Cross-roads: Making Choices

Mark Introduction:
How we understand the purpose of keeping the Sabbath holy, is often reflected in our image of God. There are those who feel that God created us so that there would be people who could worship and praise and adore him. There are others who believe that God created us, because God needs people to express God’s character. What this means to them is God is love, and that love is found in the expression of caring, encouraging and compassion given to another. So God needs to have people to literally express the very essence of who God is.

How Sabbath is understood is also influenced by where we place it in the order of our week. If Sabbath is the last day of the week, we see it as a time we gather to find God’s grace and forgiveness for not always living our call of discipleship throughout the week. Sabbath is a time we can make our relationship whole with God once again. But if we see Sabbath as the beginning of the week, then we understand our time gathered for worship as a time that empowers us to face a new week and to recharge ourselves to live the life God calls us to as God’s disciples. The benediction at the end of the service does not indicate that the worship is over, but that we are being sent back into life to live as the presence of Christ to the world.

The two passages we are about to read, express different dimensions of Sabbath. In Mark, we hear Jesus tell his followers that humanity was not made for the Sabbath, we were not created so God can somehow feel affirmed, but the Sabbath was made for us. That the Sabbath is designed to help us to know the presence of God more fully in our lives.
Read Mark 2:23-3:6

Psalm Introduction:
The verse focused upon for today’s sermon is verse two. It is a verse that helps us understand why Sabbath is so important for us in the living of our lives. We chose the 23rd Psalm as a basis for a Lenten sermon series, for it is a Psalm that reminds us that God leads us through a very difficult and dangerous world. This verse about green pastures and still waters is more than a serene, pastoral image of rest and relaxation. It is a reminder that in the midst of life, we have a God who calls us to a place and time that takes us out of the everyday paths of life so we may be nurtured and refreshed for the journey that takes us through valleys of shadows, and causes us to confront our enemies as we seek to follow the good shepherd.
Read Psalm 23:1-2

SERMON:

The opening sentence in Scott Peck’s best selling book, The Road Less Traveled, is, “Life is difficult.” It is probably not what we want to hear about life. Many of us would like to believe that life was meant to be easy and simply enjoyed. The reason life is difficult, Peck says, is because life is a series of problems needing to be solved. Life is a series of issues seeking answers, and choices needing to be made. What shall I do with my life? Who shall I date? Where shall I live? What church should I go to? Should I attend church? What should I wear today?

There is a wonderful Native American story that illustrates the impact our choices make upon our lives. There was a brave high in the mountains on one last hunting trip before the winter snows came. As he was hunting he could feel the temperature dropping and knew a storm was coming, so he prepared himself for the journey down the mountain. Just as he was ready to descend he heard a small voice cry out, “Please wait. Don’t leave me here, for if you do I will surely die.” The brave looks around for the source of the voice and finally sees a rattlesnake slithering toward him. Again he hears, “Please, take me with you.” The brave tells the snake to stop as he was too afraid to let it get too close. The brave finally says, “If I pick you up and take you down the mountain, you will bite me and I will die.” The snake replied, “I would never do that to you, for you would have saved my life and I would be eternally grateful.” The brave, still not fully convinced thought that that made sense, so he picked up the snake, put him in his pack and carried him down the mountain. When they reached the bottom, the brave reached in and removed the snake from the pack and placed him on the ground. Just as he begins to remove his hand, the snake turns and bites him. The brave, totally taken by surprise jumps back, but it is too late, the venom is already at work. The brave says to the snake as he is drawing his last breaths, “You promised that you would not harm me after I saved your life. Why did you do this?” The snake just looked at the brave and sneered, “You knew what I was when you picked me up and you did it anyway. So don’t act so surprised that I bit you.” And the snake slithered off.

We, as United Methodists, believe that we have been given free will by our God to make our own life choices. It is the only way we can ever express our love of God, as love can only be something we freely choose to give to another. So we have the freedom to make our choices, and sometimes we can see that we make choices even when, like the Indian brave, we know what we are choosing may not make sense. I think about a news story I saw many years ago about people who have built their homes on the San Andreas Fault. One person walked out their back door and showed the fault depression running right along their patio. They just laughed it off as if it would never happen. Yet, when the next big-one comes, people will be totally overwhelmed by the devastation and blame God or the absence of a God for this huge tragedy. Every year, we see towns and cities built on a river’s flood plain destroyed as the river overflows its banks from the winter snow melts and the spring rains, and then see the town rebuild in the same place after the water recedes. We can hear the words of the snake. “You knew what I was when you made the choices you did, but you made them anyway. Why do you act so surprised?”

