Love in Action

Love in Action

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

“Love. It’s what makes a Subaru a Subaru.” Or at least it is according to an ad I saw on the TV this morning. This morning I want to talk to you not about Subaru but about love. You know, love is a really big deal. It’s a big deal in popular music for example. Nearly all of the songs that become popular are about love, romantic love that is, either requited or unrequited. Love’s a big deal in the movies. I’m sure thousands of movies have been made with the plot structure boy and girl get together, boy and girl separate (usually because of some silly misunderstanding), boy and girl get back together for a happy ending. Love’s a big deal in our personal lives too, or at least it is, thank you Lord, in mine and I hope in yours. Out there in the world love is a really big deal.

Love is a really big deal in the Christian faith too. The creedal confession of our mother faith, Judaism, contains the line “love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.” Deuteronomy 6:5. Jesus took that line as part of what we Christians call the Great Commandment. In the oldest form of it we have it says, among other things, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength,” and “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Mark 12:30-31. At 1 John 4:8 we read that “God is love.” Ask a lot of Christians what their faith is about and they might well say “love.” Christianity is founded in love. Christianity is grounded in love. Jesus, the one we confess to be our Lord and Savior, is all about love. You just can’t have Christianity without love.

Which all sounds well and good of course, and it is well and good; but here’s the thing. Christians as much as anyone else are unfortunately prone to throwing words around without being sure that they know what the words mean. We tend to assume what words mean, and we tend to assume that everyone who uses a word means the same thing by it. In reality when we’re pressed to define a word we’re using we often can’t do it. And another reality is that two people may be using the same word but meaning very different things by it. It may sound like they’re agreeing with each other. They may think they’re agreeing with each other when in fact they aren’t really agreeing with each other at all because they are assuming different meanings of the word they’re using.

Well, the same thing is true about the word love. What does that word mean? What is love? Those are really important questions for a faith that claims to be founded on and grounded in love. So this morning I want to talk to you about what Jesus meant by the word love, what the Bible means by the word love, especially the New Testament.

The New Testament was written in a particular form of the Greek language. That language had several different words for different kinds of love, but the one that gets used throughout the New Testament is the word agape. It is used both as a noun and in a different form as a verb. We are to live agape. We are to have agape for God and our neighbors. So what does that Greek word agape really mean? It gets translated as love, but love after all can mean several different things. Sometimes it means no more than “like a lot.” We may assume that we know what love is, but it really is a pretty vague word that we use to mean a lot of different things.

Well, that Greek word agape isn’t nearly as vague as our English word love. It means a particular kind of love. It doesn’t mean like a lot. It doesn’t mean have warm feelings about. It doesn’t mean be fond of. It doesn’t mean want to spend time with. There are all kinds of things it doesn’t mean. What it does mean is to sacrifice, to give of oneself, for another. One online definition of it I found says it means “selfless, sacrificial, unconditional love.” It is love that says at least I love another as much as I love myself, or maybe more so. It is love that cares so much for another that it will give up its own comfort, its own wealth, even its own life for the other. In the Gospel of John Jesus says no one has greater love than to sacrifice his or her life for a friend. In Matthew Jesus says we are to love our enemies, which I suppose means be willing to give up one’s life for one’s enemy, as hard as that may be to understand and even harder to do. It’s not that those other things that we mean by love are bad or wrong. They aren’t, or at least they don’t have to be; but Jesus means something quite specific when he says love. He means give of yourself. He means think of the other first. He means understand that other people, even people you dislike or even despise, are as important to God as you are and that God loves them as much as God loves you. Love is really big deal for Jesus. It’s what life is all about, and the love he’s talking about can be pretty scary stuff. Love like that people I think I hate? Really? Yes. Really.

Now, it’s actually pretty easy to look up the definition of the word agape and say what it means. It’s a whole lot harder to figure out what that kind of love means for us as we go about our lives. Our lesson from Luke this morning gives us a pretty good example of what living agape does not mean. The rich man in Luke’s story of the rich man and the poor man named Lazarus pretty obviously wasn’t living agape. He didn’t care that Lazarus was suffering. Lazarus, a poor man apparently of no worldly estate, was nothing to him. Lazarus was ill, hungry, thoroughly miserable. The rich man of our story didn’t care. He feasted on rich food every day and gave Lazarus nothing. Luke uses an image of a tormented or blessed afterlife to say that God condemns what the rich man did, or rather didn’t do, and loves Lazarus as much as God loves the rich man, or maybe more. Living biblical love is first of all not being uncaring. It is not ignoring the needs of those who suffer. By the way, this story is one of the very few places where the New Testament actually has an image of a blessed or cursed afterlife. Sadly, our faith has come to be largely about what kind of afterlife we’re going to have when in fact the Bible is hardly about that question at all.

