I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life! – Moses declared to the Israelites.
The Israelites were preparing for their life in the promised land. The days of wandering were nearly behind them. Their slavery in Egypt a distant memory. But before the good days could begin, before they enter the land, Moses offers them some final words.
Not a speech like we have been hearing from Jesus these past few weeks with the Sermon on the Mount, but a last sermon from their leader, Moses, who wants them to renew their faith and loyalty to God, to choose that path that will ultimately lead to life.
Moses said, “I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity. If you obey the commandments of the Lord… then you shall live and become numerous…But if your heart turns away and you do not hear, but are led astray… you shall not live long in the land that you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess.”
Life and prosperity if they follow the faith; death and adversity if they are led astray. Moses is giving them a stark choice, to choose life. And they would for a time…
That same choice still exists for us today. Sometimes that choice is very personal like the addictions we all battle, each day, to choose life for ourselves and our families. Sometimes we make that choice for our family.
In an essay in The New York Times this past Christmas Eve, Tali Farhadian Weinstein tells the story of her coming to America from Iran forty Christmases ago.
In February 1979, three-year-old Tali, her parents and her infant brother were Jews trying to escape Tehran at the height of the Islamic Revolution. The family managed to get to Israel before outgoing flights were halted. Tali’s father went ahead to the United States on a tourist visa to find housing and employment. Finally, Tali and her mother and brother were able to fly to the United States, arriving at Kennedy Airport on Christmas Eve. Tali’s mother was terrified: the tourist visas she bought from a travel agent in Israel were certainly fake; they had one-way tickets; and they didn’t look like “tourists” — they had a large suitcase stuffed with pots and pans, a few items of clothing for the children and photo albums. Tali writes:
“When it was our turn for inspection, the Immigration and Naturalization Service officer — very reasonably — challenged my mother’s claim that we had come for a short visit. My mother didn’t say that what she wanted was asylum, that we had a well-founded fear of persecution in our country of origin. My mother didn’t know that those words had the power to keep us in America, that anyone on American soil had a right to be heard on that claim. Maybe because she had grown up in a county with no such protections, she couldn’t imagine such a thing.
“We could have been turned away. But that nameless I.N.S. officer — about whom I know nothing other than how he conducted himself in that moment — made a different decision. Before him stood a young mother traveling alone with her babies, visibly in need of refuge. She told him that the children wanted to see their father, that they had spent months apart. And he granted us ‘deferred inspection’ — meaning that we had permission but not authorization to enter the country — and told us to come back to the airport right after the holiday for deportation.”
With the help of New York’s Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, Tali’s family applied for and received asylum.
Today, Tali Farhadian Weinstein is the general counsel of the district attorney’s office in Brooklyn. One of the most important lessons about law and law enforcement she learned as a three-year-old immigrant from that nameless I.N.S. officer on that Christmas Eve. She writes in her New York Times piece:
“Law enforcement requires us to exercise our humanity and sense of justice, always mindful of the demands of safety, in individual cases. Discretion in law enforcement can be abused, of course, but the alternative — the letter of the law without the spirit of the law — is worse.”
In today’s Gospel, Jesus speaks of fulfilling the Law — not abolishing it. Jesus seeks to restore the spirit of mercy, justice and reconciliation that gives meaning and direction to every just legal code. The border control officer Tali and her family encounter in New York was wise and compassionate enough to see beyond the questionable documents they had to recognize the reality of their situation and respond with the discretion the law permitted.
Today’s Gospel challenges us to look beyond legalisms and social and cultural yardsticks — and our own narrow interests — to recognize people in need and our responsibility as followers of Jesus to seek them out, to advocate for them, to welcome them.
For Jesus makes it clear that what matters most is right relationship, it is choosing life. For we cannot lie low and bet that our sins aren’t so bad as to get us into too much trouble. Instead, Jesus reminds us that our very real sins do real damage to ourselves and others – damage that may be repaired if we love enough not to settle for good enough.
Jesus does not give us a pass for being ‘good enough.’ At least not here. In this difficult portion of the Sermon on the Mount he dismisses the idea that so long as our sin doesn’t rise to something particular heinous, we don’t have to worry about it. Perhaps that is why Jesus has such clear instructions about tending urgently to our relationships. ‘Leave your gift there before the altar and go.’ Go where the possibility for reconciliation lies. We do have the power in our relationships to make things right. (Alex Wimberly)
Choose life today and everyday so that our yes may be a yes, and our no a no.
So that our relationships, even to that of strangers, like Talia, may feel the love of God that we have felt in our life today. Amen. 02
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