Disciple: Choose Life

By the Rt. Rev. Anne Hodges-Copple

“See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity. If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God that I am commanding you today, by loving the Lord your God, walking in his ways, and observing his commandments, decrees, and ordinances, then you shall live and become numerous, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land that you are entering to possess. But if your heart turns away and you do not hear, but are led astray to bow down to other gods and serve them, I declare to you today that you shall perish; you shall not live long in the land that you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess. I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live….”

- Deuteronomy 30:15-19

“Choose life so that you and your descendants may live.” Interesting to see the words “choose” and “life” as parts of the same invitation from God. As I write in mid-May, military conflicts rage, hate-driven gunmen rain down bullets upon folks going about their ordinary lives, and women watch their rights to agency over the integrity of their own bodies systematically destroyed. We struggle to comprehend fully the enormous loss of one million U.S. residents and millions more around the world to the COVID-19 pandemic. And in the loss column we must add account after account of legislators, governors and courts seeking ways to impose limitations upon individuals who believe they should have the freedom to define what it looks like to choose life.

It is incumbent upon those of us who call ourselves Christian to discern God’s will for our lives using the pillars of our faith: Holy Scripture, our sacramental theology, the Creed and tradition. In Deuteronomy, God invites a people called apart from others to become a new community and follow a path that affirms a way of living based upon a shared covenant adopted freely and without coercion. God presents this opportunity to choose life. This assertion is theological, biblical and, above all, a matter of volition, not legislation.

The God of Moses, who led the enslaved Hebrew people out of Egypt through a long and difficult path, offers the people who will become Israelites a choice. They can choose to follow the commandments and discover a life of love and a different kind of freedom, the freedom of loving one another and loving God as a community that shares in common the same full-throated dedication to the way of love and peace and abundance for all its members. Or they can turn away, remain enslaved to other norms that demean rather than treasure life, and face a future of loss and peril. God invites these particular people at a particular crossroads into a new way of existing in a world full of hostility, violence and abuse of power. God calls. A people answers.

In the Holy Gospels, Jesus invites seekers to make a life-changing choice and follow in the way of love. He invites fishermen to set down their nets. He bids a rich young man to give away his wealth and become a follower. Jesus stops a crowd of men from criminalizing a woman who has made a choice they condemn. Jesus tells them not to judge and tells the woman to turn back toward seeking the will of God in all things. Jesus calls his followers to choose life.

Over and over God the Holy and Undivided Trinity points out the way of holiness and promises the spiritual resources to walk in the way of love. God invites the beloved community to choose life and promises an abundant life in return.

God does not, however, compel the tribes of Israel to enter the promised land. Jesus does not compel Galileans or Samaritans, Greeks or Jews to follow him in the way of love. God does not take away the agency of the human being. God does offer mercy and grace when our agency takes us to wander far away into harmful conditions. When our fears and failures lead us into a diminishment of life, God’s mercy and love is always there to meet us and pull us back into community.

THE AGENCY OF CHOICE

For more than six decades, going back to General Convention of 1967, the General Convention of The Episcopal Church has discussed, discerned and passed resolutions concerning the sacred nature of life from conception and the locus of decision-making powers for determining when and if to terminate a pregnancy. The historic teaching of the Church is that God’s providence is present in the creation of all life. But the charting of the earliest moments and months of a potential new human is entrusted first to the woman whose life is one with the child she carries. The Angel Gabriel came to Mary. Not Joseph, not the community, not the religious or judicial authorities. In fact, they would have condemned Mary’s choice. But God gave her the choice, and she said “yes.”

It is the task of faithful discernment to apply notions of sacred worth, holiness and God’s intent to complex issues of reproductive choices. Similar reasoning applies to discernment for other deeply personal matters where gender and sexual orientation are concerned. Religious bodies are free to make theological assertions, which other members of a pluralist society like the United States are free to accept or reject.

In a pluralist society such as the United States, all people must be free to develop and assert their own agency and values to make decisions within whatever ethical framework they find compelling. Free will is a gift—a dangerous gift for sure—from God. Each woman in the United States must be free from being coerced into decisions at odds with her own conscience, her own health concerns, her own self-determination for what is life-giving and what is not. A woman must be free to determine whether a continuing pregnancy might have life-harming, life-diminishing, life-threatening impact - and, if so, what to do next. Our own baptismal covenant demands that we respect the dignity of every human being. Dignity includes respecting bodily integrity and the agency over our own physical well-being. Women must be free to determine, from within their own ethical commitments—whether those commitments are secular or religious—what it means to choose life, and they must be free to do so without coercion from the religiously inflected values of some of their fellow citizens.

Finally, in matters of pregnancy, there is the issue of the government proposing to take away a woman’s agency and mandate that she participate in a process of giving over her body to someone else’s definition of life. Who is in the best position to determine when a woman is ready, willing and able to participate in the sacred process of nurturing a potential human into a fullness of agency and integrity that is separate from her own? The sacred story of the Annunciation is a story of God finding a woman who was ready to say “yes” to the life-changing demands of a complicated pregnancy. Mary’s reply to the Archangel Gabriel is “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.” (Luke 1:38). Our own scripture holds up Mary as an example of the sacredness of a woman’s agency to say “yes” or “no” to God’s invitation to choose life.

Christians not only delight in a paradox; we stake our lives on some forms of it. The Incarnation is at a certain level a paradox: the God/Human is one being. The Cross is a paradox: an instrument of execution becomes a means of liberation. A sign of death is at the same time a sign of eternal life. So, too, we can accept the paradox that God has set in motion a world of choices where we exercise our conscience to make determinations that best affirm the dignity of life in the wider community where all God’s children are cared for and loved. The General Convention of the Episcopal Church has passed numerous resolutions over the years asserting both that life is sacred from inception and that decisions about reproductive health are best left to a woman and her most trusted advisors, including her doctors. Contradiction or paradox? You decide.

And while we are at it, let’s allow women to make their own decisions, too.

The Rt. Rev. Anne Hodges-Copple is the bishop suffragan of the Diocese of North Carolina.