A sermon based upon Deuteronomy 31: 11-20
Dr. Charles J. Tomlin
Flat Rock-Zion Baptist Partnership
Epiphany 6, February 13th, 2011
Picture this! You’re playing a card game with some friends. You’re losing. You’re supposed to pick up a card whether it will be favorable or not. You don’t want to take a card. You hesitate. You look at your friends and they look at you and then they remind you: “Hey, You have to choose!”
The game of life is the same way. You can’t live the “game of life” and not make choices. You can’t live a human life and not make important choices each and every day of your life. You choose the people you spend your life with. You choose the food you eat, the work you do, the activities to get involved in, and the places you go. It may not feel like it, especially when there are so many things you have to do, but for the most part, life is always a choice.
Moses understood this too! In today’s text he’s preparing to send the people into the promise land. He’s soon going to die and he can’t go with them. So, he gives the people one final challenge, saying: “Now, you are ready to go, but remember this one thing always: You have to choose!” “I have set before you life….and death, blessings and curses….(vs. 15-19). Your life provides an opportunity for both, but you have to choose!
LIFE IS SOMETHING YOU CHOOSE
Bret Younger tells about a man who was in the prime of his life in 1860, the year Abe Lincoln was elected president. His name was Milton Bradley. “In that year, Milton Bradley invented a board game called “The Game of Life!”
On a red-and-ivory checkerboard of sixty-four squares, players start on a square labeled infancy and end, usually, but not always, at happy old age. The Game of Life requires you to make decisions. Most players try to go to
college, heading slowly towards happiness, but even when you are one square away you can end up at ruin, passed out, drunk and drooling on the floor of a seedy-looking tavern where death darkens the door disguised as a bill collector in a bulky black overcoat and a strangely sinister stovepipe hat. Curiously, two directions that almost guarantee that you will lose are going to prison or going into politics. Bradley’s game rewards the virtues that lead to wealth and success. The good squares are honesty, bravery and perseverance. The bad squares are poverty, idleness, and disgrace. The person who wins is the one who gets to happy old age first.
One hundred years later, in 1960, the year John Kennedy was elected president, the Milton Bradley Company released a commemorative Game of Life, which bears almost no resemblance to its 19th-century namesake. Bradley’s game about vice, virtue, and the pursuit of happiness was reinvented as a lesson in consumerism. The box is filled with fake money—seven and a half million dollars of fake money—as well as fake automobile insurance and phony stock certificates. This life is paperwork. Players fill teensy plastic station wagons with even teensier pink and blue plastic mommies and daddies, and have pink and blue plastic babies, but this Game of Life is relentlessly cash-conscious. In this version you do not die; you just retire. Life’s most important squares are marked Payday. In the 1960 game, whoever finishes with the most money wins.
Three years ago, Milton Bradley released The New Game of Life: Twists & Turns. In the 2008 version life is meaningless. This is the game’s selling point, that it has no goal. The blurb on the box says, “A thousand ways to live your life. You choose.” Money is a big part of the game, but there is no
cash. Each player receives a Visa card to keep track of points. You get the same number of points for scuba diving as for donating a kidney as for getting a Ph.D. In the new game there is no square marked “finish.” It is all pointless (Bret Younger’s source is Jill Lefore, The New Yorker, “The Meaning of Life,” May 21, 2007, 38-43.).
Choosing life is not what it used to be. Russell Moore writes: “Nobody is as happy as they seem on Facebook. A social psychology journal started with an observation about how college students felt more dejected after logging on to Facebook. There was something saddening about "scrolling through others' attractive photos, accomplished bios, and chipper status updates." The students' moods were darkened because they believed everyone else was happier than they are. http://www.crosswalk.com/11644916.
It’s quite ironic. The more choices we have, the more stuff we own or have access to, even with all the new high tech opportunities for both knowing and communicating, does not necessarily make us wiser, happier, better communicators, nor does it make us smarter about choosing life. Before I move away from this, listen to this quote I received this week in a Magazine from Baylor University about “Curiosity and Smartphones”
“For all the frenetic changes heralded by new technology, the human heart---with its longings and loves, heartaches and heartbreaks---remains essentially unchanged. We may delight in carrying new gadgets and developing virtual networks alongside of trusty old tools and time-tested friendships. Yet whatever technology’s wizardry does for us, it cannot fundamentally alter our heart’s desire to love God and to love others in God. Then the writer adds: “This is not to say that life in the virtual world is not without risks…. Having immediate access to these things is not itself bad. However, living in a world of perpetual mobile connectivity can be spiritually distracting, and even deforming…”(From Christian Reflections, p. 11).
