2023.02.12 | Choices & Commitments
“Choices & Commitments”
Rev. Pepper Swanson
Eden United Church of Christ
Hayward, California
Sixth Sunday After Epiphany
Feb 12, 2023
Deuteronomy 30:15-20 | Español
Today’s reading from the Book of Deuteronomy is a story within a story within an even larger story.
The innermost or most literal story is the story of what Moses told the ancient Israelites immediately before they entered the promised land after 40 years of wandering the wilderness.
In an extended sermon, Moses reminds them of their history and their special chosen relationship with the Lord their God. He reviews the 10 Commandments given to them at Mt. Horeb (which is called Mt. Sinai in Exodus), and provides them with a legal code to guide their conduct in their new land.
While the legal code is extensive and detailed and often harsh by our standards, Moses cushions the law with a good deal of psychological pleading for the people to understand the importance of remaining faithful to the God who has brought them out of slavery in Exodus, who has given them food and water when they thought they were dying, who has given them military success when they were under attack or attacking others and who has now brought them to the very edge of a bountiful land — a land again and again as being filled with milk and honey.
Like a parent lecturing a teenager before a night out, Moses urges the people not to let their prosperity and complacency or temptations and challenges lead them to forget their God, to fall into the worship of other gods, to neglect the care of widows, orphans, and aliens, or to harm others in their anger or in revenge. He lays out the correct ways to worship, to tithe, to eat, to mete out mercy & justice, to limit the power of royals, to provide resources to priests, to engage in warfare, to handle rebellious children, to divorce wives, and to properly treat poor and needy neighbors and workers. He also describes the legal code’s considerable punishment for transgression: punishment by curse, by banishment, by flogging, by the removal of hands, and by death — lots and lots of death, primarily by stoning.
At the end of his recitation of the code, which brings the end of the story, Moses lays out his message very clearly. Disobeying God’s law can mean death. Obeying God’s law means life. Choose, he says, life.
Then, being 120 years old and having been told by God that he will not cross over to the promised land, Moses makes Joshua the new leader and commands him to assemble the people and read the legal code every seven years. God blesses Joshua as leader of the people and after only viewing the promised land from the top of a mountain, Moses dies.
That is the innermost and most literal story. Surrounding that story is the second story that Bible scholars have identified by examining in minute detail the theological ideas, literary themes, writing style, and vocabulary of Deuteronomy and the books that follow it — Joshua, Judges, 1–2 Samuel, and 1–2 Kings — known as the former Prophets, as well as portions of the Book of Jeremiah. From this examination, the conclusion has been drawn that Deuteronomy was not, of course, authored by Moses or one of his contemporaries but by an educated elite of writers working between the 7th and 5th centuries BCE, first as refugees in Southern Kingdom of Judah where they fled after Northern Kingdom of Israel was conquered by Assyria and then in Babylon after Judah’s elites were forcibly removed to that city.
Faced first with the dire circumstances of the overthrow of their divided kingdom, their military defeat and captivity and then by the desperate hope of returning to their country to rebuild their Temple and their faith, the writers (who we can call the Deuteronomists) latched onto the story of Moses to address what the Bible scholar Ronald Clements refers to as “the leader-less malaise that…they diagnosed as part of their nation’s ills.” (1)
So in addition to receiving the 10 Commandments and the extensive legal code, we receive the story of a great, father-like, leader who is head and shoulders above the people he leads in faith and energy. He is generous when they are not and he is for pushing forward when they yearn for home. He is their intermediary to God when they were at their worst and when God was at his angriest. He absorbed the wrath of both and kept the covenant together by reminding both God and the people that they had chosen one another. He was, from the perspective of the Deuteronomists, just the leader that the captives in Babylon needed if they were to successfully return to Jerusalem, rebuild their Temple, and restart their faith.
And so, when the time came and the people prepared to return to Jerusalem after Cyrus the Persian agrees they may leave Babylon, scholars believe the story of Moses leading his people was given a new introduction and a new ending, which expanded the earlier legal code to include an exhortation to faithfulness and a blessing on those who remained faithful.
From the Deuteronomists’ story, we inherit a strong interest in the exclusive worship of God in a centralized location and a strong prohibition against the worship of images of other gods or even of the Lord, an emphasis that most likely pushed the faith toward explicit monotheism. We also inherited a moral code for personal and communal behavior that resonates throughout the entire Bible, including in our stories of how Jesus explained his own ethical decision making. And, of course, as Clements says, we inherited the beginnings of a “psychologizing and spiritualizing of religious commitment, that pervades the early Christian tradition,” meaning our focus on the connections between love of God and the responsive obedience and gratitude of his people.(2)
This inheritance is why we see that the second story, the middle story of today’s scripture reading, does not end with the death of Moses or the people entering the promised land. It ends instead with where the third and outermost story begins and that is…with us. We are the third and outermost story.
