A Sermon by Sydney V. (Skip) Jackson — February 21, 2010
Indianola Presbyterian Church, Columbus, Ohio
Text:  Psalm 1:1-6;  Deuteronomy 30:6, 11-20a

The Lord your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your descendants, so that you will love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, in order that you may live. — Deuteronomy 30:6

I have set before you life and death… choose life…  — Deuteronomy 30:19

When I was growing up, I didn’t know much about Lent.  Mostly it looked like Lent was about giving things up, and I thought it was a bummer.  Catholic friends would give up candy for Lent… or ice cream.  Adults talked about giving up smoking.  Sometimes they even tried.  Most people seemed to begrudge their sacrifice unless, of course, they gave up something they didn’t like anyway.  It didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me.  I used to say I was giving up Lent for Lent.  Now, according to a Dispatch article on Friday, kids are giving up Facebook (although it seems some will fall back on unlimited text messaging).

A lot that I read about Lent emphasizes feeling sorry for what we’ve done wrong and making sacrifices.  “Lent is all about sacrifice,” said one teen in the Dispatch article.  Scripture commentaries for Lent are filled with words like sin and guilt, temptation, transgressions, and trespasses, along with repentance—repentance, in the sense of feeling sorry for misdeeds and promising never to do them again.  Now these are certainly valid concerns with respect to our spiritual journey through life.  But they can be over-emphasized during the Lenten season.

 

The passage I read from Deuteronomy speaks of the choices God sets before everyone—life and death, blessings and curses—and then it urges us to choose life.  And that choosing primarily involves the central tenet of Deuteronomy as set out in Chapter 6 in what is called the Shema:  Shema ysrael. Adonai elohenu. Adonai echod. —“Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord alone.”  And it continues, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.”  And the impetus to do this is inscribed (“circumcised”) on our hearts so that we might live.  It’s all wrapped up together—loving God and choosing life—and God means for it to be that way.  The other side, according to Deuteronomy, happens when our hearts “turn away” from God.

“Choose life!” Deuteronomy urges.  But the common practices of Lent seem mostly to look away from life and backwards at the ways of death.  They focus on all the things we’ve done wrong and, even more, on what we must sacrifice.  As a result Lenten practices can become like the parent or teacher who constantly berates a child for their mistakes and misbehaviors—saying “Don’t do that!” so often that the child comes to believe and to declare within, “I can’t ever do anything right!”

“Choose life!” Deuteronomy urges.  Yet the church has a long history of highlighting the “wages of sin” and employing fear to get people to shape up.  Many Christians seem to know far more about the curses and terrors of hell than about the blessings and attractions of God’s kingdom.  Most can name the “seven deadly sins” far more readily than any of the “seven lively virtues.”  And “original sin” is recalled and debated at length, while the “original blessing” of creation when God declared everything “Good!” is nearly forgotten.

Lent ought to be more about “choosing life,” focusing more on ways of loving God with heart, soul, mind, and strength, than on all the ways we fail in this.  Repentance is often taken as a negative word, tasting of ashes and bitter regrets.  But in the Greek, one of its meanings is to turn—specifically to turn toward God, and to turn again and again so as to re-turn to God.  I like what Frederick Buechner says about repentance in his little book Wishful Thinking:  “To repent is to come to your senses.  It is not so much something you do as something that happens.  True repentance spends less time looking at the past and saying ‘I’m sorry,’ than to the future and saying, ‘Wow!’”  Lent should be less about our regrets and more about this kind of repentance, more about awe and wonder and choosing life.

Now, I do want to say something about this choosing.  Life and death… God sets these before us, according to Deuteronomy.  And we’re urged to choose life.  But, in reality, our choice is more than a little limited.  For instance, none of us chose to be born.  In an ultimate sense, we cannot choose life, for life has been thrust upon us… or we have been thrust into life.  And on the other hand, no matter how much we might try to deny death, we have no choice whatsoever about whether or not we will die.  Absolutely everyone will die… you, me, everyone!

I recall a story in which a woman described taking her young grandson to his very first funeral—a service for her sister, the little boy’s great aunt.  At the end of the service when everyone passed by the open casket, the boy went up to it and peered in and asked, “Grandma, who is that?”  The women replied, “That’s my sister, and she’s asleep.”  The boy looked again into the casket and exclaimed, “Gosh, Grandma, it looks to me like somebody killed her!”

Death is a reality— “earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”  There’s no avoiding it.  And if death happens to you here in Columbus, most likely a group of your friends, loved ones, and fellow church members will gather here in this sanctuary to celebrate your life—sharing memories and stories of how your life touched their lives.  Life is here now, and death will come—whether we like it or not.  As Walter Cronkite used to say, “That’s the way it is.”

So when Deuteronomy says that God sets death and life before us and then urges us to chose life, the question facing us is:  Will we die living, or will we live dying?  The British psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott began an autobiography that he never finished.  The first paragraph says simply, “I died.”  In the fifth paragraph he wrote, “Let me see.  What was happening when I died?  My prayer had been answered.  I was alive when I died.  That was all I had asked, and I had got it.”  [noted by Anatole Broyard in the N.Y. Times Book Review, April1, 1990]  Winnicott didn’t mean just that he was breathing, but that he was truly alive in the sense of choosing life even in the midst of death. 

Rabbi Harold Kushner, who wrote the best-selling book When Bad Things Happen to Good People, argues that people aren’t really afraid of dying.  What really frightens us is something even more unsettling and more tragic than dying.  “We are afraid,” he says, “of never having lived, of coming to the end of our days with the sense that we were never really alive, that we never figured out what life was for”  [When All You’ve Ever Wanted Isn’t Enough, p. 156].

So during this Lenten season, let God’s love turn your heart from death to life.  Seek out activities and do things that choose life.  The cover of our worship bulletin cover offers some ideas.  “Think freely.  Smile often.  Tell those you love that you do.  Rediscover old friends.  Make new ones.  Hope.  Grow.  Give.  Give in.  …Reach out.  Let someone in.”  There are more.  I’m especially fond of, “Make some mistakes.  Learn from them.”  Perhaps some of you came to our Ash Wednesday service and received the ashes of last year’s palm branches applied to your forehead.  Those ashes remind us that death is unavoidable, that we are dust and to dust we return.  But the point of that reminder is not to wallow in guilt and regret and sorrow, but to learn from our mistakes and then get back up, brush ourselves off, and start again.

If you would like a special Lenten discipline this year, don’t go giving something up.  Instead, turn and look the other way, toward the One Lord who loves you, face directly into the life you are given, and do something new and life affirming.  Each day ask yourself, “If this were the last day of my life, what would I do with it?”  And then… once or twice… when you can manage it… do it.  Just do it.

Choose life, even in the midst of death.  Because when the time comes when your friends and loved ones gather here for your funeral or memorial service, they won’t be tallying up all your sins, transgressions, and shortcomings.  No, they’ll be celebrating and giving thanks for your life.  And so will God!  Amen and amen.