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Your Congregation | Clergy & Lay Leaders | Sermons | Compelling Choices
"Compelling
Choices"
by Joseph C. Hough, Jr., President of Union
Theological Seminary
(The Riverside Church in New York on September 9, 2001.)
How many times I have sat
in this church and been deeply moved by what I have seen and
heard- the great sermons, the inspired music.
Often I leave here on Sunday, literally lifted up by the stirring
of deeply religious feelings and passions.
Recently those feelings and passions were raised to a new level of
intensity. In July, our pastor, James Forbes preached a series of
sermons on the divine invitation. I
returned from vacation on July 15, and heard two of the sermons in the
series. Since then I have been
thinking very much about what obligations I assume when I accept the
divine invitation to discipleship. In
this sermon, I address what I think are two compelling choices that I
must make if I am to be serious about discipleship and to act with
integrity in response to God's call to be in the world and for the world.
Let me begin with some
comments on the primary lectionary text for the morning, Deuteronomy 30-15-30.
"I have set
before you life and death ... therefore, choose life that you and your descendents
may live." That remarkable command appears in the final address of
Moses to Israel just before he died. This
was the third in a series of speeches at Moab in which Moses is trying to
prepare the Israelites for the time when he will no longer be with them.
The speech culminates with a call to renew their covenant to be faithful
to their call by God to be a chosen people.
Later, when representatives
of the tribes of Israel gathered for celebration and worship, they remembered
their roots as a covenantal people who were first called the people of God as
the children of Abraham. At this
great celebration, their liturgy gave voice to the stories that formed them as a
people. For them it all began with
the word of God to their father, Abraham. "I
shall be your God, and you will be my people; and I shall make of you
instruments of blessing for all the nations."
Now if we can let our
imaginations go a little, we see a gathering of people who try to be faithful to
their promises, much like those of us gathered here at Riverside church this
morning. Years later, they came
together to bear corporate witness to their faith.
So the leader of worship
reads the words of Moses, “I have set before you life and death-- choose life
that you and your descents may live." In response the people shout,
"We choose life!" The leader repeats the challenge and the people
shout again, "We choose life!
We choose life! We choose
life!
It is a highly charged
moment. It is a time for the
renewal of commitment to life, life in the world as God had told them to live.
Israel was not called to
affirm just any life. It was the appointed life, the chosen life made possible
by the covenant God made with Abraham.
Because
they had been chosen by God Israel's choices about life were profoundly
important. If Israel really chose
life, that is, if they lived by the covenant they affirmed, their choices were
important for the whole creation of God. The
chosen life, then, is not a badge of honor.
Rather it is the life under appointment, a life under God's call to be
instruments of redemption, peace, and reconciliation in the created order.
So
the leader says, "You who have been chosen --- now you choose to live for
the sake of all of life. Make your
choices for living in such a way that the whole world may live."
And
the people say, "We choose life! We
choose life! We choose life!"
So
this formal remembrance was more than a litany. It was at once history and prophecy. It was a powerful reminder of the history of their covenant.
It also was a vision of the profoundly serious and fundamental choice
that defined all of their many choices.
Either
they choose the life of the chosen ones so that they and the world might
envision a future of life or their choices led to a certain future of death and
destruction.
Choosing
a future with God, or choosing the end of all of our futures.
The relevance of this text is immediately startling, because what is
going on here is terribly important for us this day.
If we, as the people of God, will join this great liturgy of faith, what
are the compelling choices that we need to make?
1.
The Choice of Life.
At
the most basic level, we are compelled by our covenant to choose so that
our descendents and our world can look toward a future of life.
Every
human being has been chosen to live. Put
another way, the very fact that you and I are here today is not fundamentally
our choice. Our birth into this
world was itself a gift. Persons
came together and chose us to be here. But our being here at all is not merely the choice of
persons. The unique you rests on
the history of eons of the evolutionary process that was bringing to life a
unique ecosystem that supported and sustained the emergence of human life in our
world.
One
of my favorite books is entitled Sand County Almanac by Aldo
Leopold. Leopold was an early
environmentalist, a man who loved the natural world with a passion and with
purpose. In his book, Leopold
argues that all of our efforts to live together as fellow human beings may come
to naught unless we all begin to understand that our lives are sustained by the
whole of the natural order. He
describes our existence as a pyramid, what he calls a pyramid of life.
