Appealing On the Basis of Love

Scriptures: Deuteronomy 30:15-20, Philemon 4-21

Let’s see now.  Life…..death.  Blessings…..curses.  Hmmmm.  Which one will I choose?  If we were in a casino playing “Let It Ride”, this is what would be called a “no-brainer”.  Which of us wouldn’t choose life over death, blessings over curses?  But maybe it’s not as simple as it might seem.

We make choices every day, don’t we?  There are the mundane little choices, like what to wear in the morning, what we’re going to have for lunch, which television program to watch in the evening – to the larger choices that help to define us.  One of those, in all likelihood, was when you decided to become a Christian.  Jean-Paul Sartre some years ago (I believe it was in his play No Exit) said, “We are our choices”.  That is to say what we choose and how we choose it make a difference and define what our lives will be now and will become in the future.

What’s more, sometimes the choice between life and death isn’t all that clear-cut.  Did you know that suicide in North America is the third cause of death for youth, behind car accidents and homicide?  The choice of death seems to be a preference for those who are depressed and think their lives are no longer worth living.  One minister tells this story about a young kid whom he was counseling at a summer camp.  This kid went on and on about wanting to die until one day his counselor said, “Come on, let’s go. If you want to die I’ll help you die.”  The counselor took the kid up on the side of the mountain where there was a visitors’ cabin with a balcony hanging out over the edge of the mountain.  The counselor said, “If you want to die then I’ll help you kill yourself.  I’ll hold you by your ankles out over the balcony and drop you on your head so that it will kill you.”  The kid reluctantly said, “OK,” even though the counselor could see that he was quickly changing his mind.  The counselor took the boy by the ankles and held him out over the edge of the balcony when all of a sudden the kid yelled, “Stop!  I don’t want to die!”  The counselor pulled him back in and sat him down. The kid’s heart was racing and the counselor said, “Listen, I know you don’t want to die.  That’s not the problem.  The problem is that you don’t know how to live.”  Now, there’s an example of tough love!

Another point at which the choice between life and death isn’t clear-cut is when we or a loved one is wracked by a terminal illness.  Sometimes there is the kind of hope that comes when life continues and there are those “better” days that lift our spirits.  But sometimes there is only pain and the desire, finally, to be free of it.  And then you or I as the caregiver is confronted with a choice when our loved one says, “Help me to die.”

“Choose life.”  And sometimes the response is, “Why should we?”  That’s when we turn to this passage from Deuteronomy with renewed eyes.  In fact, this text is about God’s grace, God’s willingness to offer life even though we may have already chosen death.  This is about the blessings that God constantly showers upon us.  The context here is that God is renewing God’s covenant with Israel; that’s what’s happening in Chapters 29 and 30 leading up to our passage.  God is restoring the people to the land.  And thus God is saying to them:  “Your choice is to be faithful to God who enters into covenant with you.”

Faithfulness.  That’s really the choice we are called upon to make.  In verses 17 and 18 God says, “But if your heart turns away and you do not hear, but are led astray to bow down to other gods and serve them, I declare to you today that you shall perish; you shall not live long in the land that you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess.”  The word “hear” can also be understood as “heed” or ”obey”.  We are invited not just to listen to God, but to heed God with all of our being.

In the final analysis, then it is not so much that we choose life or choose God but that God chooses us.  We are invited into covenant; we are asked to live in the land which the Lord swore to our ancestors.  Our choice is to accept our being chosen by God, and then to live out our lives according to that promise.

The important thing is that God does offer us that choice.  It’s called free will.  God does not impose God’s will by fiat or by pulling rank or by asserting divine authority.  “Here is my covenant; choose life; choose blessings.”

There is another kind of choice that is implicit in this passage.  We not only choose to listen to God – to heed God – but we also can opt for those voices we choose to listen to.  In our lives there are people who cheer you on and those who put you down; you can choose to listen to the people who cheer you on.  In our history there are those who witness to a faithfulness from which we can take strength – we call this the communion of saints – as we sang about in our opening hymn this morning.  A familiar passage at the beginning of the 12^th chapter of the book of Hebrews says, “Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses…let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us…..”  The key learning to take from this verse is that we never run alone; across the years and still today we can be here for one another.  Choose whom you will listen to and heed and follow.

In our second scripture passage – this very short letter from Paul to Philemon – a similar dynamic is at work.  Philemon was a member of the congregation at Colossae – in fact, Paul probably wrote this personal letter at the same time that he wrote the letter to the Colossians – both of them being written while Paul was in prison and toward the end of his life.  It’s a bit hard to understand why this very personal letter was later included in the New Testament canon – but we can be grateful that it was because it gives us some insight into Paul’s personality that we don’t get elsewhere.

Philemon was a slave owner, and Onesimus was one of his slaves who had run away, met Paul, and become a Christian.  Now, Paul wants Philemon to take Onesimus back.  Paul wants to have their old relationship of master and slave transformed into a new relationship.  Paul was seeking to have Philemon accept Onesimus back as more than a slave; he wanted Philemon to recognize him as his brother.

