Choosing Life...and Being Chosen...
CHOOSE LIFE…today’s reading from Deuteronomy, the voice of Moses speaking to the people, sounds a little like the gospel of prosperity being bandied about by far too many “Christian” writers and speakers today-Joel Osteen and others like him… those who tell us that following Jesus means we will be both healthy and wealthy… And yet, Moses is actually saying that in choosing life, the people of Israel would be choosing to live in relationship with Yahweh…loving God and obeying the commandments… for that means life…which is a very different kind of prosperity. And then, along comes Jesus in Matthew’s fifth chapter…that conglomeration of t eachings called by us “The Sermon on the Mount”. And it sounds like a laundry list of impossibilities to me t his re-working, this re-focusing of emphasis in the Law of Moses, t he Ten Commandments. Because Jesus takes them and makes them harder to keep, more difficult to follow… which somehow doesn’t seem very...