February 16, 2020: L'Chaim!
February 16, 2020 Rev. Rhonda Blevins, DMIN
L’Chaim!
Deuteronomy 30:15-20
See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity. If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God that I am commanding you today, by loving the Lord your God, walking in his ways, and observing his commandments, decrees, and ordinances, then you shall live and become numerous, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land that you are entering to possess. 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. I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live, loving the Lord your God, obeying him, and holding fast to him; for that means life to you and length of days, so that you may live in the land that the Lord swore to give to your ancestors, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob.
______
Tevye the milkman is a devout Jew living in Tsarist Russia at the turn of the 20th century—the protagonist of the Tony Award winning Broadway play and Academy Award winning film, Fiddler on the Roof. Poor Tevye. His opening song—his theme song if you will—is “Tradition! Tradition!” All he wants to do is honor God and his Jewish traditions . . . but to do so in the midst of a rapidly changing culture is as difficult as playing a fiddle on a roof.
Poor Tevye wants to be rich, singing to himself, “If I were a rich man.” But if he can’t be rich, at least he can arrange for his five daughters to marry rich men in the community. So that’s his goal—marry off his daughters to rich local chaps. This should be easy enough to do in a culture where fathers arrange marriages for their daughters, often with the help of the local matchmaker (“Matchmaker, matchmaker make me a match.”)
But how well do you think that works out for poor Tevye? Before we discover the futility of his plans, he arranges for his eldest daughter, who is eighteen, to marry the wealthy, widowed butcher who is three times her age and five times her girth. Tevye and the butcher meet to arrange the marriage, and after a few celebratory drinks, they end up drunk in a bar, where the butcher buys rounds for the whole bar and makes a toast, “L’Chaim!” “To life!” As is often the case in musicals, the crowd begins to sing along, “L’Chaim! L’Chaim! To life! Life has a way of confusing us, blessing and bruising us. Drink, l’chaim, to life!” It’s one of the most raucous, joyful scenes to ever hit Broadway.
“L’Chaim!” is the traditional Jewish toast you might still hear today at a Jewish wedding or other celebration. “To life!”
And in our scripture lesson today from Deuteronomy, the final book of the Torah, we find Moses standing before the Hebrew people delivering his farewell speech at a ripe 120 years old. We get the sense that he’s celebrating the conclusion of a long journey from slavery in Egypt, the escape from Pharaoh, the forty years together wandering in the desert. All of that drama—the parting of the Red Sea, the stone tablets, the golden calf, the pillar of cloud by day and pillar of fire by night, the manna from heaven—all of it has led to this moment in time when Moses will offer his final words to the people before they cross the Jordan into the promised land without him. The scene has the feeling of a father at his daughter’s wedding reception, offering a toast before the young couple rides off to begin a new life together. “L’Chaim!” “To life!”
There’s another way in which it seems like Moses is talking to a child.
One of the brilliant parenting strategies I’ve picked up along the way is to give my children choices, but not too many—in fact, it works best with only two choices. It simplifies the matter. So I often find myself giving my children a binary choice: “You can clean your room OR you can lose video games for a week. Your choice.” “You can eat your broccoli OR you can go straight to bed. Your choice.”
Now my kids are smart, and they have learned that there are more choices than the ones I lay out, like the choice to hide broccoli in their pockets to make Mom think they’ve eaten it. Or the choice to stuff all the toys under the bed to make me think they’ve cleaned their room. Or the choice to appeal to the other parent and hope for a different set of options. Oh, so many choices that I don’t name when I offer them the binary.
But in the scripture lesson, Moses tries to make it simple by giving them a binary: “See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity. Choose life!” (Spoiler alert: they will learn the complexities later. But let’s offer dear old dad a little respect, shall we?) “Choose life,” he says in his farewell speech. So we raise our glasses and join him in the toast. “L’Chaim!” “To life!”
How do we heed Moses’ instruction to “Choose life?” It seems that life is full of choices, every day, every waking moment. Some choices are so habitual that they don’t really feel like choices anymore like, “Shall I wear clothes today, or not?” “Shall I brush my teeth today, or not?” Even though these habits are so ingrained as to be subconscious, they are choices, nonetheless. On the other end of the spectrum, there are big, difficult choices we face from time to time, like the choices young adults face: “What will I major in?” “Who will I marry?” “Will I believe in God?”
