CHOOSE LIFE

February 27, 2005

Texts – Deuteronomy 30: 11-19

Colossians 3: 12-15

            It’s a beautiful passage, one which over time has become one of my favorites.  “Put on then, as God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, put on compassion, kindness, lowliness, meekness, and patience, forbearing one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as God has forgiven you, so you also must forgive.  And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony . . .  And be thankful.” [Colossians 3: 12-15]

            These, Paul says, are the duties of a new life.  I often read it to couples on their wedding day, for I have come to realize that these are the qualities which are absolutely essential if any one of us is to have a chance to live together lovingly with another human being.  God knows Donna could never survive with me without having a major dose of compassion, kindness and patience!  From time to time, I confess, she has also had to practice forgiveness.  Lord have mercy.

            Paul, of course, did not have marriage in mind when he wrote these words, but rather of what he called “the new life in Christ.”  This was a sermon preached for those who were newcomers to the Christian faith community.  You have come not just to join a religious movement, he said in effect, but to begin a whole new way of life.  These must be your character traits from now on.  These are the touchstones for our way of living, not just together but in the world at large.  Don’t just memorize them; practice them . . . live them . . . model them for all to see.

            It’s a tall order.   “Compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness, patience . . . forgiveness” – they are attributes we all admire but often fall short of in our daily living.  I know I do; do you?  The key to all of them, though, is what comes last in the list – Thankfulness.

             Let me be more specific.  There are as many shades and variants of thankfulness as there are colors in the spectrum, but the root source of each of them lies in this – the experience of life as gift, as miracle, as something unexpectedly and undeservedly received from outside ourselves.     Isn’t this what we meet in the maternity wards of hospitals the world over?  How hard it is to stay secular or even professionally clinical when what is before you is the miracle of another human life beginning.  So tiny . . . so fragile and vulnerable . . . so incredibly miraculous.  It touches something very deep and primordial in each of us.  Before the nursery window even the most hardened pragmatist turns into a worshiper.  “Where did you come from?” is a question every human mother and father asks not just once but a hundred times over.  “What a gift you are!”

            Some of us have known this, been blessed by this, through the gift of our children.  Some of us, similarly, have experienced this through the presence of another in our lives.  That’s why I read this passage from Paul at weddings and civil unions, for the miracle of love evokes nothing so much as it does thankfulness.  “You have come together according to God’s wonderful plan for your lives,” I say to them, and it is “wonder-full” (isn’t it?)  the way our lives are brought together over time.  Life is a gift.  Love is a gift.  Miraculous.  Wonderful.

            But the deep and abiding sense that life is a gift, that it comes always and every day from God, runs counter to the surrounding view of things in a society like ours.   Clearly the reigning assumption

with many is that life is a possession of the individual to do with as he or she sees fit.  Now this may mean something over against the intrusion of a government or some other external authority, but it is a patently false reading of life when applied to God or even to creation itself.

            We neither manage nor possess our own life.  It is a mystery that comes to us with birth and which returns to God in death.  Isn’t that what we learn as we journey through time?  It is what I have learned.  And the only adequate response to such a gift is to say “Thank You.”

            Faith, this old book says, always involves the awareness of my life as something which is not my own, but which comes as a gift from God.  And as an historical faith – something rooted in a specific place and people –, this faith also always calls us to embrace our own particular life, the place and people with whom we live, as also being gifts of God.  Time and time again in the pages of our scriptures, we hear the call and the challenge to choose, to embrace, our own special place and company as gifts to us from God.  That’s what Moses was about when he challenged Israel in the wilderness.  “Choose life,” he thundered, “that you and your children and your grandchildren may live!  Choose life!”

            I wonder if part of the flatness which so many of our contemporaries experience today doesn’t derive from the fact that a secular world encourages us to take life for granted?  It is just there, a phenomenon, an accident.  It comes from nowhere and it is going nowhere.  Neither gift nor miracle; it just is.  And so we cease to know it or experience it as a choice, as something to be embraced and affirmed.

            The testimony of our faith is that if human beings are truly to live happy and fulfilled lives, rather than being ever empty and hungry, it will be as we learn to treasure life as a gift which is given to us now, this day.  The alternative, which in fact we see all around us in our secular and highly materialistic culture, are people continually longing to be someone else, wanting to live some other story, or to walk some other way. 

