It isn't that we don't want help from Jesus finding something solid and dependable in life. Many of us crave a sense of stability and certainty. We live in a world where many of the things we've counted on seem unsure. Everything is changing, and not always for the better.
Jesus certainly offers us plenty of specifics. Today's reading is the conclusion of the Sermon on the Mount, and in it Jesus has clearly laid out how we are to live, teaching on everything from personal piety to money to forgiveness to the law to judging others to putting God first in our lives. He says that actually doing his teachings will anchor our lives firmly, but in our day, it is easy for Jesus' teachings to get lost in a dizzying array of other voices and choices.
Americans have long been big on individualism and have valued making our own choices. Nonetheless, the number of choices now facing us are mind boggling compared to 50 years ago. There used to be an old joke about getting phone from the phone company (the only place you could get one way back when). It went, "You can have any color phone you want as long as it's black." I didn't have any choice about going to church as a child, or as a teenager for that matter. And the culture I grew up in worked pretty hard to limit the other available choices on a Sunday morning. The stores weren't open, the movies weren't showing, no sports were played, and you would get dirty looks from your neighbor if you cut your grass.
I have not desire to go back to those "good old days," but we do face a difficulty that some previous generations did not. To choose Jesus we have to unchoose some other things, many other things actually. And we live in a culture that constantly tells us we can have more and more, that we should have more and more. Our TVs get hundreds of channels. We flip around with our remotes trying to watch multiple shows at one time. And the TV manufacturers are trying to help us, bringing out new models that show two, three, four programs at once.
Even when we want to follow Jesus, so many other things beckon us. I'll take home a book I know I should read but then I don't want to miss that TV show, and I need to get to bed and rest but Colbert is on. And I need to spend more time in prayer but another email just came in on the smartphone, and I need to check in on Twitter and Facebook or I might miss something.
Parents over-schedule their children in sports and enrichment activities because they are afraid that those children might miss out on something valuable, on something they could need. But Jesus talks about narrow gates and hard roads, about living in a particular way, which of course means not living in some other ways.
I sometimes wonder if a problem people have with Christianity is less that they don't want to choose Jesus, and more the realization that they don't want to unchoose all those other things. Yet every choice requires unchoosing other options. To choose one person as a spouse effectively eliminates millions of other possible choices. Choosing to have children means to unchoose some other possibilities. (Though we all know people who attempt to ignore these realities, who keep dating after they marry or take infant children with them to bars, fancy restaurants, and sporting events.)
I wonder if some of us aren't so frazzled all the time because we know well how to choose, but we've become very unpracticed at unchoosing. No wonder our lives sometimes feel like they're falling down around us. I wonder what things I need to unchoose in order to get my life on solid ground, on a firm foundation.
Click to learn more about the Daily Lectionary.
No comments:
Post a Comment