OK. Fair enough. Love is not being uncaring. But what else does it mean? Well, what it means for us depends on what circumstance we find ourselves in. It applies to most everything we do in life. If applies to our personal relationships with our family. It means caring at least as much about your spouse and children, if you have them, as caring about yourself. It means not insisting on getting your own way all the time when disagreements arise. It applies to relationships in the work place. If you are an employer or manager of employees it means caring about their wellbeing as much as your own. It means not exploiting them. It means paying them a fair wage with fair benefits. If you’re an employee it means caring about your employer too. It applies to our relationships in church. Here it means caring about what others think. It means not insisting on getting your own way. It means taking care of those of us who may be in need from time to time. It means paying your pastor a fair compensation. It means resolving disagreements amicably and loving the people with whom you disagree. Living agape means all of those things.

And it means a lot more than those things. Agape applies to our relationship to the world at large as much as it applies to our personal relationships. In the context of the larger world agape means caring about social justice. It means being committed to social justice, because as a very wise man once said, justice is love in action; and agape is much more action than it is feeling. Being committed to social justice is really nothing more than being committed to the wellbeing of each and every person on the whole planet earth. It means caring for the earth itself, for the earth sustains the life and the wellbeing of every living creature on it. Agape in the world means being committed to ending oppression and discrimination against all people. We don’t want those things for ourselves, so agape calls us to work to end them for everyone. Agape in the world means being committed to peace. Peace in every context. Peace as the absence of violence and the presence of justice. We don’t want violence and injustice for ourselves, so agape calls us to resist them for everyone.

So Jesus calls us to lives of love, and he means by that lives of caring and giving not for ourselves but for everyone else. He means lives of action grounded in love, not lives merely of feelings. Few of us do that kind of love very well, myself included. That’s where God’s grace comes in, for God loves us even when we fail at living agape. But God’s forgiving us when we fail doesn’t mean we aren’t called to keep trying. To keep striving to live lives of true Christian love for the people we know and for all the people we don’t know. Lives of caring in personal relationships and lives committed to justice and peace in our larger relationships. That’s Christ’s call to each one of us, and God is there to help us do it if we’ll just open ourselves to God’s care. Can we do it? Not perfectly of course, but better than we have. With God’s help. Amen.

Who Do We Serve?

Who Do We Serve?

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

September 18, 2016

Scripture: Amos 8:4-7; Luke 16:1-13; 1Timothy 6:10.

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

I want to start this morning by asking you a question. What does the Bible say more about than it says about anything else? Sex? Power? Sin? Well, actually it says almost nothing about the first of those things. It talks about the second, power, but often only indirectly. It talks about sin but often doesn’t bother to define it. No, what the Bible says more about than it says about anything else is actually money. One site I found online says that the Bible has about 500 verses about prayer, fewer than 500 verses about faith, and over 2,000 verses about money. Jesus actually says more about money or wealth than he says about anything else. Money is a really big deal in the Bible.

The Bible says a lot about money, and it often says it in a context that makes money out to be something really bad, or at least really problematic. We heard one passage where money is associated with evil in our passage from Amos this morning. That passage doesn’t use the word money, but it pretty clearly is addressing, and condemning, people who have a lot of it. In that passage the prophet Amos blasts people who resent religious practices that keep them from making money, who cheat others, especially the poor, so that they get more money out of them, who “do away with the poor of the land,” meaning I suppose so abuse poor people that they actually die, which did happen quite a lot in biblical times. Amos judges the wealthy in some of the strongest language in the Bible. In one of my favorite verses in the whole Bible he says “let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream.” That’s at Amos 5:24. You can look it up. By both justice and righteousness he means social and economic justice, justice that protects and serves the poor rather than the rich. Amos doesn’t condemn money per se, but he sure condemns the people who have it. He condemns them for valuing money over people, all of the people of their time and place, and especially the poor. That is pretty much the whole Bible’s attitude toward money.

