February 16, 2020 “Choose Life” – Deuteronomy 30:15-20

Deuteronomy 30:15-20
“Choose Life”
February 16, 2020 – Sixth Sunday after Epiphany

One check box reads, “Yes, please sign me up for this money-saving offer!” The other box reads, “No, I’m not interested in saving money.” It’s a standard ploy used by advertisers, politicians, and all sorts of people in the business of persuading you to take a certain course of action. “You either vote for me or you don’t love your country.” “Buy this car or settle for something of lesser quality.” Two alternatives are presented as if they were the only choices you have. In logic class, we call it a “false dilemma,” because the reality is that there are several, if not many, more possibilities to consider other than the two being offered.

In our text today, Moses comes off almost like a false dilemma huckster. Near the end of his life and of his career leading Israel out of Egypt and around the wilderness, as they prepared to enter into Canaan, Moses gave his people stark alternatives: life or death, good or evil, blessing or curse. In verse 19 he boils it down to simple direction: “Choose life!” But who wouldn’t do that? Who wouldn’t want life over death, good over evil, a blessing instead of a curse? Is it really just as simple as that? Just choose life?

As I wrote on my blog this past week, “Choose life,” was the most famous tagline from the 1996 film “Trainspotting.” In that movie a heroin addict named Renton goes off on a tirade which begins with those words of Moses and then skewers and parodies many foibles of ordinary life in the 90s. He continues,

Choose a job… Choose a family. Choose a… big television. Choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players, and electric tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol and dental insurance. Choose fixed-interest mortgage payments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisure wear and matching luggage… Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it, [spending] your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish… brats you have spawned to replace yourselves. Choose your future. Choose life… But why would I want to do a thing like that? I chose not to choose life: I chose something else. And the reasons? There are no reasons. Who needs reasons when you’ve got heroin?

That nihilistic speech evidently became a poster which was hung on college dorm room walls everywhere, a reminder to young people of the bland and pointless existence which awaited them if they simply chose the life that everyone else chooses.

In the second “Trainspotting” film, a grown-up, middle-aged, and just as bored-with-life Renton explains to a young woman that “Choose life” was the slogan of an anti-drug campaign in the 1980s. I don’t know if that’s true, but it definitely became the slogan of anti-suicide public service announcements, of the gay rights movement, and recently of pro-life, anti-abortion conservative Christians. It seems to have all strayed pretty far from whatever Moses meant to say to the children of Israel 3,500 years ago. Whatever that was, it was not a simple, obvious, straightforward choice. Otherwise, why bother saying it?

Moses was talking to a new generation. Their parents had come gloriously and triumphantly out of Egypt, but then sinned against God and so spent forty years traveling around the wilderness of the Sinai Peninsula, waiting to die so that their children could cross the Jordan River and enter the land of Canaan which God had promised to His people. In the process, as Deuteronomy 28 explains, they were asked to choose between the blessings of keeping God’s covenant and commandments and the curses for failing to keep God’s law and covenant. It’s not a false dilemma if there really are only two choices.

Now the grown children of that first generation stood poised and finally ready for entry into the land God would give them. In chapter 29, Moses called them together for the last time in Moab, just to the east of Canaan. He commanded them once again to keep the covenant God had made with them, to obey the law God gave them on the mountain through Moses.

In the rest of chapter 29 Moses again laid out what would happen if God’s people chose not to keep the covenant, if they failed to obey the commandments, if they worshipped other gods made of silver and gold. It would be utter calamity. They would die or be exiled in a foreign land and their own land would be so ruined nothing would grow, as verse 23 explains, “burned out by sulfur and salt, nothing planted, nothing sprouting, unable to support any vegetation, like the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.”

