"Choose life."

That’s one of those scriptural phrases plucked out of the Bible and plunked on to a bumper sticker to promote one’s cause celebre. Although we are most familiar with its appropriation by the "right to life" movement, which uses it to justify such things as demonstrations outside abortion clinics, it could be used equally to support an all-night vigil to protest an execution, legislation against physician-assisted suicide, placement of the terminally ill on life support, and even opposing positions on stem-cell research.

"Choose life."

We’re all for that! We most of us don’t want to die…

The good feeling of "choose life" carries us right into the Gospel lesson, where we run smack into Jesus’ words which sound like anything BUT choosing life: cut off your family, be willing to risk life itself, carry your cross…

I have this image of someone, frantically digging in her heels to stop her forward motion, calling "Time out!"

Stop!
How does this compute?

I’m not sure I want to go there! Hate my family, risk my life, carry my cross indeed!

But, of course, as followers of Jesus, we do go there.

Let’s look at what it means.

I believe there are two truths which are foundational to our discussion. The first, of course, is that "choosing life" is not about biology – it’s not about this physical being that we carry around with us; it’s about relationship. It’s about relationship with God, with creation, with others, with ourselves, as who we are called to be as children of God.

The second: God is not holding up suffering as a virtue, something to seek out and endure for its own sake; suffering is not a good, but a consequence…

These truths are easy to see in the occasional bold examples we read about: the heroes of 9/11 who died saving the lives of others, for example. It’s in our daily living that they sometimes get lost.

Let’s look first at choice.

I had quite a discussion last week with someone who just could not understand the relationship between God’s plan for us – in which she strongly believed – and our ability to choose. "If it happens," she said, "that must be God’s plan, and there’s nothing we can do about it."

Do I believe God has a plan?

Yes.

How is that compatible with our ability to choose?

I think God’s plan is a desire for us – a desire for us to be in relation, a desire for us to choose life in that sense.

We are not victims of life, passive recipients of whatever happens to come along; we are participants in it.

Certainly there are some things we cannot change: we cannot re-route the course of a hurricane, or be suddenly free of a terminal illness. But there are life-giving choices we can make in our response even to such situations. I had a friend who approached the ever-increasing limitations of a body ravaged by cancer by constantly reminding herself that the choice she did have was her attitude toward what was happening to her. She could choose life while she lived – or she could languish in despair until she died. She chose life.

I don’t think it is the big decisions that are as hard for us – we’re more aware of them, we give them more attention, we try to anticipate and evaluate their consequences. It’s the small ones, the accumulation of little things which become the habits which shape our lives, sometimes causing us to wind up on the spiritual equivalent of "life support." We think we’re "choosing life" when in fact we have no quality of life, being sustained by tranquilizer respirators and feeding tubes of addiction, and seeking some kind of dialysis to purge the toxins of fear and despair from our system, simply to make it through one more day…

It reminds me of a the way one character in Matthew Pearl’s book, The Dante Club, described another: "His life was a suicide. He gave up his soul for fear, little by little, until there was nowhere left in the universe but Hell. He stood on the precipice of eternal torment in his mind…" (p. 161)

Or, perhaps, a cartoon I saw in the New Yorker a few weeks ago. One man is saying to the other, "Do you dwell on the wasted years behind you, or the terrifying years ahead?"

Sometimes "choosing life" is simply living intentionally – something we don’t do very often when we get swallowed up by habit and our daily routine.

I took my grandchildren for a walk the other day.

I’m unaccustomed to "going for a walk" – when I walk, I have purpose or an agenda: I go for exercise, or I go to a specific destination. But they "go for a walk" as an end in itself, and, as I participated with them in their walk, I found myself drawn into a "choose life" experience. Everything was an occasion for wonder and celebration: they would rub their faces in bushes, and giggle at the scratchiness, diving into one bush after another; they marveled at pebbles embedded in a section of sidewalk, flower petals and snails; they jumped in water puddles and hefted rocks and exclaimed over a mailbox shaped like a fish…

Have you taken a walk like that recently?

Children do naturally what we have forgotten to do. They can remind us that the ways in which we move through the world are a choice: we can make them life-giving. We can enjoy the journey rather than striving to possess the outcome.

So what is the relationship between "choosing life" and the cross?

How do we put those two together?

Deitrich Bonhoffer, the great 20^th century German theologian, in his book The Cost of Discipleship, reminds us: "The cross is laid on every Christian. The first Christ-suffering which every man must experience is the call to abandon the attachments of this world… As we embark upon discipleship we surrender ourselves to Christ in union with his death – we give over our lives to death. Thus it begins; the cross is not the terrible end to an otherwise godfearing and happy life, but it meets us at the beginning of our communion with Christ. When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die." (p. 89)

The cross is at the beginning. Thus, we speak of baptism as "dying to self" that we might be reborn in Christ. We recognize that there is more to life than this body and all our attachments, our possessions.

We don’t hate our families for the sake of hating, and carry our cross for the sake of suffering. We release our attachments to the things of this world so that we might choose life in Christ.

We are asked to think "outside of ourselves" and our own proprietary interests, to the needs of others, and to our connection with all of creation, to our relationships.

Today Jesus reminds us: This is not a "path of least resistance" choice. It is not easy. There are consequences.

What is being asked of us is counter-cultural – it was then, it is today.

Love your enemies.

Do good to those who hate you.

Let go of your possessions.

Feed the hungry, visit the sick, clothe the naked.

Turn the other cheek.

Carry your cross.

This choice to follow Jesus, the choice to choose life in Christ, can set us apart from the "mainstream" – from the choices made by others, including family members.

It is a choice to live intentionally, to recognize that all that we say and all that we do are choices which lead us toward God – or away from God.

It is a choice which may result in suffering or even the death of our physical bodies.

But oh, it is a choice that is life-giving! For in choosing life in Christ, we live in the heart of God and participate in the bringing about of God’s kingdom here in earth.

I can’t end without addressing the enigma of choice and suffering we have seen in the news this past week. We were all horrified to hear of the Russian school children taken hostage, and even more appalled (if that’s possible) at the story of the dozen or so women forced to make "Sophie’s choice" – to choose freedom with one child while leaving another behind to suffer not only the unimaginable horrors of captivity and possible violent death, but also the knowledge of their abandonment by their reluctant parent.

How do we "choose life" there? When no options seem life-giving?

It seems more than we can manage…

And yet – the cross reminds us of the solidarity of Jesus with those who suffer.

We ourselves can be in solidarity with them, as well, not avoiding their pain – pretending it isn’t there if we don’t see it or hear about it – but praying through it, praying through our pain and theirs in this whole awful situation.

We can seek to identify and transform the brokenness in the world which creates such evil, that such horror might not be repeated.

It is the cross which reminds us that the greatest power we have is not in our ability to produce or to wield weapons, but in our capacity to love.

It is the cross which offers hope: reminding us of life that transcends death.

It is the cross which enables us to endure.

Yes, we are given a choice.

Let us choose life!

Amen.