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LA Times, 12/01/08

Here’s an original holiday gift idea to help the person who may have everything, including a little something they don’t really want. A new way to mark the festive yearend celebration of life — a gift certificate for an abortion.

This year, for the first time, Planned Parenthood of Indiana is offering holiday gift certificates for that certain someone in your life who may want a breast exam, a pap smear or perhaps not want another life in their life.

Calling them an “unusual yet practical gift this holiday season,” the organization is selling gift certificates in $25 denominations, redeemable at any of the group’s 35 statewide locations for their services, including health screenings, birth control and abortion services.

A Planned Parenthood website page notes that a standard women’s health exam costs $58 while abortions in the first trimester can run from $350 to $900.

There’s even an online page to order the certificates if you know someone in Indiana who desires such services.

According to Ms. magazine, an official of the Hoosier Planned Parenthood group explained:

“People are making really tough decisions about putting gas in their car and food on their table, so we know that many women especially put healthcare at their bottom of their list to do.”

The official explained the group offers a range of services that can be purchased with the gift cards including pap smears, breast exams, birth control prescriptions and abortions. The organization performs about 5,000 abortions a year, according to one published figure, out of 92,000 patients treated.

Indiana’s health commissioner, Judy Monroe, ignores the mounting political denunciations and calls the idea “really a meaningful gift.”

It has taken a few days for antiabortion groups to move beyond disbelief and begin commenting on the Christmas holiday sales item. “It is difficult to think of a more tasteless, ghoulish thing to give anyone,” wrote one blogger.

Indiana’s Right to Life president, Mike Fichter, calls the Christmas gift certificates “a mockery” of a holiday designed to celebrate life by “peddling new ways to promote its destruction.”

“Christmas,” said Jim Sedlak of the American Life League, “perhaps more than any other time of the year, is dedicated to the miracle of life and divine love.” He said the gift cards “would be more accurately described as death certificates.”

Sister Diane Carollo of the Indianapolis Catholic Archdiocese said, “They deserve coal in their stocking, not money for lethal gift certificates.”

Officials of Planned Parenthood, which operates abortion clinics in Indianapolis, Merrillville and Bloomington, stress the health and pregnancy prevention part of their services.

But Fichter is unpersuaded. “The tragedy is that almost 6,000 fewer children will be celebrating a first Christmas this year,” he said, “because they were aborted in Planned Parenthood’s Indiana clinics.”

I confess that working one’s way through scripture, if you’re really going to unpack it, takes a lot of time.  When holidays and performances demand attention it gets really hard.  But I digress; on to the rest of Chapter 4.

Satan seems to think he has a chance of being successful in tempting Jesus a second time.  He dares Jesus to fling himself off the top of the temple, quoting scripture to make his case (Psalm 91:11-12) and when that doesn’t work, he makes his final offer by showing Jesus all the kingdoms of the world and saying, “All these things will I give You, if You fall down and worship me.”  The hubris Satan displays here is amazaing.  Does he really think Jesus is impressed with him?  Does he not get it that Jesus is actually God?  Could it be that because Jesus was tempted in every way as we are (yet without sin) that Satan made some really dumb assmuptions?  I’m curious why this exchange has been included in the bible and what we can learn from it.  I like the way Jesus responds in the end, “Begone, Satan!  For it is written, ‘you shall worship the Lord your God, and serve Him only’”. (vs.10).  I think that quoting scripture when we fall into temptation is an effective way to escape.   

Before Jesus preached the Sermon on the Mount (herinafter referred to as SOM) he had a few other things to say which are recorded in the Bible.  I know that Jesus said many things that are not recorded but if something is I think there is just cause to take those statements seriously and seek to understand why they were included.

In Matthew 4:4 Jesus responds to ‘the tempter’s’ rather sarcastic enticement of Him to show that He (Jesus) was God by inviting Him to turn stones into bread.  We are told that Jesus was hungry - 40 days and nights without food, yeah! - but I think that the greater temptation for Jesus might have been to do it just to make Satan shut-up.  Jesus gives in to neither temptation but instead says this, “Man shall not live by bread alone but by every ‘Word’ that proceeds out of the mouth of God.”  So I got to thinking about this verse more deeply than I have before and the word ‘Word’ grabbed my attention.  Up to this point Jesus has not revealed to any person that He IS God, so what ‘Word’ is He actually talking about?  Besides, why would Satan care anyway?   I keep thinking of the verse, I John 1:1, “In the beginning was the ‘Word’ and the ‘Word’ was with God and the ‘Word’ was God.”  So if Jesus was God and the ‘Word’ was God, then Jesus was the ‘Word’. 

