Eighth Sunday after Pentecost
The Rev. jessica young chang MDiv '22
An independent reproductive chaplain serving the metropolitan Boston area community
(The following is a transcript of the service audio, Aug. 3, 2025)
Beloved community, I am so grateful to be with you this morning. Will you take a deep breath with me and join me in prayer? Beloved Lord, lead us from darkness to light, from ignorance to knowledge, from alienation to oneness with you beyond all separation. May the words of my mouth and the meditation of our hearts be pleasing to you, oh, God, my rock and my redeemer. A content advisory. In my sermon, I mention medical conditions and concerns related to pregnancy and neonatology. If you notice feelings come up, I encourage you to tune in on how to take care of others. At home on my wall, I taped a postcard that reads, "Black women are worthy of being trusted to make their own reproductive decisions without paternalism or interference from politicians. Back women's moral agency is God-given." I got it at a national convention hosted by the Spiritual Alliance of Communities for Reproductive Dignity or SACReD.
I look at it almost every day, whenever I sit down at my desk and consider what I can do today to show the love and justice of Christ to women, birthing people, and folks who are making decisions about their reproductive lives. Is it so radical to believe that reproducing people are capable of living out our own autonomy? Is it so impossible to affirm that we can discern with our God what is the right choice for how to make a family when, if, or by what means? I wouldn't think so. But the freedom to do just that without political interference, which was enshrined in this country's law for a few decades, is being erased from the lives of women and birthing people around the country. The consequence of this erasure of our freedoms is that we are paying for our family planning choices with our lives.
Birthing people who need care and cannot receive it are dying of complications of miscarriage across the country. The clearest example of this was Adriana Smith. Have you heard of her? Adriana Smith was a 30-year-old Black woman in Atlanta. In February, she went to the complaining of headaches, and was given medication and sent home. Hours later, her partner discovered her gasping for breath and called 911. She was taken to Emory Hospital, where doctors discovered she had blood clots that had gone to her brain. She was declared legally brain-dead. She was also nine weeks pregnant. All I will say about a nine-week pregnancy is that it is not viable. A nine-week pregnancy cannot survive outside of a human being as anything even halfway recognizable to being alive.
In Massachusetts, this state generally assesses viability at around week 24 of a pregnancy. That is a gestating fetus could be able to live outside a womb at about 24 weeks into a 40-week pregnancy. Even at that point, a neonate, that's the word for an infant born so prematurely, a neonate will require months of intensive care to help them grow and to cope with respiratory problems, neurological problems, brain bleeds, blindness, and all this if they survive being born so early. So, Adriana Smith, diagnosed by her doctors as brain-dead, was nine weeks pregnant. Her mother, April Newkirk, disclosed that the hospital ignored the wishes of her family and kept Adriana's unalive body, barely functional, on what we would erroneously call life support.
The hospital made this choice presumably to avoid prosecution under a law in Georgia that makes it nearly impossible for people to have the medical care they want and need, that is, to have abortions. And that prosecutes patients and providers who seek and provide this care. In July, Adriana Smith's body experienced a non-consensual C-section procedure that resulted in the delivery of a severely premature baby boy whom his family named Chance. Four days later, Adriana's body was taken off the machines that had kept the body's organs functioning. Let me be clear, Adriana had died when doctors assessed that her brain was unable to tell her heart to beat, her lungs to breathe, in February, not when she was taken off life support.
One feature of Christianity is free will. That is, our relationship with God is mutually chosen. Christ chooses us all day, every day, always and forever, and we also have the opportunity to choose Christ. We choose to turn ourselves toward the love that Christ offers us and that Christ bids us offer others. Our only mission is to love, love those who challenge us, to love by a standard that Jesus sets, to love radically and indiscriminately. I get to practice this love as a reproductive chaplain. In addition to church ministry, I provide care to people who are making decisions about their reproductive lives. I come alongside people who are considering having an abortion and help them explore how their faith offers support, not judgment and alienation.
