January 19, 2025, Sanctity of Human Life Sunday
“The Light of Life”
Psalm 139:1-16; Jeremiah 1:4-11; James 1:16-18; Matthew 2:13-18
Divine Service IV with Holy Communion
Hymns: #396 “Arise and Shine in Splendor”; #399 “The Star Proclaims the King Is Here”
#409 “Hail, O Source of Every Blessing”; #411 “I Want to Walk as a Child of the Light”
Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,
Grace, mercy, and peace to you, from God our Father and from our Lord and Savior Jesus. Amen.
Opinions vary in this world we live in, as to the value of a human life. Some are of the opinion that life happens by accident, ends quickly, and in the end has little meaning. People who think that way all too easily devalue their own lives and throw them away; or worse still, deprive others of their lives without a shred of conscience.
If life is seen as only a throwaway, the results can be monstrous. You end up with Hitler and his final solution, and the death of millions of Jews. You end up with Chairman Mao killing millions with his “Great Leap Forward,” or Joseph Stalin starving millions to death in the name of re-ordering society. You end up with Col. John Chivington looking down at a camp full of women and children at Wounded Knee, and saying, “Nits grow into lice.” You end up with the mindset of King Herod, who was willing to murder as many innocent babies as it took to get to just One. “Collateral damage,” such people like to call it. “You have to break a few eggs to make an omelet,” the old saying goes. It’s how people justify abortion by calling it a “right to choose.” It’s how they justify euthanasia for the infirm and elderly by calling it mercy.
But the truth is, if any one human life isn’t precious, then none of them are. Trying to determine who’s “worthy of life” is a slippery slope. Whose life is worthwhile? Who gets to decide? What’s the criteria for determining if a person is a person, and worthy to live? Is it stage of development? Fetal heartbeat? Disability? Birth defects? Ethnicity? Gender? Economic status? What makes a human being a human being? Are we really just accidents? Can we classify people as untermenschen, less than people, as Hitler labeled the Jews? Can people be disregarded, forgotten, ignored, or swept aside if they’re in the way of what people call progress? Don’t ever vote for anyone who doesn’t see life as divine. If they’d murder an innocent baby without a shred of conscience, they’d happily murder you and your loved ones, too, if it came down to it, and claim it’s all for progress and for the greater good (however they choose to define what the greater good is).
I’d like to be able to tell you there’s an in between in this thing, that’s there’s room for compromise, that the definition of life can be somehow negotiated or legislated; but again, that’s a slippery slope. When does a fetus become a human being? At one month, or two months, or at the presence of a heartbeat? Can a human life be declared unproductive or unviable when a person reaches 80 or 90 years old? Can a person be terminated if they have a mental or physical defect that makes them unable to contribute to society? Can we deny life to some of us for the good of the rest of us? Those questions are already being asked in college classrooms and government thinktanks and corporate boardrooms and such, and the answers some of the “experts” have been coming up with aren’t good.
The Christian Church believes, and our Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod continues to confess and believe and teach, that every human life is holy and divine, and that our lives all begin with a divine spark from the hand of a holy God. At the creation of the very first human life, “The Lord God breathed into Adam the breath of life, and the man became a living being.” When God formed Adam from the dust of the ground, he was still a lifeless blob of tissue. What gave him life was the breath or the Spirit of God. God joined His Spirit to that body of flesh, and that’s what made Adam truly human. When we obey God’s commandment to “go forth and multiply,” the act of procreation is sacred and holy and divine, and any child conceived is also holy and divine. (I saw a wonderful video on a science program that showed that at the moment of human conception, there is a bright blue spark that can be seen under a microscope).
God says to prophet Jeremiah, "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart.” The word for “formed” in Hebrew, yatsar, means to “fashion or create or shape something with intention or purpose.” Jeremiah was no accident, and neither are you and me. God created and formed us with intent and purpose and individuality. It’s God as the Potter, and us as the clay. He knows, and has always known, who you are. And when God tells Jeremiah he’s been set apart, the Hebrew word there is qadash, which means to be consecrated or made holy for a particular purpose or use - all before you were ever conceived or born!
James, in our Epistle reading, says, “Don’t be deceived, my dear brothers.” Don’t be misled, don’t let yourselves be led astray, my dear ones, my beloved ones, my children. Don’t let the devil convince you that you’re worth less than you are. Don’t believe what the world and its experts and scientists and political pundits try to tell you about your origins and how you came to be. You’re not a nothing, or a collection of random cells, brought about by some mysterious accident that happened ten billion years ago in a pool of primordial slime. Don’t believe the lie.
“Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights, who does not change like shifting shadows,” James says. Every good and perfect gift, every preborn child, every infant, every growing child, every single human being, is a precious gift from above, a gift from heaven by the grace of God. “Coming down from the Father of Light,” James says, from the Creator of life, from the giver of Light, from the One who “gives Light to every man.” “In Him was life, and that life was the Light of men.” Life – all life – is a gift from the God of love and light who does not change or change His mind. The same God who gave life to Adam, now breathes life, that divine and holy spark, into all of us.
