MCC St. Louis - Check Us Out!
Get your own, Free HomepageIn fact, we have such a wide range of choices about so many things, it becomes almost overwhelming! When we wake up in the morning and proceed into the day, we can choose caffienated...or decaffienated...improved taste or low fat (obviously, not both!)...with flouride or baking soda or minty freshness...cable or video or internet...gas-guzzling, compact, or all-terrain...heavy flow, light flow or wings...treatments for male pattern baldness, impotence, acne or athletes foot...fresh-baked, oven-fried or air-popped. And all that's just the commercials before the local morning news! Or the "Today" show...or "Good Morning America," or...
Choices. Life is filled with them. But some are more important than others. Some of the choices we make can determine the whole course of our lives.
For example...we heard these words in our Lesson (Deuteronomy 30:11-20) reading this morning:
"...I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses."
So the question is: which will we choose?
There was a movie out several years ago called, "Beyond Rangoon." It was a powerful and disturbing story about an American woman who's on a trip to the far east, seeking to escape a tremendous burden of grief in her life. While in Burma, she gets inadvertently caught up in a violent political uprising. In one scene, early in the film, she's walking through the market place and one of the vendors there has cages filled with small birds for sale.
Feeling compassion for their imprisonment, she stops and purchases one of the birds and joyfully sets it free to fly up into the trees. She walks away feeling good about that small bird's new found freedom...when, suddenly, she hears a sharp whistle. She turns around to see the vendor holding up a finger...and the bird flies down from the trees...and gets put back into the cage. Her face shows her despair and a tour guide nearby turns and says, gently..."You see...the bird only knows the cage."
We say that, in our lives, we want to be free. Free from pain and dysfunction...free from illness and worry. We say we want to be happy and healthy and whole. But when it comes right down to it...if the cage door were opened...would we really choose to fly free?
Those words we heard from Deuteronomy in our Scripture Lesson bring us face-to-face with the reality of the power we have been given to make choices about our lives. God calls us to listen and accept God's offer of salvation and wholeness...of life and blessings. We don't have to wait to somehow find these things somewhere or beg someone to help us get them; God is holding them right in front of us! We just need to choose!
Now, I feel pretty confident that, if I could go around this sanctuary right now and question you all individually, you'd say, "Yes, I want to choose life." But the follow-up for many of you might then be..."but how can I? I'm not really sure what it means to 'choose life.'"
Well, that same passage from Deuteronomy gives us the answer. We're told to, "...love God, to walk in God's ways and to keep God's decrees." And then we are told, "Now choose life, so that you may love God, listen to God's voice, and hold fast to God. For God is your life..."
When we make the choice to connect ourselves in every way to God--to God's love, to God's guidance, to God's desires for us--that is how we find ourselves enabled to truly choose life and fly free. Now lots of people say they have God in their lives...but you certainly wouldn't know it by observation! When we say we're going to "choose life," how will we know if we're really living a life of freedom, held up and led by God, or just experiencing a false and temporary illusion of freedom, waiting to be whistled down out of the trees and back into the cage?
The truth of the choice we make will be proven in two ways: by what we do...and by how we view. Our actions and attitude will reveal whether we are truly free in a life with God or just floundering about in and out of an inescapable cage.
First, what we do in our lives says a great deal about how strong our connection with God is. One of the first things we learn as we walk with God is that we have a great deal of power to choose the course of our lives. For example: having a healthy, whole and happy life may require some real and permanent changes on our part. Are we willing to do that?
You know, from working with people as a pastor, I can tell you that people who are in some kind of need in their lives come in three basic varieties. For illustrative purposes, let's think of all these people as being stranded, without life-preserveres, in a storm-tossed sea. And then you arrive with a rescue boat. Now the first type of person is obvious: this is the one who welcomes your arrival, eagerly grabs the life vest, is so grateful to be pulled into the boat, rests a little, dries off...and then starts helping to pull others out of the sea and to safety.
Then a second type of person is a total mystery: this is a person who just flat refuses the lifevest, won't reach for any extended hand and, consequently, drowns right before your eyes. There never was a thing you could do for this type of person, and, fortunately, there aren't too many of them.
But the third type of person is surprisingly common and, frankly, incredibly frustrating. This is the person who is, also, so happy to see help arrive. They put on the life vest, allow you to pull them into the boat...so grateful to have been saved. But then, in a little while, when your back's turned and you're busy elsewhere...they'll sneak over and climb out of the boat and swim back around to be rescued all over again!
