Choose Life

I want to talk about life, not death. I now see that I've been trying to make that simple statement for at least 15 years.

In 1992 I was working at The Carter Center's Africa Program helping with new elections. A few months after being there, I was asked to start a new program at The Carter Center linking the powerful sciences of public health to the strengths of faith communities. The simple idea was that the 100 million or so people who show up in worship every month should have some impact on preventing premature death. Two-thirds of deaths before age 65 turn out to be preventable by fairly mundane social policies and pro-health personal decisions. It seemed obvious that religious folks were in positions to influence these policies and decisions at personal, family, neighborhood, and even national levels. Unknown to me, a grant had been written under which The Carter Center received $1.5 million dollars to create not a think tank, but a do tank that would go after congregations and hold them accountable to do all that they could do. President Carter called the program the Interfaith Health Program (IHP), and we immediately started having conversations with communities across the U.S. This eventually led across the globe to Europe and Africa, as well as to public health institutions like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention at home in Atlanta.

It all made great sense to me. But I didn't know if the logic that made such sense to public health people would make any sense to those in the pews. I asked Lanny Peters, our preacher at Oakhurst Baptist Church, whether I could borrow the pulpit for a Sunday and try to preach a sermon on public health. Oakhurst is the kind of place where really odd questions tend to be treated respectfully, so he said yes. In many ways, this book is a long footnote to one of the things I said accidentally in that first sermon as: "We must make the choices that lead toward life." The words of Deuteronomy urging humanity to choose life, which had been gestating in my heart for so long, surfaced with startling urgency, even though I had no idea what I was asking and certainly no idea how much I didn't know. (See Deuteronomy 30:19b.)

I thought of that odd passage in Luke 19 about Jesus weeping because Jerusalem did not know what led to peace, I now know that we have little idea about what leads to life. And Jesus still weeps.

Choosing life is a lot murkier than fighting death. A stopped war is not the same as peace. Life is different than non-death.

We must make the choices that lead toward life.

But how do you choose life when all we really have are tools to fight death? How do we even talk about it?

Choosing life is a lot murkier than fighting death in exactly the same way that trying to wage peace is a lot murkier that trying to stop a war. A stopped war is not the same as peace. Life is different than non-death.

Twenty-first-century medicine has an extraordinary array of tools, techniques, and technologies that are effective in fighting death and disability. Many in my congregation, including my wife Karen, routinely save three or four lives a week using the astonishing gifts of modern medicine. Some of us have had our own lives saved a few times. We are filled with nothing but gratefulness for those gifts. We also know a lot about preventing all sorts of terrible bodily things, some of which we don't notice nearly as much, but should be even more grateful about. We even know how to eliminate some diseases like polio and smallpox. The combination of public health and modern medicine has resulted in the average U.S. life expectancy in 2005 being roughly 37 years longer than it was when my mother was born in 1908. Thirty-seven years times billions of people is a very big deal indeed. This trend has not happened everywhere in the world, of course. AIDS is reversing this dramatically in Africa. But the exception proves the possibility.

Connection brings about life; the lack of connection brings about loneliness.

Creation brings us to agency. Death is stationary, but life is not. One thing leads to the next. In the film Jurassic Park, the cloned dinosaurs were bred to be sterile. But to the astonishment of the scientists, they were reproducing anyway. "Life finds a way," said the mathematician with a smile. Life does indeed find a way. A congregation may either dwindle or may suddenly burst in growth; either way change is at work as life finds a way. It would be impossible to tell the stories of our lives without paying attention to the way one event sets the stage for the next, how one decision inspires the next, and how these transitions move our lives along. Sometimes we are the agents of change; sometimes life itself sweeps through our lives with the power of a hurricane, the diagnosis of cancer, or the loss of a job. Sometimes this concept of agency takes on serious tones, and sometimes it is as pure and powerful as play. Agency, for example, describes the way a breeze moves the arms of a mobile and the act of the artist that created the mobile, as well as the constellations that inspired the mobile crossing overhead each night.

Blessing provides the leverage that changes the way we view the world. It is something we can receive, it is something we can give away.

There has never been a sermon that wasn't intended to inspire agency. Clergy learn to gently smile when a parishioner says, "Nice sermon." They would so much rather hear, "I am going to forgive my neighbor" or "I am going to rearrange my priorities" or "I am going to see what I can do."

Needless to say, blessing is also a necessary part of life's language so eloquently rehearsed each week in worship services throughout the earth. How many times have we as clergy been asked to bless, and how many times in our callings have we asked someone, "Could you use a blessing?" No service ends without the bene dicte, the "good word," intended to send us into a "torn and troubled world" full of renewed hope, renewed meaning, renewed connections, and renewed courage. Blessing provides the leverage that changes the way we view the world. It is something we can receive, it is something we can give away, but we cannot bless ourselves.

Think about life and the story you find will inevitably nest in these five Leading Causes of Life: connection, coherence, agency, blessing, and hope. When you tell the story we believe you will be speaking the language of life.

We have seen how communities are energized when they find a sense of shared purpose known as coherence; when hope fuels the change known as healing; when blessings provide unimaginable opportunity; when way does indeed lead to way just as the poet Robert Frost said it would. We believe that you will find the Leading Causes of Life are constantly at work behind the scenes. The neighborhood may appear discouraged, but talk to its inhabitants and it doesn't take long to discover a depth of connection between neighbors and the presence of hope. When it seems like nothing is happening,...