Sermon: Pro-Choice and Pro-Life – Lessons from the Book of Deuteronomy

 Sermon by Jim Brenneman

Deuteronomy 30: 11-16, 19a

I. 

On this fourth Sunday of the New Year as we continue to consider choices we made in the past, some great, some not-so-great, we have opportunity to consider making different choices in the year to come. Some of our choices this year will be quite consequential (the presidential election being one of many). No matter, I’m certain all of us want to make the best decisions we can for creating a more flourishing life in 2024. This may surprise you; the Book of Deuteronomy is here to help.

Some of you may remember when punk music first began to hit the charts. For we classical rock-n-rollers it was a bit over the top, but okay, “deal with it.” My most vivid memory of emergent punk was 20 years after it emerged as a force in music from a scene in the black-comedy-crime-drama movie Trainspotting, where Ewan McGreggor played a drug addicted young adult, alongside characters named Begbie, Sickboy, Lexo and Spud. The scene has McGreggor, aka Renton, singing the Punk song Choose Life, which pretty much sums up the Bible text and theme for my comments (PG version):

Choose life.
Choose a job.
Choose a career.
Choose a family,

Choose a freakin’ big television
Choose washing machines, cars,
Compact disc players, and electrical tin openers.
Choose good health, low cholesterol

And dental insurance.
Choose fixed-interest mortgage repayments.
Choose a starter home.
Choose your friends.

Choose leisure wear and matching luggage.
Choose a three-piece suit on hire purchased
In a range of freakin’ fabrics.
Choose DIY and wondering who you

Are on a Sunday morning.
Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing
Spirit-crushing game shows
Stuffing freakin’ junk food into your mouth.

Choose rotting away at the end of it all,
Wishing you last in a miserable home
Nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish,
Forked-up brats

You have spawned to replace yourself.
Choose your future. Choose life.

I chose not to choose life.

I chose something else.

And the reasons?

There are no reasons. . . 

Who needs reasons when you got heroin?

The lyrics of this song, as so much of garage band, punk music and their successors is descriptive, dystopian, ironic, prophetic, anti-establishment, and heart-wrenchingly embracing. And it’s that same emotion and passion I want us to bring to the words of today’s Bible lesson, proclaimed by Moses in his third and last sermon (his last will and testament) recorded in the last book of the Torah, the book of Deuteronomy.

II.

The Book of Deuteronomy is one of the most important books in the Bible. I contend one cannot really truly understand many of Jesus’ teachings, the boldness of his interpretations, the form of his preaching, without knowing the Book of Deuteronomy. In addition, in form and content, the book also provides one of the oldest examples of a constitutional, tricameral, adaptive, cross-generational, even democratic form of government with its laws of social equity and justice. Perhaps, we can consider these facts more in Adult Education hour, but for now, if you haven’t yet done so, before you read another thing about how bold and unique it was that Jesus said, “you have heard it said, but I say unto you,” read the Book of Deuteronomy, first (or again).

I don’t know about you, but, for almost as long as I can remember, I’ve had a hard time making decisions, some trivial, some profoundly consequential. Even today, I’d rather someone else just decides where we go to eat and save me the angst. Since I do the grocery shopping in our house, inevitably when I’m at the grocery store and see vanilla frosting on my list and see that there are three different versions of white-creamy-vanilla-frosting, I panic because I know Terri and Quinn have a determined preference for a particular kind (thank God for text-messaging). Then there’s my own indecision about whether I prefer Nature Valley, Cliff, Kind or Bariwise protein breakfast bars; peanut butter, almond, chocolate or honey crunch? Is this not a quintessential example of first world privilege? So now I add shame on top of my indecision, and I can’t get the freakin’ words of the punk song out of my head: “Choose Life . . .choose your future . . . I chose not to choose life. . . the reasons? There are no reasons?”

And then I also hear ringing in my ears, equally sobering and existential, the words of old man Moses to the next generation of wanderers in the desert:

I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity. ¹⁶ If you obey the commandments of God that I am commanding you today, by loving God, walking in God’s ways, and observing God’s commandments, decrees, and ordinances, then you shall live . . . ¹⁹ I call heaven and earth to witness that I have set before you, life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live. 

The either/or binary set-up with respect to choosing this or that (as depicted here by Moses) is both excruciatingly true to life and a half-truth. We will unravel this a bit more as we consider our many choices, but for now: We accept that some decisions are deadly binary. We have come to call these “Sophie’s Choice” decisions, where Sophie, in the Nazi Concentration camp at Auschwitz, is forced to choose between the lives of her two children: pick one to live while the other is gassed, or else watch both die. By contrast, other choices be they binary or not, might have beautifully consequential outcomes, like when I chose to marry Terri (even though I almost changed my mind). 

