“I learned what it means to love life, and hate life, and to love your parents (or great grandparents) and hate them.”
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This part of Deuteronomy we hear today was likely written after the Israelites were exiled to Babylon. It was a re-remembering of Moses’ final sermon – and a reminder for then, and now, that we choose to listen to God today every time we hear these words.
Jesus has been speaking with the affluent and rich and he is becoming very famous. Today, he looks at the followers and reminds them that his way is not a popularity contest…
When I was a young child, I remember visiting my great grandmother in the nursing home. She had Alzheimer’s and dementia. This meant that some days she was my great grandmother – a woman with about my mental ability who liked to count buttons with me and color pictures. And some days, she was an angry stranger shouting with my grandma and mother about being locked in a medical prison against her will.
One especially trying day, my mother sat down in the lobby with me and explained, “Some days, Great-Grandma remembers everything. She knows who she is. And where she is. She gets angry. She wants to be home. And this place is not the home she remembers. Other days, she doesn’t remember who she is. And she likes it here. She is happy. The disease in her head doing this.”
As I got older, she got younger. I began to remember things she did not – such as that I wasn’t her daughter, but great-grand daughter… or that the irises were blooming and just as they were yesterday, and I wasn’t surprised.
I also began to learn more. Learned about her brother who died in WWII. Learned about her life as a working mom when few other moms were. Learned about her dancing. Modeling. House selling. Farming. Her life before… the disease.
And I learned what it means to love life, and hate life, and to love your parents (or great grandparents) and hate them.
The Bible so often appears to contradict itself because life contradicts itself. We contradict ourselves. Our boxes of right and wrong, black and white, good and evil are never solid lines but get fuzzy whenever we apply them to actual real lived life. God created our world with in-betweens and contradictions. Every bright day and dark night has twilight and dusk; dawn; cloudy days and brilliant full moon nights.
Lots of variety. Lots of taking opposites together. Lots of life being… messy…. And not fitting into two perfect, opposite categories.
Moses had to have known this.
In the reading today he is speaking to the people whose parents and grandparents lived in Egypt just a generation ago. They’ve been wandering and wandering in the desert. They’re ready to cross over into the Promised Land. He tells them that if they hold true to the ways they have learned; if they choose to follow YHWH who brought them out of Egypt, their community will know life… but if they stray, the community will die.
He sets it out – black and white. Clear as a bell. Today – choose life, love life, love God. OR Today – choose death, hate life, and disobey God. There is nothing fuzzy about it at all. It is everything or nothing. God has chosen you – how will you respond? By choosing God, or by walking away?
… Scripture doesn’t tell us what they pick. They don’t answer Moses.
But we know. We know they go into the Promised Land. And it gets messy. It gets real. Some stay true to God and yet, they are sent into exile. Some disobey God, and yet, are left to live in the Promised Land. The community from Egypt breaks and comes together again and breaks and comes together again. Their beloved King David is a horrendous sinner and saint. Their prophets come preaching God’s words– and get stoned and ran out of town. They survive under constant warring states taking them over… survive through the first and second temple destruction… and their faith and descendants survive through millennia, through the Holocaust, to this very day.
The community still lives. But you can’t say it hasn’t know atrocities and death.
After today’s reading, Moses confirms he knows the people will not face easy black and white, right and wrong choices. God God’s self tells Moses this and speaks about how the people will fall from the path, and come back. Moses tells us we can follow God’s ways because God is with us…
But doesn’t say it’s easy. Or clear. Or comes without sacrifice.
I wonder if maybe Moses knows from God that some generation, some day, like our generation, was going to look at the verse Honor Thy Mother and Father, hear our mother or father say “I want to go home!” and know… know… a nursing home might be a better way to honor them.
Honoring them by not honoring their requests.
That’s messy. That’s choosing life… and yet, might look like hating parents.
Great – Grandmother didn’t get diagnosed and then leap into a nursing home. We kept her in her home for a long time. Meals on Wheels brought food. I got off the school bus there while my mother cleaned the house. We got her soups that were easy to open and eat. And installed railings to help getting in and out of the bath. She lived alone, but we visited every day.
