We are practically knee-deep in the Sermon on the Mount. This year, every Sunday in the month of February we get another reading from Jesus’ famous sermon. As a Mennonite pastor this ought to delight me to no end.  Instead it is a bit terrifying.

As Anabaptists we pattern our lives after this part of the gospels, we take it seriously. We believe it is important to try and live into the kindom of God now, not just wait for it to happen in the future some time. But whew. The Beatitudes are great – and then we get into these hyperbolic aphorisms and re-workings of the law.

The other text for today is part of one of the final sermons Moses gives before he dies – and the people cross without him into that Promised Land that has eluded them for 40 years.

It is actually a great pairing of texts: Moses preaching to the gathered crowd   –    and Jesus re-interpreting the Mosaic law for those gathered on the mountain. It’s a good reminder that for the writer of Matthew, Jesus is the new Moses. This teaching on the mountain is one of the ways that Matthew helps make the connection for us. Moses went up to the mountain to get the Ten Commandments; here is Jesus on the mountain helping a whole new generation understand those commandments, the law and the prophets.

Last week, in the sermon on the mount text, we heard Jesus say he did not come to abolish the law but to fulfill it. He is not negating of the law; he is unpacking it, helping us see how we too can be part of fulfilling the law. This new way of understanding applies the law not only to the most extreme members of society, the ones who murder or commit adultery. This new way of thinking applies the law to everyone, even to those that we imagine most under control – like the right hand. The right hand is the hand you eat with; the powerful one sits at the right hand of God. But, Jesus says, even the right hand-the power hand – can offend, and it can be brought down to size.

(Is this yet another sly wink to the religious leaders who imagine that by keeping the letter of the law they are somehow above the law?)

Several times Jesus talks about the fires of hell, being cast into hell. At least that is what we often hear when we read this passage. But the literal translation is not an amorphous hell but Gehenna, the trash dump that sat on the outskirts of Jerusalem. Gehenna was on fire 24/7, burning the city garbage, and sometimes even the bodies of criminals and people too poor to have a proper burial.

Jesus is not using some idle threat of a future hell. Jesus is speaking about a current reality that everyone on that mountain understands. He is stating plainly, if with hyperbole, that when we are careless in our relationships, when we do not monitor our anger, when we look only at the body and not at the whole person, when we fail to see in our neighbor the image of God, we are cut off. It is as if part of ourself is thrown into the burning trash heap.

Too often we have read this as a formula or a reason to cut others off. The recent PBS documentary “The Amish: Shunned,” about the way the Amish community shuts out former members, quotes silently on the screen, “if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee.”

In an attempt to take Jesus seriously, we in the Anabaptist tradition, have often taken the hyperbole literally and cut each other out – tried to throw each other to the outskirts of town or at least outside the church community.

I wonder if we have gotten it wrong. What if Jesus is not telling us to pluck out other people? What if he is asking us to look at ourselves, to be honest about our own behaviors? What if Jesus is suggesting that when we look at someone lustfully, we dehumanize not only the object of our lust but ourselves as well. Perhaps he is suggesting that when we do this we cut ourselves off from our own true selves. And it is like we have cut off our most useful part – the eye or the right hand – and put it to burn with the trash. When we dehumanize others in our lust or anger or lies we cut ourselves off from our own best and true selves; we drift toward Gehenna.

So what could it mean coming from Jesus, this talk of Gehenna, of his fulfilling the law? Because let’s be honest. Jesus does not hang out with the rule keepers. He most often hangs out with the people who do not keep the law in the most traditional ways. He seems to keep company with the plucked eyes and severed hands. And he looks for ways to reattach them.

The message from Moses is shorter; perhaps easier to understand in this regard. Moses says, “Today I have set before you life and success or death and disaster… choose life.”

As followers of the Jewish-Christian tradition, as followers of Jesus – the new Moses – we have choices to make. God does not coerce or force, we are given a choice. After all these generations of practice, we still struggle to choose life. It is not a once and forever choice for any of us.

Living in these beautiful bodies, we are presented with choices time and time again, which is why we need these concrete reminders from Jesus about killing and anger, adultery and lust, disagreement and reconciliation, oaths and telling the truth.  As followers of this Jewish teacher we have to keep choosing, over and over again, choosing life every day, every hour, with every interaction.

It is hard work. One of the places that trouble shows up is when we make choices not just for ourselves but for the community. It is one thing to choose life as an individual but we live as families, as communities, and sometimes we need to make choices together. Sometimes we make choices for other people, or imagine that we need to.

