Choosing to follow (proper 18)

Deueronomy 30: 15-20,   Luke 14: 25-33

 

This week September has crept up on us and arrived with not so much a bang as a downpour. As the children around us return to school, we might have remembered this week to offer up a little prayer for them. Our grandchildren are just starting out in year 13 & 11: what I still think of as the upper sixth and the fifth form – in other words Rose will do her A levels at the end of this school year and Jonah will do his GSCEs – and both of them will need to make decisions pretty soon about what they want to do in the next stage of their lives, and what exam results they might need to get there.

 

Life can seem hard for the children in our families, or the children we know from our streets: it feels as though there are more choices than ever in their lives, and yet so many pressures to endure and temptations to resist.

 

The work of schools is to help young people navigate the choices of this world and make good choices in their lives: in the way they behave, in their interests in learning, and in their priorities in life. We could pray that all young people find adults to help them do that – we might even be those adults for some children.

 

In the book of Deuteronomy we read the words of God, spoken through Moses

 

‘I call heaven and earth to witness … that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live.’

 

Choose life. What does this mean?

Anyone who’s ever had an argument with a stroppy teenager might have reached the point where they snarl “I didn’t ask to be born!”. We don’t choose life – it just happens. And there are lots of things in all our lives that we don’t choose and we wouldn’t choose, but they are part of being alive; grief, stress, suffering, aging, being tired and worn out and hurt.

An awful lot seems to happen to us in life that we wouldn’t choose and that we can’t choose to avoid. Sometimes it can feel as though we have very little choice at all about the things that befall us or those we love. So, what does it mean to choose life?

 

In the long story of the people of God in the Old Testament, Moses spoke the words ‘choose life’ to the people of Israel as they were about to enter the promised land.

They had been slaves in Egypt – the worst kind of human life, a life that leaves people with no choices at all, no power, no agency. Then they had wandered for years in the desert, within a bleak and boring landscape, with little food, with dangers all around them, and a life so tough that sometimes even slavery seemed a better option. So now they stood on the very edge of something that might be almost normal, land to make a home in and grow crops in, neighbours to dwell with and hopes for the future.

But Moses makes them pause before they rush ahead and he tells them that now they have choices, now they can choose – and they can choose life or death. They have a choice.

 

And I imagine that if Moses were here today he would tell us that we have a choice too. We may not be able to choose lots of things that might happen, but he tells us that we can choose between life and death; we can choose between all that is good and holy and generous and abundant and loving, or we can choose to shut down those things and lead lives that are mean, shallow, narrow, cruel and limited.

We can choose.

 

I wonder whether you feel as though when you wake up each day that you are being offered a choice?

I know that when we are in the first decades of life it can seem as though we have endless choices; and life is about choosing a path, making decisions that will shape our lives and our future.

But as we grow older it can seem as though the choices we have made have already carved out fixed spaces for us so that there’s no going back or forward much to anywhere else. And it can seem as though we have fewer choices than we once did as our bodies begin to weaken and our faculties begin to fade.

 

It can really begin to feel as though we have little choice about what happens to us. Nobody chooses a weak heart or arthritic knees and nobody chooses to let go of memory or stamina. There are things that happen to us and we can do little about those. But, those things are not the only things about our lives.

 

We cannot choose what happens to us, what befalls us, but we can choose what meaning we give to our lives and how we respond to what happens to us. We can still choose life. Jesus said that he came so that we could have abundant life, and it is always possible to choose life and to celebrate its fullness.

 

The last lesson my mum taught me, as she lay in a bed at the age of 91 knowing her heart was failing and she was dying – was that we can still choose to live well, even at the point of death. Mum stayed concerned about everyone around her – even the nurses who were bringing the morphine, and she chose to love us all, and she chose to die well.

 

Moses wasn’t inviting the people of Israel just to go on breathing. He was talking about a deeper meaning of life than that.

He was talking about the kind of life that can shine from a human being, who might be physically disabled or mentally weakened, but still definitely fully alive.

 

He was talking about the kind of life that can be evident in someone deeply grieving, but still determined that love was worth it. He was talking about the kind of life that makes love and generosity and joy possible even in the worst of times.

Moses was offering a worn out bunch of former slaves the kind of real choices that we all have, whoever we are.

We can choose life…

 

In the passage we heard from Luke’s gospel, Jesus makes it clear that making choices is not something which ends when adulthood arrives – our whole lives involves continuing to learn how to make better choices. So what is Jesus asking of us?

 

"Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple”.

 

Does Jesus really want us to hate our families? Hate life itself? What’s going on, here?

It may be that Jesus is using a deliberately provocative word like ‘hate’ to get his disciples to think – that what Jesus really means is that his disciples should place following Jesus above all things – even family loyalties, even life itself.

He is presenting a stark choice, just as Moses presented the people of God with a stark choice. Moses says choose life or choose death; Jesus says love me and hate everything else.

 

In the same way, Jesus says “none of you can follow me unless you give up all your possessions”

In other words, you cannot let any thing you own get in the way of following me and being my disciple.

 

Jesus tells his disciples to count the cost of following – like a builder counting the cost of building a tower, or a king counting the cost of going to war. Jesus tells us to count the cost of following him.

 

God’s grace is free – we are loved without the need to do or pay anything, yet, Jesus warns us, when we accept God’s love we enter into a relationship where we find ourselves following Jesus. And if we do that, we will find it has a cost – because Jesus must come before everything else in our lives.

I wonder what the young people we know would make of this teaching of Jesus?

 

There has been a little flurry of writers recently suggesting that young people are starting to look for a faith to bring some certainties into their lives. One of these writers used the phrase ‘full fat faith” to describe what younger people are looking for. As churches, we should not be afraid to try to describe exactly what it is that we believe about the God we know in Jesus.

 

Jesus is certainly offering ‘full fat faith’ in Luke’s gospel. To follow Jesus we need to put love first – love for God, love for neighbour; loyalty to Jesus and loyalty to the gospel – believing and proclaiming that God’s love is for everyone.

 

We can live in God’s love as people who continue to learn and grow and choose all our days, and we can pray that those around us have that same freedom.

 

So may the whole of God’s family, of every age and place, continue to grow into the maturity of being faithful followers of Jesus,

With God’s help and to God’s glory. Amen.