But back to the “…Word that proceeds out of the mouth of God.”  This is a quote from Deuteronomy 8:3.  At this point the children of Israel (Jews) have just finished a 40 year stint wandering in the desert eating manna from heaven with a quail bird once a week for Sabbath and are on the edge of, and about to enter the ‘promised land’.  Fleshing out this statement Moses says, “And He humbled you and let you be hungry, and fed you with manna which you did not know…that He might make you understand that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by everything that proceeds out of the mouth of the Lord.”  Since the book of Deuteronomy is considered to be the “second law” (because they very successfully forgot the first one) it seems to me that Jesus is very much about the law from the standpoint that among His first recorded words on this earth are words from this book.  Since Jesus quotes repeatedly from the Old Testament I think that it is imperative to look at the context of His quotes in order to aid in the understanding of what He is about.  I think at this point that we could accept that the book of Deuteronomy, and indeed, the rest of the law fround in the OT are the ‘Word’ of God.  In fact Jesus says right in the beginning of the SOM, “Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish, but to fulfill.” (Matt. 5:17).  Though we live in the ‘age of grace’ having Jesus as our advocate with the Father, and no longer needing to bring a blood sacrifice for the cleansing of our sin, the law does not cease to exist or have application for us today.                                

This post says so much despite how short it is.

John the Baptist was the immediate forerunner of Jesus.  His message was this, “Repent of your sins”!  For this message he was beheaded.  Why?  Because he had the arrogance to publicly call Herod the tetrarch on his sexual sin.  Herod had married his brother’s wife, Herodious.  Here are some Biblical accounts of the event:

Luke 3:19 “But when Herod the tecrarch was reproved by him (John) on account of Herodias, his brother’s wife, and on account of all the wicked things which Herod had done, he added this also to them all, that he locked John up in prison.”

Mark 6:18 “For John had been saying to Herod, “It is not lawful for you to have your brother’s wife”.

Matthew 14:3-4 “For when Herod had John arrested, he bound him, and put him in prison on account of Herodias, the wife of this brother Philip.  For John had been saying to him, ‘It is not lawful for you to have her.’” 

We are going to see Jesus appear on the scene today but John has a little more to say.  Begining with verse ten and through twelve, he seems to turn his attention back to the crowd he has already baptized. ”And the axe is already laid at the root of the trees (are the trees the Pharisees and Saducees?); every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit (is good fruit repentance?) is cut down and thrown into the fire (is the fire hell?).  As for me, I baptize you with water for repentance (there’s that repent word again) but He who is coming after me is mightier than I, and I am not fit to remove His sandals (this is obviously Jesus and if John wasn’t good enough to do that, how could I be?):  He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.  And His winnowing fork is in His hand and He will thoroughly clear His threshing floor; and He will gather His wheat into the barn, but He will burn up the chaff with unquenchable fire.”   Maybe it’s just me,  but I see two clear descriptions of Jesus.  First, when one is baptised with the Holy Spirit and fire, the impression is that this person will be forever changed; like born-again.  Second, the analogy of the winnowing fork and the clearing of the threshing floor clearly indicate a seperating of those people who are His own from those who are not, and also an eternal fire that will consume those who are not (sounds like hell to me).  When I read this same account in Luke there is this added to it, (3:18) “So with many other exhortations also he preached the gospel to the people.” The word ‘exhortation’ translates as urgent appeals so at this point no “warm fuzzies” have been given.  But here is something I find particularly curious, the use of the term ‘gospel’.  Remember, Jesus has not yet revealed Himself, let alone died for our sins and rose again with victory over them, so what is this ‘gospel’?  Is it the promise of Him who is to come? 

Finally, in verse 13, Jesus arrives from Galilee, is baptized by John “Permit it at this time; for in this way it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.” I’m unsure why the word used is ‘righteousness’ instead of ‘prophecy’.  Actually, the very first recorded words of Jesus occur in Luke 2:49 when a twelve-year-old Jesus questioned his distraught parents saying, “Why is it that you were looking for Me?  Did you not know that I had to be in My Father’s house?” (I love the fact that his mother was treasuring this in her heart (vs. 51)- she hadn’t forgotten who her boy really was!)

