Choosing Life

"The antitheses are all about choosing life. In this section of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus insists that life is threatened when anger and judgment and insult reign. Life is threatened when women are objectified, merely fulfillment of sexual desire or the carrying on the family name. Women, Jesus insists, are not culture’s for the taking. Life is threatened when women are consistently reduced, even discarded, based on their capacity to satisfy privileged and patriarchal needs and their capacity to bear children. Life is threatened when you do not follow through with oaths you make.

In other words, Jesus is saying that interpreting the law is far more complex than you make it out to be. And if your interpretations lead to death -- the silence of voices, the discounting of the personhood of the other, the disrespect and demeaning of entire groups of people, the labeling (which is a nice way to say calling names) thereby putting people in their place -- then you have to think long and hard about what it means to be a disciple of Jesus.

If “choose life” was the test case for what we did and said, the canonical marker, if you will for disciple-speak, we may pause before we lash out in anger and fear. We might take a moment before we label someone pro-life, pro-choice, pro-abortionist, (or anti all of those things). We might stop and think, is what I am about to say and what I am about to do something that would be recognizable as life-giving, life- upholding, life-empowering?

One of my favorite poems of late is one that speaks the truth of our bifurcated world but also the truth of what we as preachers might preach as the alternative: ( "clothesline," poem by Marilyn Maciel) 

i
you
us
them
those people
wouldn’t it be lovely
if one could
live
in a constant state
of we?
some of the most
commonplace
words
can be some of the biggest
dividers
they
what if there was
no they?
what if there
was only
us?
if words could be seen
as they floated out
of our mouths
would we feel no
shame
as they passed beyond
our lips?
if we were to string
our words
on a communal clothesline
would we feel proud
as our thoughts
flapped in the
breeze?"

http://www.workingpreacher.org/craft.aspx?post=4810

We are called to say "Yes"

We are called to say yes
That the kingdom might break through
To renew and to transform
Our dark and groping world.

We stutter and we stammer
To the lone God who calls
And pleads a new Jerusalem
In the bloodied Sinai Straits.

We are called to say yes
That honeysuckle may twine
And twist its smelling leaves
Over the graves of nuclear arms.

We are called to say yes
That black may sing with white
And pledge peace and healing
For the hatred of the past.

We are called to say yes
That nations might gather
and dance one great movement
for the joy of humankind.

We are called to say yes
To a God who still holds fast
To the vision of the Kingdom
For a trembling world of pain.

We are called to say yes
To this God who reaches out
And asks us to share
This amazing dream of love.

From Edwina Gateley, There Was No Path So I Trod One (Sheed and Ward, 1996, 2013).