A few initial observations about this scripture passage:
The commandment to choose life is within us, not far away. It is in our mouth and our heart. When I was about 12, I wanted someone to tell me what to believe, how to act, so I could go to heaven when I died. This passage says that knowledge of the Divine is within us. We just have to listen.
The choice is ours. We have free will to decide what to do. We can choose life and prosperity or death and destruction. But whichever choice we make, God will be paying attention.
“You” is plural. We choose not only for ourselves but for our communities, our families, our future generations. Our choices matter. They have ripple effects.
If we choose to center our lives in God, to love our neighbors and ourselves as God calls us to do, we will live in a way that is life-giving.
If we bow down to other gods, we will not live in a life-giving way. What other gods can you think of that you or others might worship? Gods that take you away from what is loving and life-giving?
Money
Fear
The need to be right—which makes others wrong
Pride
Ambition
Racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, ageism, ableism—all the ways we “other” people
God calls heaven and earth to bear witness against the people if they do not choose life. Think how the earth bears witness against us today with climate change. We have taken more than our share, lived beyond our means for the past couple of centuries. The earth has paid the price.
Choose life so that you and your descendants may live: this is the Native American concept of making choices now that will continue to benefit people seven generations from now. Live in harmony with creation and with other humans, not taking too much, but just enough. I’m reading Suzanne Simard’s book Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest. She notes how our modern logging practices clearcut whole forests at once, wiping out the entire ecosystem, whereas Indigenous people took trees that had fallen down, or they stripped bark from standing cedar trees in order to weave baskets and clothes, but they never took enough bark to kill the tree.
When we live in harmony with heaven and earth, we don’t just take; we give back as well. Farmers know that if they just keep growing crops in the same soil year after year without amending the soil, without feeding it nutrients, the yields will diminish to nothing over time. European settlers on the East Coast farmed the land until it was worn out and then just moved west. The land was treated as disposable. Farmers in the Midwest wore out the soil to the point that we got the Dust Bowl in the 1930s, because there was nothing to hold that soil down. You have to put back into the soil; you can’t just take and take. In Braiding Sweetgrass, Robin Wall Kimmerer talks about asking permission of the plants before you harvest. Don’t take all of it. And give something back, a thanks, a gift. Reciprocity.
We get to share what we have. Apples on Catherine’s farm are shared. Humans get as many as they can use: we eat them fresh, make applesauce, press them in the cider press for juice, dry them, freeze them. Sheep get a bag of apples every day during the season. Chickens get apples. The dogs find themselves some apples. The wasps and ants get some apples. This is life-giving abundance. Everybody eats.
What is life-giving for Prospect? We’ve been working on that with the Thriving Prospect conversations. Gatherings to worship, gatherings over food, opportunities to learn, opportunities to reach out into the community—these can all be life-giving. We will host a workshop soon on how to end sexual abuse of children. We will have a class starting in January called “This I Believe,” to help us write our own statements of belief. We are finding opportunities for life-giving connections.
What is life-giving for our larger society?
We are about to start voting. Choose life. Which candidates, which initiatives do you think will create a more loving society, a more caring society for people of all ages and abilities and backgrounds? Vote for that. Choose life. Which candidates will work for peace around the world? Vote for them. Which candidates and initiatives will best help us cope with climate change? Vote accordingly. The initiatives set before us in this season are mostly appealing to the desire for each rich individual to hang onto every last penny, to not share for the greater good. That means that voting NO on these initiatives is actually how we choose life.
We can also help get out the vote. The Social and Environmental Justice Team set a goal to invite Prospect folks to write 1,000 postcards to help get out the vote around the country. All of those postcards have now been distributed and many have been filled out and returned, ready to be mailed in a week or two. Some of you have participated in other postcard-writing efforts as well. Some of you are knocking on doors, either here or around the country.
Do we want our larger society to live mostly in fear and paranoia? If so, we must portray immigrants as thieves coming to steal our jobs and possessions. We must be suspicious of people of other races and orientations. But if we live centered in God, we might instead support groups like Annunciation House in El Paso, which welcomes undocumented immigrants and helps them get on their feet; or the Methodist church in Tukwila that flung its doors open to all the asylum seekers that were landing in Seattle with nothing. If we live centered in God, we march in the Pride Parade to celebrate the broad spectrum of our diversity. We affirm that all lives matter but that Black lives in particular have been oppressed in this society for centuries and that we must do better for and with our Black siblings.
Choose life. Participate in the greater good.
All through this time of wandering in the wilderness, God has promised to show up for the people and not abandon them in the desert. God has appeared to them in a pillar of fire and cloud. God has provided manna and water so that the people have enough to sustain themselves. God has also asked the people to be faithful to this divine-human relationship. And time after time, the people have panicked and lashed out at Moses, demanding that he get God to fix things for them. We’ve talked in previous sermons this summer about God giving the people tools for agency. Here God makes it even more explicit. God gives the people choices and tells them to choose to show up to what is life-giving—that is, show up to what is centered in this God-human covenant. And of course that is what God asks of us as well: keep showing up to God.
Next week we will return to our newly refurbished sanctuary after spending much of the past two months wandering in the wilderness, worshiping in other spaces. We take back with us the certainty that God never abandons us, that God provides for us, and that God gives us agency and choices. We take back with us the reminder that God asks us to show up to this divine relationship. We continue to dwell in the uncertainty of what the future holds, both for Prospect and for our nation. But we know that if we nurture that divine relationship, center our lives in it, all else will flow from it. Choose God. Choose life. Amen.