Choose life

Deuteronomy 30:15-20

15 Today I have set before you life and success, or death and disaster. 16 For today I command you to love YHWH, your God, to follow God’s ways and keep the commandments, the laws and the customs. If you do, you will live and increase, and YHWH, your God, will bless you in the land that you are entering to possess. 17 But if your hearts stray and you do not listen to me, if you let yourself be drawn into the worship of other gods, and serve them, 18 I tell you today, you will not survive. You will not live long in the land which you are now crossing the Jordan to enter and occupy. 19 I call heaven and earth to witness against you today: I set before you life or death, blessing or curse. Choose life, then, so that you and your descendants may live, 20 by loving YHWH, your God, by obeying God’s voice and by clinging to YHWH. For that will mean life for you, a long life in the land which God swore to give to your descendants Sarah and Abraham, Rebecca and Isaac, and Leah and Rachel and Jacob.

Priests for Equality. The Inclusive Bible (p. 337). Sheed & Ward. Kindle Edition.

During college, I started a practice of framing passages of scripture and hanging them on my walls. One of those verses of scripture on my wall is part of our morning prayer lectionary this morning—Deuteronomy 30: “Choose life.”

College was the time in my life when I started to develop a sense of my own beliefs and spiritual practices. I had grown up busy with church activities, and spiritual community was my top priority in leaving for college,

but at 18, I wasn’t equipped to know what to look for when finding spiritual community. When I joined InterVarsity, I didn’t even really know what theology was, let alone what kind of theology I held.

In this context, I was presented with a theology that was simple, certain, and reflected God’s inerrant truth as written in Scripture. I wasn’t given options—there was one right interpretation of Scripture, and perspectives that disagreed with that truth were dismissed as heretics.

Eventually this sort of black and white worldview I held cracked open and swirled into a spectrum of gray, (as it will)

but for a while it felt really good to be certain. Maybe you can relate.

It felt grounding to have a clear set of rules to follow, concrete morals to shape my life around.

Those were the days when I bought the most elegant paper I could find and wrote on it: “I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. Choose life that you and your descendants may live.” and hung Moses’s words from Deuteronomy in a gold glitter frame on the wall of my bedroom.

A simple binary felt nice when I was looking for certainty. (Life/death, blessing/curse)

In their biblical context, these words are the conclusion to a particular chunk of Deuteronomy that reestablishes the relationship between the Israelites and their God after wandering in the desert for an entire generation.

This section is the finale of four chapters where Moses calls blessings and curses onto his people based on whether they follow God’s commands or not,

and they all culminate in Moses summoning the witnesses of heaven and earth to ensure that his people might live prosperously and abundantly.

They have a choice, of course. Seems like a simple choice to us, but how should they do it? How could they be sure to choose the path of blessing and not the path of destruction?

Moses says choosing life works like this:

Love God. Obey God. Hold fast to God.

Love and Obey God by keeping Deuteronomy’s very particular set of commandments

written for this community wandering in the desert, trying to establish some sense of order and justice so they can build a society strong enough to survive.

Is this also how we hold fast to God today?

I think the way in which we love and hold fast to God has to transform as we grow as individuals, and as life on our planet continues to unfold.

I’ll say this, I’m glad I didn’t hold fast to the commandments I thought I was receiving from God when I was in college in a fundamentalist bible study.

I’m grateful abolitionists pushed us beyond holding fast to slavery as a God-given economic arrangement.

In fact, even the Hebrew laws about slavery changed between the writing of Exodus and Deuteronomy—

which is evidence of an evolving perception of what obedience to God means for each generation.

Now,

I understand God to be the force of Life itself—so choosing Lifeis by definition choosing God.

Our modern human experience has been so focused on our own species that often it seems we elevate prolonging human life as the highest good. Even when I say “choose life,” you even be reminded of a particular political issue where those two words have been split to represent two separate parties—pro-life, and pro-choice.

But life is much more than our human-centered media, advertising and political campaigns lead us to believe.

I’d like to tell you a story that might broaden our perspective—a story of life—you might have heard it before.

The best scientific evidence we have now suggests that our Universe began expanding 14.5 billion years ago, in an explosion of such force that not long after, particles would combine to form the first atoms.

14.5 billion years is hard to conceptualize, so to try, if we condense those 14.5 billion years of our Universe’s existence

Down into one calendar year, with the Big Bang at midnight on January 1,

It’s not until September, about 10 billion years later, in the swirl of another explosion in space, that our sun—the giver of life in our solar system—begins to form,

along with Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars and our distant neighboring planets, asteroids, and comets.

In these early days Earth was too hot for life, but once the ocean formed, single-cell organisms began to appear in her depths. Now after the billions of years from January to September, Earth has given birth to her own life.

In October, photosynthesis begins producing oxygen, and all the activity of multicellular life happens in December.

On December 19, plants migrate to the land; and mammals appear on December 26.

Modern humans evolve on December 31 at 11:52 PM, and just seconds before the clock strikes midnight, Christopher Columbus lands in America.

It gives me chills to consider Life’s trajectory and our tiny place in it.

Life is the main character of this story, not humans. Life is the producer and the director, too.

We are products of life, creatures of our Mother Earth, and we are equipped to be agents of life—but we humans also seem to be uniquely equipped to be agents of death and destruction.

Choose life that you may live, you and your descendants.

Choose life. This choice is the blessing and the curse of being human! We get to choose, and our choices impact far more than just our individual lives.

I don’t think choosing life is about getting it right anymore, I think it’s about humbling ourselves in a story that’s much bigger than us, and offering our lives in faith to support Life’s much larger movement.

We will constantly be met with other gods demanding our worship—security, success, family, comfort.

Will we choose the path that reconnects us with the whole of life? Or will we insist on our human conveniences that sow death into our own lives and that of the planet?

We have very little time on this space rock, and we choose whether we simply perish at the end of it, or we spend it seeking and nurturing life among all beings.