Then at the beginning of chapter 30 Moses said,

When all these things have happened to you, the blessings and the curses that I have set before you, if you call them to mind among the nations where the Lord your God has driven you, and return to the Lord your God, and you and your children obey him with all your heart and with all your soul… then the Lord your God will restore your fortunes and have compassion on you…

Moses was telling them, and I think he was telling you and me, that we always have a choice, an opportunity by the grace of God, to turn back, to repent, to be once again the people God means for us to be. God brought His people out of Egypt, and He would bring them out of another foreign land a thousand years later, if they would only choose His blessing rather than His curse, choose His life rather than death, choose Him rather than all the idols the people around them worshipped. It’s our choice too, but it’s not a simple choice.

It may seem obvious that we want life and prosperity over death and adversity, but the choices which lead to those outcomes may not be so obvious. As Renton the druggie in “Trainspotting” was asking, is dying by heroin so much worse than a slow, dragged out life doing nothing at all significant, then spending your last couple years peeing in a bag in a nursing home? If we are going to choose life, then we will want to choose real life, good life. And that’s what Moses and what God offers us. There is a gracious choice, given by God in His compassion and mercy, which allows us to choose abundant and eternal life.

As Moses explained to Israel and as Renton explained also, we can’t have that choice God offers by just doing what everybody else is doing. That was Israel’s downfall and what may be your and my downfall as well. In verse 17 that I read, Moses was worried that his people would see how other people in the land worshipped and be “led astray to bow down to other gods and serve them.” You and I need to ask if we are, in fact, serving the other gods that people around us serve.

That’s the point of mocking things like mortgages and dental insurance, big televisions and nice luggage, and we could add cell phones and social media. Is the fact that you and I use and do all those things, and even find them extremely important, simply a sign that what we actually care most about is not God, but money or entertainment or security or health or popularity? And what are those things but names for other gods?

When Moses offers this choice to Israel, then, when he asks them to “choose life,” he is asking them to choose between actual, genuine alternatives. It’s not a false dilemma. To choose life is not what Renton thought it was, to simply go on living in the same pointless way that everyone else does. Moses wanted his people, and I believe Jesus wants His people, wants you and I, to choose life in a way which leads to better, richer, fuller life. It’s not just merely existing. It is a passionate, committed embrace of all that is beautiful, good, and true. It is a life of love for God above everything else.

You can see that is what Moses meant if you just read on a bit. In verse 19 he says, “Choose life so that you and your descendants may live,” then in verse 20, “loving the Lord your God, obeying him, and holding fast to him; for that means life to you and length of days…” To choose life is to choose to love God.

That is the big choice, the deciding one, the crucial decision which changes everything, to love God rather than money, rather than sex, rather than security, rather than comfort. But as all those commands which Moses and then Jesus gave show us, that big choice will constantly lead us into smaller, more specific, and sometimes pretty difficult choices.

For a person in Israel one of those small choices might have been not to make an offering to a rain god when everyone else around said that’s how you grow a crop in that land. Or it might have been a choice to sell grain with an honest measure when a crop was harvested. It might have meant not sacrificing an animal to a fertility god in order to have a baby or it could have meant not sleeping with a man other than your husband in order to have a baby. There were choices like that then for those who loved God and wanted to obey His commandments.

As we heard this morning from Jesus in Matthew 5, the choices to love and obey God are not only about our behavior, what we do on the outside, but about what we think and feel on the inside. Jesus called us to choose not just to avoid violence and murder, but to avoid anger and name-calling. Jesus taught us that it is not just sex outside of marriage that is wrong, but that even thinking and lusting for someone else is wrong. And He commanded us not just to tell the truth when we are under oath, but to tell the truth all the time. Those are the sorts of choices Jesus asks us to make if we love Him.

As I said last week, quoting an ancient Christian letter, choosing life which is love for God, won’t always make us look that much different from those around us. We’ll still have and want houses and cars and health insurance plans. We’ll shop in the same stores and go to the same schools. But because we love God, because we have experienced the love of God in Jesus Christ His Son, we will sometimes, maybe even often, make different choices.