What can be so “distracting and deforming” about the virtual world should be obvious: We satisfy our curiosity and desire for knowledge…the same kind of knowledge Adam and Eve wanted in the garden… , but all the while, we forget to make wise judgments that we should be making with the knowledge we already have; ie., we fail to seek the kind of knowledge which brings us greater opportunities for life rather than death.
All of us know the blessings and the curses of the Internet. Just a few weeks ago, a 30 year old Google Marketer in Egypt named, Wael Ghonim, sparked an online campaign that inspired the democracy revolution in Egypt. This is how this new technology works. It brings new opportunities for life, but there is also the possibility for chaos, destruction and death.
Perhaps you can think of some occasion when a person used the “Internet” for good, but you can think of several occasions people have used it to spread lies, to start rumors, to ruin reputations, or to fuel crime, or abuse it through pornography, inappropriate texting, or sending photos or videos that have enabled bullying and caused people to commit suicide. Today, the opportunities of the Internet “promised-land” are much the same: “See I have set before you life and death…blessings or curses (vs. 19). Much has changed in the world since Moses, but this has not changed. We still have to choose life over death.
So, how do we use the opportunities, choices, freedom and chances we are given to choose life, rather than to let life “steal” our life away from us?
TO CHOOSE LIFE YOU MUST CHOOSE LOVE
The dots of life and love are especially connected in this passage. To “choose life” you’ve got to include “loving the LORD your God with all your heart...” (vss. 6, 16). Moses says this means loving God in a way that it gives “prosperity to your descendants…your children, you grandchildren, and your great grand children”and on and on. We read later, beyond our passage that “loving God” includes loving “men, women, children…as well as the aliens residing in your towns… (31: 12). It is one of the remarkable things about Deuteronomy, that it calls upon the lover of God to even “love the stranger, because you were also strangers in Egypt (Deut 10:19).
Over and Over I have to ask myself, like Jeff Foxworthy’s TV show: Am I as Smart as I was as a 4th grader? It was in the 4th grade, that I recall preparing to hand out Valentines to fellow students. I was preparing those Valentines when I noticed that I was preparing the better Valentines for those I liked the most and the lesser Valentines to give to those I like the least. Then something I had been reading in Sunday School hit me like a ton of bricks: “If I’m going to be a Christian; a real Christian, then I need to give just as good a Valentine those I dislike! It’s easy to like those who like me, but the way of Christ is to care even about those I don’t like as much.”
Of course, that’s not an easy thing to do. I knew it first-hand. When I was in the 3rd grade, we had moved from the city to the country. I remembered that while I was in the 3rd grade, I was the stranger who could have been left out. It was not just a Bible story, but it was my story.
Did you know that Deuteronomy was Jesus’ favorite book of the Bible? Part of the reason was that it was a “second writing” or rewriting of the Law which put the Law of God in its proper context. It was written right after the Exile…after the people sinned… after they lost everything….after they felt God had abandoned them. Even though it sounds as if God is warning them, this warning was written down, after the fact, which makes God sound rather harsh and threatening. But if you a little closer, you will see that you can’t fully understand all these threats, warnings or hopes for blessing without the context of God’s love and the language of covenant.
Deuteronomy 7:7 is especially expressive when it says: “7 "The LORD did not set His love on you nor choose you because you were more in number than any other people, for you were the least of all peoples;
8 "but because the LORD loves you, and because He would keep the oath which He swore to your fathers, the LORD has brought you out with a mighty hand, and redeemed you from the house of bondage, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt.
9 "Therefore know that the LORD your God, He is God, the faithful God who keeps covenant and mercy for a thousand generations with those who love Him and keep His commandments; (Deu 7:7-9 NKJ).
The point Deuteronomy makes is that you can’t properly understand life, even life in God, until you understand the love God has and the love God wants his people to have. After Israel had learned the hard way, what it was like to forget God and what it happens when they forget to love God with their “whole heart” they wanted their children to know only whole-hearted covenant love can prevent the curses of life they had experienced.
