Friends, we have been set up.
These texts have set us up for a massive disappointment. And not even just disappointment, but maddening, paralyzing, failure. If you didn’t have that experience when you heard the texts just a moment ago; if you somehow escaped the hearing of these words unscathed; let me help to scandalize you, to bring you to that point of failure.
The calculus of Deuteronomy is as simple as it is precise: obey God’s commandments, things go well; don’t obey the commandments, things go badly.
The Psalm puts this same scenario in slightly different terms: speaking of how “happy” the life of obedience can be.
If the overly simplified calculus of Deuteronomy hasn’t alerted you to the fact that something is amiss here, then the overly optimistic happiness in the Psalm perhaps moves us a little closer to the punch line.
Because, if we ask, how does one achieve this happiness?
What does it mean to obey the law?
We realize that it does not say: by having the best of intentions, 
It doesn’t say: by trying really hard to observe the law. 
No, it says “happy are the blameless,…[those] who never do any wrong.”
If this seems unreasonable to you. 
If the choice seems just too stark to make sense in our complex world,
If the stakes seem too high, 
if you’re feeling like opting out,…think again. 

The choice, if we are to take our texts seriously, is irrevocable. It is as though we have been summoned to answer – even to testify – before a cosmic courtroom. This is a question of law, after all.
I call heaven and earth [Deuteronomy reads] 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.
This is a difficult place to be, indeed: Before the tribunal of the universe, forced to choose to be on the right side of the law – to choose life over death.
But even more than the intensity of the demand, isn’t the problem here with law itself ?
For isn’t law simply an abstract and violent way of enforcing norms?
Abstract in the sense that law does not address itself to singular concrete existence – law does not address itself to me. No, it is by definition general, needing to be “applied” in any number of cases.
And it is violent in the sense that the application of law to concrete life is accompanied by potential and often real force?
(Repeat?)
And, above all, don’t we have to reckon with Paul’s devastating critique of the law -- as the very origin of the possibility of disobedience?
if it had not been for the law, [Paul says in Romans 7] I would not have known sin. I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, ‘You shall not covet.’
Obedience – not to mention the “blamelessness” that the Psalmist demands – would not only be difficult, it would be impossible. The abstract and violent law itself provokes us to disobedience (and therefore to death), and yet we are asked to choose obedience and therefore life.
You see: We have been set up.
What is asked of us is simply impossible.
II.
When we get to the Gospel reading, Jesus does call us to rethink this relation of life to law.
But let’s not summon the tired and caricatured argument that the question of law is only an Old Testament problem. That somehow we Christians have the New Testament to get us out of the problem. We know from last week’s Gospel reading that this was not Jesus’ way of dealing with the law:
‘Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth pass away, not one letter,* not one stroke of a letter, will pass from the law until all is accomplished. Therefore, whoever breaks* one of the least of these commandments, and teaches others to do the same, will be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.
And so, far from giving us an “out” from this impossible situation of obedience to an abstract and violent law, that in some bizarre way is meant to lead us to life,
Jesus ups the ante.
He does not release us from the demands of the law – today he refers specifically to murder and adultery – he makes those laws more demanding:
implicating us even on our perceived islands of innocence; 
even to the depths of our most secret interiors – our thoughts and our desires.
Jesus resolves the question of law and its relation to life not by releasing us from it, but by implicating us more deeply.
Against the abstraction of law, Jesus increases its intimacy to us – bringing it to bear not just on our actions, but on our thoughts, our desires, our intentions:
the prohibition against murder comes to include even anger. The physical act of violence begins with a disposition of the heart, thus the commandment against murder concerns even me.
In terms of law’s violence, Jesus adopts a strategy that – strangely – can be explained by an analogy with mixed martial arts – that glorified form of street fighting that has been made popular by the Ultimate Fighting Championship franchise.
I know very little about MMA, (I’m sure you’re surprised to hear this), but I know that the best strategy for neutralizing your opponent is not taking distance from them:
by running or pushing them away. This would only open up a striking distance.
Instead, by pulling your opponent close, it becomes very hard for them to land punches or kicks.
The closer they are to you, the less violent is their force.
Likewise, in Jesus, the force of law is neutralized not by taking distance from it – not by trying to avoid its reach –
but by drawing close – so intimately close – to the point that it becomes indistinguishable from life – from my life.
In effect then, law ceases to be law – it ceases to be abstract and violent, it ceases to produce that instinct to disobedience that Paul referred to.
Whereas Deuteronomy equates obedience with life, Jesus transforms law into life.
Jesus releases us from the law, not by absolving us from it or destroying it, but by transforming it into life:
obedience becomes not a question of adhering to an abstract and violent norm, it becomes a way of life.
If the truth of this transformation is not made clear enough for us in Jesus, then perhaps we can look elsewhere:
It is one of the great legacies of monasticism that the monk or the nun would enter the religious life not in order to dedicate some aspects of his or her life to the way of Jesus, but his or her life in its entirety.
For monasticism the doing that characterizes legal obedience is transformed into being,
All of existence takes place under the sign of the cross in a very literal way.
The profanity of time is transformed into the divine hours. 
Work, study, and eating are all undertaken as acts of worship
Life, in short, is transformed into liturgy.
For the Franciscan’s, for instance, Poverty, Chastity, and Obedience become not particular acts, but the very form-of-life of the Friars and Sisters.
Monasticism, in keeping with Jesus’ strategy of transforming law into life, 
or the mixed-martial-artist’s technique of neutralizing the force of its opponent, 
draws the law 
– the Rule (which is often called a “Rule of Life”) – 
into such proximity that it becomes indistinguishable from the life that it is apparently governing. 
The Rule as a document becomes redundant.
Monasticism teaches us not how to “obey” a “law,” but how to “inhabit” a “form-of-life.”
In Jesus and in Monasticism – Law becomes Life; Practice Becomes Posture; and Doing becomes Being
Worship, more than what we do on a Sunday afternoon transforms life itself into Liturgy
The Rule we “apply” becomes the very Rhythm of our lives.
As self-identified followers of Jesus and as new-monastics, the Jeremiah Community has a special calling and a special challenge here.
What would it mean to transform our Rule of Life into the actual Rhythm of our Lives?
Would it mean, for instance, ceasing to view our Rule as an abstract law that provokes our inevitable failures?
Would it mean giving up “doing” in the interest of “being”?
Would it mean holding that Rule in such intimate proximity to our lives that the written document would become redundant?
Can you imagine what it would mean for our Rule of Life to be legible in the Rhythm of our Lives?
I’d invite you to look at the “Postures” card that is included in your leaflet…
And, consider the following as a possible movement from doing to being, from obeying to inhabiting, from practice to posture:
In this movement there is the chance for us to be transformed, beyond just a people who show appreciation, into a people of Gratitude;
And our practices of prayer might become a habit of continual Contemplation;
When our small acts of protest, give way to a posture of Resistance to all evil;
When, more than works of kindness, a deep and abiding Generosity is formed within us;
And beyond mere frugality, a people of Simplicity is born;
Our curiosity, a posture of Wonder that ever informs our study;
Our deference to our neighbor, a truly Peaceable existence;
When random acts of creativity become a sustained life of Imagination;
And when optimism gives way to Hope.
Consider, in short, that another way of life is possible.
Indeed, this other form of life is not only possible, but she is on her way and (in this place and in many others around the world), on a quiet day, if you listen very carefully, you can hear her breathe. Amen.