In our own personal lives, and in our faith journeys we often do the same things. We know what cigarettes are, what drugs do, what meanness and self-centeredness can cause, and what the “isms” of life do to diminish another human being, and yet, we see people choose them anyway. We see lives that are empty and without meaning, or chasing after false gods or empty promises, but we see people choosing them anyway. It is why Lent begins with the temptations of Jesus. It is the recognition that we have many places and people in our lives that seek to have us make choices other than God in the living of our lives. And we, like Jesus, must make peace with those temptations, those choices, if we hope not to be misled and used in our life’s journeys. (Idols don’t love us in return)

Choices are a major part of our Lenten experience. Lent gives us a time to reflect upon those places we have chosen other than God, to see those places we are separated from God, so we can repent, make a new decision that allows us to bridge our separations from God. On Ash Wednesday I shared several definitions for repentance, a key theme for Lent. Repentance literally means to make the choice to have a change of heart, a change of mind and a change of direction in our lives. Using Peck’s words, to find new solutions to the problems and issues we face. My favorite definition for repentance is one I learned from Rabbi Abraham Heschel, which is “return to the answer.” Return to the One who gives us healthy and caring choices for the living of our life. As the Deuteronomist says, “I set before you this day life and death. Choose life.”

This is one of the reasons Nancy and I chose the 23rd Psalm as the basis for our Lenten sermon series. The Psalm, as Rabbi Harold Kushner says, “is about a God who seeks to lead us through a dangerous world.” Who seeks to lead us and guide us through the dark shadows of life. A God who seeks to lead us on paths of righteousness which taken literally means to provide us guidance through temptations and rough roads filled with pot-holes.

Today’s verse, which we often say from the King James is, “He maketh me to lie down in green pastures, he leadeth me beside the still waters.” It is a very serene image is it not? Rabbi Kushner says, it is better translated, “he leads me to the waters of rest and relaxation.” There is indeed that sense of Sabbath and a pastoral relationship with God. The Lord knows most of us can use a time of rest and relaxation. It is not a choice many of us make very well. I remember an event early in my life that illustrates this for me. One night I was in my den watching television when I all of a sudden heard my father break out in a fit of hysterical laughter. When I ran into the kitchen to see what was happening, I saw my mother pouring some juice from a can into a jar, which was now overflowing and causing the juice to run across the table and onto the floor. My dad was teasing my mom as she just continued to pour the juice. Finally my mother said, “This is a quart can and this is a quart container, so it should fit. And she kept pouring. Obviously, after she had poured a half-quart onto the floor, we read the label and found that she had indeed misread the amount of fluid in the can. Now, knowing that I contain my mom’s DNA, I am sure many questions have now been answered for many of you about me. But before we judge my mom too harshly, how many of us make the kind of choices that try to live a quart and a half of life in a quart time frame. So we do need a time of Sabbath, a time of rest and relaxation. It is a very important choice for our own spiritual and physical well-being.

But I am not sure that this truly addresses what is meant by the Psalmist, especially in light of Jesus’ words about the Sabbath. The Sabbath is made for you and me. And I believe it is for a respite from our regular life’s journey, but I also believe it is because of the whole issue of making choices. It is to help us make the kind of choices that help lead us through a dangerous world of temptations, to help us avoid the pot-holes of life that seek to lead us from the life abundant that Jesus came to bring us.

William Willimon and Stanley Hauerwaus wrote a wonderful book in the mid-90’s entitled, Resident Aliens. They said that the church is an oasis in the midst of our culture. They go on to say that many people see the church as a place where people of faith come to escape from the realities of life. That somehow life is not meant to be difficult, and that life with God gives of this serene, false, pastoral hope of green pastures and relaxing waters. Willimon and Hauerwaus suggest the truth is that the church is an oasis, but not to escape reality but where we come to find what is really real about life. Where we come to hear about the God who seeks to lead us through a dangerous world. Where we find the real choices and directions of living life in love and compassion. Where we find the choices of values and mores and spiritual understandings that allow us to know God more fully and live life more abundantly. That we come to this oasis not only to hear and learn, but to also practice these realities, to hone our Christian skills so we can bring these skills back to the living of our lives in the greater world. They said that there was a time that the church saw its mission as simply helping people to cope in the world, to escape the realities. Today, they said, people want to know how to live their faith in the world. We want to know what those choices for our faith journey are. We want to know what they may look like. We want to practice them so we may live them in full and healthy ways daily in our gift of life. We want to receive the encouragement and direction of the church so we may receive the light of God’s love and indeed be a light of love to the world.

We come to understand what our choices are, and why they are important and how we may choose to be Christian in this God’s world. And we seek a God who reaches out to us, not to simply tend us and take care of us, but to help us live this calling of discipleship in a world that needs to experience the choices we make.

Repentance, change, deepening our relationship with God are all a part of Lent. But it is simply not choosing something new for the sake of change. It is a returning to the answer, returning to the one who seeks to lead us and guide us through the temptations of life that separate us from the love of God through Christ Jesus our Lord. It is why we gather on Sabbath. It is why you have JHC. To be with the church, the community that seeks to help us all see the presence of God, and choose the leading of God in our lives.

Sermon delived by Rev. George Cushman on February 17, 2008.