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We’ll get back to the gospel lesson later, but first let’s start with the wise words attributed to Moses found in Deuteronomy. Here, Moses is addressing everyone and their neighbor, the leaders, elders, men, women, children, foreigners, and servants, about what he had heard from God. I was hopeful when I saw how God was speaking to everyone, ready to find that wonderful sense of God’s justice I must have missed while reading the first time. But things didn’t improve after a second or third reading of Deuteronomy. It still said a lot about perishing. Not only was I concerned about perishing, but there was another part that I was pretty nervous about. I was confused with how simple the connection was between obeying God and prosperity. It says, “If you obey the commandments of the LORD your God that I am commanding you today, by loving the LORD your God, walking in his ways, and observing his commandments, decrees, and ordinances, then you shall live and become numerous, and the LORD your God will bless you in the land that you are entering to possess.” This seems contrary to what we all know, that bad things happen to good people, no matter how much it seems like they are obeying God.
Some Christians do believe that if you just ask in faith, God will bless you. This is an idea not just found in the Old Testament, but the New Testament as well. I was in a bible club in junior high where our advisor had taught us that if we asked anything in the name of Jesus, we would receive it. Jesus says in John 14:13-14, “I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it.” I thought this was great. I thought I could ask to be a piano genius without practicing and an endless supply of cosmic brownies. That was my idea of being blessed by God Perhaps it was because my faith was already that of a curious skeptic, but I never did get a bottomless supply of brownies.
This experience, along with many others, has shaped my belief that God doesn’t function like a vending machine, where you put in the correct amount of change and you get a predictable product. I don’t think it’s any surprise that the verse that comes in John 14:15 is “If you love me, keep my commandments.” Looks like it’s not just up to us to order God around to shower blessings on our lives, and that we still have some responsibility. But then, if God isn’t a brownie supplier for 13-year-olds, what does God do? How do we understand God’s action in our lives? Maybe the rest of the chapter in Deuteronomy was going to help me out, I thought.
But tracking God’s involvement in human lives through chapter thirty of Deuteronomy is likely to give you whiplash. Because there is this somewhat baffling mix between God’s action and our choice that I think should make us question how we believe God is at work in the world. Deut 30:4-5 says, “4 Even if you are exiled to the ends of the world, from there the Lord your God will gather you, and from there he will bring you back. 5 The Lord your God will bring you into the land that your ancestors possessed, and you will possess it; he will make you more prosperous and numerous than your ancestors,” which really makes it seem like God is in charge of things. But then the bit that we read later in the chapter is all about our choice between life and death. “Choose life so that you and your descendants may live, loving the LORD your God, obeying him, and holding fast to him,” it says.
As it usually goes, the bible is heavy on suggestion and light on conclusive answers. This is part of the reason why we have so many types of Christians. So we have some deciding to do. Do you think that God is controlling the world and that we are just tiny puppets? Does God wait to bless until we ask for it? Or is God suspended far away, unable to participate in the work of the world? Does God intervene in extreme circumstances, or for those people who please God the most? Or, does God work in and through us through the Holy Spirit? If you’re really interested in debating these questions, I can take you to the seminary and set you up with some theology students who would love to argue with you all day.
Sometimes when I’m writing sermons and I’m stumped with hard questions I end up on facebook instead of diligently writing. Usually, this is a counterproductive exercise, but I got lucky. Like I sometimes do, I got sucked into reading these inspirational lists of how to make the most of your twenties or great life lessons or other similarly cheesy, but yet oddly addicting collections of inspiration and advice. Perhaps I was subconsciously looking for something to balance all the reading about the fires of hell I was doing. One of these articles was about all the false things we are told in the media about love. How love is marketed, especially to girls, as this magical, passive experience. But this article countered that with the repeated refrain, love is a choice.
So there, in the middle of an article that seemingly had nothing to do with Deuteronomy, I figured it out. Love is a choice. I have set before you life and death. God has given us a choice. So choose life. Chose love.
These scriptures are doing everything in their power to convince us of this. They make pretty clear divisions between what is good and what is bad, I think not to shame all of us that drift toward making the less life-giving choice, but to encourage us that love is a choice. When Deuteronomy talks about God setting choices before us, that makes sense to me of how God is at work in the world. There are a few theologians who have imagined God as presenting us with new choices in each possible moment, always trying to guide us toward the best possible choice. God knows which one of these is best, but does not coerce us, but instead tries to persuade us toward the best possible outcome. It makes sense to me that this persuasiveness might look like some pretty exaggerated claims about life and death. That doesn’t explain away all of the confusion from the rest of Deuteronomy that I’ve been wrestling with, but it’s a good start.
This really changed reading the Matthew text for me. What if this is Jesus trying to persuade us toward the best choice? Let’s take a look at just a few verses. One part reads, "You have heard that it was said, 'You shall not commit adultery.' But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” So this could be an exceptionally harsh ruling. But I was reminded of an experience I had this summer while waiting for the bus in Cleveland. It was really early in the morning and I wasn’t even quite awake for the day, when a car drove by and I heard a man’s voice call out the window some pretty vulgar names that I wouldn’t feel comfortable repeating from the pulpit. You see, by the laws of adultery, he didn’t do anything wrong. We were separated by the road and the enclosure of his car. But I can tell you from the sick feeling in my stomach that he had done something wrong, and Matthew encourages that kind of thinking. Instead of blind obligations, Jesus is saying, no. You have a choice to not objectify women. Love is a choice.
Most of what Jesus says can be understood in this way. These bizarre statements about cutting off body parts are a startling reminder that we are not controlled by robotic obedience, but that we have an active role to play in the decisions we make. We should take our actions seriously.
Now, I’m kind of glad that these were the texts for the day. I think when we encounter difficult scripture passages, it’s important to see how we can claim them as part of the Christian witness. I think the scriptures that we like to avoid might have the most to teach us. Confronting them reminds us not to dismiss God. It reminds us to think about God.
Deuteronomy 30:11-14 says, “Surely, this commandment that I am commanding you today is not too hard for you, nor is it too far away. 12It is not in heaven, that you should say, ‘Who will go up to heaven for us, and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it?’ 13Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, ‘Who will cross to the other side of the sea for us, and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it?’ 14No, the word is very near to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart for you to observe.”
This tells me I shouldn’t push away from these scriptures. That these scriptures are meant to be held close to us. They aren’t meant to be something so difficult that only exceptional people get to learn from them. All of this distancing from the text can stop us from hearing how God might be persuading us. God is trying to persuade us to remember that love is a choice. That we can wake up and choose to love God, to thank God with five minutes of prayer. We can love our family with a phone call. We can love with our actions, even when the euphoric feeling is gone. Understanding that love is a choice doesn’t mean that we have a magical blessing where it only takes a few whispered words and a glance toward heaven for your dream car to arrive. But it means that our actions can build prosperity in the world. Choose love. Choose life.
Amen.
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