What is covenant love? There is a lot of “love” that gets promoted in this world that has nothing to do with talk of “commitment” and “covenant”. Last week, on the Today Show, I heard the author of the book “Eat, Pray, and Love” Elizabeth Gilbert make an very interesting comment about her new book on relationships, entitled, “Committed, A Love Story.” I haven’t read her book, but in the interview she shares that the book is a record of observations made about getting married after adventuring around the world, learning to eat, pray, and to love. She then went on to tell how being ‘committed’ in love is something our culture has a hard time with because most people today equate “love” with romance rather than commitment. She said this is a problem other cultures outside the west don’t have as much as we do. Since our culture has moved from having “arranged” marriages or marriages based on ‘business’ contracts to having marriages based solely upon our romantic feelings, she says, since this has happened, we’ve seen both the quality and length of marriage constantly decline. A lasting marriage, she has learned, must be based more upon a “contract” or a “covenant” than romantic love. Some time or other, we can all be disappointed by the failures of romantic love.
I don’t know that much about what this woman is writing, but there sure is wisdom in what she is saying. It’s this same kind of “contractual” or “covenant” love that the book of Deuteronomy calls for when it says we are to love God “with our whole heart.” Only “covenant”, “committed” or “contractual” love is able to hold together in human lives.
LOVING GOD MEANS OBEYING GOD
The other important word, besides the words: “life” and “love”, is the word “obey”. Moses writes in verse 15: “See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity. If you OBEY the commandments of the Lord your God… by loving your God, walking in his ways, and observing his commands, decrees and ordinances… then you shall live….and the Lord will bless you…(vss. 15-16).
Can a culture like ours, a culture that is so used to being free, independent, and self-reliant really know or appreciate the word: obey?” In the moral, social, and religious confusion of our times, can people still understand obedience to anyone beyond our own choices, beyond our own private opinions, and beyond our own conclusions about God? Our text suggests that there is, and that “it is not too hard for you, nor is it too far away. It is not in heaven, that you should say, “Who will go up to heaven for us and get it…. Neither is it across the ocean….so that we have to cross to the other side to get it?” (See verses 11-14).
Before we can “map” out what our “own” obedience to God can look like, we must answer another important question: Is this a game you really want to play? When you became a Christian, did you think you were signing up for something different? Having abundant, meaningful and eternal life is not in any way an automatic choice. In fact, if Milton Bradley is right, understanding that there is a purpose and promise in life at all is something fewer and fewer know today.
To understand what it means to “obey” God, where the main game in our world is not God’s game, but is the game of life we “want” to live, as Christians, we need more than Moses’ challenge to answer this question. We need also to turn to John 14: 15 to the “second Moses”, Jesus, telling his disciples something that very similar: “If you love me, you’ll keep my commandments.” Jesus continues in verse 23, “Those who love me will keep my word.”
O.K., now, are you getting the plan? If you want to love God, then love Jesus. And if you say you love Jesus, then keep his commandments and keep his word. But what Jesus sees at the center of everything is not always what we put in the center of everything. Pay close attention. You find it continuing in chapter 15, verse 4 where Jesus says, “Abide in me as I abide in you…Just as the branch can’t bear fruit by itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me….” Now, Jesus outlines what it means to abide in him: “If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love….. I have said this, that my joy by be in you…and that your joy might be complete. (vs. 10ff). Jesus is not trying to get us to follow a bunch of strict rules and regulations (15: 9-11) for the sake of the “rules” themselves. Jesus is talking about following and obeying for the sake of the joy of a sustained relationship with him. Are you still with Jesus on this?
Further explanation comes in John 15: 12 when Jesus says: “This is my commandment…that you love one another as I have loved you.” With Jesus, God’s law has now come full circle. The commandments given for us to obey are explained for what they were designed to be in the first place: The law is about love for the sake of love, not law for the sake of law. Furthermore, God does not need our love….but we need God’s love, and we need his love to know how to love each other.
Now we are finally ready God’s greatest commandment as it works out in John 15: 13ff: “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for ones friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. I do not call you servants any longer… but I have called you friends… You did not choose me, but I choose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit (the fruit of love that will last), so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name. I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.”
We could spend another sermon on only these words, but what God essentially commands is that we bear the fruit of love in our lives. This is what God wants and it’s how energy and the source of life comes to us. Did you catch the powerful statement Jesus makes at the end of his discussion of love and commandments in verse 16? It’s a shocker. Jesus concludes that God gets what God wants by telling us how we can get what we ask for. Let me repeat that again just in case you didn’t get it: GOD GETS WHAT GOD WANTS AS HE GIVES US WHAT WE ASK FOR. The whole point of our asking and God’s wanting are to be lined up together and this brings both life and blessing to us. When we get on the same page with God’s will and purposes, every day and in any moment blessings can happen.