If you're wondering this morning whether you've really been "choosing life" as God calls us to or not, I would ask you: how often do you have to be rescued? Occasionally? We all do sometimes. Consistently? Then I might suggest that you take a look at some of the choices you've been making!
What we do--the actions we take--say a great deal about whether we're respondong to God's call to "choose life." You know there are changes that we all need to make in our lives. And we have choices about whether those changes get made or not. Choosing to make those changes can open up the door of the cage we may have been dwelling in and allow God to lead us to freedom.
Now I know some of you may be thinking, "Well, that's all well and good. But you know what? Not everything is life is a choice. I have AIDS...or cancer...or I endured years of physical or sexual abuse...and I didn't have a choice about that. And much of the pain I face doesn't come with a choice. How can I choose life when so much of life is out of my hands?"
Good point. And the question brings up the other point I want to make about our choices in life. You see, it's not just what we do--the action we take--that reveals how we are "choosing life," but it's also how we view--our attitude, that can set us free or keep us caged.
There's an old saying that you may have heard: "Two people looked through prison bars--one saw mud, the other stars."
Or perhaps you've heard it this way: "I cannot adjust the wind--but I can adjust the sails?"
I think of the words written by Helen Keller who was born premanently blind and deaf: "Never consent to creep when you feel an impulse to soar."
How we choose to view things in life--our attitude--says much about whether or not we have decided to choose life rather than death, to be blessed rather that cursed.
On July 26th, when we celebrate my "official" installation a Senior Pastor, my parents are coming up from Alabama and they will have my two nieces, ages 8 and 11, with them. I got a great lesson on how we can choose to view things in life from one of my nieces a few years ago when they were visiting with me. At dinner time we began to bring various chairs aroung the table to seat everyone. The back on one of my dinette chairs then was loose and when you leaned back on it very much, it would move out of place. Well, sure enough, one of the girls sat down there and leaned back...and when it moved, she said, "Hey! This chair's adjustable!" And all that time I'd thought it was broken!
It's true that, for many of us, there are circumstances in our lives that we didn't get to choose: illness, abuse, accidents, unforeseen events...we don't choose those things and we aren't responsible for the circumstances they've brought us. But we do have a choice about how we view our circumstances.
I can remember meeting with a man named Preston who was dying of AIDS. He wanted to plan his own memorial service so that he could have some say so about how things were handled. Although I only visited with him for about half an hour, during that time he told me worlds about his attitude. He was upbeat, laughed, told of his many friends and, above all, he insisted that the service we were planning be called "Celebration of a New Beginning," because that's what he was anticipating...not an end, but a new beginning. And, in the meantime, he chose to be at peace and enjoy the people around him and appreciated every moment that he had. I don't know about you, but to me that seems like a good choice for anyone to make.
Choose life. Take action toward being all that God has made you to be and have an attitude that displays your trust in God.
Think of the perosn who was healed by Jesus in our Good News (Mark 2:1-12) reading today. Scripture doesn't tell us much about him or her. Let's say, just for the moment, that it was a man named Ben. We don't hear about Ben's history. What we do know is that Ben and his friends had enough faith to come to Jesus for healing. And healing is what he got.
Now many Biblical scholars contend that, because the Jewish people of that time believed that illness was the result of sin, the man may not have been medically paralyzed but was, perhaps, suffering the result of some great sense of guilt and need to be forgiven.
Well, Jesus--the one who brings forgiveness and healing to all--gave him what he needed. And, whatever it was, it was a miracle for Ben.
Scripture doesn't tell us what happened for Ben after that. But we can just imagine him walking slowly but joyfully toward home on that bright afternoon, carrying the mat he had laid on all those years and seeing the world from a whole new perspective. Because he chose to trust in the power of God and he chose to respond to the gift he'd been given, his life was renewed and he was set free from his cage.
Perhaps as he walked along, he felt so light it was almost as if he could fly. And perhaps as he glanced toward the heavens to give thanks, he noticed a great eagle soaring high overhead. He would have seen that there was no frantic flapping...only the graceful floating of one who had learned to trust the ruach, the very breath of God, to bear her up. And perhaps he felt at one with that kindred spirit who was living and flying free...just as he was...just as you and I can...if we choose to. Amen.
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