Dr. Seuss captures this anxiety well in his children’s book, “Oh, the Places You’ll Go”:
You will come to a place where the streets are not marked.
Some windows are lighted. But mostly they’re darked.
A place you could sprain both your elbow and chin!
Do you dare to stay out? Do you dare to go in?
How much can you lose? How much can you win?
And IF you go in, should you turn left or right . . .
Or right-and-three-quarters? Or, maybe, not quite?
Or go around back and sneak in from behind?
Simple it’s not, I’m afraid you will find,
For a mind-maker-upper to make up his mind.
Moses has one piece of advice, “Choose life!” Most of our choices aren’t between good and evil—that’s easy for those of us who aren’t sociopaths. Most choices aren’t as clear as Moses makes them sound: “life and prosperity, death and adversity.” Most of our choices are between good and better.
How, then, do we choose? Moses calls out to us from the Torah, “Choose life!” When faced with a choice, make the life-giving choice. This advice, though simple, may offer some light when the windows (in the words of Dr. Seuss) are “darked.” With the options laid out before us, we can ask the question, “Which path is the life-giving path?” “Which choice is the life-giving choice?” Not just for me, but for my family, my community, my world.
Moses lays out three pillars for choosing life and in so doing, receiving God’s blessings: “If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God that I am commanding you today, by loving the Lord your God, walking in his ways, and observing his commandments, decrees, and ordinances, then you shall live and become numerous, and the Lord your God will bless you.” Let’s break down these three pillars of the blessed life:
1. Love the Lord your God. Give God our hearts, the seat of our emotions. We are to give God our affection.
2. Walk in God’s ways. Give God our minds that set the direction for our feet. We are to give God our attitude.
3. Observe God’s commandments. Give God our hands and our lips—what we do and what we say. We are to give God our actions.
Three pillars for the good life according to Moses, involving our affections, our attitudes, and our actions. It reminds me of the teaching from the prophet Micah we studied a couple of weeks ago: do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God. Action. Affection. Attitude. In short, when we yield our whole selves to God, blessings are sure to follow.
But I want to be clear here—when I speak of “blessings” I’m not talking about what is sometimes called the “prosperity gospel” sense . . . the “health/wealth” gospel. This is the fallacy that if you “live right then you’ll have lots of money and never get sick.” No. Most of us have lived long enough to realize that bad things happen to good people. But the blessing comes from recognizing our home is in the Lord, not in the things of this earth. When our affections, our attitudes, and our actions are rooted in God, the temporal things of this earth take on less import for us. This is what it means to be “blessed.”
So how does your life measure up according to Moses’ three pillars for a “blessed” life? Let’s take a little inventory, shall we? Rate yourself on a scale from 1 to 10, with 10 being second only to Jesus, and 1 not too far off from Beelzebub.
1. First pillar: Love the Lord your God—how much of your affection, your heart, does God have? (rate yourself)
2. Second pillar: Walk in God’s ways—have you given God your mind and your attitudes? (rate yourself)
3. Third pillar: Observe God’s commandments—how much control have you given God over your hands and your tongue? (The tongue may be the hardest thing to control.) These are your actions—what you do and what you say.
If you scored a 30, congratulations! You’re perfect! If you’re like me and you scored a little less than 30, maybe there’s room to grow along the way to choosing life. Please don’t hear this as a guilt statement (so many of us have come out of religious traditions based on guilt)—but an encouragement to “choose life” by doing what Moses said would bring blessings. Real blessings . . . not the material stuff folks today claim when they post a picture of their new car on Facebook labeled “#blessed.” No, I’m talking real blessings here.
Choose life and receive God’s real blessings. Today I raise my glass and say, “L’Chaim!” “To life!” May these blessings follow:
May God bless you with discomfort at easy answers, half truths, and superficial relationships, so that you may live deep within your heart.
May God bless you with anger at injustice, oppression and exploitation of people,
so that you may work for justice, freedom and peace.
May God bless you with tears to shed for those who suffer from pain, rejection, starvation, and war, so that you may reach out your hand to comfort them and turn their pain to joy.
And may God bless you with enough foolishness to believe that you can make a difference in this world, so that you can do what others claim cannot be done.