We are in the midst of some big choices these days in Mennonite Church USA. Some parts of the larger church have made choices that they believe move them toward life. Mountain States Mennonite Conference, after a year-long, deliberate process, chose life when it licensed Theda Good for ministry two weeks ago. I found it very emotional to watch the service on-line as Theda and her partner Dawn were asked questions about their commitment to the church and to God. I wept at the congregation’s sustained applause, when Herm Weaver, the conference minister, pronounced Theda licensed for ministry in Mennonite Church USA.

Eastern Mennonite University is choosing life as it listens to many voices and responses in the next few months about a possible change in its hiring practice. It is asking the question “Should we change our practice so that we hire qualified faculty and staff who happen to be LGBT people in monogamous committed relationships?”

Allegheny Mennonite Conference is choosing life in initiating a Reconciliation Discernment Committee with our own congregation. Our life these past eight years as a congregation living on the edges, has been a rich one. But many in the conference have been feeling the pain of imposed separation, of that empty space when something is plucked out. We have now had two meetings (with another next month) to talk about reconciliation – what that might mean, what that might look like.

While I view these choices as choosing life, there are others in the larger church that see these decisions as choosing death.  It sounds to them like Deuteronomy, “if your hearts stray and you do not listen to me, if you let yourself be drawn into the worship of other gods and serve them, I tell you today, you will not survive.” There is great fear that the choices of some parts of MC USA are choices for death – the death of faithfulness to scripture, the death of discipleship, the death of tradition, the death of the denomination.

Others say, without any hesitancy, that the church’s decades-long discussions about LGBT sexuality are a choice for death, as well as a kind of violence. Stephanie Krehbiel posted an essay this week on the PinkMenno Blog entitled “The Violence of Mennonite Process.” She quotes Carol Wise, the executive director of BMC – the Brethren Mennonite Council for LGBT interests.

Carol says –  I’ve come to the conclusion that process is how Mennonites justify and inflict violence. As long as we have a process, then somehow we have not engaged in violence. We have been fair, good, and kind people. It’s such a distortion. People trust it. And then it gets misused. I think it’s a powerful mechanism to carry violence, and I see it over and over and over again.

Unfortunately it seems like traditionally the Anabaptist way has been to “pluck” each other out or pluck ourselves out if we find that the impurities are too dangerous. In an attempt to be gentle, to stop “plucking,” we have in the past decades made a shift. We now “choose process.” Carol reminds us that to “choose process” does not mean we are choosing life, at least not for those whose lives are on the line. Because often we “choose process” that talks about people instead of with people; we “choose process” that talks about issues as if they are disconnected from real people’s lives; we “choose process” without a commitment to decision-making and this allows the status quo and those in power to continue unchecked.

Too often in church we are afraid to acknowledge that conflict is a part of life – so instead we choose process. We choose process with the thought that at some point when we are ready, we will choose life. At some point – when it is really clear to all of us, every last one of us, then we will make a choice and then it will be “life.” But in the meantime to those who are being talked about, who are left in limbo, who are caught in process, it feels violent, it feels like death.

It might be helpful to remember that the Deuteronomy text is layered. It is a teaching of the law that prepares the people to enter the Promised Land. It is also the holy law that is read to the people upon their return to Jerusalem after they have been in exile. After years in slavery they understand in a new way that the first time around, their ancestors did not choose life. Now, after several generations in Babylon, they are given another chance. They are invited again to choose life. It is as if Moses calls out from the grave, “This time choose life so your descendants may live.”

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The anger and hurt, the distrust and grudges that exist in Mennonite Church USA right now are real and huge. Many LGBTQ people and their friends and family feel as if they are living under oppression or in exile. And yet we see places around the church where people are choosing life. Perhaps that is what people mean when they say they appreciate what this congregation is doing.

While we are quite aware that many in the conference, and larger church, disapprove of who we are as church and how we do church, we choose life. We do not choose handwringing or loud wailing or lamentation. We do not choose endless internal process. We do not choose to be victims. We do not choose to pluck ourselves out and cast ourselves into Gehenna. We choose life. Life in a full, robust, joyful, diversifying community. And we invite others to join us in the rich life that we find here with the HolyOne who calls us together.

We do not ignore the pain and grief, the “plucking” and process, the questions and wonderings. We are not unaware of the death all around us. But as a community in a tradition that takes the life of Jesus seriously, we look not to the grave and death but to the resurrected One who walks ahead of us. We choose life.

To live in these bodies, to be part of the body of Christ, means that every day we get to choose how we will live. Every day we get to choose life or choose death. Every day we are able to choose to love God, love ourself and love our neighbor. Let us choose life, clinging to the Holy and to the community to which we have been called.