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TALK TO PASTORS’ BREAKFAST AT TACOMA DOME HOTEL
ONE WEEK PRIOR TO PASTORS’ PROTEST (CAC)
AT TACOMA GENERAL HOSPITAL
by
Robert Rayburn
September 26, 1986
It is not my task this morning to persuade you of the evil of abortion. Most if not all of you do not need to be persuaded of that. Believing the Bible to be for Word of God a you do, you know that every human being is fearfully and wonderfully made by the hand of the living God in the womb of his mother.
You know that the tiny baby thus formed is already a moral being, having been conceived in sin, as David says. Abortion is thus nothing less than a vicious sin against God and our very little and very defenseless neighbor. Furthermore, you have watched as the widespread practice of abortion on demand has further eroded what remained of our society’s sense of the sacredness and value of human life and how it has served to strengthen the determination of our countrymen to brook interference from no one, including little babies, as they pursue headlong their selfish and empty interests. You do not need to be convinced that both the Bible and the testimony of classical Xianity place a Christian in irrevocable opposition to abortion on demand or that in this sin and in this toleration of sin which now so deeply strains our beloved land it remains true that “the way of the transgressor is hard”.
My task this morning is rather to encourage you as a minister of the word of God and Church of Jesus Christ to take a high profile in the fight against abortion and to place yourself and your office behind such efforts as the Pastors’ Protest at Tacoma General Hospital.
- I know that sometimes even strongly pro-life pastors must be encouraged to take an activist role because it was so in my case.
- I grew up in a Christian home and a conservative, patriotic home. I grew up thinking that those who carried picket signs and marched in city streets were people who did not think or believe as I did. I still today have a deep-seated reticence to protest and march and picket.
- What is more, as a minister of the Word of God, I have come through the years to believe even more firmly that my calling in life is not the organizing of Christian activities or political action, but always and only the proclamation of the Word and the shepherding of the people over whom God has placed me as pastor.
Nevertheless, I speak to you this morning as one who is thoroughly convinced that I should be present next Saturday morning at the Pastors’ Protest and that it is largely my calling as a minister of Christ which makes my presence there so important and so necessary.
Let me briefly set before you the reasons which prevail to convince me that it is not enough for me to preach and counsel against abortion as a minister in my own pulpit, but that my calling demands a more public testimony against this evil and for the truth of God.
- First, I have an obligation as a minister of the Word of God to society as a whole.
The law of God, the Bible teaches us and our experience confirms, has been written upon the hearts of all men. It is the testimony of this divinely implanted law in the conscience which keeps the wickedness of men in bounds and prevents the virulence of human sin from overwhelming our world. But that conscience can be dulled and eventually virtually silenced by much sinning and by the absence of a public testimony to the law of God. This is what is happening in our society before our very eyes. Things which shocked unbelievers a few years ago, now hardly raise even a Christian’s eyebrow! But no society can sustain itself for long if it allows its best impulses to be silenced and demands the toleration of all of its most wicked urges. We have no love for our society if we stand by and permit the feeble light which burns within it to be extinguished.
Do you not see how this has happened in the case of abortion? Today, people will tell us that it is pointless to boycott a single hospital or to picket a single clinic, for, even should you be successful, people who wish to secure abortions will simply go elsewhere. “They are going to do it anyway, why bother,” is commonly heard as a justification for doing nothing.
But you see, they won’t do it anyway. Some will, of course. Some will commit murder even if there is a death penalty for homicide. But vast numbers of people will not do it if it is made to be once again against the law, or if the society rises up in outrage against the evil of it, or, even if, they can no longer have their abortion in the respectable confines of a public hospital with a real doctor performing the procedure, but instead are forced to go to an abortion clinic and to someone who makes his living putting to death little babies in their mother’s womb. The proof of this is that prior to Roe v. Wade, when abortion was illegal and generally condemned, only a tiny percentage of the present number of abortions were performed. People know down deep that it is wicked to kill their babies; they know it is evil to make money from killing babies.
There is light, feeble perhaps, but real light - the light of the truth of God and of his will, planted in the heart of every man and every woman in this nation. Surely as ministers of God, we have a responsibility to do all we can to make our society answer to that light and not to permit it to be snuffed out.