Leopold certainly sees human beings as the peak of the pyramid, but the
peak is resting on a large and complex base of living and non-living things
that, woven together, form the basis for any human life at all.
Without the base, the pyramid collapses and we all disappear.
Bill
Moyers' recent documentary, entitled "Earth on Edge" communicated much
the same message in a most powerful way. In
that film, the connectedness of our lives with all of creation was dramatically
clear. From the great network of
plant growth in the tropical rainforest to the tiniest microorganisms, life is a
complex whole. My life and your
life are bound to the whole of creation.
What
is more, the incredible moment of your conception is an event that astounds even
the most cynical microbiologists to this day. The genetic selection of the unique you is the product of
billions of years of planetary change so that in a precise moment in time, you
were chosen to be you. You and
no one else. The fact that we are
here at all rests on the creative power infused into the elements of nature, and
our unique selfhood is an event contingent upon the magnificent and largely
mysterious workings of a creative process, which literally calls us to live.
What
a wonder!! --- over the years, the emerging elements of this remarkable universe
converged in such a way as to create the possibility of your being chosen
to be. The Hebrew word
for chosen is also translated beloved. So
we have been loved into the world by God.
Think of it! You and I are here by the creative and loving act of our
God. And that same loving God
has given us a remarkable and beautiful world.
Yet,
for years we have treated this planet as if its resources were inexhaustible and
its future unlimited. We have acted
as if the world is ours rather than a precious gift from God.
Sadly, we are now beginning to see the consequences of those kinds of
choices. Some people have chosen
the "good" life of unbridled consumption in a way that has highly
destructive consequences for the earth. And
in choosing this so-called "good life," we are choosing an illusion.
Just
recently, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued its report
entitled, Climate Change 2001. Put together by conferences held in
Shanghai, Geneva, and Accra within the last twelve months, the three-volume work
argues that we are on the edge of a worldwide environmental cataclysm.
As
Bill Moyers pointed out in his report, we are pouring poisons into our drinking
water and our air. Our fertile
soils are being destroyed by careless and profligate use. Thousands of species of animals are being destroyed, and the
rain forests that supply us oxygen to breathe are being cut down at an alarming
and unsustainable pace.
Here
is a fundamental compelling choice. It
is the one choice that will determine all of the other choices we make.
It is an absolutely bottom line, base line choice between life and death.
-
Yet, despite the disappearance of the forests, the death of thousands of species and the pollution of air and water;
-
despite the growing consensus that we have already done irreparable harm to our world;
-
despite the fact that we are in danger of opening another nuclear arms race;
-
despite the fact that a deteriorating ecosystem can seriously distort the genetic structure of those yet unborn;
Despite
all of this that we now know, our national political leaders scorn the warnings
of the world's top scientists and stand alone against all efforts of
other nations to stem the tide of destruction.
This
cannot go on. This is not a matter
that we Christians can leave to habitual partisan politics.
At this moment in history, our choices have to transcend our
self-interests and our political loyalties.
The care of the earth is a part of our covenant with our God that
determines who we are and what we choose. So
let the voice of the covenant people rise into a mighty and deafening roar so
that all the world may hear:
This
destruction of God's world cannot go on. The
time is now and we cannot rest until we are heard.
We choose life! We choose life! We
choose life! -- a life that will ensure that we are working with our God as
a covenant people to ensure a future of any life at all for our children and
their world!
II.
The Choice for the Poor.
Now
let us turn to the gospel text for the morning. Here in Chapter 4, Luke makes it clear that we have not been
chosen by God simply to ensure that life is possible. If our being alive at all reflects the fact that we have been
chosen to live, then our being where we are today means that we have been chosen
to live by other human beings, chosen to live with other human
beings and chosen to live for other human beings.
The
fact that we are here today, that we are who we are, that we are able to do what
we do, reflects the sustaining power of a thousand choices and covenants that
have been made and kept by countless persons. They form an abiding structure of possibility within which
our own opportunities have emerged. And
they have created situations that make our own choices possible.
This
is a reminder that our second basic compelling choice is to make a
profound difference for the future hopes and dreams of many others who are
dependent upon and related to our choices.
But
Luke is even more specific. Jesus,
himself, puts our second compelling choice into clear focus.
