How to Choose Life

Charlotte Collins Reed

Christ Church Episcopal

February 16, 2020

6 Epiphany A

          As a somewhat linear person, I have to say that I do love a good set of instructions.  Give me an address that I can plug into my GPS and I will follow the directions I am given until I get where I am going.  Unfortunately, GPS is not fool proof, and I have found myself going the wrong direction more than once because I was paying attention to the directions and not paying attention to where I was going.  Likewise, give me a box from Ikea, a few hours and a good set of instructions, and I can make that dresser, or table, or whatever it is and pretend that I am a carpenter when in actuality I have no idea what I am doing other than following the directions step by step.

          So, as someone who likes a good set of instructions, when I hear this morning that by obeying the commandments I can choose life, I am on it.  Moses says “If you obey the commandments 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.”   Commandments are like instructions, right?  So tell me what they are and I will follow them.

          Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5 give us the 10 commandments.   Moses is not interested in listing those today, but instead is telling God’s people how they are to live them.  Great! Instructions about the instructions!  In this passage, Moses tells the people that they are to obey the commandments by loving God, walking in God’s ways, and observing God’s commandments, decrees, and ordinances.  Deuteronomy 6 tells the people, and us, that they are to love the Lord their God with all their heart, soul, mind, and strength.  So, loving God involves the whole self-our thoughts, prayers, and actions.  Walking in God’s ways makes obedience active and requires attentiveness to what God is calling us to do in response to God’s great love for us.  Walking in God’s ways is not the same as passively following the GPS.  And lastly, the people are to keep all of God’s commandments, ordinances, and decrees, not as a form of bondage to the law, but as a way of being faithful to the God who brought them out of Egypt, through the wilderness, and to the cusp of the Promised Land, and showing the world their identity as God’s people by the way they order their lives.  All of a sudden the instructions for choosing life seem a lot more complicated!

          If we are looking to Jesus this morning to simplify the instructions for choosing life, we will be sorely disappointed.  This passage reminds us of what we heard last week-that Jesus has come not to abolish the law and the prophets but to fulfill them.  This week, Jesus takes the 10 commandments and far from abolishing them, he intensifies them and takes them deeper.  Simply refraining from murder is not good enough.  Anger and insult are choices for death, not life.  Reconciliation is the choice that brings life.  Avoiding the act of adultery or divorce becomes a command to a new attitude that avoids treating people as objects. 

          On the one hand, Jesus seems to be raising the stakes impossibly high and makes following the instructions ridiculously complicated.  The 10 Commandments seem simple relative to the instructions Moses and Jesus are giving this morning.  Where Moses this morning focuses on deepening those of the 10 commandments that have to do with our relationship with God, Jesus focuses on commandments that have to do with our relationship with each other and the whole of humankind.  He doesn’t even get to honoring your father and mother, nor coveting or stealing.  But we can imagine that we would not be let off easily there, either. 

          When Jesus deepens and intensifies the commandments of God, what Jesus is doing is giving us instructions for being a community rooted in  love.  When we put the passage from Deuteronomy together with Jesus’ words this morning, we hear that, in order to choose life, we give our lives over to love of God and love of humankind.  In this community rooted in love, all of our thoughts, actions, and prayers reflect our identity as people of God and we walk with God.  In this community, everyone is valued and no one is an object that can be cast aside or treated as less valuable.  Women, children, people of color, gay people and transgendered people, immigrants and refugees, Native Americans, people of other faiths or different political persuasions, the list goes on and on of people who throughout history have been objectified and treated as something other than beloved children of God.   In our present day, we can all to easily fall into considering those who think differently that we do, or look different, or come from a different place, or orient differently to be somehow less worthy of consideration as a beloved child of God.  Jesus tells us that when we treat anyone as someone other than a beloved child of God, we are choosing death.  When we live as a community grounded in God’s love for every human being, and we walk in that love, we choose life.  The instructions may not be easy, but they are very simple.  Choose life.

                                                          Amen.