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| "Poppy Nova" by Alan King, on Flickr |
Deuteronomy 30:15-20
See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity. 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. But if your heart turns away and you do not hear, but are led astray to bow down to other gods and serve them, I declare to you today that you shall perish; you shall not live long in the land that you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess. I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live, loving the Lord your God, obeying him, and holding fast to him; for that means life to you and length of days, so that you may live in the land that the Lord swore to give to your ancestors, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob.
Luke 14:25-33
Now large crowds were traveling with [Jesus;] and he turned and said to them, “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple. For which of you, intending to build a tower, does not first sit down and estimate the cost, to see whether he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who see it will begin to ridicule him, saying, ‘This fellow began to build and was not able to finish.’ Or what king, going out to wage war against another king, will not sit down first and consider whether he is able with ten thousand to oppose the one who comes against him with twenty thousand? If he cannot, then, while the other is still far away, he sends a delegation and asks for the terms of peace. So therefore, none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.”
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”Choose life, that you may live.”
It makes a great bumper sticker slogan, doesn’t it? A great meme? A great motto to live by?
Sigh. If only it were that simple.
Our words from Deuteronomy this morning come as Moses and the Israelites are standing in sight of the promised land, the land that they have been longing for all these forty years. Moses is about to hand over leadership to Joshua, who will be the one to lead them over into the land to conquer it. But before Moses steps down, he gives a long farewell speech to the people, reminding them of the covenant that God has made with them: the promise of a nation given to Abraham, the promise of a freedom from slavery and a life-giving law given through Moses, the covenant promise of God's enduring faithfulness to his people.
And here, on the verge of stepping fully out of the bondage of Egypt and into the fulfillment of their liberation in the promised land, Moses says to the people, "See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity...blessings and curses. Choose life so that you...may live."
For the Israelites, these are words of blessing and of hope, reminding them of who they are, where they have been, and where they are going. They are a spiritual pep talk to a group of wilderness wanderers who have the end of their exodus story in their grasp.
The trick for us, when we read this passage, far removed from the time of Moses and the exodus, is not to misread it as a passage assuring us blessings and prosperity if we just make the right choices in God's eyes.
It is a dangerous and yet popular misunderstanding of humanity's relationship to God that we are given our lot in life based on the choices we make. That natural disasters are curses and consequences for a nation's unfaithfulness. That people who have more faith in God or better faith in God receive more wealth. That God really just wants us to be happy and to be good people. That our own life choices are directly parallel to God's response to us. As if all we have to do is say, "I choose life!" and then God will give us all the things that make us happy.
Let's be honest here. Human beings have never been all that good at making good choices. We have never been all that good at choosing life. Adam and Eve had a choice: life or the knowledge of good and evil, and what did they do? They ate the fruit. Cain had a choice: honor his brother even in his jealousy, or let his anger get the best of him, and what did he do? He killed Abel in a fit of rage. The Israelites had a choice: wait patiently down the mountain for Moses to return with a word from the Lord, or fashion a more immediate idol to worship, and what did they do? Enter the golden calf, stage right.
Even now, as the Israelites stare salvation in the eye, we know that their story is still in its infancy. It's only the book of Deuteronomy. And while they will indeed cross into the promised land, they will also continue to make poor choices. They will worship other gods. They will neglect the poor in their midst. They will forget about God's law. They will trample the Sabbath with self-interest. Their story does not have the happy ending that we want it to have, where they choose life and they receive life, blessings, and prosperity.
Friends, at no point in our history of faith has it been such that human beings have been able to choose themselves into life-giving relationship with God. And at no point in our history of faith has it been such that human beings have been able to choose, without failing, the way of unwavering faithfulness to God and God's commands.
Which is why we have to remember that the exhortation to "choose life" comes not as a way into covenant with God, but as a calling borne out of the covenant that God has already made with his people.
Within the framework of God's love for Israel, they make good choices and bad choices. They face prosperity and adversity. They face times of blessing and times of exile. And through it all, God, no matter how angry and frustrated he gets, holds true to his side of the covenant, even if it takes some courageous prophets to talk him off the ledge.
It is within the framework of God’s love for Israel that they can reach out to grasp the life that is ahead of them. And it is within the framework of God's love for all creation, shown in the cross-shaped life of Jesus, that we, too, are promised salvation and are charged with the task of "choosing life," even if we don't always succeed, even when we face times of trial and fear and frustration.
In our reading from Luke today, Jesus goes on yet another discipleship rant, as he has done so many times over the last chapters, warning the crowds that have once again gathered around him that following him is a costly task. He keeps talking about the demanding side of discipleship, because he worries that the crowds think that following Jesus will bring them easy lives of blessing and prosperity; that following Jesus is a quick path to a good life. He warns them that being a disciple of Christ means bearing his cross despite counting the cost…and that the cost might be extravagant.