And I suspect that some of you may be thinking yes, that’s right, for money is the root of all evil. A lot of people think that the Bible says that money is the root of all evil. Well, here’s the thing. The Bible doesn’t actually say that. What it says is “The love of money is a root of all kinds of evil.” That’s at 1 Timothy 6:10. You can look that up too. See, in the Bible’s way of looking at the matter, money isn’t the problem. It’s our relationship to money that’s the problem. 1 Timothy says it’s the love of money that is a root of evil, not money itself. That verse often gets misquoted, but is about our relationship to money not about money itself.

We heard it again in our passage from Luke. There’s that parable of the shrewd manager. It is perhaps a bit startling when it tells us to be shrewd, to use worldly wealth to gain friends. I suppose there are lots of sermons in that part of the passage, but what struck me this week about the text is how it ends: “No servant can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and Money’ Jesus, like the author of 1 Timothy, is talking here about our relationship to money, not about money itself. 1 Timothy speaks of the love of money. Jesus speaks of serving money. Both of these texts are pointing us toward something more than money itself.

Maybe it’s because by American standards I don’t have much of it, but I find it really easy to think that money in and of itself leads to various kinds of evil. I used to work in a world where a lot of people had a lot of money, a lot more than I ever had working there as an employee not a partner. I see how money corrupts American politics. I see the great gap in prosperity between the wealthy in our country and the poor. Last Monday I was up in Skagit County representing the Faith Action Network in connection with a vote to form a union by farmworkers, most if not all of them Hispanic. I was powerfully struck by the presence there of these poor laborers and the several quite opulent houses you see dotting the landscape. It’s really easy for me to think that money in and of itself creates social inequality and political corruption.

Yet that’s not what the Bible says about money. Now, clearly money created problems in the worlds of the Bible, as we see in our passage from Amos. But the Bible is in most respects quite wise, and it is often a lot more nuanced than are the people who use it as a weapon in support of various causes in our day. It doesn’t say money is the problem. It says that an unhealthy relationship to money is the problem. Serving money is the problem. Loving money is the problem. So what are we to make of these biblical warnings about the dangers of a bad relationship to money?

Well, maybe we can start to answer that question by looking at what our biblical texts imply about the nature of a healthy relationship to money. If loving money is the problem that creates an unhealthy relationship to money, then I suppose not loving money is part of a healthy relationship to it. If serving money is the problem that creates an unhealthy relationship to money, then I suppose not serving money is part of a healthy relationship to it. But what does it mean to love money? What does it mean to serve money? I think some of my life experience have a bit to say about that, so I’ll share a little of that experience with you here. Like I said, I used to work in a world where a lot of people had a lot of money, both the partner lawyers I worked for and many of their clients. I sensed quite strongly that, with a few exceptions, the people who had the most money were the people who cared the most about money. In biblical terms they were people who loved money and served money. Again with exceptions, it seemed to be general rule in that world of wealthy lawyers that the ones who cared the most about money cared the least about lawyer ethics. Many of them saw the ethical rules by which lawyers are bound as unnecessary interference with their ability to make more money. They didn’t care what people or what causes they represented as long as they could make money doing it.

I think we see the same dynamic in the larger world of our American society. Greedy wheeler-dealers on Wall Street caused the worst collapse of the American economy since 1929 a few years ago as they thought up ever shadier schemes to get more money out of people with little concern for what those schemes actually meant for the people whose money they were taking. A British petroleum company cut corners to save money and nearly destroyed the environment of Gulf of Mexico a while back. Many other examples could easily be noted. In all of those cases it wasn’t really money that was the problem. It was the love of money that was the problem. It was serving money not the common good that was the problem. In all of those cases loving and serving money hurt people and/or hurt God’s good earth. Love of money is indeed the root of all kinds of evil.

So if that’s what an unhealthy relationship to money looks like, what does a healthy one look like? I think Jesus implies a good answer to that question when he says that you cannot serve God and money. Clearly Jesus calls us to serve God in all aspects of our lives including in our relationship to money. We learn from Jesus that serving God means first of all serving God’s people, all of God’s people but especially those whom the world puts down, rejects, or oppresses. Serving God means caring for people. It means caring about their health and their wellbeing. It means caring about their opportunities to lead a whole life. It means not kowtowing to those in power but lifting up the lowly. It means, as we read in the Gospel of Matthew, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, visiting the sick and the prisoners. If serving God means doing those things, and it does, then money can play a significant role in our service of God. It can pay for housing for the homeless. It can pay for clothes for the naked. It can pay for food for the hungry. It can pay for medical care for the sick and injured. Some people with a lot of money get that about money, Bill and Melinda Gates for example. They have a really healthy relationship to money. Yes, they keep a lot of it for themselves, but they also give enormous amounts of it away to support programs the aid the poor all over the world.

