Choosing Life

In order to choose life, we need to know how dead we are.

Transcript

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And so, in his last words, to the people of God before they enter the promised land. Moses spoke to them and said, I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore, choose life that you and your offspring may live. Grace, mercy and peace be with you from God, our father and our Lord and savior Jesus Christ. Amen. So there was a man, maybe from Montreal, who entered C. B. C's birthday contest, and he won the grand prize. He was all excited because Ian Hanomansing came to his house to visit and said that he had two options for his prize and he had to make a choice. One was to spend a whole week in the most remote part of Canada's Northern Arctic wilderness, and the other option was to see the best tourist destinations across the country. In other words, he had the choice between seeing all of it or Nunavut. Choices. Life is all about choices. We're faced with a 1,000,000 choices all day long, and if you look at the account in the scriptures of God's interaction with people, it is also a story of choices.  To eat from this tree or do not eat from this tree. To get on this giant boat with all these animals, or to not get on this giant boat. To leave your homeland for a new country that the Lord is going to give you or to stay home. And that's just the first few chapters of Genesis. The choices continue to pile up even after that, but today's choice is the stark one. It's the big one. It's the grand prize of all the choices that face all people of all time, the choice between life and death. As we go deeper into the Sermon on the Mount, we realize that we're not being asked by Jesus to make a choice between this or that, like a choice between vanilla and chocolate, but a choice between how we will look at the world, the choice between life and death. How so? Well, the first thing that pastors normally introduce people to in catechism class or adult instruction, especially those who are not familiar with Christianity or who've been away from the church for a while is the 10 Commandments. Hopefully, all of you know a least a few of the 10 Commandments. We talk about what they are. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your strength. First commandment. You shall have no other gods before me. Remember the Sabbath day. You shall not murder. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not steal. Now the commandments seem simple on the face of it. Pretty straightforward. Do these things and you will live. But that's the problem when we think that it is obedience to the commandments that give us life. Then we run into all sorts of issues. What really is murder and what isn't? What is adultery on? What is it? Is it okay to divorce? When is it okay to divorce? How should we divorce Blaise Pascal, one of my favorite writers of all time. Most of us know him as a mathematician from 16 hundreds in France, but he was also a very devout Protestant Christian wrote about this whole issue in one of his famous books, the provincial letters where he says, Is it not a sin to be sitting in a bar with someone and smack him in the face and killing. And he says, There are people in the church telling you that. Well, maybe not. Maybe that isn't actually murder, especially if the person has looked at you sideways or given you cause to not like him. What Blaise Pascal was addressing is the question of casuistry. It's great to have the commandments. It's great to know what they are. But if we think that it is obedience to those commandments that give life, then we're gonna want to know all the jots and tittles for when we are and are not breaking them. When are we murdering and when are we not murdering? When are we stealing and when are we not steal? And the Jewish faith got absorbed with this game. How do we interpret the commandments in such a way that we can feel like we have done what God has asked us to do? And so over the centuries, rabbis went through the case study issues, they drew up documents, they wrote letters, they gave speeches and eventually all that the sermons were by the time of Jesus was "Rabbi so and so says this, but Rabbi so and so says that." But then there's another rabbi that says the other thing and there's all sorts of loopholes in the law. So we get Jesus. And if Jesus were to stand up and say You have heard it said to those of old "Do not murder: but Rabbi so in so said murder is this, and Rabbi so and so says that" we probably wouldn't have the Sermon on the Mount recorded in our Bibles at all. But what makes them so original and what shocked people to the core maybe even more than the miracles was that something different was happening in this Jesus of Nazareth when he looked at them and said, "You have heard it set of old but I say to you," and when he said, "I say to you" he didn't give them an out. He didn't explain the loopholes. He actually took the base understanding and made it even worse. "You've heard it said to the people of old, do not murder. But I say to you anybody who is even angry with his brother in his heart has broken the Fifth Commandment." "You have heard, it said, do not commit adultery, but I tell you that any man who looks at a woman with lust in his heart has already broken the Sixth Commandment." "You have heard it said when you divorce just right piece of paper that says I divorce you and you're free to remarry. But I say to you, you shouldn't even be getting divorce at all. How dare you treat it so casually?" This thing called marriage, where God unites a man and a woman together for life as one flesh and promises you have all these grades of promises. Jesus says, "Well, I only swore by the moon, so I'm only 80% obligated to keep the promise." Jesus says "Let your yes be yes and your no be no." If you say you're gonna do it, you're going to do it. Those words, I think, had to have so stunned the crowds listening and challenged the disciples that I think there was switching back and forth between the two groups,  people in the crowd who became disciples and people who thought they were disciples, who said, "I think I'm just gonna kind of go further down the mountain here and and fade into the group because I can't do this." If this is the choice between life and death, to do these things, to live out the Sermon on the Mount or to not I think I'm gonna have to choose death now. I don't know why, but even we Christians are not all that different from the ancient Jews. We try and do the same thing to the law that they did. Look for the loopholes, the casuistry as well. Yes, Jesus said, but really did he mean it? So when I was in college, I was in college with people from all sorts of different Christian denominations. We were in a Mennonite college on the campus of the University of Waterloo, and they prized themselves on bringing together people from all sorts of different backgrounds to make them live together and learn from one another. It's a great experience. I think the world would be in better shape if you had to deal with people that didn't agree with you all the time, and you had to still have breakfast with them the next day. But I had a lot of evangelical friends, and they would always tell me that well, it's only a sin if you do it.  