But notice how he goes about it.  He praises Philemon for his faith and his love, and he talks about how Onesimus has grown in his own faith.  Like the Lord in Deuteronomy, Paul doesn’t seek to exert his own will or command Philemon by fiat or claim authority over him – even though he could based on Paul’s long history of ministry and mission.  No, Paul appeals to him “on the basis of love”.

Is this beginning to sound a bit familiar?  It has resonances, doesn’t it, with both the story of the Prodigal Son and the story of the Good Samaritan.  No wonder, then, that this small letter was included in the New Testament canon – it is full of what Jesus is constantly asking us to do – to forgive and bring back into the fold like a brother one who has strayed; to care for the one whom we might have thought to be a stranger; to love even those who are the most unlovable among us.

You all know the serenity prayer attributed to Reinhold Niebuhr:  “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference.”  Here’s a paraphrase of that prayer which may hit us a bit too close to home:  “God grant me the senility to forget the people I never liked anyway, the good fortune to run into the ones I do, and the eyesight to tell the difference.”  Perhaps Philemon really wasn’t all that interested in welcoming Onesimus back.  How do we move from wanting to forget those we don’t like to loving them as a brother or sister?

Last Saturday, as you all know, was the ninth anniversary of the event we have come simply to know as “9/11”.  I don’t know how prominent it was in the media here, but in New York and New Jersey where we were for the past two months there was constant talk about the mosque proposed to be built near the Ground Zero site (what is proposed, by the way, is actually a community center which has a worship area as part of the complex).  Since that anniversary date of 9/11 conversation about where the center should be located seems to have abated; it may be a while now before there is a resolution of the matter.

Yet, here is a clear opportunity for us to utilize a symbol for loving those we would like to forget as our brothers and sisters.  It’s not often you’ll hear me quoting George W. Bush with approval, but he got it exactly right after 9/11 when he said, “The face of terror is not the true face of Islam….. This is not the America I know.”  USA Today editorialized on August 16:  “the mosque, like the calm that has prevailed since Sept. 11, 2001, will stand as a marker of the USA’s enduring commitment to religious freedom.”

The Rev. Michael Kinnamon, General Secretary of the National Council of Churches, tells this story as a way of relating the role of religious freedom in relation to our feelings about 9/11:

“For thousands of families, Ground Zero in southern Manhattan is holy ground. Thousands lost someone they love in the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, and hundreds of thousands know someone who was directly or indirectly scarred by the collapse of the World Trade Center. The emotional investment in Ground Zero cannot be overestimated.

“That is precisely why Ground Zero must be open to the religious expression of all people whose lives were scarred by the tragedy:  Christians, Jews, Sikhs, Buddhists, Hindus, and more.  And Muslims.

“No one knows how many Muslims died on 9/11, but they number in the hundreds.  One was Salman Hamdani, a 23-year-old New York City police cadet, emergency medical technician and medical student.  When Salman disappeared on September 11, law enforcement officials who knew of his Islamic faith sought him out among his family to question him about the attacks.  His family lived with the onus of suspicion for six months until Salman’s body was identified.  He was found near the North Tower with his EMT bag beside him, situated where he could help people in need.

“The point of this now famous story is simple.  Not every Muslim at Ground Zero was a terrorist, and not every Muslim was a hero.  The vast majority were like thousands of others on September 11:  victims of one of the most heinous events of our times.”

For those of us who are Christians the proposed center is more than simply a symbol of America’s commitment to religious freedom.  It is also a way for us to stand in solidarity with our co-religionists – to realize and to say to a doubting world that Christian, Jew, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, Baha’i, and so on and so on stand together in offering a choice for life in the face of whatever terrorism might fling our way.  Thank God – literally – that the Rev. Terry Jones finally backed away from his threat to burn copies of the Koran on the anniversary date of 9/11; that example of hatred and animosity – which was rightly almost universally condemned, even by the Rev. Jones’s co-Pentecostalists – fans those flames which help to breed intolerance.  (As a side-bar, it strikes me as fascinating that the burning of a revered symbol – book-burning, flag-burning – reaches such deep emotions of horror in our hearts; imagine for a moment in your own hearts the feelings you would have if, say, a group of atheists gathered around a bon-fire to burn copies of the Holy Bible as a protest against what Christianity has done to the world.)

In terms of our two texts the proposed center and mosque near Ground Zero stands as a symbol for the brother or sister – the slave, in the Philemon text – the blessing in the Deuteronomy text – that we’re not quite sure we want to welcome back, not quite sure we want to choose.  Tom Paine put it this way two hundred years ago in the American Revolution when he said, “We have it within our power to make the world over again.”  In other words, we have choices that are so consequential that the world in which we live is literally determined by the choices we make.

If Philemon accepts the appeal that Paul is making to him on the basis of love, then he will accept Onesimus back as a brother in Christ and bear his burdens (as we have talked about before in reflecting on Galatians 6:2), even as we are called upon to receive our Muslim brothers and sisters in the wake of “9/11”.  We are empowered to do this because we are the “community of saints” – the “cloud of witnesses”, as the author of the book of Hebrews puts it.  We are here for one another.  We do indeed “choose life so that you and your descendants may live”.

Amen

Dave Pomeroy

First Congregational Church/United Church of Christ
Las Vegas, NV
September 19, 2010