Choose life

 Deuteronomy 30:15-20

Choose life. What does it mean to choose life? I've been thinking about this all week. I know I'd not always choose life. After all the highest reach of this is to be a blessing to others and I know I don't always do this. So does this mean we shouldn't even try? I'd put think so.

The walk of faith is being able to acknowledge when your not walking it. Then be faithful to return to the path. John the Baptist asks us to turn again and again in our lectionary. It reminds me of the Shaker hymn about a gift in simplicity, and simplicity is turning. So we turn until we come round right. So turning over, choosing life is an act of trying to see where we've been and where we might try to head. 

It is like the example Jesus is setting before us today. He didn't come to change the law, he came to make us question our hearts. To look inside, have we thought what is sinful, then it is sin. We are to remember this before we offer up our gifts at the altar. If we find there is someone we have wronged we are to actually go and reconcile. This is choosing life.

This is not an easy way forward. It takes us on a path of being vulnerable with each other. Yet this is the way of love. Or to put it in the words of Brene Brown being brave. It is choosing life. 

I think most acts of turning and being vulnerable are acts of bravery. Take for instance the history of where this passage comes from. Just before Moses dies, just before the battle of Jericho, just before they take land by force. Wait a minute this doesn't sound right. Actually archeologists believe it didn't happen this way either. This is their story.

A few of the Hebrew people came through the desert and encountered the Canaanite settlement. They found their an egalitarian society. This community came out of the hard place or rulers who killed and they found another way to live together. So this small remnant sent word back to Egypt that they had found a better community. Come and be with us.

More came and settled and Intermarried there. The surrounding powers needed a better story than this not to attack them, so this is where we have the battle of Jericho and the walls came tumbling down. What walls do we need to knock down in ourselves in order to choose life?

Maybe this is the question we struggle with. Maybe this is the day we truly try and choose life. If we are beginning  to ask the question and turn it over in our heart we are at TBE beginning. Go and choose life.