Choosing

Readings from Joshua and John 

Joshua gathered the people and had them stand before God and he said to them, OK, here we all are now in this new land and I’m getting old and will be leaving you soon. So I’m going to ask you an important question - I’m going to give you important instructions. And here it is: You must choose this day whom you will serve.

We like to have choices, don’t we? That’s the way our society works in our day - we like choices, we want choices, we want to protect our right to choose all kinds of things, even though many of us end up being paralyzed by the sheer number of choices we are faced with every day. But it has become ingrained in our society that we should always be able to make our own choices, and to allow ourselves to be told what we should and should not do diminishes us as human beings. Of course, some of this insistence on being able to choose has turned out to be problematic. We’ve sometimes let the notion of personal freedom override the notion of serving the common good. We have to choose whom we are going to serve, and we do not always choose wisely.

Joshua reminded the Israelites of what God had done for them and then said, in light of what I’ve told you, decide if serving God is what you’re going to do and then choose it now, today. They’re at a crossroads.

Jesus’s disciples are at a crossroads today, too. Jesus has been telling them who he is and what he has come to do, and his message is hard to believe. He says he has come from heaven, from God, and this sounds preposterous to even those who are close to him. This teaching is difficult, they say. And many begin to desert him even then. He closes in on his inner circle, the chosen twelve. Do you want to go away, too? He asks them. No Lord, they say. Where would we go? We have chosen you.

But choosing means stepping out into the new thing that God is waiting to show them through Jesus. It isn’t choosing to stay the way things are. They’re going to be moving forward into even more preposterous territory, death and resurrection and ascension, things they cannot even imagine now. Peter and the disciples are not going to get it right, either, and Jesus knows that. He knows who is going to betray him, who is going to deny him. But he has already chosen them. Now they have to choose him.

And this was true for the people Joshua addressed as well. They had been through a lot as they entered the Promised Land - there had been death and much destruction - but they were there, safe and settled, because God had chosen them to be God’s people. Joshua gathered them together and told them about their history and how God had over and over again delivered them, from pestilence, from enemies, from war, and brought them in to safety. And so, Joshua said, now it is your turn to choose to serve God who brought you in to safety, who delivered you, who chose you when you didn’t even know who God was. And that means, he went on, that you’ll have to NOT serve the gods that you see others serving. So choose this day whom you will serve.

The people declared that they too, like Joshua and his family, were choosing to serve God who brought them out of Egypt and into the Promised Land. And Joshua, knowing human nature, replied, no doubt with some sadness, that he thought maybe they wouldn’t be able to live up to their promise. Which brings us back to Jesus, who knew that Judas would betray him and Peter would deny him and all the disciples except for a few women would abandon him in the end. But he did not abandon them.

Whom do we serve? Who are the idols that tempt us to serve them? Jesus said you can’t serve God and wealth, and he cried in frustration oh, how many gods you all have! And we do, we all have a bunch of gods. When I was little I had a literal idea of what an idol was. It was a statue that silly people who didn’t know any better bowed down to. The Veggie Tales story about the people having to bow down to a huge bunny statue was my idea of idolatry. 

But now I know that it isn’t just statues that are idols. We can make anything an idol by believing that it can save us and must be therefore be served. Money, wealth, the stock market, economic systems; nationalism; power and position; other people - we are tempted to serve some or all of these in our world today. We are tempted to put these things above God and neighbor. We are tempted to choose power over love and ideologies and systems over people, believing those things to be where our salvation comes from, believing that they will save us.

Theologian Paul Tillich described idolatry as anything other than God that has become our ultimate concern. It is God, who is the ground of all being, that should be our ultimate concern, and our whole life should be oriented toward God, just as Joshua tells his people, but we will be tempted to give our whole allegiance to other things instead. 

As we come to the close of summer and look toward the fall, not knowing what it will bring, now would be a good time to hear the challenge from Joshua again so that we might take a good look into our lives and discern what really is our ultimate concern, to recognize where we may have gone astray in our allegiances, and choose again this day the one who has already chosen us.