?!
Jesus said pointedly: A thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I have come that they may have life, and have it in abundance. What do you want? Life or death? Choose Life!
Reminder:
Last weekend in my four homilies I drew attention to the first reading of Exodus 17, of the attack of the Amalekites upon Moses and the Exodus Hebrew people who were returning to their Holy Land as once given by God to Abraham, and his descendants Isaac and Jacob. Some evil people stood in the way of that advance—these were the people of Amalek. Amalek and all his Middle-eastern followers had long pledged to kill off all the line of Jacob. Why? Because of hatred and envy of Jacob’s line, because Amalek was of Esau’s lineage, the twin of Jacob who bargained away his birthright in Genesis 25’s story. Esau is the one who choose flesh over spirit, and porridge over privilege of living responsibly in the holy line of Isaac. Esau’s people through history would be like him–worldly and viscous; and hateful of all of Jacob’s line. Esau seemed to pass on to the Amalekites his howling, distressed way of life (the laghib way, as described in Arabic). St. John Chrysostom wrote ancient homilies about these Amalek people, following Esau’s hunting and killing orientation, and weakness of the flesh, as to fall into godless activity and loss of spiritual values. Later in Jewish history, in the Haman stories in the Queen Esther account, they were still on the rampage of death to Jacob’s line. That kind of laghib people sounds familiar—I compare it to the abortion pushers. What drives a people to be of death and offense against the innocent or righteous? Moses found victory over the laghib by prayer.
In last Sunday’s lesson, from Moses in Exodus 17, it takes a lot of prayer in a spiritual warfare story, before the Exodus people can continue on from Rephidim to Jericho to enter back their land after a 430 year exile. The Amalek army lost and Joshua led the people forward. Perhaps the Abortion issue is in the way of our getting home to God, unless the Church takes it more seriously as an enemy of Life and of the God of life.