This is our calling, too, that we bear the cross despite counting the cost. But here’s the thing that we sometimes forget: We are indeed called to bear the cross, but we don’t choose the cross. The cross chooses us. We already bear it.
At our baptisms, we have already been marked with the cross of Christ and claimed by the Holy Spirit. For most of us, that cross was given to us at infancy, before we had any power to take it up on our own power. This cross is traced over our foreheads in times of healing and times of anointing and times of blessing. This cross is what we might trace over our heads in the shower each morning to remind us of our baptism. It is the cross that we dust on our heads on Ash Wednesday and the cross that we trace over the head of the casket when we bury our dead.
And while the cross was exceedingly expensive for Jesus - demanding of him his very life - this same cross is a blessing to us. Jesus says, "my yoke is easy and my burden is light." The good news is that this is not a cross of suffering or reproach, but an identity: “Child of God.”
The cross is both God's claim on us and our claim on God. It is the center of our redemption, it is the heart of God’s love and grief for our world, it is both an event in the life of Jesus and a description of his mission. The cross is the heart of our salvation, and what that really means is that what is saving the world, what is giving life to the world, in every moment, is the sacrificial work of Jesus - in life and in death - on behalf of those who have no power, strength, or ability to save their own lives.
By faith, we recognize the power of Christ and his cross in our lives, and so what is left for us to do is not to decide whether or not to pick up the cross - that decision isn't ours to make - but rather to decide how to live as cross-marked people with a cross-shaped calling. Hint: this is where we get to do that whole “choose life, that you and your descendants may live” thing.
See, the cost of the cross, like the cost of a man building a tower or a king going into battle, is the cost of clinging relentlessly to the goal and promise that God has set before us. The cost of the cross is the cost of choosing life at all costs, of seeking glimmers of life and hope even when it looks like there is only death and destruction around us.
The cost of the cross is that we proclaim life - real life - into a world that wants to seek cheap and easy paths to short-term, fleeting blessings. A world where we choose the pursuit of youth at all costs, thinking that we can somehow cheat death. A world where we seek prosperity at all costs, thinking that we can somehow buy happiness. A world where we seek self-satisfaction at all costs, thinking that the highest goal is our own self-worth. A world where we put our faith in miracle drugs and heroic politicians and magic superfoods and shiny as-seen-on-TV purchases, all which offer us the illusion that we can merely choose life and prosperity and blessing for ourselves.
Except that these empty promises of life come cheap, and fall apart quickly. These shallow promises of life tell us lies that are so easy to believe, but they cannot provide us relief when we have seen our homes wash away in floods, or when we have seen our loved ones snatched away by chronic illness and death, or when we continue to watch wars and rumors of wars unfold around us.
Friends, the only thing that actually brings life is the cross that marks each of us. And I'm not just talking about the cross as the moment when Jesus died on the cross, but about his whole life and disposition, the way that he bore a cross long before he was nailed to one, by bearing the burdens of those who had nobody to carry them, and bearing the weight of those who had no other relief, and bearing the burden of speaking out for the sake oft he poor and the oppressed, and bearing the burden of standing up to the status quo, which benefitted the privileged on the backs of the lowly. Jesus bore the cross from the moment that he understood his life’s mission as choosing life for others and bearing their burdens as his own. The cross of Jesus’s life is what let us reach out and choose the life that really is life; eternal and abundant life; life that is now and life that is forever.
It is by the cross that we can find life even in the ruins. It is by the cross that we can find the heart of God even in the depth of suffering. It is by the cross that we bear the sufferings of others and offer our world a vision of resurrection. The life-giving cross calls and empowers us to choose life, holy life, God-given life for all people, and all creation, in all times and in all places. And darn it all if that choice for life might cost us our own lives in the process as we die to self and then rise again to new life in Christ.
Choosing life is our vocation. It is our highest calling. On this Labor Day weekend, let us consider that all of our labors are given new meaning when we recognize the calling of the cross in them and through them.
When we are teaching or farming or dealing with spreadsheets or fixing cars or writing out lecture notes or tending to our families, we bear the cross. Because faith doesn’t take Monday through Friday off while we work on other things. Faith and life and hope and redemption permeate every moment of our God-given lives.
Here in worship, we touch the water of baptism to remind us of the cross that we have already been given. We eat and drink the meal of Christ’s passion to remind us of the cross that Christ has already born for us. And from these touchpoints, we go back into the world for the rest of the week, called to choose life at all costs, called to remember the sign of the cross that claims us as God’s children, called to a life of hope through good times and through bad.
Brothers and sisters, chosen by God, you have been marked with the cross of Christ and sealed by the Holy Spirit, now and forever.
Go forth, this day and always, to choose life, that you…and all people…and all creation may live.
Amen.
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