parish, Park Church, in Grand Rapids, Michigan (1968–1971), talk about abortion galvanized a number of my colleagues. The Roe v Wade Supreme Court decision lay a few years off. The Senior Minister, Rev. McKenney, placed abortion advocacy petitions to Congress at the church door, appealing for signatures. My clergy peers were helping women find physicians who would perform abortions. I had no use for this activity.
When we came to Pullman, Washington, in 1971, I soon helped found a Pregnancy Counseling Center in Moscow, Idaho, the adjacent city. There I worked with Catholics and Protestants of similar views to enable girls and women to find a supportive atmosphere in which to find alternatives to abortion.
On December 10, 1972, I brought this issue to the pulpit in an oblique way under the title, “Mary Had a Baby.” I wrote a dramatic dialogue for Mary and Joseph as they considered together the “problem pregnancy.”
Taking extensive poetic license from the evangelists, Matthew and Luke, I presented the couple as caught in a struggle about what course to take.
The dialogue which Brenda Robinson, as Mary, and I, as Joseph, held that morning before the congregation took place as follows:
Once coming to terms with Mary’s pregnancy, they spoke of the threatening political circumstance around them—their poverty–laden situation and their forlorn hopes for Messiah. Mary exclaimed, “These circumstances grip me like a vise.” Joseph even tells Mary he knows of a man who can end the pregnancy.
There is a pause, as if time has passed. Then the couple begin to speak to each other of the arrival of resources beyond themselves, “life affirmers” from the ancient text and saints around them. Mary tells Joseph she has “pondered things in her heart.” Then she exclaims, “Dare I say it, Joseph. I feel as a co–creator of the world. Without me part of the future dies . . . Joseph, I feel that God is with me . . . I will have this baby!”
The dialogue builds in affirmation. Joseph exclaims, “Mary, we have traveled thousands of miles in this room. We can travel the rest of the way to new birth.” And Mary replies, “Joseph, I feel the ecstasy of hope . . . I am literally inhabited by hope! My soul magnifies the Lord . . . ”
So as Mary utters the words of the Magnificat, Joseph concludes it, words they both know from the tradition when Hannah bore Samuel, her first–born son.
In his excellent volume, Psychology as Religion: The Cult of Self Worship, Paul C. Vitz criticizes “selfism” psychologies that have attacked the family structure. He then offers a word of advice which I approve:
May we not see that a psychologist advising abortion is acting in hostility against the deep structure of beliefs and meaning celebrated in the Christmas story? Recall that the young Mary was pregnant under circumstances that today routinely terminate in abortion. In the important theological context of Christmas, the killing of an unborn child is a symbolic killing of the Christ Child.8
Mr. Vitz sees the development of counseling approaches under the rubric, “family therapy,” as a hopeful sign.
For a long time now I have noted that promoters of liberal thought in religion and politics speak out on behalf of the most vulnerable in society. They even say a society should be judged on how it treats its weakest members. How can they leave the fetus out of this equation? An anomaly!
Of course, I know the reply: “Well, the unborn is not yet a person.” Really? How is it we allow nine allegedly wise persons to decide the arrival of personhood in the womb? What is there in our holy history that gives women, or men for that matter, “the right to choose”? We’ve come a long way, baby. A long way away from reverence for life.
Funding Our Lives by Chance
During my last year of ministry in Pullman, Washington, and my first year in Tacoma, Washington (1981–1983), I filled the role of President of the Washington Association of Churches (WAC). I served as Vice President previously (1979–1980). This body, the successor to the Washington Council of Churches, brought Catholics and Protestants together around many themes. Rev. Loren Arnett served for many years as its effective Executive Minister.
The ministries of the WAC were as long as your arm. It attended to refugees, food needs, employment, etc. Annually a legislative conference alerted churches to relevant issues on tap in the state legislature. The WAC supervised the Washington Wheat Campaign in which agriculture in the state contributed donated wheat to be shipped from Portland or Seattle to needy sites abroad. For example, in January 1984, 3,936 bags (200,000 lb.) of wheat traveled through Peru to Bolivia to be distributed by the indigenous churches to the most in need.
As I say, the vast amount of ministry would require many pages to disclose. Perhaps a report from Loren Arnett, in July of 1987, will serve to speak of the quantity and quality of the WAC’s ministry:
• 250 refugees were resettled with the help of fifty–eight congregations.
• 360 refugees were placed in jobs.
• 281 Salvadorans and Guatemalans were provided emergency housing.
• $1.3 million worth of food passed through the Food Buying Service warehouse to food banks.
• 150 persons attended the Legislative Conference.
• Over 2,000 individuals and congregations received the legislative newsletter ALERT every week during the legislative session.
Stepping down from the Chair in 1983, I was appointed convener of a WAC ad hoc committee to study and report on private gambling and the proposed lottery in Washington State. At that time few states in the Union possessed state lotteries. The WAC advocated in the state legislature to keep a state–run lottery out of the picture. To no avail.
Not many in the churches knew of the millions of dollars in favor of the lotteries flowing into states from the gambling enterprises. Regularly newly designed games to entice the consumer came on board. Meanwhile, more and more church members found their way to Las Vegas or Reno to fritter away their God–given assets.
I well remember standing on a street corner with Rev. Paul Pruitt, a United Church of Christ minister and a member of the state legislature. Earnestly he said to me, “I’ve not had one letter or phone call from any of the churches urging me to oppose the onset of the lottery in the state.”
I think I have never heard a homily devoted to Christian stewardship in relation to gambling. I do have a record from the 1978 General Synod when Rev. Avery Post, President, UCC, said, “I do not want to bring people into our covenant on low demands, but as members we accept the stewardship of time and money . . . ”
In the spring of 1975, in a series of pulpit words on social issues, I broached the subject of gambling. I said:
Let’s suppose two primitives meet for a first time in a clearing, with a bundle of fur skins over one’s shoulder and the other with a basket full of grain on his head. Simultaneously, they think, “Exchange!” How might that exchange occur? One could by brute force or trickery rob the other. Or they might negotiate some sort of barter system. They might then make some sort of exchange based on a common, valuable currency. Who knows, they might even exchange gifts.
There is one more exchange possibility. I quote from the 1975 pulpit word:
They could spot a piece of wood and throw it in a stream. If it comes down on the side with the bark showing, the pelts guy surrenders them all to the grain guy. If the non–bark side is up, then the pelts guy gets all the grain. It’s an exchange. We call it gambling.
Gambling is a wild ride on the fatalistic back of chance. Exciting. Addictive. Also, antisocial and without any basis in reason.
One more element of concern enters. It’s illustrated by my mother’s refusal in my childhood to let me play marbles “for keepsies.” She understood that such behavior loses the element of conscience. In the gambling act, there is a desire to win all, even if that leaves the other destitute.
In my homily, I weighed the pros and cons. Is not all of life,