Choose Life

Text: Deuteronomy 30:15-20 Other texts: Luke 14:26

I set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you may live.

The Israelites sit on the border of the land of Canaan. They sit like kids on a seawall, contemplating the ocean, side by side, imagining their future. They have been traveling forty years to get to this place and this time to take the land they have been promised by God. They have been led here by Moses. They have been given the law to follow. They have made an agreement with God. God is their God. They are God’s people. The land of God is ready for the people of God.

Now Moses, near death, preaches to them for the last time.

I have set before you life and death, Moses tells them, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you may live.

These words can guide us. They can be, as they have from time to time been for me, a touchstone against which we prove decisions. Is what I’m about to do a blessing or a curse? Will it add life to this world or diminish it? Will it help others, or harm them? Will what I do cause pain or peace?

But these wonderful words, wise and powerful, can turn to mock us. They make it sound so easy. Just turn away from death. Just turn toward life. As if choosing were so simple. As if we didn’t already know that blessings are better than curses. As if we didn’t already know that life is better than death. Who among us would on purpose choose death? Who among us wouldn’t choose life if we could?

I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you may live.

It’s not easy.

It’s not easy because it is not always clear what’s a blessing and what’s a curse. Things that look good on paper turn out to be disastrous in fact. Things started for good reasons turn out to cause suffering. We start in love and end in sorrow. We start in hope and end in frustration.

The morning glories twist and grow and delight us with their blossoms, but they twist the necks of the marigolds and choke them to death. Life or death, blessing or curse?

How can we know all things? How can we control all the variables? How can we see all the ways our actions will affect all other people and this earth?

We cannot.

Issues that we deal with as a society are difficult because we can’t figure out, much less agree about, what’s going to happen. Does stem cell research fall on the life side or the death side? How about military intervention to stop a genocidal war? How about abortion? How about locking someone up in prison for life? It’s not that some folks are on the side of death and the others on the side of life (even though our politics sometimes makes us think so). It’s that both sides are trying to figure it out. What is the blessing here? What is the curse? Where is life? Where is death?

It’s not just large world-wide issues, but personal ones. We ask ourselves: should I, middle aged parent, move across country to care for my ailing and frail mother or stay where I am, where my popular daughter is in junior high school and my shy and difficult son is in fifth grade. Should we, a young couple in our late teens, raise our unexpected child ourselves or put it up for adoption? Should I, recent law-school graduate with lots of student loans, go for the big-bucks big-firm job for a while, maybe forever, or go back to my small hometown as I had planned? Should I, successful entrepreneur, whose son hates school—should I push him to work harder because I believe that success in school leads to success in life? Which is blessing? Which is curse?

I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you may live.

It’s not easy.

It’s not easy because the consequences are often hard to take. Jesus’ harsh words about hating one’s family are shocking. They make no sense coming from someone who advises us to love all, including our enemies. To love our neighbors as ourselves. To obey the commandments, including the one about honoring one’s father and mother.

They make no sense unless we imagine that Jesus is describing what is, not proscribing what ought to be. To disagree with those we love and who love us is not a recipe for discipleship. But it can be a result. People get angry and hurt and frightened. To follow Christ—to be my disciple, Jesus says—to follow Christ into life means putting Jesus ahead of all else, even family, even if it causes hurt. It is a horrible decision. How did Zebedee feel when new disciples, his sons James and John, abandoned their father and the family business and took off after Jesus?

I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you may live.

It’s not easy.

It’s not easy because it doesn’t end with one decision.

It might seem that Moses is asking the Israelites to make one final choice. But no such luck. The Israelites will have to make that choice over and over again.

The decisions we make, make our lives. Too often it is not a menu of choices that face us, but a choice between two alteratives. One or the other, no chance to back up. We have to do as Yogi Berra said, “when you come to the fork, take it.” And there is not just one fork in the road, but one after another. The forks we choose define our path.

Moses asks the Israelites to choose a life, a way of living, that aligned with God’s hopes. The book of Deuteronomy is about Israel’s covenant—their agreement—with God. When Moses asks them to choose life, he is asking them to put that agreement first in their minds and in their hearts. He is asking them to make God and God’s law the focus of their lives. He is asking them to be foremost, before all other things, people of God. He is asking them to think of themselves that way before all other ways.

And in the same way Jesus asks his disciples to choose. Jesus asks the crowd to hate mothers and fathers, wife and children, brothers and sisters, even life itself. The word “hate” here does not mean “have bad feelings toward.” The words are like legal terms. Love means “be loyal to” as one country might be loyal to a treaty with another country. When Jesus tells his listeners to hate life and family, he is telling them not to cling to these things above all. Like Moses, Jesus is asking the crowd to put God first before all things. Their first loyalty is to God, not to even important things like their families.

The book of Deuteronomy is formed as a book of laws, but in it’s 600+ laws, is a book of the heart. It is guide to responding to the experience of God’s love for a people. It is a guide to a way of living with God first in mind.

The Israelites stood on the border, just one step away from Canaan, the promised land. They stood on the border, just one step away from a prosperous future. They stood on the border, one step to complete their freedom from Egyptian slavery.

I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you may live. Living with God, Moses adds importantly. Loving God, obeying God, and holding fast to God.

Yet in this passage, unlike others in the Torah, the Israelites do not choose. The book of Deuteronomy ends with the people still on the border, still ready, waiting. The story doesn’t end. The offer remains for all people. And all people, including us, may accept it or not.

Will we? We often stand at some border, waiting, wondering what to do, nervous and confused. Wanting to choose blessing, afraid we will choose curse. At the fork, what path will we take?

To choose life and blessing is, as Moses says, to choose to walk in God’s path. God’s path is the path on which God walks. It is the path that God enjoys. It is the place where God is, where God is likely to be found. It is where God roams. God roams there waiting for us.

I will be your God, and you will be my people. That is God’s promise. God asks us to take one hesitant step onto God’s path. And when we do, God comes to greet us. God comes to take our hand. And as we walk step by step, day by day, God comes to walk with us.