This is me, lamenting.

As we all know, last week, our Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. I feel deeply sad and I also feel really mad. I mostly feel mad because this decision was influenced, primarily as far as I can tell, by conversative Christians––a thing I used to be and still hold dear to my heart––and so in part, I am responsible. And I’m sad because it feels like a deep and willful misunderstanding about what it means to be “pro-life” and hold life as precious. I guess I’m additionally sad because I think this misunderstanding is deeply rooted in how our scriptures are interpreted, and it feels like it just doesn’t have to be this way. 

The way I grew up, we studied the Bible intensely, but focused our attention on the end of our time on earth. Looming over everything were the letters of Paul and the commands of Jesus to go out and preach the Good News. In our understanding, we were awaiting the return of Jesus, the reign of God on earth, and subsequently awaiting the great judgment of God. Everything we did, or thought about doing, we held captive in hopes that when God judged us on the last day, we would be included with those in heaven and not into the flames of hell. We lived by Matthew 24:14, “And this good news of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the world, as a testimony to all the nations, and then the end will come.” We read this as a literal if/then statement. In short, we focused our attention on the death of Jesus, where Jesus went after he died, and where we might go once our time on this earth had concluded. 

Yes, of course, we read the book of James, that faith without works is dead, and of course we read the charge of Jesus to take care of the widows and orphans, but those commands were shadowed by the larger question of where we might go after death, and where everyone else around us might go.

And so you can imagine my shock when, while studying the scriptures in seminary, I realized that rarely, up to that point, had my studies of Jesus or the scriptures focused on the life of Jesus. I had been so wrapped up in his death and what that meant, that I had almost completely missed the political subversiveness of the life of Jesus. It became one of those things that I could not unsee. 

Under this lens, it’s hard to miss Jesus’ attention and care to those who were being abused and oppressed by the political structure at the time––like those widows and orphans, for example. He healed people who had been left outside of society, like the demoniac or those with leprosy. He hung out with women who had been divorced, and women who were prostitutes, and gave them freedom. It all feels so obvious now. I spent so much of my life worried about where I would go after I died (a place, by the way, we have no real quantitative evidence for), and being saved from the flames of hell, and missed the people around me living an actual hell, asking for actual salvation.

What does this have to do with Roe v. Wade? Based on my own experience in the mostly white Evangelical church of California, I think the fervor around the belief that making abortion illegal will be/is a victory for the Kingdom of God and a victory for life is deeply rooted in this view of scripture that focuses more on Jesus’ death than his life. But as we all know, making abortion illegal does not stop abortions, and does not lower the rate of abortions. If we really want to defend life, we must care for women’s health, ensure parental leave for all, provide contraception where it is needed, and work to correct the myriad ways in which People of Color in America are systematically overlooked and mistreated (Rachel Held Evans called out the inconsistencies of being “pro-life” really well in this article she wrote in Vox back in 2016). If we want to follow the life that Jesus lived, we must allow women the freedom to choose what happens to their bodies. We must focus on the life and the lives in front of us that are hurting and dying. To be pro-choice is to be pro-life.

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So, what’s next? What has been done has been done, so what do we do next? 

First, we lament. 

It’s important that we feel, in our bodies, our sadness and our rage so that when we act we do so in a way that knows itself and is aware. We must do this work in ourselves, first. And it’s the work Jesus taught us to do, as Cole Arthur Riley beautifully writes about in her book This Here Flesh:

You can’t tell me that it doesn’t change everything that the one who created all things and holds together all things cried. If Christ wept for Lazarus, he must’ve done so not out of an absence of hope or faith, but out of love. It was an honoring. When we weep for the conditions of this world, we become truth-tellers in its defense. People who can say, This is not good. It is not well. People who have seen the face of goodness and refuse to call good and curse by the same name…True lament is not born from that trite sentiment that the world is bad but rather from a deep conviction that it is worthy of goodness.

It’s important that we lament right now, and that we rage––that we not shrink away from this sadness––for it points to a greater hope, and makes truth-tellers of us in this world. In the course of Jesus’ life, he lamented and he raged (remember the turned over tables), he healed, he died, and still that was not the end of his story. My hope is that as Christians, we live this life of Jesus in our world––that we pray for and with people, and that we also listen and pay attention to the real lives of those around us, and the ways in which these lives are calling out to be healed.