You
will recall that just prior to the reading in the synagogue at Nazareth, Jesus
had been in the wilderness subjected to the temptations of Satan.
Each of the temptations captures a prevailing view of the anointed one of
God the appointed one, the one who would come to deliver Israel.
So
it is significant that when Jesus came to Nazareth, "in the power of the
spirit," as Luke put it, he was, in all likelihood, making a statement
about his own appointed mission. He
opened the scroll and began to read from Isaiah:
"The
sprit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to preach good news to
the poor. God has sent me to
proclaim release to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to set a
liberty those who are oppressed, to proclaim the Year of Jubilee."
This
is the Jesus covenant, and it is specific and clear. Those who are Jesus covenant people will bring good news,
freedom and hope to the poor. If
you count all of the references in the fours gospels of the New Testament, a
clear reference to the poor will appear on an average of every six lines.
His special love for the poor is everywhere in the life and
teachings of Jesus.
So
here it is! the second compelling choice for the people in covenant through
Jesus Christ. We choose life!
We choose life! We choose life! We
choose so that the poor will hear good news.
Nothing is more important for our faith than this single choice.
I
do not have to recount for this congregation the bad news that is the lot of the
poor in our world. And I am proud
to be part of a church that is deeply committed to justice.
Yet the problem persists in our city.
On August 1, The New York Times reported that here in New York City,
there are 6252 families with 11,594 children living in the city's shelters.
"This," said Leonard Koerner, a city official, "is
completely off the charts," breaking all records for New York's homeless
living in shelters. And these are
not individuals alone. And this is
not only a New York problem. Martha
Burt, an authority on homelessness, says that similar situations prevail in all
of the 25 cities she monitors. Many
others live in "night to night" apartments using subsidized vouchers
to supplement what they can pay. These
are the desperately poor. They do
not have the means or the support to secure what Nobel Prize winning economist
Amartya Sen calls the "capability to function" in our society.
They are under the poverty line, near the survival line.
The
official borderline income of absolute poverty in the United States is $17,100
per year for a family of four. Using
this criterion, approximately 13% of Americans live in absolute poverty, a
poverty that daily grinds the life out of them and clouds the horizon of every
morning with despair. We stand
alone among all of the industrialized nations as the one rich nation in the
world that is willing to live with this poverty and allow it to get worse every
day. So what do we think about
this. We live in a nation that is
sending people off welfare to earn wages that will not sustain them while we are
cutting supporting services at every turn.
But
the poor are not just those who live below the official poverty line.
Many more of our neighbors, who work full time, earn wages that are not
even close to a "living wage," one that would enable just adequate
provision for health, shelter and food. According
to the Economic Policy Institute a family of four, in order to live just above
the edge of poverty would require an income nearly twice the amount of the
official poverty wage level.
Using
this living wage criterion, more than 90 million Americans live in poor
households, and more than 30 million of the poor are children.
Even
if the working poor hold two and sometimes three jobs, or even when there are
two or more persons in the family who are working, it is very often difficult to
provide the bare necessities for a family of four.
We
are talking about hard working people here!
We are talking about hard working people on whose work we depend every
day of our lives. They make the
beds in our hotels. They harvest
much of our food and check us out at the grocery store.
They clean our work places, and sometimes they even teach our children
and protect our neighborhoods. They
travel further to work, pay more interest for loans, a much higher portion of
their wages for rent, higher prices for food, and often are without access to
adequate health coverage. They are
more likely to live near garbage dumps, more often victimized by crime and more
often subject to periodic unemployment.
Here
it is, then, our second compelling choice.
"The spirit of the Lord is
upon us because he has anointed us to preach good news to the poor." And
good news to the poor cannot be carried on the wings of charity or so-called
charitable choice alone. What is
required is a determined political movement that will support a guaranteed
living wage for all Americans. We
know that our services will cost more. We know that our taxes will be greater, but enough is enough.
We Jesus people call on all people to join us.
Jesus
once said, "I came that you might have life and have it abundantly.
The Jesus people must rise up and say, "in the name of Jesus Christ
no more!" We shall not cease our work until we see that morning when all of
God's children glimpse the light of hope piercing the darkness of despair.
We choose life! We choose life! We choose life! And in choosing life we are compelled to choose certain clear political and personal commitments if we are serious about our calling.