I rejoice and celebrate with parents who have had children. I grieve with women who have miscarried and encourage them to share their anger, their grief, or their fear. I accompany people who are struggling in their fertility journey, looking for spiritual direction amidst the wilderness of unmet expectations and desires. I remind birthing people that God has given them the power to make good and right decisions, whatever that decision is, and that they make that decision with God on their side. I do this work because God asked me to, because I love to, and because it makes me feel alive. One of the things I sometimes say to clients is ‘you know your body better than anyone else.’ Often, birthing people have providers who function as experts. And I reiterate that providers are experts on pregnancy, childbirth, or various medical conditions. But only one person, that pregnant person, that laboring person, is the expert on their own body and their own life.
I think our sister in today's scripture knows this about herself. She knows better than anyone about how she's been suffering and what she needs. Scripture tells us that this woman spent 12 years trying and failing to experience healing from a bleeding disorder. I imagine that this unnamed woman has a reproductive illness, uterine fibroids, endometriosis, cervical cancer, polycystic ovarian syndrome. Conditions like this put women at risk for other health conditions, so she'd likely be experiencing malnourishment, weakness, fatigue. Maybe she is a woman who miscarried, and despite all of the doctors she has seen, and all of the money she has spent, she continues to hemorrhage. She has never been able to get the care that she needs and has a right to. Her life is at risk because her body has not known healing. Her spirit has not known peace.
In the context of this gospel, an illness like this was considered unclean. And people who were considered unclean according to community law had to announce themselves. While moving through public spaces, they had to speak in a loud voice and shout unclean, unclean, in order to let other community members know, so they could keep their distance and sustain their status. So, we know about our woman in the crowd, that she's considered unworthy to be in public, much less to be in the presence of the teacher. She's a woman, which compromises her status in the social and religious hierarchy, and her illness makes her a pariah. She's sick, bleeding, exhausted, hurting, frightened, and this is the only chance she has at healing.
All these things are true about her. All these odds are stacked against her, yet she reaches out her hand and she grabs hold of the cloak, the hem, the fringe of the anointed one. She grabs a hold of the only thing she thinks can deliver her from a culture and a system that has left her to die. This is a woman who knows her needs, who knows what it means to trust her own body, who knows what it means to trust the presence and the power of the healer. She takes an enormous risk. She flouts the law she's supposed to keep. And rather than announcing herself, she remains silent and squeezes in close to Jesus and to others, getting as close as she dare, only close enough to grab a scrap of Jesus' clothing. Her risk is clear, because when Jesus feels her touch, Jesus knows He has been transformed somehow by her faith, by her risk.
Let me say that again: Jesus was transformed by her faith and the risk she took. What might have happened to this woman if things had gone a different way? She might've been shamed, punished, arrested, even stoned to have dismissed community laws in such a way. But this woman knew what she needed and she knew who could help her. And when she realized she'd been discovered, she didn't run. She summoned her courage, and she told Jesus and everyone in that crowd the truth. She engaged her God-given agency, her faith in the teacher. She experienced healing. This woman is my hero. She knew what Christ is capable of. She knew to listen to her body more than the demands of the majority culture around her. She knew how to act in a way that would restore her to wholeness, to her vision for her life. And Christ met her in that place.
We are living in a time where we are losing our freedoms. The freedom to trust our bodies and our wisdom to choose what is right for us is compromised at best and ripped from us at worst. Community, let us resist the temptation to turn away from this struggle. It is easy when cruelty, starvation, and erasure are everywhere we turn to tune out the calls for resistance, to consume input under the guise of pleasure that only offers numbness and ignorance. Let us turn away from the hollow promises, and rigid grasp of the state, and turn toward the love, the wisdom, and the care that God has for us, that the Holy Spirit has placed in us. Resistance is trusting the wisdom of our faith and our connection with God to live lives rooted in integrity and love. Christ had faith in a woman to choose what was right for her. Let us practice that same faith in ourselves and in one another.
The love, the non-judgmental presence, and the restoration of Christ is capable of meeting every woman, every birthing person, every human being. The wholeness of Christ is present to us in our joy, our struggle, and our grief, and our resilience. I pray the faith and self-knowledge that this woman demonstrates in the gospel would be realized in everyone struggling with choices, including reproductive health choices. And I pray and believe that Christ's resources beyond what is legislated, beyond what any of us can ask or think, would find those in need and restore them to wholeness, remind them of their wisdom, and affirm their God-given moral agency and integrity. May we who are related to a birthing parent, who knows someone grieving a miscarriage, who loves someone who has had an abortion, may we be able to come alongside these people, offering the witness and the love of Christ.