We used to sing a little chorus in Sunday School that went like this:

“I don’t wanna be a Pharisee, I don’t wanna be a Pharisee, ’cause a Pharisee’s not ‘fair, you see’.  I don’t wanna be a Pharisee.

“I dont’ wanna be a Sadusee, I don’t wanna be a Sadusee, ’cause a Saducsee is ’sad, you see’.  I don’t wanna be a Sadusee.”  (You saw that one coming, right?)

Moving right along into Matthew chapter 3 verse 7, “But when he saw many of the Pharisees and Saducees coming for baptism, he said to them, “You brood of vipers, who warned you to flee from the wrath to come?”"  Why would he call them that? Again, we see extremely harsh words directed toward the religious theologians of the day.  If they were coming for baptism, why didn’t John at least give them the opportunity to explain themselves?  Wasn’t he judging them?  And what is the “wrath to come”?  It would seem that they came for baptism because it had become the trendy thing to do, but apparently they weren’t interested in the confession of sin part.  He goes on to say, “Therefore, bring forth fruit in keeping with repentance;”.  What is ‘fruit in keeping with repentance‘? I found this interesting description of Saducees:

“the Sadducees are those that compose the second order, and take away fate entirely, and suppose that God is not concerned in our doing or not doing what is evil; and they say, that to act what is good, or what is evil, is at men’s own choice, and that the one or the other belongs so to every one, that they may act as they please. They also take away the belief of the immortal duration of the soul, and the punishments and rewards in Hades.” (source: Josepheus) 

This sounds like some leaders of the emerging church; Doug Pagitt and his road tour come to mind.  Here is an interesting description of the Pharisees:

“…they did not interpret the Written Torah literally; rather, they asserted that the sacred scriptures were not complete and could therefore not be understood on their own terms. The Oral Torah functioned to elaborate and explicate what was written… the Oral law was simultaneously revealed to Moses at Sinai, and the product of debates among rabbis. Thus, one may conceive of the “Oral Torah” not as a fixed text but as an ongoing process of analysis and argument; this is an ongoing process in which God is actively involved; it was this ongoing process that was revealed at Sinai, and by participating in this ongoing process rabbis and their students are actively participating in God’s ongoing revelation. That is, “revelation” is not a single act, and “Torah” is not a single or fixed text. It is this ongoing process of analysis and argument that is itself the substance of God’s revelation.” (Source)

I recently read Brian McLaren’s “A New Kind Of Christian” and here is what he says about the written text of the Bible: “So the real authority does not reside in the text itself, in the ink on the paper, which is always open to mininsterpretation…  Instead, the real authority lies in God, who is there behind the text or beyond it or above it, right?  In other words, the authority is not in what I say the text says but in what God says the text says.” (page 50) Or in emergent-speak, “don’t take the written text too seriously, no one can really know what God really means and those who say we can know the Bible and, through it, God, are just arrogant”.

So it would seem to me that the first ‘fruit of repentance’ is the confession of sins.  Baptism alone won’t do it.  Claiming Abraham for their father wouldn’t do it (vs. 9) and there is a stated consequence that “every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire”. (vs.10)   Again, very harsh words.

(I’m editing this post slightly here on 11/12 because in Luke’s account John doesn’t just refer to the religious leaders as ‘brood of vipers’ but the entire multitude.  Hmm…)

Well, so far I’ve managed to get through six verses.  How did J. Vernon get through the Bible in only five years?

I don’t think you can just jump into the Sermon On The Mount (Matthew chapters 5 -7) without first backing up to what lead into the sermon in the first place.  I decided to find the very first word preached by Jesus (accorcing to Matthew’s account) which was “Repent” (4:17).  Whoa!  What a way to begin a preaching career!  But going back even further I discovered the same word - or phrase - preached some weeks earlier by Jesus’ cousin, John the Baptist. The actual phrase was this, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”  The NIV quotes both men with the identical statement, John in Chapter 3 verse 2 and Jesus in Chapter 4 verse 17.  What I find interesting is following the rest of what was happening in the preaching ministry of John at the time.  John was not preaching in town or in a building but rather in the wilderness - wearing a camel hair outfit with a leather belt and eating locust and honey. I know that there is significance to these things but what really strikes me is the fact that lots and lots of people were getting baptized by him AS THEY CONFESSED THEIR SINS (3:5-6).  So it seems that the preamble to the announcement of Jesus public ministry came through his cousin John and required the confession of sins on the part of individuals.  It will be interesting to see as we go along how individual confession and repentance fit into God’s overall picture.