Amen.
February 16, 2020 Rev. Rhonda Blevins, DMIN
L’Chaim!
Deuteronomy 30:15-20
See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity. If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God that I am commanding you today, by loving the Lord your God, walking in his ways, and observing his commandments, decrees, and ordinances, then you shall live and become numerous, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land that you are entering to possess. 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. I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live, loving the Lord your God, obeying him, and holding fast to him; for that means life to you and length of days, so that you may live in the land that the Lord swore to give to your ancestors, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob.
______
Tevye the milkman is a devout Jew living in Tsarist Russia at the turn of the 20th century—the protagonist of the Tony Award winning Broadway play and Academy Award winning film, Fiddler on the Roof. Poor Tevye. His opening song—his theme song if you will—is “Tradition! Tradition!” All he wants to do is honor God and his Jewish traditions . . . but to do so in the midst of a rapidly changing culture is as difficult as playing a fiddle on a roof.
Poor Tevye wants to be rich, singing to himself, “If I were a rich man.” But if he can’t be rich, at least he can arrange for his five daughters to marry rich men in the community. So that’s his goal—marry off his daughters to rich local chaps. This should be easy enough to do in a culture where fathers arrange marriages for their daughters, often with the help of the local matchmaker (“Matchmaker, matchmaker make me a match.”)
But how well do you think that works out for poor Tevye? Before we discover the futility of his plans, he arranges for his eldest daughter, who is eighteen, to marry the wealthy, widowed butcher who is three times her age and five times her girth. Tevye and the butcher meet to arrange the marriage, and after a few celebratory drinks, they end up drunk in a bar, where the butcher buys rounds for the whole bar and makes a toast, “L’Chaim!” “To life!” As is often the case in musicals, the crowd begins to sing along, “L’Chaim! L’Chaim! To life! Life has a way of confusing us, blessing and bruising us. Drink, l’chaim, to life!” It’s one of the most raucous, joyful scenes to ever hit Broadway.
“L’Chaim!” is the traditional Jewish toast you might still hear today at a Jewish wedding or other celebration. “To life!”
And in our scripture lesson today from Deuteronomy, the final book of the Torah, we find Moses standing before the Hebrew people delivering his farewell speech at a ripe 120 years old. We get the sense that he’s celebrating the conclusion of a long journey from slavery in Egypt, the escape from Pharaoh, the forty years together wandering in the desert. All of that drama—the parting of the Red Sea, the stone tablets, the golden calf, the pillar of cloud by day and pillar of fire by night, the manna from heaven—all of it has led to this moment in time when Moses will offer his final words to the people before they cross the Jordan into the promised land without him. The scene has the feeling of a father at his daughter’s wedding reception, offering a toast before the young couple rides off to begin a new life together. “L’Chaim!” “To life!”
There’s another way in which it seems like Moses is talking to a child.
One of the brilliant parenting strategies I’ve picked up along the way is to give my children choices, but not too many—in fact, it works best with only two choices. It simplifies the matter. So I often find myself giving my children a binary choice: “You can clean your room OR you can lose video games for a week. Your choice.” “You can eat your broccoli OR you can go straight to bed. Your choice.”
Now my kids are smart, and they have learned that there are more choices than the ones I lay out, like the choice to hide broccoli in their pockets to make Mom think they’ve eaten it. Or the choice to stuff all the toys under the bed to make me think they’ve cleaned their room. Or the choice to appeal to the other parent and hope for a different set of options. Oh, so many choices that I don’t name when I offer them the binary.
But in the scripture lesson, Moses tries to make it simple by giving them a binary: “See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity. Choose life!” (Spoiler alert: they will learn the complexities later. But let’s offer dear old dad a little respect, shall we?) “Choose life,” he says in his farewell speech. So we raise our glasses and join him in the toast. “L’Chaim!” “To life!”
How do we heed Moses’ instruction to “Choose life?” It seems that life is full of choices, every day, every waking moment. Some choices are so habitual that they don’t really feel like choices anymore like, “Shall I wear clothes today, or not?” “Shall I brush my teeth today, or not?” Even though these habits are so ingrained as to be subconscious, they are choices, nonetheless. On the other end of the spectrum, there are big, difficult choices we face from time to time, like the choices young adults face: “What will I major in?” “Who will I marry?” “Will I believe in God?”