The outcomes to choices we make can hover toward one side or the other of a continuum between death/cursing on one side and life/blessing on the other. The difficulty for us often is, we aren’t always sure what the outcome of our choices will prove to be. I propose four “laws” to help guide our decisions whatever they may be in 2024 and beyond.

III.

The law of free choice: God has granted to humankind absolute freedom of choice to our benefit and blessing and/or to our judgment. It is the best and most difficult gift given to us as human creatures. It’s what truly makes us humans living in the image of God. As we have already heard in the reading of our biblical text, the Book of Deuteronomy closes out the Torah with this principle laid out in the starkest of binary terms. Life or death, you choose. Blessing or curse, you choose. The very first book of the Bible (Torah) opens with God giving the first humans the same gift of free choice. Time and time again in the rest of Scripture, God or one of the characters in the Bible, lays before the people a choice: “choose this day whom you will serve” (Josh). This freedom is so radical and discomforting that most of us fear it! Even trivial choices can become overwhelming. How much more those choices of great consequence?

The easier path for us might be, like Alexander in the children’ story, when faced with having to choose one flavor among the 15 flavors of ice cream, he chooses all fifteen. What can go wrong in doing that? Or we might be tempted to turn over our choice, especially choices with potentially great consequence, to someone or something else with more authority or seemingly more in control than us: a parent, a Sovereign, authoritarian God, a city or country ruler, the Scripture, a Pope, someone, anyone, higher up the chain of responsibility. It’s sometimes easier to throw up our hands and pass the buck of responsibility for an outcome up the chain of responsibility into the universe or to God. Let God handle it. “Who are we to do ethics for God, anyway,” since God is in control, no? One might call this choice-avoidance on steroids. But, alas, if we don’t do ethics for God, who does? As Scripture reminds us (John 8:36): “Whom the Lord has set free [to choose], is free indeed.” Like it or not.

The Law of Amendment: You have a God-given absolute right to disobey Scripture.  In fact, some Scripture must be disobeyed. If you think what I just said, might lead people away from God, then I surely invite you to disobey Deut 13:6,10, which says, “anyone who entices you away from God . . . stone him to death.” Please don’t obey this commandment. In principle and most often (as adults) with few exceptions we do not have to do or obey anything.  We don’t have to obey the ten commandments. And I’m suggesting that we should likely not obey even those laws in the Book of Deuteronomy like killing innocents in warfare, or stoning a child for disobedience even though Moses says in the Book and demands that we do so.

Here, lies one of the great ironies in the very name of the Book of Deuteronomy: Deutero-nomos, means a “second-law.” The name recognizes the fact that, according to the Torah story, in just two generations, Moses is here updating the laws given to those who fled in the Exodus and forty years later find themselves still wandering in the wilderness. He shifts between saying “at that time” in Chaps.1-4, to the here and now in Chap 5 and beyond that the laws were not made only for our ancestors, “but for all of us alive, here today.” So, he reworks the laws, changes some, provides new motivations for following others, and reframes them to address new circumstances to come. So, already right here in the Torah, a precedent has been set, the biblical laws are being amended to better fitthe next generation of law-abiding-pilgrims and those generations after them. It is precisely, the law of amendment shown here that provides the justification for Jesus saying over and over (Matt 5:17-48), “You have heard it said, but I say unto you.” He had Moses to back him up. 

The law of wisdom:  God respects humans to grow in wisdom. Even when confronted with contradictory options, even in Scripture, God trusts us to choose the better option for the time and place and circumstance that we find ourselves in. For example, in the Book of Proverbs (wisdom genre par excellence), the writer deliberately places two contradictory Proverbs side by side in Chap 26: v 4. “Answer not a fool according to his folly, lest you be like him yourself.” v. 5. “Answer a fool according to his folly, lest he be wise in his own eyes.” Which is it? This or that? Answer a fool or don’t answer a fool? The choice is left up to you and me.  

Elsewhere in the Book of Proverbs, we are given examples of how to wisely consider our options, perhaps, especially when they conflict or contradict each other, even in the Bible, but certainly in everyday life. There are a group of proverbs called the “better sayings” proverbs: 

• Better is a dinner of vegetables where love is than a fatted ox and hatred with it. (15:17)
• Better to be told, “Come up here,” than to be put lower in the presence of a noble. (25:7)
• Better to be of a lowly spirit among the poor than to divide the spoil with the proud. (16:19)
• Better a little income with righteousness than an abundant income with no justice. (16:8). 

