Sermon, February 13, 2011, Epiphany 6

“Sacred Choices,” A Sermon preached by The Rev. Canon Dr. C. Denise Yarbrough on Sunday, February 13, 2011 at Church of the Ascension, Rochester, New York

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. (Deut. 30:19-20)

We live in a culture that reveres choices. Go down any aisle in Wegman’s and you are overwhelmed with choices, whether it be for breakfast cereal, flavored water, soft drinks or detergents. Tide with bleach or with febreze? Whole grain cereal with honey or plain? Regular Triscuits or the low fat variety? Butter with or without salt? Organic veggies or regular? And we value choice in more important matters too – how many of those who lobbied against health care reform chanted the mantra that government sponsored health care would adversely affect the consumer’s choice of doctors? And the several decades old controversy over legal abortion pits pro-choice advocates against the pro-life advocates, as if choice and life were definitional opposites. We now encourage people to execute living wills so that they are able to make choices about their end of life care before they are rendered unable to voice their choice. We revere personal choice so much that we allow individuals the right to bear arms, even when doing so encourages the carnage that we witnessed in Tucson several weeks ago. Our pioneering, rugged individualist spirits thrive on personal autonomy and individual choice and woe to anyone, governmental or religious, that appears to want to curtail our freedom to choose.

Enter Jesus and Moses. Today you have the privilege of hearing three sermons: one by Moses, one by Jesus and mine, attempting to unpack the other two! And neither of those other two sermons are of the kind I prefer! Moses sounds like a prosperity gospel preacher, dangling the carrot and stick threat that if you don’t do what God wants, bad things will happen to you while if you do what God wants, everything will go well for you, which frankly doesn’t comport with my experience of life. According to Moses, the choices are simple – choose covenant, receive life; reject covenant, receive death. Choose covenant, gain land; reject covenant, lose land. Choose covenant, receive blessing, reject covenant, receive curse. God isn’t offering choices here, rather God is demanding obedience. And obedience to anyone other than our own autonomous selves isn’t something we modern Americans cotton to really well.

And then Jesus seems to be doing a version of fire and brimstone preaching, with his hyperbole about poking out your eye and cutting off your hand if they cause you to sin in order to avoid having your whole body go into hell. Not to mention, if you read this portion of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount carefully, you might be inclined to throw up your hands and give up, because truly, no matter what you might do, you’re wrong, according to his interpretation of God’s law. It’s now not enough to refrain from murder, you can’t even be angry. It’s not enough to discipline yourself to remain faithful to marriage vows, if you merely “lust in your heart” you’ve already committed adultery. And if you choose to divorce, and you are a woman, you will forever after be committing adultery if you choose to remarry. How is this good news?? Especially in a world where we have seen all too often how just these kinds of human choices have devastating consequences not only for the person who made the choice but for those he or she hurts as well. Take the Tucson shooting – if it’s true that merely being angry is as sinful as acting on that anger, then the shooter did nothing more sinful in shooting and killing six people while wounding nineteen others, than someone who might have been similarly angry but who chose to refrain from violence and deal with their anger some other way. Surely we don’t want to encourage an ethic where it’s just as bad to think bad thoughts as to act on them?

Honestly, the sermons of Moses and Jesus’ are the kinds of sermons that give institutional religion a bad name. And yet, both of these sermons are important and significant wisdom texts from our tradition, preached by Moses and Jesus respectively at major transitional times in the history of our religious ancestors. These are not sermons we can ignore or dismiss. And when we understand more of the context of these sermons, their messages make considerably more spiritual sense.

