Choose This Day

Every once and in while, our entertainment and scandal hungry society grasps onto a headline or a story and does not let go. If global realities such as wars, famine, natural disasters, refugees and poverty are too much for us to take in on a daily basis, what replaces them is a cultural bent to follow closely trials of the sometimes rich, powerful and famous. We endured the Michael Jackson trial this past year. We have witnessed the impeachment of a president: part civics lesson part soap opera. The daddy of them all when it came to public interest was the infamous O.J. Simpson trial 12 years ago, the so-called “Trial of the Century” when the former football star was accused of killing his wife and a companion. The lawyers in the case became household names. The judge was lampooned each night on the Tonight show with a lowbrow sketch “The Dancing Ito’s.”

Over these past two weeks it was hard to avoid the recent news of the arrest of a man in Thailand who is suspected by police in the murder of child beauty pageant queen JonBenet Ramsey ten years ago. It may very well be this recent turnabout will not bring any resolution to this unsolved cold case, but this much is true: the mother of the young girl killed in Colorado will never see an arrest made. Patsy Ramsey died two months ago of ovarian cancer at the age of 49. She died as she lived -- under a cloud of suspicion by the police and the public and unable to fully prove her innocence or make a proper defense because the police could never find enough evidence to charge her with the crime. Perhaps you felt a bit like I did when told of Patsy Ramsey’s death – even if you did not know very much about her ordeal – it just seemed so sad and compounded an already heartbreaking loss.

Wanting to tie up endings is a natural human desire. I for one like the movies and the books that tell me what happens in the end. The characters may live happily ever after or not, just tell me. Cliffhanger endings may be a great way to keep interest going for the next season or the sequel, but is a messy way of living. Closure and resolution are words used to describe the need to tie up the loose ends of our lives that need tying up before life as we know it can go on. A death awaits a funeral and a burial, a milestone awaits an anniversary, and a crime or a court case awaits a verdict. Until then, until resolution and closure, it is hard to move on.

It would be nice if in the Bible we could find closure and resolution in abundance, but not always. One of the more stunning examples in our faith tradition of an unresolved moment comes at the end of the life of Moses. The great Moses of the Exodus, who had led his people out of slavery, received the Ten Commandments from God on Mt. Sinai, and sojourned with his people for 40 years in the wilderness. For the people who followed Moses, the wilderness was a time of temptation and hardship, of hunger and thirst, regret for what they had left behind, a time of bickering for the weak-kneed and stiff-necked. At a reported age of 120, the Lord God showed Moses all of the land he had promised that he and his people would inhabit. God said to Moses, “I have let you see it with eyes, but you shall not cross over there.” Deuteronomy 34:4 After all he had been through, Moses would not get to step foot into the long-awaited Promised Land. It is one of the Bible’s great unresolved personal stories. Those who would come after Moses were the ones to carry on what he and God began. They would retell the stories, form the corporate memory, and continue the life journey.

It would fall to Joshua to settle the Israelite tribes into Canaan. The passage of the Old Testament we read today comes at the end of the book of Joshua, a book of the Bible not for the faint of heart. In it we will read accounts of battles and massacres. For the land that was called Promised, and that today we call Holy, was not unpopulated when Joshua and the Israelites showed up. On one day alone Joshua and his men killed 12,000 men and women in battle. These are not the Bible stories we like to focus on in Sunday school inviting the children to make collages with construction paper of Joshua’s great and bloody conquests.

When we pick up the story in today’s passage, Joshua has consolidated his power and has brought together the many tribes and families of Israel to another covenant. Covenants are big in the Bible. What Joshua says to those who gathered at Shechem reveals one of the core dynamics of the entire Hebrew Bible or Old Testament. In dramatic fashion, the military leader turns prophet: “put away the gods of your ancestors served” in the past. Joshua 24:15. “Choose this day whom you will serve.”

Who does not find it hard not to fall back into old ways? It is as if we were hardwired with a kind of benign forgetfulness. The things we may slide back into in our lives -- eating or drinking too much, working too long, spending less time with family or friends, not exercising, not coming to church on a more regular basis – may seem minor compared to the problem that Joshua lays out. The theme never far from the surface of the Old Testament is: will the people of Israel hang in with the God who has taken them so far and given them so much? Or will their eyes wander to the plethora of choices of gods around them. Modern believers are often labeled “cafeteria Christians,” choosing which parts of the Bible or church tradition they wish to follow. That charge may very well be true, but if so, it is a temptation that has been around for a long while.

Choose this day whom you will serve. Ideally, I need at least three things to make a choice. First, I need options. I need information. Then, ideally, I need some time.

Options are important. Without options, it is not really a choice. “My way or the highway” may be an effective way to give young children or teenagers boundaries, but it is not a way of relating to others we can cling to for too long. The many idols and temples scattered around the landscape of the Promised Land were built to tie God with a specific location and time and culture. The God Joshua points to is the one God who accompanies us on the journey, just as he did with Abraham and Moses. God is not stuck in time, God invites searching, pilgrimage, and movement.
God is mobile. (term mobile God from Bernard W. Anderson “Understanding the Old Testament”)

Sometimes the best we can do is sum up a moment in life as “being stuck” -- stuck in the same grind day after day, in a job or a house or an empty relationship. May we choose this day to get unstuck by taking a chance, trying something new, saying what is on our mind and on our heart. Our God will pick up and follow us through change; even through the valleys of the shadow of death.

Information. To make a choice, I need information. I remember more than two years ago when I was thinking about coming to the Cathedral, I asked for some information about the parish. I read through the results of the questionnaire that some of you may have completed. I asked for copies of financial information and budgets, for these are obviously important to anyone wanting to know about the health and priorities of a congregation. I also called around. I got nosey. I called people who knew people who knew you. “Would it be a good fit?” I asked to put my name forward to the search committee and the bishop.

We all need information before making the important decisions of our lives. Part of the reason the Bible repeats the stories of the past so often is to offer new generations information so they can make their own choices. A forgetful and a short-term culture as our own can learn from looking back as the people of Israel did. "It was the Lord our God who brought us and our ancestors up from the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, and who did those great signs in our sight.” Joshua 24:17.

Finally, to make a decision, I need some time. It would have been different perhaps if the time in the wilderness after the flight from Egypt had been 40 hours instead of 40 years. Quick victories, or easy fixes, and instant responses may be exceedingly satisfying at first, but too often the joy, the certainty, the victories, and the feeling of being at the top of the world recedes. When asked, choose this day whom you will serve. The people who heard it had had many years to give an answer.

So choose this day, or this week, or before next year, but most importantly before your last breath who will you serve? How will you live? Whose company will you keep? Will there ever be an issue or a cause to move you enough to write a member of congress, march in a rally or light a candle? Will forgiveness be offered more than denied? What kind of legacy or footprint will each one of us leave behind for those who will come after us to venture a guess about how we eventually answered the question?