None of us has that kind of money, as far as I know. If you do, let me talk to you about tithing. But we all have some money. And that means that we are all faced with decisions about what to do with our money. I often think that the old cliché WWJD, what would Jesus do, is flip and even silly, but in this context maybe it isn’t. Jesus had no money as far as we know, but it’s easy to see what he would have done with it if he’d had it. Feed the hungry. House the homeless. Help the sick. Oppose injustice and oppression. Those things are the marks of a healthy relationship to money.

So who do we serve, God or money? That, I think, is a challenging question for all of us, or at least I know that it is for me. So let us wrestle with that question. Let us seek to serve God rather than money. Only by doing that can we be faithful disciples of our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

Lost and Found

Lost and Found

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

September 11, 2016

Scripture: Luke 15:1-10

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

So Jesus told a couple of little parables about things getting lost. We just heard them. In the first of them a sheep, one sheep out of a flock of 100 sheep, wanders off into the wilderness. The shepherd leaves the other 99 sheep in an unprotected place and goes looking for the one that got lost. He finds his lost sheep, takes it home, and throws a party to celebrate because the one that had been lost has been found. In the other a woman loses one of ten silver coins that she has. She searches high and low until she finds it. Then she calls her friends and neighbors in to celebrate because she too has found what she had lost. At the end of both of these parables Jesus says that there will be great rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents, more rejoicing even than the rejoicing there is over a larger number of righteous people who have no need of repentance, as if there actually were any such people. These little parables set up the much longer parable of a lost son that we know as the parable of the Prodigal Son, but we don’t get that one in the lectionary now. We get a lost sheep and a lost coin that get found. I think there’s a lot we can learn from both of these little parables, but this morning I want to focus on the lost sheep. A sheep of course isn’t a human being, but unlike a coin it is at least an living being with a will of sorts that reacts to situations in its life. So let’s talk about that lost sheep for a minute or two—or more.

The parable of the lost sheep is very short. It’s only 4 verses. Most of Jesus’ parables are very short, and because they are so short they usually leave us with a lot of questions that they don’t even explicitly raise much less try to answer. So it is with the parable of the lost sheep. Why, for example did this wayward sheep wander off? Curiosity maybe? Looking for something she didn’t have there in the flock with the shepherd? Absentmindedness, a simple failure to pay attention to where the flock was going? We don’t know. Jesus doesn’t tell us. Then how did our sheep filled with wanderlust react when the shepherd found her? Did she run to him for safety? Did she try to run away from him because she wanted her freedom? Was she entangled in thorns crying for help? Again, we don’t know. Jesus doesn’t tell us. How did she feel when the shepherd took her to his home instead of taking her back to the flock? Did she think she was about to become a mutton stew? Or was she pleased that so many people were celebrating over her discovery by the shepherd? Again, we don’t know. Jesus doesn’t tell us.

Now, I don’t think these are idle questions about Jesus’ parable of the lost sheep. See, Jesus’ parables are never merely about what they say. This parable isn’t really about sheep and shepherds. It’s about us. It’s about human beings who wander away from God and about how God responds to those wandering humans. And I think those questions are very real questions about how we humans are when we stray from God and when God comes looking for us and finds us. To illustrate, let me tell you a little of my own story of wandering away from God and getting found again. Perhaps I want to do that because I turned 70 yesterday, and that milestone birthday is feeling to me like an occasion for reminiscence and contemplation about my life, the life I’ve lived so far and the life I have left to live, however much life that may be.

See, I really identify with that lost sheep. I was raised in the church, First Congregational Church of Eugene, Oregon. I didn’t learn very much about God or about the Christian faith there, to be honest about it; but at least I was part of church in my early years. I was, but I wandered. I left the church when I was in high school. I told myself I left because all the good folks of that church were, in my arrogant teenage opinion, hypocrites. Actually, I left because I just didn’t fit in with the other teenagers of the church. I didn’t really fit in anywhere. I couldn’t leave school, but I could leave church; so I did. I didn’t feel any loss when I did. I perceived no need for God, no need for Jesus Christ, no need for a faith community. We all tend to be that way to some degree when we’re teenagers, I think. It’s part of our growing up, of our becoming independent, self-reliant people; and that’s not a bad thing. Be that as it may, I left the church behind; and I pretty much left God behind as well.