            That is what Alexander Solzhenitsyn thought he saw in us when he came to our country as an exile so many years ago.  Speaking out of his own experience as a prisoner for many years in the Soviet prison system, he said,

            “Don’t be afraid of misfortune and do not yearn after happiness.  It is, after all, all the same.  The bitter doesn’t last forever, and the sweet never fills the cup to overflowing.  It is enough if you don’t freeze in the cold and if hunger and thirst don’t claw at your sides.  If your back isn’t broken, if your feet can walk, if your arms work, if your eyes can see, and if your ears can hear, then whom should you envy?  Our envy of others devours us most of all.”

Solzhenitsyn’s words can be found in many of our own stories.  I’ve heard them in the testimonies of some of our women and men who have returned from serving in the armed forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, grateful just to be alive and home.  One of our own said, “I learned that every American, no matter what their life circumstance, has already won the world’s greatest lotto drawing.”  I’ve felt it myself when coming back from India or Haiti or Central America, glad to simply be back where I can be at home and at peace.

“Be thankful,” Paul says.  Be aware of the miracle which is the gift of life, and learn to accept your own particular life as a gift to you from God.  It can lead to the liveliest of lives, one blessed with the capacity to appreciate and be grateful for whatever comes. 

            I love the story of a couple who were given the heartbreaking news that their son had what appeared to be an incurable disease.  Everyone was torn with pity for them, but they remained remarkably calm and uncomplaining.  One night, a friend tried to express his admiration for their fortitude.  The boy’s father looked up at the stars and said, “Well, it seems to me that we have three choices.  We can curse life and what it does to us at times and look for some way to express our rage.  We can grit our teeth and endure.  Or we can accept the life given to us with Charlie each day as a gift.  The first alternative is useless; the second is exhausting.  The third enables us to go on really living.”

            Choose life, Moses said to his people.  Choose life, our tradition says to us.  Don’t just receive it or acknowledge it or take it for granted; choose it.  Embrace it as gift to you!  Not just on the easy days, but on the hard ones too.  Especially on the hard days.

            Two more stories and then I’ll end.  The first is from Susan DeVore Williams.  She writes:

            “Our friend’s wife had just succumbed to cancer after a long struggle, and when his letter arrived, I opened it with a certain amount of dread.  It was hard to be reminded that this dear man was now so alone, without the comfort of children or other family.  Thanksgiving was just around the corner, and it broke my heart to imagine how empty his tiny apartment would seem at this time of year.  I was sure his letter would be a sad one.

                        But my friend surprised me.  “I thought I might go out to the cemetery today,” he wrote, “but instead I’m sitting here thinking about gratitude.  I’m reminded of the little boy who was asked by his teacher to describe salt.  He answered, ‘Salt is what spoils the potatoes, when you leave it out.’  Thankfulness is like that, I’ve decided.  It’s what spoils everything when you leave it out.  God would probably forgive me for being unthankful right now, and would understand if I decided to ignore Thanksgiving this year.  But I’ve made up my mind:  I am not going to leave out the thankfulness, no matter how I may be tempted.  Having decided that, it’s surprising how much better, how much stronger I feel, how much more alive I am, and how much I’m finding to be thankful for.”

            And then, finally, this from Samuel Shoemaker, a wonderful writer and preacher who passed on many years ago.  He left these words behind –

            “As I sit on a cool winter afternoon looking out the window on the snowy scene, I look back with many thanks.  It has been a great run.  I wouldn’t have missed it for anything.  Much could have been better, and I have, by no means, done what I should have done with all that I have been given.  There were dreams that did not come true, and losses not a few.  But overall it has been a school of lessons, not easily learned but of infinite worth, an instruction of a gentle and patient kind.  So the over-all experience of being alive has been and remains a thrilling experience.  And I firmly believe that death will be a doorway to more of it:  clearer, cleaner, better, with more of the secret of it all opened.  But again I say, it’s been a great run.  I’m thankful for it and, next to my gratitude to my God, (thankful) for all the friends who helped to make it so, especially those closest and dearest to me. “

            Let us choose life, my friends, all of it, as the very gift of God to us, that we and our children and our grandchildren may truly live.  Amen.