Survival Is Insufficient | A Sermon on Choosing Something More
A Sermon by the Reverend Mother Crystal J. Hardin on the Thirteenth Sunday after Pentecost (C), September 4, 2022.
Deuteronomy 30:15-20; Psalm 1; Luke 14:25-33
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 (Deut. 30:19-20).
Moses sets before us this morning a choice: life or death; blessings or curses. The Common English Bible translation suggests that we are meant to choose between “life and what’s good versus death and what’s wrong.”
This doesn’t seem to be a particularly difficult choice. It seems most people would choose life. In fact, the will to live, to survive, is quite strong –both in us, as human beings, and in our fellow creatures, big and small. We are hard-wired to survive.
And yet living, not merely surviving, is something different.
In Emily St. John Mandel’s novel, Station Eleven [1], the world as we know it has ended. A deadly flu has eliminated 99.6% of the population.
The novel follows the survivors, tracing how their lives intersect in a group of entertainers called the Traveling Symphony, a theater group turned chosen family committed to performing the plays of William Shakespeare for what remains of humanity.
In a dangerous world, a world where everything that we have grown accustomed to has fallen away and death waits behind every corner, the Traveling Symphony is trying to be something more, to make something more, and to remember something more.
Mandel writes: All three caravans of the Traveling Symphony are labeled as such, THE TRAVELING SYMPHONY lettered in white on both sides, but the lead caravan carries an additional line of text: Because survival is insufficient.
Shakespeare, their offering to a broken world.
Of course, one of the most well-known lines from William Shakespeare is from Hamlet: “To be, or not to be? That is the question.”
In Hamlet, sure. That is the question. For Shakespeare, maybe. But not Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy suggests another question entirely. A question that raises our collective eyes beyond merely existing, surviving, going along to get along.
More than to be, or not to be. Because survival is insufficient.
Moses’ challenge to choose life and blessings and good is something more.
And Deuteronomy is clear about what it means to choose life.
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 . . . 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 (30:16-18).
Right worship. Faithful living. Obedience. A heart always turning toward the One True God.
We’ve heard this in other ways, in other words, in other voices.
Earlier in Deuteronomy: You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might (6:5).
In Micah: He has told you, O Mortal, what is good, and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice and to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God (6:8).
And, in the Gospel of Matthew: You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind (22:37).
Scripture bursts at the seams with this central theme: that to love God, to listen to God, to walk with God, and to abide in God is to choose the way of life.
And Jesus told us: I came that they may have life and have it abundantly (John 10:10).
This is what it means to be like trees planted by streams of water, bearing fruit in due season, with leaves that do not wither. Happy are they our Psalm tells us (Psalm 1).
So, Moses sets before us this morning a choice: life or death; blessings or curses. And then there’s the Gospel.
Admittedly, it’s a difficult one. It begins with an admonition to hate those you probably love a great deal; or, at the very least, those that probably hold many chapters of the story of who you are: father, mother, brother, sister, and the like.
We are also told that to follow Christ we must give up all of our possessions –a good stewardship message to be sure.
And since I’m a fan of talking stewardship all year, let me take this moment to make a public service announcement (or at least a St. George’s service announcement). Your monetary generosity is extremely important to us. When stewardship season arrives, dig deep. It’s what Jesus would want you to do. Just saying.
So, to recap, the Gospel tells us that we are to hate those we love. And we are to give up all our possessions. Fine.
But then it also tells us that we must hate life itself to be a disciple of Christ.
This doesn’t make a lot of sense on its face, especially sitting alongside Deuteronomy. Are we not meant to choose love? To choose life?
And Jesus said, Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it (Matt. 10:39).
It’s as if Jesus himself knows something of the traveling symphony, begging us to understand that in the Christian life, survival is truly insufficient.
Survival is small. Restrictive. Individual. Lonely. Survival is concerned with the most basic of needs. My needs. It scrapes together from what is not enough so that I might have more than enough to get by.
Survival makes idols of who we are to others (brother, sister, mother, father) and what we have in relation to others (our possessions). Survival prioritizes me beyond the communal and rests on me and my abilities.
But to rely on God come what may, that is truly living.
It is choosing more. It is choosing to risk. And to create. And to love. It is choosing to forget the story of I in favor of the story of we.
To choose life is to loosen our hold on all the ways we attempt to survive in a world that would have us speak of us versus them, that would have us hoard so that we might have; in a world that tells us there is never enough and that we must always look after ourselves and our own first; in a world that tells us it is wasteful and naïve to trust, to dream, to hope, to create, and to love.
But God, God says otherwise.
As one reviewer notes, Mandel’s novel Station Eleven begs the question, “Why?”:
Why bother with iambic pentameter in a world littered with decrepit skyscrapers and [signs of death]? Because to be human is to create: to make things, and to make meaning, out of the chaos.
In the face of terrible trauma, the heroes of Station Eleven choose to keep growing. Dealt a hand of unthinkable brokenness, they choose to rebuild. Confronted with chaos, they choose to be agents of order. Tempted by retreat into self-referential pity, they choose to serve others. Surrounded by things to fear, they choose courage. Fueled by an inherent desire to survive as individuals, they choose one another [2].
They choose life. Because survival is insufficient.
When our hearts turn towards the one true God we begin to live. To truly live. To notice what is good. What is beautiful. What is beyond us as individuals.
We create. We come together. We reach for something more.
That is what all of this is about. What we are doing here this morning. The worship of our God knows something of living because it too is something more.
In worship, we transcend whatever limitations the world has placed upon us and see beyond, into the very heart of God.
We take what is ordinary –bread, wine, water, words- and, with God’s help, allow them to speak of heaven.
In our lives, we are called to do the same. In the words of Samuel Wells. We are called:
to imitate, as best we can, the nature of God --in the excess of energy that created the universe, the exquisite miniature that constituted the incarnation, the harrowing agony that underwent the cross, the restorative joy that burst out in the resurrection, and the dance of delight that caught fire at Pentecost. Because our God is [a living God], and each human life is an event of recognition, interpretation, and improvisation on the wondrous imagination of God [3].
My friends, Moses sets before us this morning a choice: life or death; blessings or curses.
May we choose life, always. Because survival is insufficient.
*Image is from the cover of the book Station Eleven.
[1] Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2015).
[2] Brett McCracken, “In ‘Station Eleven’ Trauma Is Real, But Resilience Prevails,” The Gospel Coalition , January 26, 2022, https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/station-eleven-trauma-resilience.
[3] Samuel Wells, Turning All Into Alleluia, Faith and Leadership, September 19, 2011, https://faithandleadership.com/samuel-wells-turning-all-alleluia.
