Deuteronomy 30:15-20; Matthew 5:21-37
February 13, 2011
Choosing Life
Joanna Harader
Some Sunday mornings here at Peace Mennonite, we don’t have a sermon at all. When I do preach, I try to keep it short. Mark Twain said that “no sinner is ever saved after the first twenty minutes of a sermon.” And I have a hunch he’s right. So it is a rare event that this morning we have not just one, but three sermons. Before you start checking your watches in a panic, though, I’ll tell you that you’ve already heard two of them.
The Old Testament reading this morning from Deuteronomy is part of Moses’ sermon to the Israelites as they gathered on the plain of Moab, just outside the promised land. Moses has led the people out of their slavery in Egypt. He has been wandering with them in the wilderness for about forty years. He has listened to their whining. He has seen God’s provision. He has brought down the ten commandments and destroyed their idols. He has laughed and wept with these people. He has encouraged them, scolded them, led them the best he knew how toward the life that God had promised.
Now Moses is near death. He looks out at his people and he knows their tendency to fight with each other when things get difficult; their tendency to abandon God when it seems that another path will be easier. Summoning energy he barely has at age 120, and he preaches one last sermon. He tells the people what they must do to fully live out their calling as the people of God; to inherit the blessings promised by Yahweh. And the passage we heard this morning is the heart, the impassioned conclusion, of the sermon:
I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses.” And, in a point that many a preaching professor would mark as “stating the obvious; talking down to your congregation,” Moses tells the people to “Choose life so that you and your descendants may live.”
“Choose life.” It sounds simple, right? But the history of the Israelites is riddled with examples of people choosing death and curses over life and blessings. Eve and Adam eating the fruit. Cain killing his brother. Esau selling his birthright for porridge. Sarah abusing Hagar. Lot’s wife looking back toward Sodom. Building the tower of Babel . . . it’s a long, long list.
“Choose life,” Moses says to the people. But he knows and they know that it’s not that simple. How does one choose life? It can get tricky. So God, through Moses, gives further instruction:
“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.”
The people are to choose life by obeying the commandments of God.
Fast forward over a millennium to our Gospel reading for the morning. We are listening in on another sermon–this time it is Jesus preaching his Sermon on the Mount. Whereas Moses was preaching a sermon to sum up his time of spiritual leadership, Jesus is preaching this sermon toward the beginning of his ministry. Moses was closing the curtain. Jesus is setting the stage.
Still, the central concern is the same. Moses tells the people that they are to choose life and blessing. Jesus opens his sermon with what we refer to as the Beatitudes: blessed are . . . blessed are . . .
Both of these sermons seek to steer God’s people onto the path that leads to life and blessing. And both of these sermons suggest that the way to move toward life and blessing is to follow the Law. That would be the capital “L” Law. The commandments of God. The message of both Moses and Jesus is that we choose life by following God’s commandments.
Jesus’ listeners knew these commandments. Had grown up with the teachings of the Law. And I think it is reasonable to assume that Jesus’ listeners, for the most part, obeyed these commandments. At least, they obeyed them in the most narrow, literal ways.
Just like with brothers and sisters harassing each other in the back seat of the car or business executives finding loopholes in regulations–we all know it is possible to follow the rules without acting in a way that honors the rules.
So Jesus’ task as a preacher is not to convince to the people to obey the commandments, but to reinterpret these commandments for a people who have become lazy with obedience. And about a century later, the writer of Matthew’s gospel likewise wishes to push his readers beyond the letter of the law and inspire obedience to God’s deeper call. And today, we need to look at these laws again. We need to ask ourselves what it looks like for us to follow God’s deepest intent. When we look beyond the checklist of rules, we see that at the heart of these commandments is a deep concern for the quality of our relationships. A concern that all of our relationships be grounded in the love of God.
The passage we read this morning contains the first four of Jesus’ six “you have heard it said” statements. At their root, all six of these statements deal with being in life-giving, blessing-producing relationships with the people around us.
The first of the statements is that law says we should not murder. Jesus points out that even thinking murderous thoughts, harboring grudges, can kill a person’s spirit. It can certainly kill a relationship.
The fourth statement, the final one of this reading, is that the law says we should not swear falsely. But, says Jesus, just because you’re not under oath doesn’t mean you can lie. And it won’t do to technically tell the truth when your intent is basically dishonest.
Jesus’ reinterpretations of these laws regarding murder and honesty seem pretty applicable today. And it is clear to see how choosing respect for the life of other people, choosing honesty, is a choice for life, a choice for blessing.
I think the middle two statements here have some more cultural baggage from the first century. They need to be unpacked a bit more. We need to consider what these laws mean for us in 2011.
Plus, who doesn’t want to talk about adultery and divorce on the eve of Valentine’s Day?
The law says that we should not commit adultery. For Jesus’ audience, this law was understood mostly in terms of property rights. Sleeping with another man’s wife meant that the other man could not know for sure that his wife’s children were his–and this is a major problem in a culture that understands immortality to be achieved through offspring.