In other words, just based on these four “better sayings” alone, we might accept as a lesson in wisdom that in any given situation when having to make a choice, we apply the “law of wisdom” and ask which is the better choice for the better outcome for the “least of these among us.” At the very least “do no harm.” 

The law of wisdom here is a very old rabbinic way of interpreting conflicting texts or making decisions in the Bible and in life called in Hebrew, Qal va-homer (literally meaning “light and heavy”). What argument or idea has the greater weight in making a choice. In modern research terms we might call this the Likert scale model of decision making in weighing potential outcomes from 1-5: worst, okay, neutral, better, best.

The law of wisdom, of course, includes other sources: Scripture, Spirit, reason-mind (our various intelligences), community, ethics, common sense, science, and Divine break throughs, to name a few of many.

The Law of “Thou mayest.” By another name this might be called “the of grace” or “the law of the heart.” Moses recognizes that the law and grace and love and the heart are altogether part of making better choices. In the text for today, Moses says,

“Surely, this commandment that I am commanding you today is not too hard for you, nor is it too far away. It is not in heaven, that you should say, ‘Who will go up to heaven for us and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it?’ Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, ‘Who will cross to the other side of the sea for us and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it?’ No, the word is very near to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart for you to observe.

Sometimes some people have very few options or choices in front of them. For many, poverty or caste or racial barriers or abuse or addiction or totalitarian governments have severely limited the choices that can be made. For others, that likely includes most of us, we may simply make the wrong choice, especially if it’s between two goods or the lesser of two evils. Often, we make decisions based on our own understanding of the world as we see it, and only later it becomes clear that it was based on mistaken assumptions. Sometimes in those situations, we can’t change or withdraw the choice we made. Sometimes we choose what we think is a blessing, and our choice ends up feeling more like a curse. The law of “thou mayest” or the law of grace or the law of the heart are available to us in these moments as well. 

It troubles me that some people (many Christians, especially) see “the law” as a lesser good, not spiritual, unnecessary, contradictory to grace. Others, however, see “the law” as saving and protecting them. Laws against domestic violence, for example, sound like pure grace to an abused family member. It also seems to me, protecting a woman’s right to make a Sophie’s choice-like-decision regarding her unborn child is another instance in which the law of the heart of the mother for whom such a decision most often matters most must be especially protected. For those who must decide to remove life-support for an irreversible brain damaged loved one, the law of grace must abound. Law and grace are not opposed to each other in God’s economy. Perspective matters. 

One last story. In his novel East of Eden, set in the nearby Salinas Valley, John Steinbeck, tells a multigenerational story of twin boys Caleb and Aaron, which is the biblical Cain and Abel story writ large and in present day terms. It is the story of choices that lead to fratricide that leads to Caleb (Cal) standing at the death bed of their father, Adam, feeling all the shame of his part in his brother Aaron’s death at the battle front. Cal is begging his father for forgiveness. Cal doesn’t know how he can go on living with such guilt. The only words his father says, his last words in fact, is a quote from the Bible, the very words God says to Cain just before he goes out to kill his brother Abel.

God reminds Cain that evil is lurking at his door ready to seduce him to do evil. God says to Cain (Gen. 5:6), “v’atah timshel bo” “you may rule over it.” (Jewish Bible Society translation). In most Christian Bible’s this is translated, “you must rule over it.” The difference in the two versions has to do with what vowels are put into the vowelless Hebrew text by later scribes. The standard Jewish version is much more in keeping with a less punitive God in presenting Cain his options. Both Cain and for his counterpart Caleb, in Steinbeck’s novel receive the consequences of their choices, and both also receive forgiveness. In both accounts, the lessons are the same whether before or after the fact of whatever dire choices were laid before Cain or Aaron or lay before us, even when we are forgiven for wrongs past or having to face life after having made wrong choices. Indeed, with every choice of little and great significance, God says to us: “v’atah timshel bo” “Thou mayest rule over it,” “You may [or may not] rule over it.” The choice is ours. The future is open to us just as it was for Cain before and after he killed his brother and for Caleb after his part in his brother’s death. It is not that we must make this or that choice! Rather, we may freely choose life instead of death, blessing over a curse, good over evil. In God’s kingdom we may be pro-choice and pro-life.

IV.

And so, I wish to leave us with this thought and final question: The Book of Deuteronomy channeling Moses channeling God in today’s text says, “I call heaven and earth to be witnesses: I have put before you life and death, blessing and curse.” To which the poet Mary Oliver channeling Deuteronomy channeling Moses channeling God asks: “What do you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”