What we have in common with the first and second stories is that we too are a people on the cusp of great change and an uncertain future. On Thursday, Mayor London Breed said a remarkable thing: she said, downtown San Francisco “as we know it,” is “not coming back.” And I thought that dire prediction seems so true these days. The pandemic has altered our world in terms of how and where we work, how and where we live, and how and where we socialize, even how and where and whether we worship. But even before the pandemic, the seeds of change were planted: we are entering a time when much of what we assumed to be true will be challenged, including our definitions of democratic, legal, and moral order.
We may be entering a time where our lack of national consensus on personal, political, and social norms leads simultaneously and confusingly to both less personal freedom (as is the case with abortion) but more negative consequences of other people’s freedom (for example, Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter and Trump’s return to Facebook), fewer personal resources (such as many face in retirement), but more focus on accumulating excessive wealth (witness the rise of online gambling), and more personal security (there’s no place like home) but increasing crime, violence, and desperation on the streets around us (the result of drug addiction). Conflicts over ethics and values are rising around us because we lack a shared understanding of the causes as well as solutions. Like the ancient Israelites, we are walking into a new world, confident only that the old world as we knew it is probably not coming back.
Although we share an uncertain future with the ancients, we are different from the people in the first two stories in this one key respect: most of us will never hear or read or preach the whole of Deuteronomy from the pulpit as a method of preparing us for the future that lies ahead. And that is a good thing, because if you hadn’t heard, what the Biblical authors call the promised land of milk and honey was already occupied by Canaanites! When Moses sent Joshua and the Israelites into Canaan to take and occupy the land, they were to destroy in the process the residents and their way of life, including their religion. And it is also a good thing that in the thousands of years since the legal code of Deuteronomy was introduced, the rigid requirements of that law and its most draconian punishments have fallen into disfavor in most of the world but most especially here in the US, where until recently we have lived with more freedom and less cruelty, and with more focus on resolving problems than just killing problem creators.
While we can and do reject much of Deuteronomy’s harsh treatment of non-Israelities and other religions and its draconian legal code, we can still embrace the thought embedded in today’s Scripture reading that each of us are presented with a choice between beliefs and behaviors that contribute to life and those that contribute, if not to death, then to suffering of ourselves and others. With the right instruction in childhood, be that in our families, our schools, and our places of worship, we have the tools that we need not only to make the right choices, but to make the right commitments so at the moment we are confronted with an ethical decision we know how to act because we know who we are.
One of my favorite writers in Christian Ethics, which is the study of how we make decisions as Christians about what is right and moral, is the Rev. Samuel Wells. I’ve probably spoken of him and his book Improvisation before.
Rev. Wells says of Christian ethics that: “...ethics is about making good people who live faithfully, rather than about guiding actions so that any person can act rightly. Ethics is about forming lives of commitment, rather than informing lives without commitment.” (3)
I have always interpreted that to mean that while considerable time and talent can be spent arguing whether the 10 Commandments can be displayed in a statehouse or a public courthouse or a public park or in public school, that time and talent might be better spent not only teaching children in Church what the 10 Commandments are but talking about what they meant to Jesus and how and why we live within His teachings.
As Rev. Wells says, “Christians find their character by becoming a character in God’s story. They move from trying to realize all meaning in their own lives to receiving the heritage of faith and the hope of glory. They move from fearing their fate to singing of their destiny.”
That’s the end of the third story of the three stories within today’s Scripture reading. Whereas the inner story and the second story that surrounds it end with the people entering or re-entering a promised land, our story ends with some uncertainty as to where we are going but with confidence that our faith is God’s blessing to us if we can embrace it and teach it to our children.
I’ll leave you with one more thought about choices and commitments. As we go through life, we make choices. Some of those choices are not worthy of us — we may party too hard, spend too much, love the wrong person, or cheat in some small or large way. And, in one way or another, we usually suffer some consequence for those poor choices.
It is also true that some of our life choices — like marriage and having children — are good choices but thrust upon us responsibilities that we find more challenging than we expected and we suffer as we learn and adapt to our new situation.
Humans at their most spontaneous make choices — both bad and good — quickly, too quickly, and find themselves with either the consequences or responsibilities they can’t handle and no real process for making decisions.
Today’s Scripture points us to one way to change that. If we make our commitment to God and to Christ first, our choices about what to do on a daily basis become easier and less surprising. I think that’s what Moses meant. Having laid out for his Church the consequences of their choices, he asks only that they make a commitment first and foremost to that which is life-affirming and use that as their internal compass when faced with a choice of whether and how to act in every situation.
As Moses says: “Choose life so that you and your descendants may live, loving the Lord your God, obeying him, and holding fast to him, for that means life to you and length of days.
My friends, choose life so that you may live. Amen.
Clements, Ronald E., “The Book of Deuteronomy: Introduction, Commentary, and Reflection” in The New Interpreter’s Bible: A Commentary in Twelve Volumes, edited by Neil M. Alexander et al, Abingdon Press, 1998, v. 12, 283.
Ibid, 285
Samuel Wells, Improvisation: The Drama of Christian Ethics (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2004), 30.