Then Jesus comes up with this line: “Everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” The very idea of committing adultery in one’s heart is absolutely ridiculous from the perspective of property law. Turns out the commandment is not about property rights at all. It is about the relationships between spouses, the relationships between strangers. In particular it is about those with power (in this situation the men) seeing those without power (here, the women) as valuable human beings.
Frankly, this is one that I think we need to face today on the level of literal law and the deeper level of respectful relationships in general. There seems to be a prevalent attitude in the broader culture that sleeping around is no big deal.
In the movie Please Give (spoiler alert), the forty-something dad sneaks away to have sex with a twenty-something massage therapist. He does this several times. His teenage daughter figures it out. His wife doesn’t. And towards the end of the movie he quits sleeping with the younger woman and all implications are that he is a hero and his family is stronger and healthier for his liaison.
Movie after movie, TV show after TV show suggest that adultery is no big deal; that it has no consequences. I have talked with too many victims of adultery to believe that it is no big deal.
Adultery is a big deal, not because it goes against some Puritanical social taboo, but because it hurts people’s hearts deeply–and it shatters relationships that should be held sacred.
And Jesus says, “Everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” Now, it takes one kind of willpower to avoid adultery. And many of us can confidently say that we have obeyed the commandment about adultery. It’s something else entirely to avoid lust. To avoiding considering people as objects that could potentially meet our needs, rather than viewing them as human beings with needs of their own.
Each time we look at another human being with lust, we reduce that person to a physical object, which makes it very difficult to form respectful, loving relationships. And in terms of our sacred commitments, we all know that there are ways to cheat on your spouse without actually having sex with someone else. E-mail and Facebook and Chat Rooms provide ample opportunity for people to engage in emotional affairs.
Following the law, choosing life and blessing, means that we deeply honor the sacred commitments we have made to another, and that we deeply honor the full humanity of each person we encounter.
The law also said that a man must give his wife a certificate of divorce if he wanted to leave her. Without such a certificate, a once-married woman would be absolutely destitute–this is a law designed to protect women.
Jesus says that giving a certificate of divorce is not enough. It is not OK to break the marriage covenant just because you’ve decided you’re tired of the relationship; just because you think you’d be happier with someone else; just because the other person has put on a little weight or doesn’t keep the house clean enough.
Marriage, for those who wish to follow God’s Law, is more than a legal agreement that can be easily dissolved by another legal agreement. Marriage is a sacred relationship that should be nurtured and lived into. For Jesus’ listeners, this was a pretty radical statement, and one that served to protect vulnerable women and children who could basically–as far as the law was concerned–be abandoned on a whim.
Today, of course, some Christians go from one harmful extreme–you can drop a spouse at any time for any reason-to the other harmful extreme.
I had a student at KU who had grown up in very conservative, fundamentalist, Christian churches. She said that her father had beaten her mother frequently. When her mom talked to the pastor about the abuse, he told her it was God’s will for her to stay in the marriage. That divorce was a sin.
Some of you grew up in churches where divorced people were not allowed to serve in leadership positions. Probably churches where the pastor would not officiate at a second marriage.
Divorce on a whim and rigid prohibitions against divorce both extremes go against the teaching of Christ. When it comes to the question of divorce, Jesus does not say “never,” he says “except.”
There may come a time when a legal marriage ceases to be a marriage in any other sense. A time when one or both of the partners have dehumanized the other and made the relationship toxic. A time when this relationship that should be life-giving is deal death–to the spirit or even to the body.
In the first century, Jesus’ teaching on divorce served to protect the rights of the vulnerable. Today’s Church should honor the state of marriage and we should not take divorce lightly. We also should not become so rigid in our condemnation of divorce that the vulnerable are endangered. That people are forced toward death and curse rather than life and blessing.
In order to choose life, we must obey God’s commandments. We must obey not merely the technicalities of the Law, but we must live by the deeper intent of the law–working toward loving, blessed relationships with all people.
God sets before us life and death. Blessings and curses. And God says “choose.”
Only it’s not that easy–not always easy to know the good or to do the good. The choice for life is often difficult. As one pastoral colleague pointed out, many people have died this past week in Egypt as a result of choosing life.
The choice is not always easy, but it is always possible. God encourages us through Moses’ sermon:
Now what I am commanding you today is not too difficult for you or beyond your reach. It is not up in heaven, so that you have to ask, “Who will ascend into heaven to get it and proclaim it to us so we may obey it?” Nor is it beyond the sea, so that you have to ask, “Who will cross the sea to get it and proclaim it to us so we may obey it?” No, the word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart so you may obey it.
Thanks be to God.
[…] Old Testament reading in parallel with the New Testament reading (which is the same thing I did with last Sunday’s sermon). Right now my thoughts are being drawn to the tensions and complements between law and […]