My wife Beth went with a couple of you to see the film, “A Hidden Life.” I didn’t go, but I heard that the story is powerful. Beth came home in tears. It’s the true story of Franz Jägerstätter who lived in Austria during World War II. I’ll tell you what I learned about it from Wikipedia, both about the movie and the historical person. He had a simple life as a farmer in a small rural community. He and his wife had three daughters. Jägerstätter was called up and sent to basic training, but then France surrendered to Germany and he was sent home without going into battle. He and his family farmed the land in peace for a while. There are beautiful scenes of cutting and gathering hay and the river that ran nearby.

Then as the war progressed, men from their village including Jägerstätter were called up again, this time to fight. Their first requirement was to swear an oath of allegiance to Adolf Hitler. The mayor and his neighbors pushed him to take the oath, but because of his Catholic Christian faith Franz refused. He saw how the Nazis were suppressing the church. He had heard about their involuntary euthanasia program. Ultimately he was arrested and imprisoned in Berlin. He and his wife exchanged letters and she was once able to visit him.

Jägerstätter was held and suffered for months before being tried and sentenced to death. Even then, the authorities gave him several opportunities to choose to sign the oath of allegiance and even to receive non-fighting work in the military, but he refused. He had heard about a priest who refused to take the Hitler oath and was executed. He decided to go the same way. On August 9, 1943, the Nazis put him under the guillotine.

You might think Franz Jägerstätter chose death, but according to Moses, according to Jesus, he chose life. He chose genuine, true and eternal life out of love and devotion to the only Lord, the only “Führer,” the only God he wished to serve.

Your and my choices in this life may never be as dramatic and dire as Franz Jägerstätter’s, and I honestly hope they are not, but they could be. Regardless of how severe the consequences, our choices are just as important when they are based on the fundamental choice of choosing a life of loving God and following Jesus rather than some other way of living.

A Christian young person really can choose God’s life by deciding not to inhale some drug when others around him are doing so. A young woman surprised and dismayed by pregnancy can blessedly choose God’s life for herself and her child by seeking help to have her baby. And Christians around such people need to choose the life God gives by helping create a society where there are actually good alternatives to the choices which bring death for children growing up in need and despair.

In the midst of our current time’s political turmoil, Christians can choose life by following Jesus in refusing to swear unqualified, unquestioning oaths of allegiance to any person, party or government. We can choose life by remembering that only God deserves our absolute love and obedience. Remember in our lesson from I Corinthians 3 how Paul urged the church not to put their final trust in human leaders, not even in himself. Instead, he pointed them toward God, God who sends them growth and fruit. “You are God’s servants,” he said, “working together, you are God’s field, God’s building.” We belong to God and to no one else. Remember that and you make the choice for life.

Finally, you and I gladly choose life just by remembering the remarkable and wonderful fact that God has given us a choice. We often repeat the two greatest commandments quoted by Jesus, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind,” and “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Hearing just those it may sound like God commands and demands our love. But what Moses said here, inviting his people to choose life and love God, reminds us that God does not demand, but offers us the grace and gift of choosing to love Him.

We all know that love which is demanded is not truly love. You didn’t want a Valentine Day card that you had to tell someone to give you. That’s why our Lord invites us to choose. That’s why He lets everyone go his or her own way and does not force anyone to love Him or do as He asks. Instead, He simply says “choose,” inviting us to discover that the choice to love Him and do as He directs is the choice for life. As our psalm today said,

Happy are they who observe his decrees
and seek him with all their hearts!

That observation about the way to happiness is God reaching out to us again, like He reached out to Israel over and over, saving them from their enemies and freeing them from slavery. It’s how God reached out to us in the loving sacrifice of Jesus, forgiving our sins and setting us free to choose to love and obey Him. He was showing us the way to life, to “length of days” as Moses put it, to everlasting, happy life in His kingdom. That’s the life to choose. I hope you will.

Amen.