"God is Pro-Choice" - Sermon for 13 Pentecost 9-7-25

I will admit right up front that the word slavery as a metaphor in modern usage is problematic. Our nation’s history of the horrors of chattel slavery risks trivializing the word when it is applied to describe other forms of bondage.

Slavery – the ownership of one or more persons by another – is always wrong, was always wrong, even in biblical times when slavery was a common- enough practice to make regular appearances in the historical narratives, the Pauline epistles, and in Jesus’s parables.

Saint Paul’s persuasive gem of a letter to the slaveowner and fellow Christian Philemon to free the runaway Onesimus, while not a masterstroke for universal manumission – for elsewhere Paul himself admonishes slaves to be obedient to their masters – nevertheless serves to weaken one link in the long chain that normalized human bondage, a chain that held until one-hundred-sixty years ago in this country; and that still binds people around the world, overtly and covertly, to this day.

Thus, we are left to wrestle with the historical reality of slavery and with the present-day legacy of it and of its malign successors: Jim Crow, apartheid, systemic and institutional racism, and the individual bigotries that are trumpeted these days by those who wish to return to this epoch of so-called American greatness.  

That caution being spoken, and the pitfalls notwithstanding, we recall that the scriptures and the church have used the term slavery as a metaphor for spiritual bondage. The most common usage is this: we are slaves to the passions, the practices, the sins that separate us from each other and distance us from God. We, on our own, are unable to break these chains that bind us. We are freed through the passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus. And we recall and participate in Jesus’s liberating act by what he gives us through the Church: chiefly the emancipating Sacraments of Baptism, Communion, and Confession.

Jesus’s liberating act is freely given. Our response, however, is voluntary. Like the ancient Israelites whom Moses led out of slavery in Egypt, we often express a preference for who we were and what we had while we were enslaved. Our spiritual ancestors longed for the predictability of their tortured lives; we long for the same. They preferred the melons and leeks and cucumbers in Egypt to the heavenly manna in the wilderness; we prefer the comforts our commercial culture promises to the life-giving Body and Blood of Jesus from the altar.

Unlike the enslaved peoples throughout history who had little if any choice but to comply with the whims of their masters who sought to bleed them dry, we can choose whether we live spiritually-enslaved or spiritually-free. Choose, Moses said, either life and prosperity or death and adversity. Choose, Paul said, Onesimus as a slave or as a brother. Choose, Jesus said, the cross of discipleship or the possessions of enslavement. God’s is pro-choice; the consequences are ours.

Like the word slavery, the word hate is freighted with the baggage of modern usage. When Jesus says hate, he does not mean despise; hate is not the opposite of love. Jesus does not ask us to despise our families or even life itself: that would be a violation of the Fifth, the Sixth, and the Greatest Two Commandments. Hate, in biblical usage, means something more like preference, a choice. It is only by loving Jesus first that we can fully love others and love ourselves. We might try it more often.

If all this seems difficult, it is because it is. The saints long have struggled with this; none succeeded perfectly. But they knew that finding the freedom Jesus offers only comes through persistent asking and seeking. And with Jesus, the notion, the thought, the desire, even the smallest seed of faith is enough for him to use to set you on your way to freedom in his promised land. Let us begin, now, together, today.

Father Daniel S.J. Scheid, SCP

13^th after Pent. C: Proper 18 – Sep. 7, 2025

All Saints’ Episcopal Church, San Francisco

“God is Pro-Choice”