I didn’t really start to come back until the 1975-76 academic year. As some of you know, I spent that year in Moscow. Not Moscow, Idaho. Moscow Russia. Soviet Russia. Communist Russia. Aggressively atheistic Russia. That year my late wife Francie and I became regular attenders of the Anglo-American Church in Moscow, which is attached to the American and British Embassies. We became good friends of Pastor Mike Spangler, an American Presbyterian, and his family. Something about the gloomy, depressive atmosphere of Communist Moscow made faith in God and the Christian religion seem awfully appealing. When we came home in the summer of 1976 we joined what was then Pilgrim Congregational UCC on Capitol Hill in Seattle. I’ve been a church person most of the time since then. Was God using my time in Communist Russia to call me back home? Perhaps. It’s not always easy to know the answers to questions like that.

Those years between about 1963 and 1975 aren’t the only time I got lost and found in my life. I got lost big time starting in about 1994. That’s when I started to burn out on my profession at the time, law. That’s when something inside me first started to tell me that I’m a preacher not a lawyer. It took me three years of depression, of being really lost, before I had the courage and opportunity to accept God’s call to ordained ministry and go to seminary. During those years God called, and I said no. I said I can’t. I said that’s not what I want. I said I’m too old. I said I can’t afford it. Finally I said that those things may very well be true, but they don’t mater. Finally, I said yes.

And maybe that’s why I ask some of those questions about the parable of the lost sheep. See, in that parable all that happens is that the sheep gets lost, and the shepherd finds her. With us humans it’s a lot more complicated than that, or at least that’s what my personal experience of being lost and found tells me. I got lost. God found me, but I didn’t exactly go rushing back into God’s arms as the sheep in Jesus’ parable may have done when the shepherd found her. I resisted. I said no, and I think it works that way with a lot of us human types. I know that it worked that way with many of my colleagues in professional ministry. At the first orientation session I attended at seminary it just became a joke how many of us said “God called, and I hung up.” I suppose the shepherd could make the sheep go with him even if the sheep didn’t want to. It’s not that way with us. Our relationship with God is very much two-sided. Jesus told his parables about sheep, coins, and even sons getting lost to make the point that God is always looking for those who have gotten lost and always welcomes us back with joy and celebration. True enough, but of course unlike a sheep or a coin we humans are always free to say no. Yes, God seeks us. Yes, God finds us, but God doesn’t force us. Rather, God invites us. God calls us, but God doesn’t kidnap us. Whether we come to God or not is as much up to us as it is to God.

So here’s something I’ve learned as I begin my eighth decade on earth. When God calls, don’t hang up. When God finds you and invites you home, say yes. When God asks you to do some crazy, utterly nonsensical thing (like, say, go to seminary), say yes. When God calls you to do something you’re sure you can’t do and certainly don’t want to do, say yes. Because here’s the thing. The shepherd in Jesus’ parable took the wayward sheep home. That’s what God always wants to do with us. Take us home. Take us where we belong. Take us where we should have been all the time anyway. Take us to a place a safety, even if it may well not be the world’s notion of safety. Take us to a place of joy. Take us to a place of celebration over those who have said yes to God. That’s what I eventually got myself to do when God was calling me into ministry. People ask me if I like ministry better than law. I always say yes, going into ministry simply and quite literally saved my life.

That’s what God wants for everyone. Not going into ordained ministry, not for most folks although for some. But into something. Into some new way of being. Into some more faithful way of being. Into a way of being that leads to wholeness of life, that leads to a life filled with meaning and, at least at times, filled with satisfaction and even joy. That’s what can come from getting lost and then getting found. Found by God. Of course, being lost and getting found isn’t really something that just happens once. It is a lifelong process. So I ask: Where is God going to find me next? Where is God going to find us next? What’s the new home to which God is calling us? I pray that we will continue to work together to find answers to those questions. Amen.

Choose Life

Choose Life

Rev. Dr. Tom Sorenson, Pastor

September 4, 2016

Scripture: Deuteronomy 30:19-20

Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.