We are custodians of our society’s morality and order. We need very much to confirm the testimony to right which is within our fellow citizens, most of whom do not hear us when we preach in our churches. Those who privilege and office it is to speak for God and to represent His church should not hesitate publicly to demonstrate their deep-convictions regarding the evil of abortion and the great harm that it does to individuals and to the society as a whole.
Some will scorn us and some will hate us for it, and no doubt we will be misrepresented and misunderstood, but it falls to us and it is our privilege to stand in the great tradition of courageous Xian ministers who have spoken the truth to their societies, have placed their own fortunes cheerfully in their Master’s hands, have said with Chrysostom: “I fear nothing except sin!” and have counted it their greatest honor to bear their Master’s reproach.
- Secondly, as a minister, I have an obligation to the church.
I have an obligation to see to it that the church’s own testimony is pure and clear amidst the darkness and the death all around. I have an obligation to see to it that the church which our Redeemer purchased with His own blood and called out of the world to be a people for his very own, zealous for good works, is in fact the salt and the light which it ought to be, which Christ deserves for it to be, and which the lost world desperately needs it to be.
- I know that it will greatly strengthen the church in its own convictions to see her pastors standing up for them. I know that it will greatly nerve God’s people to see their leaders unashamed to proclaim the Word of God by word and by deed in the streets of the city and against the grain of current opinion.
- I know it will help immensely Xian young men and young women who are tempted to secure abortions for themselves to know that this matter is not merely a talking point with their pastors and elders but is a matter of profound conviction and what they obviously consider to be a test of loyalty to Jesus Christ.
As in any other army, Xian soldiers are usually as brave, as loyal, and as effective as their captains.
Many of you no doubt remember in your reading of church history of the historic collision between Ambrose, Bishop of Milan in the 4th century, and the Emperor Theodosius. Theodosius, enraged at the city of Thessalonica because of a riot which had happened there, had caused many thousands of innocent people to be put to death along with the guilty. Ambrose, defender of God’s truth and the church’s purity that every true minister must be, demanded repentance of the emperor and refused to give him the Lord’s Supper without it. “How will you”, he said, with all the authority of his divinely given office, there in the vestibule of the church, "How will you lift up in prayer the hands still dripping with the blood of the murdered? How will you receive with such hands the body and blood of the Lord? Get away and dare not heap crime upon crime.”
- The emperor actually submitted to ecclesiastical discipline, made public confession of his sin, and received forgiveness and access again to the table of the Lord, but only after he had issued a law that the sentence of death would never be executed until 30 days after it was pronounced.
- Years later the penitent emperor died in his bishop’s arms declaring that Ambrose was the first man who ever told him the truth.
What a pure, what a sturdy, what a light-bearing, what a beautifully and flourishing church we will have when its ministers are as brave and bold and uncompromising in standing for God’s Word and law as was Ambrose in his day.
- Then in the third place, as a minister of Christ’s church, I have an obligation to the lost.
Most of those who are securing abortions, or performing abortions, or approving of them or tolerating them do so because they live still in the darkness of sin; they do not know the will of God, have no adequate sense of their guilt before him or of their need for the salvation which may be found in Christ alone.
It is altogether imperative that we proclaim to them the sinfulness of sin and demonstrate for them the truth that God is a judge and that he condemns the sinful acts of men and that unless they repent, believe in Christ and follow Him, they will not be saved but rather be condemned for their sins.
It is precisely a lack of conviction that most endangers their souls. They do not think themselves bad enough to need a Savior or their actions bad enough to deserve God’s wrath. They must hear a funeral bell of eternal loss toll for them, they must come under the sound of divine judgment for their sin if ever they are to have a taste for Jesus Christ who came to save sinners. They must know God’s severity if they are to appreciate his goodness.
