“Choose Life!”
Deuteronomy 30:11-15

Take a minute to let the picture that we just read about, from the story of God’s ancient people, sink in.  They’ve been in the desert for forty years.  They’ve been through hell and back—literally—and now they’re just a few miles from their destination, the land of promise.  The “land of milk and honey”, in a phrase that we still use and that came from this exact place, this exact moment.  They’re so ready to be there, they can hardly contain themselves.  “Let’s go, let’s go...” I bet they were muttering under their breath while Moses was gearing up his last sermon to them.  

“I have one more commandment for you,” he begins; and you can almost feel their impatience and disappointment.  One more commandment?  Are you kidding?  We’re there!  We have enough commandments!  Isn’t it time for life to start being good to us, instead of us having to watch ourselves all the time?  Isn’t it time for everything to be good and right for a while, all by itself?  This is what we’ve been waiting for!  

But Moses ignores their frustration, because he has something important to say. It’s the last thing he will have a chance to tell them.  Maybe it’s more important than anything else he has ever told them before.  So stop and listen, he says.  When you go into this promised land, Moses says, you won’t be slaves or wanderers any more.  You’ll be at home. You’ll have what you need.  This place won’t look like the desert, where you know you’ll get lost if you wander off by yourself, or if you stop paying attention to the leader.  You’ll have choices.  Choices between things that will bring you blessings and things that might look shiny and new and attractive at first, but ultimately are curses.  But I’m telling you that the real blessings come in practicing the things you already know, sticking close to the God who brought you out of slavery and through the wilderness.  

You already know what will bless you, what will give you real life.  You learned the things that matter while you were hungry, and homeless, and afraid.  Don’t forget those things now.  Hold onto those commandments, those lessons.  Keep going back to them.  Choose life.  

Choose life.  Those are the words for this season, when we too are mindful that we are people with choices.  In the rhythm of the liturgical year, we are Easter people—people who, with Christ, have come through our own experience of death and now might be living in the promised land of new life.  But not every day that we’re breathing feels like real life.  Sometimes—for all of us—it can feel like we’re sleep-walking through our own lives—not living so much as avoiding death.

We’re going to spend the next five weeks in worship talking about what choices we can make so that we can really live.  I’m using a book written by Gary Gunderson, who comes from a background in public health.  He’s spent his career thinking about the intersection of health and faith.  This book is called Leading Causes of Life, and here’s what he says, basically:
That what we are trained to listen for and speak, in our society, is a language of death, a language that is most conscious about danger and fear.  Huge amounts of money, and research, and our own attention to our lives, are spent on resisting death.  Many of us could tell someone—maybe not with complete accuracy, but in a reasonably educated way—what the leading causes of death in this society are:  heart disease, cancer, stroke, accidents, diabetes.  We know how you ought to eat and exercise and what medicines to take to avoid illness and death.   

But are there causes of life that can be known just as concretely?  Things that, if you practice them, can help make you really live rather than just not die, thrive instead of just avoiding pain?  Things that are about not just extending our lives, but living more satisfying and useful lives?

There are, Gunderson says.  There are leading causes not just of death, but of life.  And we know what they are because we can see them at work in people who have not just avoided death, but who really live—maybe even with joy.  People who have chosen life, when they could have chosen something else.  

Each of these five weeks, I’ve asked one of these people to share their story with you.  A story that’s about finding life, and the possibility of more life in the middle of circumstances that might look to some sort of like this pile of junk and broken stuff that’s here at the front of the sanctuary, with flowers growing out of it.  

This morning I want you to hear Nora Benavides’ story.  Nora lives in Marysville, so you may not see her often on Sunday mornings, but she considers herself part of this church.  She serves now as the executive director of Sacramento’s Faith & Homeless Families Initiative, and she has been doing justice work for more than 20 years.  She has led campaigns to help farm workers and victims of violence and racism, and to improve the environment.  She has worked as a consultant to cities and the California legislature and the United States Department of Justice.   And she has learned, from her own experience, what it means to really live.

(No text available for Nora's story.  Listen to audio above.)