“He chose to give us birth through the word of truth, that we might be a kind of firstfruits of all he created,” James says. “He chose” is an absolutely critical part of the whole picture. Again, we are no accidents. God chose, willed, desired, intended to create us. That applies to humanity as a whole, and to all of us as His unique and individual children. You’re loved as only a father can love a child. And our own conception, our own birth, came by “the Word of Truth.” It was by the Word of God that we were called into being. The Lord God said, “Let there be”, and there we were. In the beginning was the Word – the second person of the Trinity, Jesus the Christ – and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. By Him all things were created, and without Him, nothing was made that has been made. In Him we live and move and have our being. You’re pretty special! Don’t let anyone tell you different.
“For what reason?” is a question worth asking. Why would God bless sinners like us with the gift of life? Why would He create human beings, knowing what a mess our sin would make of things, and how poorly we would come to value this gift we’ve been given? The answer James gives is “that we might be a kind of firstfruits of all He created.” Our purpose here on earth isn’t just to reproduce ourselves and pass on life. Anyone can do that, and the whole world continues to do it. The commandment not to commit adultery is the commandment most frequently broken, and also the source of so much human grief and sorrow when it’s disobeyed. Abortion, adultery, sexual sin, divorce and broken homes. Our purpose with these lives of ours is not only to reproduce ourselves, but to pass on the Light to the little ones we produce. It’s to teach our children the truth, to bring them to faith, to bring them to Baptism, so they can also know where they came from, and to whom they belong. So they can also understand what life is, and why it’s important for them to put such a high value not only on their own lives, but on the lives of everyone around them. What kind of child are you going to be? A child of light, or a child of darkness? Life or death, light or darkness, God’s way or the world’s; there is no in between.
Ah, and here’s where we come to the practical, life-application part of this talk. In Matthew’s Gospel, God has sent the Light of Heaven into the world. Jesus, the Son of God, has been born in a cattle shed, full of light and love and grace, come to shine the light of hope into a broken world. The wise men accepted His coming with joy, and followed God’s light to come and worship Him. But King Herod, wicked man that he was, set out to kill Him, for the sake of his own power and place and position, and for the sake of preserving himself and his place in the world. And to do that, the king had no problem with collateral damage. What’s a few Hebrew babies when my kingdom may be at stake? To kill Jesus, he’d have killed a thousand babies, or ten thousand. (The actual number may have been less than 50; Bethlehem was a small town). But what does it matter how many? Herod cast a wide net; he went back two years, and he included the entire area surrounding Bethlehem, just to make sure. That’s pure and selfish evil.
The God of life was there to intervene, all thanks to Him forever. The wise men were warned not to go back to Herod, and went back home by another route. Joseph was warned by an angel in a dream about what Herod was about to do, and escaped with his family to Egypt. The Christ was born to save our lives, and nothing was going to stop that from coming to be. But what about the babies? What about all the little boys that Herod killed? What did God do to help them? Why didn’t He stop Herod from doing such an awful thing? Why were all the Rachel’s in Bethlehem left weeping for their children?
I don’t know – any more than I know why God still allows the murder of preborn children to go on, or why He still allows people to die by murder and violence, or why He allows wars and genocides to go on and on in this world. What I do know, though, is that God’s intent and plan and purpose is for all of us to live - to have what Jesus calls “life, and life to the full.” From the beginning, since Adam and Eve fell into sin and brought death into the world, God’s plan has been to give us life again. Just as Jesus was born into a world with Herod’s in it, we also live in a world that acts and thinks like Herod did. Jesus came and preached life and love and peace. He came to be the Light of hope and grace and mercy. And for that they nailed Him to a cross. If we tell God’s truth and stand up and speak up for life, we can expect nothing different from the world.
You and I live in a world in the dark, a world where life sometimes seems to have so little value, and where death is seen as a common, natural, and ordinary thing. (Although that isn’t true; death wasn’t part of God’s good creation, but an unhappy result of sin.) Yet we who know and believe God’s truth also live in the light of Christ’s Resurrection. “I no longer live, but Christ lives in me,” St. Paul said. We’re children of the Light, children of life, “stars that shine in the universe as we hold out the Word of Life to the world.”
Ah, practical, I said… We who know Christ, and who are well and whole and able to preserve our own lives and look after ourselves on this day, have a divine obligation to defend the lives of those who are smaller and weaker than we are, and to stand up for those whose precious lives may be in physical or spiritual danger. It’s up to us to look out for the little ones when no one else will. “What you did for the least of these, you did for Me,” Jesus says. May our acts of love and kindness and patience and mercy bring light and life to the world!
O Lord, help us to remember that we are loves, and help us to love like Jesus did. We pray in His name; Amen.