So we just heard a brief passage from the book of Deuteronomy, and I have to be honest here. I have a big disagreement with the basic theology of Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy is the fifth book of the Torah, which makes it one of the most important Bible books for Judaism. It has some great stuff in it. It has what is called the Shema, the creedal statement of the Jewish faith. It’s at Deuteronomy 6:4. It reads in the NRSV translation that I prefer: “Hear, O Israel. [In Hebrew that’s Shema Yisroel, hence the name of this passage as the Shema.] The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.” Jesus took the Shema as part of what we call the Great Commandment. It’s really good, really profound, really foundational stuff for both Judaism and Christianity.

So what’s my disagreement with Deuteronomy? Deuteronomy has a central ethical perspective that I think is just wrong. Deuteronomy is set at the end of the Exodus as the people are about to cross the Jordan River into Canaan. It is written as words of Moses to the people before they do. It says again and again that if the people obey God’s laws and commandments they will live long and prosper in their new home. If they do not obey God’s laws and commandments they will suffer and perish. Deuteronomy has it that God rewards faithful living with long life and prosperity in this life and punishes unfaithful living with suffering in this life and early death. That theology gave the Hebrew priests substantial power over the people, so I understand why priestly writers like the author of Deuteronomy taught it. Problem is, it’s just wrong. Life doesn’t work that way. Good, faithful people suffer and die young all the time. Wicked, unfaithful people often live long and prosper, perhaps even because of their wickedness. The foundational theology of Deuteronomy just isn’t true. It flies in the face of the realities of human life. Yes, it’s in the Bible, but it’s still wrong because it is denied by human experience. That’s my big problem with Deuteronomy.

That being said and truly meant, I quite love our passage from Deuteronomy this morning. Yes, it reflects that central teaching of Deuteronomy that I reject, but here’s what I love about it. It says that God (or at least Moses speaking for God) has set before the people the ways of both life and death, and it exhorts them to “choose life.” Choose life, it says, and it gives us what it thinks choosing life entails: “Now choose life, so that you and your children may live and that you may love the Lord your God, listen to his voice, and hold fast to him.” I hear this text saying that life, true life, whole life, comes from loving and listening to God. I don’t think that means that loving and obeying God guarantees good health, long life, and material prosperity the way Deuteronomy does. I do believe that loving God and seeking to walk in God’s ways is the path to true life. It is the path to wholeness of life. It is the way of life that gets us through  despite what comes our way in life. I hear this passage saying that God wants us and all of God’s people to have such a life, a full, meaningful life lived in the love of God, trusting God more than we trust ourselves or the world. God’s goal for every person is wholeness of life. This passage from Deuteronomy speaks a truly profound truth.

God sets before us life and death. God calls us to choose life, but so often we don’t. At least, we don’t choose that full, whole life that God sets before us. First of all we don’t choose it for ourselves. We reject it in the way we pay insufficient attention to our own spiritual lives. We don’t spend nearly enough time connecting with God, and that’s as true of me as I suspect that it may be of some of you. We choose to live ordinary lives, lives of routine and rote, lives of duty and compliance. It’s not like things like duty are necessarily bad, but concepts like that can trap us in the ordinary and keep us from extraordinary lives. When God calls us to choose life it is a call to extraordinary lives filled with the joys and challenges of the Holy Spirit. That’s the life we so often deny for ourselves.

We also deny fullness of life for others. We deny it for them when we think in terms of stereotypes and cultural prejudices. When we won’t take each person as she is, as she comes to us, faults and all. When we deny the God-given goodness of some human characteristics that we don’t like.  When we expect others to live up to our expectations and standards rather than letting them discern, discover, and grow into what is fullness of life for them even if we don’t approve of it. Choose life means choosing life not just for ourselves but for everyone.

So this morning I join with Moses from the book of Deuteronomy and call myself and each of you to choose life. Choose life in the Spirit of God. Choose a life of prayer, meditation, peace, and challenge. Choose the kind of life we see in Jesus, life that is for ourselves by being life for others. Choose life free from fear and from the constraints that culture imposes on us.  Choose a life that doesn’t tolerate differences but celebrates them. Choose a life of creative expression, whatever that is for you. Choose a life of joy, a life of love, a life of service. That’s the kind of life God calls each one of us to.

Sure, choosing that kind of life can seem intimidating. Sure, some people won’t like it that you’ve chosen that kind of life because that life is so different from the lives most of us live. But always remember this. God is with us every moment when we choose life. God is there holding us, encouraging us, cheering us on. God sets before us today and every day life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life. Choose life with God. That’ what God created us for. So let’s do it, okay? Amen.