All the Least of These

I just finished reading Mike Beates’ helpful book Disability and the Gospel: How God Uses Our Brokenness to Display His Grace. The book is important and necessary, and is disarming in its direct honesty. It is a disturbing challenge to consider how the Christian church has successfully excluded the ‘different’ and the ‘imperfect’ from her community.

The book stimulated two tangential thoughts which I think call for some more long term thinking.

Once again I’m struck with how God has used the non-Christian to shame the church. If any should be the champions of the weak and powerless, it should be Christians who have a deep appreciation for the gospel of grace. And yet the most forceful, effective and prophetic voices in fighting for accessibility in the broader culture have come not from Christians, but from those outside the church. Our blind spots have been legion (see slavery, civil rights, poverty). When will we have eyes to see the causes worth championing and the courage to champion them?

One cause that we have championed has been a concern for the unborn. But labor in this field, while producing local and individual victories, has not produced much in the way of a fundamental shift in public concern. After 40 years, abortion is still legal and prevalent.

And so I wonder if there is a connection between our embrace of the ’cause’ of life for the unborn and our lack of embrace of the actually disabled all around us. Causes are always easy to embrace, but broken people are not. Letter writing, petition signing and sign carrying are all fairly easy and antiseptic. But actually engaging our lives with those whose brokenness makes us uncomfortable is all so much more difficult.

Perhaps what this exposes is hypocrisy in our camp. We OUGHT to care passionately about the unborn and the women who carry them. But the reality of our caring is tested and measured by our lack of concern for the born, but different. Perhaps God withholds his blessing until we learn to love in deed all the least of these.

Personal Authenticity on the Clinic Sidewalk

Earlier today we posted this quote from John Stott’s book Christian Mission in the Modern World.

If we do nothing but proclaim the gospel to people from a distance, our personal authenticity is bound to be suspect. Who are we? Those listening to us do not know. For we are playing a role (that of the preacher) and for all they know may be wearing a mask. Besides, we are so far away from them, they cannot even see us properly. But when we sit down alongside them like Philip in the Ethiopian’s chariot, or encounter them face to face, a personal relationship is established. Our defenses come down. (71)

The lack of such authenticity is why I’m generally critical of ‘guerilla’ techniques in evangelism (raiding the world from our safe strongholds) and of the various methods of street preaching. But to every principle there is an exception. There is a man in the church I pastor, let’s call him John (for the simple reason that that is his name) who, finding himself out of a job this time last year, believed God was calling him to preach at an Orlando abortion clinic six mornings each week. He has been doing that for a year, and has seen a number of people come to Christ and a number of women decide to keep their babies.

Most remarkable to me, though, is this. Recently, John was laid up with surgery and a heart condition and was unable to make his daily trip to the clinic. When he was finally able to return, two of the nurses who work at the clinic, whom he has urged to repent and seek other work, came to him and told him that they were worried when they did not see him. They were genuinely concerned that something had happened to him. His message is dismissed by them, but he has established a personal bond with them.

John is unique. You cannot talk to him without knowing that you are loved. Even though he has been preaching a strong message of sin and repentance for a year, these women, while opposed to what he does, have been captured by his faithful earnestness. He has with these women established the kind of personal authenticity that is normally not at all possible for one doing what he is doing.

And so we pray for these two nurses, not only that they would turn from the awful work they are doing, but that they would respond to John all the way, not only to his love, but to the love of the One whom he represents.

Let’s Be Honest

Few news organizations have as many people in as many places covering as much stuff as the New York Times or National Public Radio, and so I trust them as sources of good and relevant and accurate information. And yet try as they might to be objective, and they do try, that they cannot succeed should be obvious to anyone who knows anything about the strength and blindness of human bias.

Several articles in the NY Times lept out at me this past week or so as revealing this blindness. Two address the recent efforts of the majority Republican US Congress to reduce spending. One is an op-ed piece about those cuts whose headline is “The G.O.P.’s Abandoned Babies”. The other is an editorial headed “The War on Women”.

In both, the pro-life tilt of the Republican party is used as a foil against which to portray the party as having no compassion for children or women. They are, the author of one says, “pro-life before birth and indifferent afterward”. Their efforts to restrict federal funding of abortion services are nothing less than misogynistic.

This is, of course, no better than a conservative paper trumpeting the extension of abortion rights as “The War on Babies”. And it does not matter who is in power and who is making cuts, when budgets get cut, those cuts are made as carefully as possible to effect those with the fewest number of votes. As David Brooks pointed out, in the same publication, the problem does not lie with ideology or party, but with politicians unwilling to face their difficult task.

So, pardon me, Mr. NY Times, your biases are showing. I know these are opinion pieces. But the headlines you gave to them suggest the tilt.

Ironically, the Times this week as well ran a story about the New York City Council being incensed that crisis pregnancy centers in New York do not advertise themselves as ‘not providing medical or abortion services’, ‘tricking’ women into walking into their ‘trap’ and then feeding them loads of mis-information, contrary to honest service providers like Planned Parenthood.

Okay, I know that there are crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs) whose operational practice is less than stellar. But they are rare. If I might make an observation on those that I have had the privilege of being associated with, their whole goal is to give the information that Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers are denying women. The mis-information is not on the CPC side of the street, but in the halls of the abortionist who will not provide the woman an ultrasound to see the baby’s beating heart to make sure she wants to go through with a procedure that will stop that beating heart. The ‘war on women’, rests with those like Planned Parenthood who happily support efforts to get pregnancy centers to fill their advertising with disclaimers, but staunchly oppose bills to require that THEY THEMSELVES give accurate information to the women whose abortion fees fund them.

I’m all for civility. But I treasure honest clarity as well. Not seeing a whole bunch of it here.

And finally, in the Irony of Ironies Department, Life Division, NPR ran a story this week on Republican efforts in the House to alter EPA funding. One concern is that changes in the regulatory power of the EPA will reduce the agency’s ability to control mercury emissions, a pollutant particularly dangerous, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics, “for young children”. To raise awareness of this danger, the Environmental Defense Fund is running a television ad stressing this danger by using footage of an ultrasound of a fetus. The same ultrasound that Planned Parenthood refuses to show their patients, unconcerned, it would seem, about an abortion’s danger for “young children”.

The human heart is incapable of impartiality. Read. But read with discernment.