But will they if no Xian ministers, with the authority of their office and their knowledge of the Word of God, find them in the streets and in the market places to tell them that what they are doing is evil and is provoking the Almighty to wrath and is storing up for them judgment to be revealed in the great day? As ministers of the gospel we need to be confronting these multitudes with the message that abortion, among other sins, is punished in God’s universe with weeping and gnashing of teeth, and that this punishment can be escaped by no other means than true repentance toward God and faith in Jesus Christ. This proclamation of God’s judgment, this identification and exposure of sin is a chief part of the gospel preaching and of the love we owe to the lost. As the Lord said to Ezekiel: “When I say to the wicked, ‘O wicked man, you shall surely die’, and you do not speak to warn the wicked from his way, that wicked man shall die in his iniquity, but his blood I will require from your hands”.
But there is another way in which our public demonstration against abortion is a proclamation of the gospel and a reaching out for the salvation of the lost. Julian the Apostate, was emperor of Rome and nephew of Constantine who sought to return the empire to paganism when once it had become officially Christian. He wrote that the reason Xianity had made such inroads in the Roman world, the reason it had attracted so many followers, the reason for its tremendous success in expanding from a few in Judea to cover the whole empire, was three-fold: the purity of the Xians’ lives, their treatment of the dead, and their compassion toward the unfortunate.
It will be so again, brothers - that our influence will increase, our message will be taken with much more seriousness, we will have adorned our doctrine, when people see that we are willing to go to any lengths, to make any sacrifices, to offer ourselves, our reputation and our possessions for the well-being, the salvation, the life of our neighbor - especially our poor and helpless neighbors who have no one else to care for them or love them.
- Finally, as a minister of the church of God, I have an obligation to the name and the honor of Christ, my Master, my Redeemer and King.
It is the prerogatives and the name of our God and our Savior which are chiefly being dishonored by our society and its practice of abortion. Men and women in this way behave as though God did not exist, or, if he exists, as if he were not the holy, pure, and sovereign Creator and Lord which he reveals himself to be. They behave as though His Word were untrue, as though he were no judge, as if he were not worthy of their fear, and as if his love and his promise were not to be trusted but that they should rather rely upon themselves and their own devices, as if Christ Jesus had never visited the world, to save the world from the power of sin and death.
The Almighty certainly does not need our defense, but having come to know him and love him as we have and owing such an incalculable debt to Him as we do, we must rise up in defense of His honor when it is impugned before us. It is love for him and everlasting gratitude which compels us to take his side and publicly to defend his name and his Word.
Not long ago, I read William Manchester’s magisterial biography of Winston Churchill. In that book, he describes at painful length the very unhappy childhood of the great British leader, whose parents were too busy with their own interests and pleasures to pay attention to their little boy who craved their affection but rarely received it. Churchill was raised in largest part by his nanny, a Mrs. Everest, whom he called from his early days, “Woom”. It was Woom who loved him and cared for him and give him a sense of worth, while his parents played. Then the young Churchill was sent off to school, to Harrow. Well, let Manchester tell the story. “Public school boys then were ashamed of their nannies. They would no sooner have invited one to Harrow than an upper-class American boy today would bring his teddy bear to his boarding school. Winston not only asked Woom to come, he paraded his old nurse, immensely fat and all smiles, down High Street, and then unashamedly kissed her in full view of his schoolmates. One of them was Seely, who later became a cabinet colleague of Winston’s and won the DSO in France. Seely called that kiss “one of the bravest acts I have ever seen”.
He owed too much to his nanny, you see, to be ashamed of her; duty and gratitude and love required a most public demonstration of his loyalty to her.
You see, in the final analysis, to me it matters not if by protesting at Tacoma General we serve in some small way actually to awaken the conscience of our city and its hospital, or if we manage to impress upon her church her inescapable obligation to obey her Lord and Master and to serve him in the world, or if we, by God’s grace awaken some to the reality of their sin and the impending judgment of God that they might fly from their sin and guilt to Christ for salvation. May God be pleased to use the protest and our involvement in it in all of these ways.
But if not, it remains the fact that our city is in a most profound way, dishonoring the name and the character of our God and Savior - and the pastors’ protest is one opportunity for me and for you, in full view of everyone, to kiss our Redeemer in the High Street.
Daniel prophesied: “the people who know their God will display strength and take action”.
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