Dr. Seuss captures this anxiety well in his children’s book, “Oh, the Places You’ll Go”:
You will come to a place where the streets are not marked.
Some windows are lighted. But mostly they’re darked.
A place you could sprain both your elbow and chin!
Do you dare to stay out? Do you dare to go in?
How much can you lose? How much can you win?
And IF you go in, should you turn left or right . . .
Or right-and-three-quarters? Or, maybe, not quite?
Or go around back and sneak in from behind?
Simple it’s not, I’m afraid you will find,
For a mind-maker-upper to make up his mind.
Moses has one piece of advice, “Choose life!” Most of our choices aren’t between good and evil—that’s easy for those of us who aren’t sociopaths. Most choices aren’t as clear as Moses makes them sound: “life and prosperity, death and adversity.” Most of our choices are between good and better.
How, then, do we choose? Moses calls out to us from the Torah, “Choose life!” When faced with a choice, make the life-giving choice. This advice, though simple, may offer some light when the windows (in the words of Dr. Seuss) are “darked.” With the options laid out before us, we can ask the question, “Which path is the life-giving path?” “Which choice is the life-giving choice?” Not just for me, but for my family, my community, my world.
Moses lays out three pillars for choosing life and in so doing, receiving God’s blessings: “If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God that I am commanding you today, by loving the Lord your God, walking in his ways, and observing his commandments, decrees, and ordinances, then you shall live and become numerous, and the Lord your God will bless you.” Let’s break down these three pillars of the blessed life:
1. Love the Lord your God. Give God our hearts, the seat of our emotions. We are to give God our affection.
2. Walk in God’s ways. Give God our minds that set the direction for our feet. We are to give God our attitude.
3. Observe God’s commandments. Give God our hands and our lips—what we do and what we say. We are to give God our actions.
Three pillars for the good life according to Moses, involving our affections, our attitudes, and our actions. It reminds me of the teaching from the prophet Micah we studied a couple of weeks ago: do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God. Action. Affection. Attitude. In short, when we yield our whole selves to God, blessings are sure to follow.
But I want to be clear here—when I speak of “blessings” I’m not talking about what is sometimes called the “prosperity gospel” sense . . . the “health/wealth” gospel. This is the fallacy that if you “live right then you’ll have lots of money and never get sick.” No. Most of us have lived long enough to realize that bad things happen to good people. But the blessing comes from recognizing our home is in the Lord, not in the things of this earth. When our affections, our attitudes, and our actions are rooted in God, the temporal things of this earth take on less import for us. This is what it means to be “blessed.”
So how does your life measure up according to Moses’ three pillars for a “blessed” life? Let’s take a little inventory, shall we? Rate yourself on a scale from 1 to 10, with 10 being second only to Jesus, and 1 not too far off from Beelzebub.
1. First pillar: Love the Lord your God—how much of your affection, your heart, does God have? (rate yourself)
2. Second pillar: Walk in God’s ways—have you given God your mind and your attitudes? (rate yourself)
3. Third pillar: Observe God’s commandments—how much control have you given God over your hands and your tongue? (The tongue may be the hardest thing to control.) These are your actions—what you do and what you say.
If you scored a 30, congratulations! You’re perfect! If you’re like me and you scored a little less than 30, maybe there’s room to grow along the way to choosing life. Please don’t hear this as a guilt statement (so many of us have come out of religious traditions based on guilt)—but an encouragement to “choose life” by doing what Moses said would bring blessings. Real blessings . . . not the material stuff folks today claim when they post a picture of their new car on Facebook labeled “#blessed.” No, I’m talking real blessings here.
Choose life and receive God’s real blessings. Today I raise my glass and say, “L’Chaim!” “To life!” May these blessings follow:
May God bless you with discomfort at easy answers, half truths, and superficial relationships, so that you may live deep within your heart.
May God bless you with anger at injustice, oppression and exploitation of people,
so that you may work for justice, freedom and peace.
May God bless you with tears to shed for those who suffer from pain, rejection, starvation, and war, so that you may reach out your hand to comfort them and turn their pain to joy.
And may God bless you with enough foolishness to believe that you can make a difference in this world, so that you can do what others claim cannot be done.