It's not a sin if you think about it. But how can you say that when Jesus makes it so clear in the Sermon on the Mount that no, actually thinking about it is, in fact, sin? Well, their answer would always be "but that would make us sinners and not holy and we wouldn't be saved." See the problem? If you look to the law to save you, you've got to soften the blow. And I'm not gonna let Lutherans off the hook because I was reading my brand new commentary on Matthew, written by a well known professor of mine not from my seminary, but our other seminary in ST Louis. And lo and behold, he tries to do the same thing. Wow. Jesus surely couldn't mean this because that would be impossible. Oh, really? How is that Lutheran? How can you bring yourself to say that when in just a few more chapters, you're gonna hear Jesus say, "Take eat this is my body," and you're not gonna turn around and say the same thing. Well, that's impossible. You're going to say, "Well, if Jesus says that he must I mean it." But. but. But. That's always what we want to do when confronted with the starkest of choice is life or death. But... there's gotta be a middle option. Can I have mostly life? What are you going to do when Jesus says "If your right eye causes you to sin, tear it out and throw it away? And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away?" Surely Jesus can't mean that literally. But what if he does? What if this is precisely the point that he is trying to get to. Okay, men, you find yourself looking at women lusting after them in your heart. You pluck out your right eye. You suppose your left eye is gonna be all holier than thou? And let's suppose that your right hand is always grabbing for the thing it shouldn't be grabbing for and you cut it off. Do you think suddenly your left hand is gonna be perfect? So you've got no right eye and now no left eye. No right hand, No left hand. Do you think the rest of your body is going to stop sinning? If you take Jesus's words literally was is their obvious conclusion? What is he asking you to do in order to be saved? To die. If you want to follow the path of the law, if that's how you want to choose life is by remaining obedient to the commandments, to the standard that God has laid down, the kind of life he wants us to live, there is no choice but to die. What if, in order to be blessed, we have to see how cursed we are and what if to choose life, we have to first choose death? What if we need to accept that we cannot be sexually moral enough to save ourselves? What if we acknowledge that we can't be calm and patient enough to never break the Fifth Commandment? What if we need to understand how weak our promises always are compared to God's. God never breaks his promises. We always at some point will. Well, when you get to that point, you're sort of forced to do what Paul did in Romans chapter seven. "Wretched man that I am," he calls out, "who will deliver me from this body of death?" That's where the Sermon on the Mount is leading brothers and sisters. This is where Jesus wants you to get. This is what he's trying to break through to these crowds who have thought all along that choosing life meant somehow living up to this standard and being able to stand before God and say, "Look at me. I am awesome. I have done everything you have asked. I have lived a holy, an exemplary life. I have always served my neighbor." The whole point is to realize that we're cursed and therefore dead. And only then can we choose life. Paul answers his call "Wretched man that I am who will deliver me from this body of death with the words thanks be to God through Jesus Christ, our Lord." Not "Oh, Lord, help me do a little bit better tomorrow. Oh, Lord, I can keep these commandments. I just need another day. Oh, Lord, just let me focus a little bit more on not being angry and not being lustful. Let me pluck out another. I cut off another hand." Paul gives up on all of them and says, thanks be to God through Jesus Christ, our Lord. "So then I myself serve the law of God with my mind," Paul writes. "But with my flesh. I served the law of sin." I know that my flesh is cursed. I know my eyes need to be plucked out. My hands need to be cut off. My feet need to be torn out. But you have saved me. You have saved me from death. I choose Jesus. And that's how I choose life. The law, you see, was never meant to give life. It never did. It never could. But it can lead us to the one who does. And that is Christ. The one who is love and life, salt and light. It is he who saves us. Not we ourselves. He first kills us. Baptism says "I'm gonna pluck the eyes out, cut the hands off, cut the feet off. You are now dead and drowned" and then turns around and gives us new life by the Spirit and says, "and now you truly are alive because you are mine." He feeds us not with earthly food as good as that might be, but by his own body and blood of the altar. He sustains us regularly and daily with his very words from Scripture. We as the people of God and as the pastors in God's house may plant and we may water, but it is always God who gives the growth. It's not you or me, and the new growth includes a more expansive view of the law, and we're no longer afraid as those who have been saved by Christ to see just how far and hide the bar set. We don't read the Sermon on the Mount anymore in terror, we read the Sermon on the Mount and say, "Won't this be great?" Imagine a world in which we are rid of our lust and anger and infidelity and untrustworthiness, a world in which we live as Christ lived, a world in which are perfect even as he is perfect, because we read the Sermon on the Mount now not as being about judgment, but as a picture of what God intends for his world on the Last Day, a picture of what Jesus intends for us to be by his blood and his spirit in our resurrections. When the law is about judgment we lower the standard as low as we can go so that we can get away with whatever we need to get away with to survive. But when the Good News of Jesus is preached that it is him, his blood at his cross that were redeemed, then we can see the Law in a whole new way. Not as death, but as a picture of the new life as something that is good and righteous. We can love the law even when we know we fail to keep it. So remember how Moses said I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore, choose life. What did he say next? Choose life not by doing your best to follow a moral code and so prove yourself worthy of God's love? No, he said, "loving the Lord, your God obeying his voice and holding fast to him. For he is your life and length of days," not the law. He is the one who is the resurrection and the light and the salt and the life. We believe these things. We trust these things. That is how we choose life and not death. Blessing and not curse. To choose life is to choose Jesus. Amen.