Jitterbugging for Jesus

So totally unhinged are these Texas boys that my former Congressman from when I lived in The Colony, Texas, Michael Burgess, is so desperate to sway public opinion against abortion that he, in his twisted and dark mind, somehow sees fetuses masturbating in their mothers’ wombs.

And this poor excuse of a national leader (and, sadly, poor excuse of a Texan) is a physician, an OB/GYN, no less.

Thank God this masturbation of which he speaks is done in the privacy of wombs; masturbation in public is against the law and public masturbation is not something that I or most people of polite society ever want to see.

This stuff would be laughable if not so utterly serious.

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Look, I’m personally for legal abortions.

But I’m also–and please stop and let this sink it before you send your hate mail to revpaulmckay@gmail.com–for making abortion and war–both abortion and war–as rare as we can possibly make them.

And now read this: I am also for Christians and churches stepping up and leading the way in making violence in wombs, or our own violence against living, breathing humans in distant countries, rare in ways that Christians and churches seem never to have the Christian will to do.

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In yesterday’s posting I called for a “National Day of Confession, Mourning and Prayer” for all the innocent pregnant women and the children and others that we Americans kill, maim or traumatize, every day, with our own weapons of mass destruction.

I published that yesterday knowing there’s not a chance that my Senators would push legislation for such a day, and in the process of posting it I actually aimed to underscore how cynical and hypocritical our politicians can be in bombing and brutalizing people around the world without a hint of remorse over the children and pregnant women who get blown away.

You never hear politicians who are all for bombing, say, Iran, or North Korea, say how sad it is that innocent men, women, pregnant women and children will suffer and that we need to be in remorse and prayer over our killing people a long, long way from our up-close and personal witness to the horrors of our violence actions.

In fact, you hear politicians, and conservative media more than most media, stirring up that old “patriotic gore” (to borrow a phrase from Edmund Wilson’s classic book on the Civil War), which fans the flamingly un-Christian attitude of “bombing em back to the Stone Age and lettin’ God sort em out.”

Which makes me wonder, as much as I want to give the grace of the benefit of doubt to them, if these political leaders and war propagandists really care, as moral beings, about the consequences of their war-making and their constant calls for violence as the only real alternative to global conflicts and issues.

It also makes me wonder if they genuinely care about protecting pregnant women and babies and children at all.

Lord forgive my own cynicism but cynicism can be contagious when it’s so widespread and practiced as a matter of course by ignorant leaders (“you can’t get pregnant in rape,” they say) who are terribly insecure as people and, worse, insecure in the Christian faith of which they talk.

And talk and talk about.

Sometimes they make me wanna holla:

“Shut up with your talk about your Christian faith! Show your Christian love and grace and peace and compassionate heart and good will toward all, will ya?” Show your trust and faith in God and your seeking real discernment through and from the God you yap about.

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And so . . .

I also knew that few Americans would support such a day of “Confession, Mourning and Prayer” anyway, including Christians, although I like to think I’m wrong about that.

(And never mind the issue of separation of church and state–we’ve already stomped all over that with acceptance of a “National Day of Prayer” in which political leaders get to knock down camera men to prove to us all just how genuinely pious and Christian they are! Jesus had something to say about that in Luke 18: 9-14; by all means take your bible and look it up if you don’t know the parable.)

When it comes to these hot-button issues, we all have our blind spots. We get so dug in to our positions that we can’t see our own hypocrisies or double-minded thinking.

So it is with the “disconnect” between protecting wombs here, and bombing wombs somewhere else, without much thought or remorse.

And I hasten to add here that, yes, I can be as hypocritical and blind as anybody else in my lousy but human condition.

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But here’s the thing. . . .

I’ve always called myself an “almost pacifist,” believing as I do that, on what should be rare occasions, war or violence really is a “necessary evil” in order to protect innocent and powerless people out of the Christian ethic of love of neighbor.

Even one of my faith heroes, Martin Luther King Jr.–who taught me and all of us so much and so well about the power of non-violent resistance in the manner of the non-violent Jesus–acknowledged that sometimes you have to stop a “mad man” running through the village to protect the innocent.

But Christians or anybody else waging war or killing without remorse and a heavy heart, in my own humble opinion, should take no kind of delight in it, patriotic or otherwise. I know what a release it can be to celebrate something like the killing of Osama Bin Laden, who, again in my humble opinion, had to be killed to spare us of so many other killings of so many innocents right here in my own country.

Perhaps even to the sparing of my own life and/or my loved ones, which could still be taken in a terrorist attack.

But I always come back to this . . . .

Me, personally, I just want war and abortion and all forms of violence to be as rare as we can make them–and want the Christian churches on almost every block in this “Christian nation” to lead the way in making anything that is destructive really, really rare.

What have you and I as a Christian–or your church or mine–done to aggressively, intentionally, help women and children and families in ways that will significantly make abortion rare and promote constructive lives and living for other people outside our churches?

It seems to me that these are the soul-searching questions we should be asking rather than arguing endlessly about whether abortion should be safe and legal or outlawed.

Why don’t we stop talking “pro-life” and stop making counter-productive laws that create more unhealthy lives and homes and hardships for women and for children and families while at the same time, as Christians, start really being the church of God’s endless love, endless grace and tender mercies?

That, to me, is our Christian challenge on abortion and so many other issues.

And with that, here’s some thoughts from other Texas native guys on this very matter of the challenge of abortion law and the church’s challenges:
This is a think piece I saved from the Christian wise man Marv Knox at The Baptist Standard, a Christian periodical I’ve mentioned here before that’s very much to my liking, as is Marv as a man–I’ve met him a few times know him to be a really nice and grace-filled man and fine journalist.

This if from Donald Miller, the Houston boy whose Christian evangelical book “Blue Like Jazz” is a spiritual classic. (Actually I posted this once before back in the spring.)

Both these fellow guys are on the same wave lengths as yours truly the ranting radical.

I’m off to the riverside for some radical Sabbath peace time now.

Grace and peace and Lord help us all.