In today’s first lesson Moses stands with the people at the edge of a new beginning. Behind them lies forty years of wandering; ahead lies promise and uncertainty. Moses doesn’t offer them a map, only a voice—a word from God that says, “See, I have set before you life and death.” The Hebrew here suggests not a threat but an unveiling, a choice placed in open view. The decision is relational, not transactional: to live is to listen, to love, to walk God’s way. In other words, to live out God’s will, to confess by their lives: “Your will be done.”
The text plays on the same word for “hear” and “obey.” To listen is to live. To stop listening is to start dying. It’s a pun Moses would have loved, and it fits our moment too. We are a culture fluent in noise and tone-deaf to truth. We’ve turned our public life into dueling monologues where everyone is shouting to be heard and no one is listening to understand. We live in a world of competing voices, all shouting at us—“My will be done!”
There are movements today that wrap certainty in moral armor—some obsessed with purity, others with power—and each claiming to speak for righteousness. But when conviction becomes deafness, when slogans replace prayer, we’ve forsaken the first commandment: we’ve made gods of our own echo.
And here comes God, speaking through Moses, to this serious, serious situation with…a pun: “Can you hear me now?”—God’s ancient question to a people with selective hearing…and to be sure, his present question to us, who still have selective hearing…
When God says, “I set before you life and good, death and evil,” the Hebrew plays on a moral symmetry: life is aligned with goodness, death with distortion. The contrast isn’t only personal. It’s communal, social, and ecological. Obedience isn’t blind compliance—it’s harmony with how creation itself is tuned.
We live among new idolatries of progress and nostalgia. Some of us imagine that human ingenuity can redeem the world if we just optimize the system, as though justice were an algorithm. Others of us seek redemption in the memory of a mythic past, as if God once lived in an era now gone. Both get rid of that thinking. God is not trapped in our ideas of what’s new or what was. Both substitute their own reflection for God’s face—and that’s forsaking the first commandment.
Life and death aren’t just future outcomes. They’re atmospheres we create. The air of cynicism, the drought of compassion, the smog of arrogance—these are as lethal as famine or war. The way of life begins when we listen differently, when hearing becomes the first moral act. God isn’t just saying live right—God’s saying listen right.
Moses warns, “If your heart turns away and you do not hear, you will perish.” The Hebrew here means more than physical death. It’s the unraveling of purpose. The heart turns first, then the ears close. It’s the anatomy of spiritual decline.
We see this everywhere. In those who bow before the golden calf of self-righteousness—who worship moral superiority as though virtue were a contest. In those who kneel before the idol of strength—who mistake domination for blessing and confuse fear with faith. Every idol promises life and delivers silence. Every idol demands worship and gives no word in return. That’s what it means to forsake the first commandment—not just to name other gods, but to stop listening to the living one, when we talk so loud that we can’t hear heaven, even our prayers become echo chambers. When we make something else or allow something else to become so important it displaces God in commitment, priority, trust—work, past times, politics, family, money, education, our opinions. Any of these can and often do rival and overtake our allegiance to God. They demand—“my will be done!” And so to reiterate: when we talk so loud that we can’t hear heaven, even our prayers become echo chambers.
Moses calls heaven and earth to witness. It’s courtroom language, but also cosmic poetry—all creation listens, waiting to see if we will. The Hebrew here translates “choose life” as something active—deciding with the whole being, not a momentary moral checkbox. To love, obey, and cling to God is to move in rhythm with the universe God made.
Our culture breaks that rhythm daily. Some defend “life” but only in part—as if it begins and ends in the womb. Others defend “freedom” but only their own—as if one person’s liberty must silence another’s dignity. Others champion compassion but really only for those who think as they do—grace with an asterisk, mercy with conditions. Still others preach justice while quietly craving control, even hoping to avenge evil in the future with a different evil, believing paradise can be engineered if only the right people pull the levers of power. All these fragment what God unites. Life, as Moses means it, isn’t compartmentalized. It’s wholeness: body, spirit, neighbor, creation.
Heaven and earth are listening still. Every river choked with waste, every face turned away from another’s pain, every word spoken without truth—all testify that we haven’t been listening. Yet the invitation stands, patient and unrevoked: “Choose life.” Heaven and earth are listening. The question is—are we?
Israel could not keep its hearing. Humanity…we still cannot. So God came not only to speak but to listen—to our cries, our silence, our unspoken need. Christ is the Word made flesh, the one who obeys perfectly because he hears perfectly. He listens where we shout. He kneels where we stand on out tiptoes to be just that little bit higher. He dies where we insist on being right.
On the cross, heaven and earth both bear witness again. The sky darkens. The ground quakes. Life and death face each other one last time. And life wins—not as conquest, but as communion.
At the table, we’re given more than bread and wine. We’re given hearing aids. Here God feeds us back into tune, clears the static, returns us to rhythm. “This is my body…this is my blood”—the sound of life reentering the world. All of it, from God, freely given…for us, for you…
As we rise, the world does not change because we are told to change it. It changes because we’ve heard again what’s real. Grace vibrates through us like a frequency we didn’t know we’d lost. Life hums beneath the noise. God’s will prevails…God’s will will be done, come whatever may. Question is—will we choose to embrace its inevitability or will we insist upon our own understanding, our own will? Will we choose life? Or will we choose death?
And all the while somewhere, faint but clear, a familiar voice keeps asking, “Can you hear me now?”
Do you hear it?
The Rev'd Daniel W. Spigelmyer, Jr. 