“‘People I associate with are looking at me like, are you guys crazy?’”  That was school committee chairman John Coyne’s comment when a measure he opposed was approved by a 7-2 vote of the Portland (Maine) School Committee (South Bend Tribune 10-19-07).  Why did that vote make the national headlines a few weeks ago?  Because it was a decision to allow children as young as eleven years of age to obtain birth control pills at a middle-school health center.   News indeed!

In defense of the King Middle School, it should be noted that school officials maintain that only five of the school’s 510 students would have qualified for birth control under the program last year.  And the policy does require that students have parental permission to use the health center at the school (although the students would not have to tell their parents that they were seeking birth control).

But all of that aside, dispensing contraceptives for children as young as eleven years of age is surely a social commentary on our times, is it not?  Is this where “the land of the free” is destined?  Does the early onset of puberty mean that we must keep revising our sexual health policies downward in order to accommodate younger and younger children?

But then, is anybody really that surprised it has come to this?  Didn’t the ancient prophet warn, “They sow the wind, and reap the whirlwind” (Hosea 8:7)?  After decades of prime time sex on America’s channels and screens of entertainment, are we surprised that our kids finally got the message?  That unbridled sex is not only the acceptable, but the preferred norm for our society?  Who can blame eleven year olds for thinking, “If my body can do it, I might as well do it”?  We have reaped the whirlwind.

In the words of Christian philosopher Francis Schaeffer, How then shall we live?  Or shall the community of Christ sow the same sexual winds and reap the same night-after whirlwind?  Our series, “The Chosen,” moves now to the heart of the dark game plan on the borders of the Promised Land: play the sex card.

But the good news is Christ offers us a winning hand!  And he does so with the profound declaration that our bodies “were bought at a price,” the crimson currency of “his own blood” (I Cor 6:19, 20; Acts 20:28).  Clearly, having emptied heaven’s treasury to redeem not only our souls but our bodies at the cross, it is in God’s own interest to protect his investment in us and to spare us sexual defeat.  All of his power to protect all of our purity—ours for the asking.  How could the headlines be better?