Seeker, Not Sought

Text: Deuteronomy 30:15-20
Other texts: Luke 14:25-33

Happy are those who have not walked in the counsel of the wicked, sings the psalm for today. Psalm 1, the one that introduces the 149 others. Happy are those who have not lingered in the way of sinners. Happy are those who do not sit with the scornful. They meditate on God’s teaching day and night. And everything they do prospers.

It is a small crowd, those happy people. So small that perhaps there is no one in it. Who are these people who have never sinned nor listened to sinners, who think only of God’s teachings? Whose every endeavor prospers. Are there any such people in the real world?

Moses has presented his people with a choice. He has done God’s work, leading the Israelites out of slavery and conveyed to them God’s law and commandments. Now, on the verge of finally entering the land promised to them, Moses preaches one last sermon, exhorting them to walk in the way of a God who has freed them, fed them, guided them, and now brings them home.

I have set before you today life and death, Moses tells them, prosperity and adversity. Choose to follow your God, not other gods. Choose to observe God’s decrees. If you do so choose, you will prosper. If you do not, you will perish. Blessings or curses, he offers. Life or death. Choose life.

The choice is clear. Choose life. Obviously. Who, given this choice, would willingly choose death?

Yet, we are easily led astray, as Moses warns the people. The Bible is a story of a people who, though they love God, are nonetheless unable to keep God’s commands, who are unable to keep away from the counsel of the wicked, who are unable to do what they want and refrain from doing what they do not want. In other words, it is the story of all people.

It is not easy to choose life. It is not always clear what is a blessing and what is a curse. Can a war be just? Can ending a life be compassionate? Can greedy accumulation enable mercy? We are more confused than villainous.

We are prone to distraction. It makes sense. We are aware creatures with lots of interests and a brain that likes to know everything that is going on. It helps us survive. Things compete for our attention. Some are the commandments and ordinances, as Moses says, of God, and the teachings of Jesus, whom we follow. But even when we turn to God, that attention is short-lived. So there is never only one choosing of life and that’s that. We have to choose life over death again and again, endlessly.

Our distractions are rarely evil. Jesus tells his disciples that those who do not hate their families cannot be his disciples. This is a hard saying. Partly that’s because we in our time honor families and find them to be—usually—a source of physical and spiritual comfort and energy. And partly because honoring parents is one of the commandments that we are supposed to obey. And partly because it is hard to make yourself feel some way, much less hate what you now love. Including life itself.

But Jesus is not talking about feelings, here. The words love and hate in Jesus’ time were more about obligations and behavior than about emotions. They had their source in contract law. So the admonition of Jesus here is not so much about degrees of affection. It is rather about loyalties and where they lie.

This is not the first or last time that Jesus compares his disciples’ allegiance with other calls on them. Elsewhere in the Gospels they leave their homes, their work, their nets and fields, their parents. They leave the dead to bury the dead. They are advised—as they are here—to give up all they own. They are instructed to carry no baggage. These things are all distracting voices—serving other gods, in the words of Moses. They add to the cacophony that makes it harder for one to decide how to choose life.

These statements by Jesus are not a call to asceticism. They are not a call at all. They are not a list of requirements. They are not a gateway to discipleship. They instead are an observation, a description, a statement of fact. Physics.

Being a disciple of Jesus is likely to get you in trouble with your family. Jesus is going to ask you to make moral, practical, and political choices that may estrange you from others, including your family and in spite of your bonds to them.

When Jesus talks to his disciples in this passage, he is giving them a heads up. When you become a disciple of mine, here is what might happen. This is a warning of sorts. A disclaimer.

The cross is not a prerequisite of following Jesus, but it may be a consequence. Disagreeing with ones we love is not a recipe for discipleship, but it may be the result. Those who hold their families most dear—and their possessions—are likely to run into problems. They will likely have to make decisions in which it is hard for them—maybe impossible—to choose life over death.

A disciple is a student. That is what the word means. The hope of discipleship is transformation, not just accumulation of knowledge or a notebook full of aphorisms. Those who follow Jesus hope for transformation in themselves and, as a result, in the world. Being Christian changes things. We obey God—we follow Christ our teacher—because we love God and also because we find that God’s promise of a new life is trustworthy.

This does not mean we have to get it exactly right. We will not get all A’s. We will choose our families and possession—other gods—over Christ. Our hearts will turn away, as Moses warns. Yet that is not a reason to abandon the whole enterprise.

The commands and grace of God are good news about the heart of God, who longs to bring us life. Moses’ talk about loving God, obeying God, and holding fast to God is not so much a statement about law as it is about heart—God’s heart. God makes a promise of life. It turns out not to be as contingent as it seems, for as the story unfolds, God delivers on God’s promise anyway, even when the Israelites—and we—continually choose death over life. Even when we walk in the counsel of the wicked.

A lectionary alternative for today is psalm 139. It is a fitting partner to the one we sang today, almost as near the end of the book as Psalm 1 is to the beginning. The psalm gives thanks that God is with us, even when we stray. As we are bound to. You search me, it says to God, you know me, you follow my journeys, you surround me.

Even when we walk among the wicked, the scornful, the sinners. No matter how little we meditate on God’s teaching. God seeks us out and walks with us.