But Alzheimer’s and dementia have a way of taking a person, moment by moment. Until she would get lost in her home, and scared, unable to find her way to a light switch or telephone. Until clothes became an optional thing while answering the door. Until she got lost outside her home, without clothes, at night.
She needed someone constantly available. She needed a safer environment. She needed more than we could provide without outside assistance.
She thought we were monsters when we told her.
Sometimes, we hate life.
Life isn’t a photograph. It is always changing and moving. Steadily, our bodies and minds break. That which grows grand grows weak. Like breath, lives comes and flourish and sigh and extinguish. Life cannot hold still.
And that change hurts.
Great-grandma kept a photo of her brother in uniform with her everywhere she went. Her only sibling. They were inseparable before the war, and his death. As time went on, she began to ask when he was coming to visit. She began to tell us about his last visit. She began to tell us he was visiting her right now.
If the dead are supposed to be beyond and not interact with the living, they do a very poor job of it. Many, many people are visited by their loved ones as the space between life and death narrows and thins. And my great-grandmother was comforted by her brother and parents who came to whisper good things and assurances that they are here, waiting, and ready to help her across.
If Heaven is our Promised Land, and death the crossing of the Jordan, then these loved ones might be the Moses telling us to hold fast to God and God’s promises. Not for personal life… which is passing… but for communal life everlasting.
So how can Jesus tell us to hate these people? To hate our parents, spouse, children, siblings and life itself?
I think he must mean to prioritize.
Hebrew uses what we translate as “love” and “hate” to mean “first choice” and “second choice.” It’s why, perhaps, Matthew records Jesus saying these words as “if you love anything more than me” instead of love and hate. Hate – that visceral, emotional reaction – tends to be another word in the Bible that we often translate as “condemn” or “to damn.”
Maybe Jesus is saying our first priority should be to God, and not to follow Jesus because its the current band-wagon and socially acceptable thing to do. Jesus isn’t our fashion statement. And you can’t take your Christianity on and off as the situation dictates. To follow Jesus is to commit… to give up… family, friends, loved ones… and even life.
To love Jesus first is to offer your entire life to God… waking, sleeping, resting, when God is popular and when God is not.
When doing the Godly thing makes your loved one hate you. And maybe you hate them back a little.
I watched my mom cry one afternoon after we visited Great-Grandma. Great-Grandma had chased our nurse out because she was dark skinned. Great-Grandma had screamed with terror and said all kinds of horrific slurs. My mom cried on the nurse and told her that her grandmother had never been racist before. She’d shunned that kind of language.
The nurse reassured my mother than sometimes, with advanced dementia or Alzheimer’s disease, people’s personalities radically change.
“But don’t hate her for this. She is trapped in a mind that isn’t her own. In a body. Her soul is still there. Love her. Love her through.”
And we did. My mom. My grandmother. My aunts and uncles and great aunts and uncles. The nursing home staff. The other residents. Our priority, our love, our first choice and preference was the woman who had lived for decades as a vibrant life and witness to Social Gospel among her community. Our second choice, our not preference, our “hate” in the non-emotional but Biblical sense, was the woman who used the “n” word like it was her new favorite noun.
Carrying the cross… not “our cross” or “your cross,” but scripture says THE cross… carrying THE cross is living in that messy place of loving and honoring parents, even as simultaneously being dismayed by or dishonoring their wishes.
I think this is what Jesus was warning us of. Choosing blessings and the greater good can really hurt an individual in the short term. But we’re a people with long-term goals – not short-term. It takes generations and sacrifice, but eventually, we help one another cross the wilderness and reach the far side of the Jordan. That long-term goal is worth the short term pain.
It’s not easy to love.
Moses told the people not to worry, however, “You’ve got this.” God’s commandments are not impossible because it’s on your own hearts, writ there, by the finger of God. It IS possible to love yourself, your neighbor, and God.
It’s not easy.
But you’ve got this.
You’ve got it because Jesus himself helps carry the weight.
You’ve got it because we’ve got each other’s backs.
You’ve got it.
Go love.
Amen.
Pastor Whitney Bruno Sermons 