Amen.
February 16, 2020 Rev. Rhonda Blevins, DMIN
L’Chaim!
Deuteronomy 30:15-20
See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity. If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God that I am commanding you today, by loving the Lord your God, walking in his ways, and observing his commandments, decrees, and ordinances, then you shall live and become numerous, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land that you are entering to possess. 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. I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live, loving the Lord your God, obeying him, and holding fast to him; for that means life to you and length of days, so that you may live in the land that the Lord swore to give to your ancestors, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob.
______
Tevye the milkman is a devout Jew living in Tsarist Russia at the turn of the 20th century—the protagonist of the Tony Award winning Broadway play and Academy Award winning film, Fiddler on the Roof. Poor Tevye. His opening song—his theme song if you will—is “Tradition! Tradition!” All he wants to do is honor God and his Jewish traditions . . . but to do so in the midst of a rapidly changing culture is as difficult as playing a fiddle on a roof.
Poor Tevye wants to be rich, singing to himself, “If I were a rich man.” But if he can’t be rich, at least he can arrange for his five daughters to marry rich men in the community. So that’s his goal—marry off his daughters to rich local chaps. This should be easy enough to do in a culture where fathers arrange marriages for their daughters, often with the help of the local matchmaker (“Matchmaker, matchmaker make me a match.”)
But how well do you think that works out for poor Tevye? Before we discover the futility of his plans, he arranges for his eldest daughter, who is eighteen, to marry the wealthy, widowed butcher who is three times her age and five times her girth. Tevye and the butcher meet to arrange the marriage, and after a few celebratory drinks, they end up drunk in a bar, where the butcher buys rounds for the whole bar and makes a toast, “L’Chaim!” “To life!” As is often the case in musicals, the crowd begins to sing along, “L’Chaim! L’Chaim! To life! Life has a way of confusing us, blessing and bruising us. Drink, l’chaim, to life!” It’s one of the most raucous, joyful scenes to ever hit Broadway.
“L’Chaim!” is the traditional Jewish toast you might still hear today at a Jewish wedding or other celebration. “To life!”
And in our scripture lesson today from Deuteronomy, the final book of the Torah, we find Moses standing before the Hebrew people delivering his farewell speech at a ripe 120 years old. We get the sense that he’s celebrating the conclusion of a long journey from slavery in Egypt, the escape from Pharaoh, the forty years together wandering in the desert. All of that drama—the parting of the Red Sea, the stone tablets, the golden calf, the pillar of cloud by day and pillar of fire by night, the manna from heaven—all of it has led to this moment in time when Moses will offer his final words to the people before they cross the Jordan into the promised land without him. The scene has the feeling of a father at his daughter’s wedding reception, offering a toast before the young couple rides off to begin a new life together. “L’Chaim!” “To life!”
There’s another way in which it seems like Moses is talking to a child.
One of the brilliant parenting strategies I’ve picked up along the way is to give my children choices, but not too many—in fact, it works best with only two choices. It simplifies the matter. So I often find myself giving my children a binary choice: “You can clean your room OR you can lose video games for a week. Your choice.” “You can eat your broccoli OR you can go straight to bed. Your choice.”
Now my kids are smart, and they have learned that there are more choices than the ones I lay out, like the choice to hide broccoli in their pockets to make Mom think they’ve eaten it. Or the choice to stuff all the toys under the bed to make me think they’ve cleaned their room. Or the choice to appeal to the other parent and hope for a different set of options. Oh, so many choices that I don’t name when I offer them the binary.
But in the scripture lesson, Moses tries to make it simple by giving them a binary: “See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity. Choose life!” (Spoiler alert: they will learn the complexities later. But let’s offer dear old dad a little respect, shall we?) “Choose life,” he says in his farewell speech. So we raise our glasses and join him in the toast. “L’Chaim!” “To life!”
How do we heed Moses’ instruction to “Choose life?” It seems that life is full of choices, every day, every waking moment. Some choices are so habitual that they don’t really feel like choices anymore like, “Shall I wear clothes today, or not?” “Shall I brush my teeth today, or not?” Even though these habits are so ingrained as to be subconscious, they are choices, nonetheless. On the other end of the spectrum, there are big, difficult choices we face from time to time, like the choices young adults face: “What will I major in?” “Who will I marry?” “Will I believe in God?”