Moses is addressing the Ancient Israelites at the very end of his life. He is dying and will not see the Promised Land that they are about to enter. His farewell address to his people takes 26 chapters and in it he reviews their entire sojourn together, starting with their liberation from captivity in Egypt, continuing on through their forty years of wandering in the desert. As they are on the cusp of entering the Promised Land, Moses wants to remind them of their covenant with YHWH and of the fact that they prosper and thrive best when they are in right relationship with YHWH. He reviews for them God’s insistence that they be about justice, and that their people thrived best when they canceled the debts of the poor (15:1-11), pushed government to guard against excessive wealth (16:18-20), limited punishment to protect human dignity (19:1-7), offered hospitality to runaway slaves (23:15-16), paid employees fairly (14:14-15) and left the gleanings in the fields for those who are poor. (24:19-22) As Moses looked back he noticed that life was best for God’s people when they were trying to please God and working to keep the promises of their covenant with God. And so he exhorts them to choose well, to choose that which is pleasing to God because God longs for all God’s people to thrive and prosper and God expects God’s people to care about each other so that the community will know life. God, you see, is concerned about people being loving community, and God urges God’s people to make choices that benefit the larger collective, not choices that are good only for a given individual or small group. Here’s where God’s ethics diverge from the prevailing ethic of our contemporary culture.

Now Jesus, as you recall, is preaching to his disciples. He has just told them that they are the salt of the earth and the light of the world. He believes in them and their connectedness with God and their ability to be God’s light in a dark world. He then moves to some of the minutiae of their laws to emphasize the importance of not only adhering strictly to certain behavioral norms, but to be mindful of their feelings, of what is happening in their hearts so that they remain able to direct their behavior in ways that benefit the society as a whole. He understands that the society will not thrive or reflect the love and mercy of God if the people in it merely refrain from certain bad acts while interiorly experiencing enmity or contempt or apathy. He engages in some homiletical hyperbole, to get their attention and make a point. The gist of his concern is that they work on their inner selves so that their outer behaviors will conform with a transformed and holy inner self. That is advice that stands the test of time, and while the details of the civil laws may change throughout history and from culture to culture, the importance of developing our souls to be bearers of love and compassion in the world remains paramount for all cultures in all ages.

Today we are baptizing Madison Renee McKinley and her parents and godparents will make promises on her behalf as we go through the baptismal covenant. We will all reaffirm our baptismal covenant along with them. Note that our baptismal covenant calls us to be about just the transformation of soul and heart that Jesus and Moses preached about in their respective contexts all those thousands of years ago. Turning from evil, repenting when we fall into sin, loving our neighbor as ourselves, respecting the dignity of every human being, participating actively in the teachings and worship of our faith community, are all means by which we grow into the full stature of Christ and develop ourselves into a community of people who make the love and compassion of God a reality in our contemporary society. Dr. Cornel West wrote “never forget that justice is what love looks like in public.” Justice and love are two sides of the same coin and so our baptismal covenant binds us to a life of justice seeking and peace making as the way we will live out God’s love in the world. And neither justice nor love becomes real in the world without choices being made by God’s people to create a society that is just and loving. Our choices do matter and the only way we will have a just society or a peaceful world is if we choose to be about justice and love. And choosing to be just and loving requires that we let go of a lot of that rugged individualism and “me first” mentality that is so much a part of our civic culture and be prepared to make decisions and choices that are good for everyone not just for our own selves.

Both Jesus and Moses were preaching to a community. They were talking about how people live in community, and how a community lives according to the will of a loving and just God. In God’s heart, every individual matters and is loved unconditionally, but no individual is more important than the community of which he or she is a part. Self giving and sacrifice, love of other and generosity are necessary for a community to be God’s light in the world. To be a religious person is to agree that the interests of others are just as important as my own interests and to make choices taking into consideration what will bring prosperity and justice and peace to my community, not just to me. Our lives are filled with choices, profane and ordinary choices like what detergent to buy or kind of car to drive, and sacred choices, like what social policies we will support and work to enshrine in our civic life, and how we will transform our own hearts and souls to become peacemakers in a violent world, and justice seekers in a culture that encourages and creates injustice. Every day we confront sacred choices. So when you face an important decision and you are trying to figure out what to do, remember the words of Moses, “Choose life…loving the Lord your God.” Amen.