But let’s stop and ask for a moment: “Whatever” is really a “big” word, isn’t it? It can sound more like “I Dream of Jeannie” than the hard realities of life. It especially sounds like too tall of an order in a world where fewer think faith in God has much of anything to offer at all. What can a life of obedience in God offer that the world can’t give? The answer is in understanding how Jesus started this whole conversation with the issue of “believing” the Father as he does (John 14: 11), doing greater works than he did (John 14: 12) and living a life where we feel like we are so close to God, like friends (John 15: 15), so that we can ask for “whatever” and God will do “whatever” we ask (John 14: 13 and John 15: 16). If you are still wondering what “whatever” means, read John 14:27 and you’ll hear "loud and clear" what God can give that no one else can: “My peace I leave with you. My peace I give to you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.”
If you are still having a hard time fathoming what God can give, think about Luke Skywalker in Star Wars. Do you recall that moment in Star Wars, when Luke is part of a squadron of fighters attacking the huge “death star”, a planet size fortress so well armored that only an exact torpedo shot in a small vent can destroy it. Time is short because the death Start is revving up its weapons to destroy a good planet. Luke and his comrades fly toward the fortress and fire their torpedoes, but to no effect. As the story goes, most are shot down, leaving only Luke to save the day. As he hurtles in his fighter toward his target, he hears the voice of his dead mentor “obi Wan Kenobi”, saying “trust the Force”. Luke has only a few second to choose his course and his aim. Having been squinting through his gun sight, he raises up and waits until the moment is right. “Trust the Force,” Luke. The voice keeps coming. Luke has only one moment take the right aim and make the right choice, and it was not a choice he could make on his own. He had to “trust the Force!”
That’s how the “choice” of life is dramatized in human fiction and fables, but the real way we “choose life” is more complex and much more complicated.
There is a “true” human choice being made by American teenager, Trey Styles, played by Cuba Gooding, in the movie “Boyz n the Hood.” Growing up in South Central Los Angeles, most of the boys there grow up having to cope with all the violence of the “hood”, which can lead young boys to choose “death” over “live”, just so they can survive. But in this story, one of the boys is raised by his strict father, who has made mistakes and wants his boy to make a better choice, to see beyond the games of death in the “hood” that most of the boys make.
In a most important moment, young Tre has to make a hard choice. He has some advantage over the others, in that because of his Father, he has made good grades and has a chance to choose a life beyond the “hood”. But now comes the moment of truth. A close friend of Tre has been killed by a rival “gang” and his two close friends ask Trey to join them in getting their guns and going after them, to avenge their buddy. He goes home to get his gun, but his Father protests, but still he chooses to return to be with his “friends”.
Finally, Tre is in the car with his friends and they are on their way to kill the murderer. But along the way, Tre hears his Father’s voice, heeds the warning, comes to his senses and asks his friends to stop the car, so he can get out. In that moment, Tre chooses life rather than death. Later after his friends return, they understand Tre’s decision, but both lament that they have to follow the rules and conditions of the “hood”. Finally, as the flim ends, both of those friends are killed by way of vengeance they have chosen. The cycle of violence goes on. Only one, like Tre, who’s Father has shown him a way to “choose” and to “live” beyond the rules of the “hood” can be saved. (From goodpreacher.com, and Lectionary Homiletics, Vol. XXII, Number 2, p. 18).
You and I have been fortunate enough not to have to grow up in “the hood”, but we still live in the “world” where we must continually choose the high way of God rather than the lower way of living only by our own desires. I can think of several moments in my own life, where, as Robert Frost said, I choose to take a certain path and “that has made all the difference”. The road of abundant life is a road you have to “take”---you have to choose it. If you don’t choose it each and every day, and if you don’t keep asking for it, the right choices get harder, if not impossible to make.
Obeying God in the small choices of life paves the way toward the greatest choices you will ever make. Even “small” “choices” for God are steps toward a limitless future beyond your imagination. But before you can know where the choices lead, you have to make them. Each and every day, if you want the life only God can give, you still have to ask for it; you of course: you have to choose! Amen.
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