Dr. Seuss captures this anxiety well in his children’s book, “Oh, the Places You’ll Go”:
You will come to a place where the streets are not marked.
Some windows are lighted. But mostly they’re darked.
A place you could sprain both your elbow and chin!
Do you dare to stay out? Do you dare to go in?
How much can you lose? How much can you win?
And IF you go in, should you turn left or right . . .
Or right-and-three-quarters? Or, maybe, not quite?
Or go around back and sneak in from behind?
Simple it’s not, I’m afraid you will find,
For a mind-maker-upper to make up his mind.
Moses has one piece of advice, “Choose life!” Most of our choices aren’t between good and evil—that’s easy for those of us who aren’t sociopaths. Most choices aren’t as clear as Moses makes them sound: “life and prosperity, death and adversity.” Most of our choices are between good and better.
How, then, do we choose? Moses calls out to us from the Torah, “Choose life!” When faced with a choice, make the life-giving choice. This advice, though simple, may offer some light when the windows (in the words of Dr. Seuss) are “darked.” With the options laid out before us, we can ask the question, “Which path is the life-giving path?” “Which choice is the life-giving choice?” Not just for me, but for my family, my community, my world.
Moses lays out three pillars for choosing life and in so doing, receiving God’s blessings: “If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God that I am commanding you today, by loving the Lord your God, walking in his ways, and observing his commandments, decrees, and ordinances, then you shall live and become numerous, and the Lord your God will bless you.” Let’s break down these three pillars of the blessed life:
1. Love the Lord your God. Give God our hearts, the seat of our emotions. We are to give God our affection.
2. Walk in God’s ways. Give God our minds that set the direction for our feet. We are to give God our attitude.
3. Observe God’s commandments. Give God our hands and our lips—what we do and what we say. We are to give God our actions.
Three pillars for the good life according to Moses, involving our affections, our attitudes, and our actions. It reminds me of the teaching from the prophet Micah we studied a couple of weeks ago: do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God. Action. Affection. Attitude. In short, when we yield our whole selves to God, blessings are sure to follow.
But I want to be clear here—when I speak of “blessings” I’m not talking about what is sometimes called the “prosperity gospel” sense . . . the “health/wealth” gospel. This is the fallacy that if you “live right then you’ll have lots of money and never get sick.” No. Most of us have lived long enough to realize that bad things happen to good people. But the blessing comes from recognizing our home is in the Lord, not in the things of this earth. When our affections, our attitudes, and our actions are rooted in God, the temporal things of this earth take on less import for us. This is what it means to be “blessed.”
So how does your life measure up according to Moses’ three pillars for a “blessed” life? Let’s take a little inventory, shall we? Rate yourself on a scale from 1 to 10, with 10 being second only to Jesus, and 1 not too far off from Beelzebub.
1. First pillar: Love the Lord your God—how much of your affection, your heart, does God have? (rate yourself)
2. Second pillar: Walk in God’s ways—have you given God your mind and your attitudes? (rate yourself)
3. Third pillar: Observe God’s commandments—how much control have you given God over your hands and your tongue? (The tongue may be the hardest thing to control.) These are your actions—what you do and what you say.
If you scored a 30, congratulations! You’re perfect! If you’re like me and you scored a little less than 30, maybe there’s room to grow along the way to choosing life. Please don’t hear this as a guilt statement (so many of us have come out of religious traditions based on guilt)—but an encouragement to “choose life” by doing what Moses said would bring blessings. Real blessings . . . not the material stuff folks today claim when they post a picture of their new car on Facebook labeled “#blessed.” No, I’m talking real blessings here.
Choose life and receive God’s real blessings. Today I raise my glass and say, “L’Chaim!” “To life!” May these blessings follow:
May God bless you with discomfort at easy answers, half truths, and superficial relationships, so that you may live deep within your heart.
May God bless you with anger at injustice, oppression and exploitation of people,
so that you may work for justice, freedom and peace.
May God bless you with tears to shed for those who suffer from pain, rejection, starvation, and war, so that you may reach out your hand to comfort them and turn their pain to joy.
And may God bless you with enough foolishness to believe that you can make a difference in this world, so that you can do what others claim cannot be done.
Amen.