A Time to Choose
Joshua 24:1-3, 14-15
In the weeks since his death, there’s been a Steve Jobs quote bouncing around the internets. It came from his address to the 2005 graduating class at Stanford. Jobs told them,
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Graduation day is a kairos moment, what the Bible might call, “the fullness of time.” It’s one of those moments when you step out of ordinary time, the seemingly ceaseless flow of one moment into the next, and catch a glimpse – however fleeting and incomplete – a glimpse of almost infinite possibility.
Joshua has called the people of Israel together to offer his own valedictory address. He is old, and they are about to graduate from his leadership and be set off on their own. They have a choice to make.
Our lives find their ultimate shape in the way that we respond in such moments, to such choices.
I have a somewhat mixed reaction to what Steve Jobs advised the Stanford grads in that particular moment, that kairos time, and somewhere in the mix of my own response I also discern guidance for our own path through such moments.
On the one hand, Job’s morning mirror story is quite similar to the ancient monastic practice of St. Ignatius who asked each day variations on the basic question, “what this day has fed me and made me feel whole, what has drawn me closer to God and what has pushed me away?” Patterns in one’s response to such questions over time are excellent indicators of where God is calling you. I’ve commended that practice to many people over the years, and I fall asleep each night with my own responses swimming around my mind.
I commend such practice to you, as part of faithful living and discerning God’s call and claim on your life. So I read what Steve Jobs said and I want to say, “amen to that!”
On the other hand, I read the quote and also think, “what an incredibly privileged position to be in, that you could even imagine changing something if, upon greeting the new day, you do not want to do what you know you must do and will do that day.”
I find myself feeling convicted in my own privilege, because I know that there are billions of people around the world who simply do not have the choice to change.
Remember the scene from the movie Groundhog Day? Bill Murray’s jaded and self-important weatherman finds himself stuck inside an endlessly repeating day, and, what’s worse, he’s now stuck at a bar with a couple of fairly drunk blue collar workers. Murray says,
“What would you do if you were stuck in one place and every day was exactly the same, and nothing that you did mattered?”
One of the guys looks over his beer and responds, “that about sums it up for me.”
Because it’s a movie, and a comedic one, hilarity ensues.
At the tragic end of the same scale, however, I’m mindful of a friend who tells the story from a Christian Peacemaking Team accompaniment journey to a war-torn country in the developing world. His group was in a village, and they asked a villager if she could imagine herself happy. She thought for a long while before finally responding, “I guess on the day that I die. That will be a happy day.”
At my ordination service, many years ago, I had some friends perform a song called Solo la Pido a Dios. It’s a song by Argentinian singer-songwriter Leon Geico. It translates simply as, “One thing I ask of God: that God not let me be indifferent to the suffering.”
In particular, from my privileged North American position, I ask that God not let me be indifferent to the suffering of those whose conditions I am complicit in. To turn that around, what I am saying is that I bear responsibility for the suffering of the villager who cannot imagine the simple happiness I take utterly for granted. My wealth is not separate from her poverty, and because my wealth and its security are contingent – to whatever degree – upon her poverty and insecurity I cannot rest from the work of trying to create a more just and peaceful world, for when I do I stand convicted of the great moral crime of indifference.
The gospel reading this morning insists that we do not know the time when time runs out. In that vein, Steve Jobs was absolutely right in insisting that we should be asking ourselves what to do with the time we have been given. But the arc of the story of faith pushes us to inquire further. The question is not only “do I want to do what I am going to do today, is it going to bring joy to my life.” For our lives to be complete – to be morally whole – we must push through the fog of indifference to ask also, “what might I do so that on this day someone else experiences joy as well.”
My joy cannot be complete if there is no joy for you.
We are all, whether we like it or not, whether we admit it or not, bound together in this world. As Martin Luther King was fond of saying, we wear a single garment of destiny; we live, and move, and have our being within a great web of mutuality. Whatever affects one directly affects us all indirectly, and, therefore, injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
I had lunch last week with some colleagues with People of Faith for Equality Virginia. We were talking about marriage equality and about bullying, and about taking action in regards to those concerns in January and February. It’s not my marriage, my security, my well-being or my safety that is at stake in those conversations. But it is my soul that is at stake. “One thing I ask of God: God do not let me be indifferent to the suffering.”
This is the choice that Joshua puts before the people: choose this day whom you will serve – the God who brought liberation to the captives, who let the oppressed go free, or some other god unconcerned with the well being of others far distant from me.
Choose this day whom you will serve: the God of exodus hope, the God of liberating love, the God of faithful justice; or some other god. As for me and my household, we will strive to serve the Lord, the God made known in the life of the one called to bring good news to the poor, to restore sight to the blind, to bring liberty to the captives and let the oppressed go free.
God, do not let me be indifferent to the suffering.
Amen.
In the weeks since his death, there’s been a Steve Jobs quote bouncing around the internets. It came from his address to the 2005 graduating class at Stanford. Jobs told them,
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Graduation day is a kairos moment, what the Bible might call, “the fullness of time.” It’s one of those moments when you step out of ordinary time, the seemingly ceaseless flow of one moment into the next, and catch a glimpse – however fleeting and incomplete – a glimpse of almost infinite possibility.
Joshua has called the people of Israel together to offer his own valedictory address. He is old, and they are about to graduate from his leadership and be set off on their own. They have a choice to make.
Our lives find their ultimate shape in the way that we respond in such moments, to such choices.
I have a somewhat mixed reaction to what Steve Jobs advised the Stanford grads in that particular moment, that kairos time, and somewhere in the mix of my own response I also discern guidance for our own path through such moments.
On the one hand, Job’s morning mirror story is quite similar to the ancient monastic practice of St. Ignatius who asked each day variations on the basic question, “what this day has fed me and made me feel whole, what has drawn me closer to God and what has pushed me away?” Patterns in one’s response to such questions over time are excellent indicators of where God is calling you. I’ve commended that practice to many people over the years, and I fall asleep each night with my own responses swimming around my mind.
I commend such practice to you, as part of faithful living and discerning God’s call and claim on your life. So I read what Steve Jobs said and I want to say, “amen to that!”
On the other hand, I read the quote and also think, “what an incredibly privileged position to be in, that you could even imagine changing something if, upon greeting the new day, you do not want to do what you know you must do and will do that day.”
I find myself feeling convicted in my own privilege, because I know that there are billions of people around the world who simply do not have the choice to change.
Remember the scene from the movie Groundhog Day? Bill Murray’s jaded and self-important weatherman finds himself stuck inside an endlessly repeating day, and, what’s worse, he’s now stuck at a bar with a couple of fairly drunk blue collar workers. Murray says,
“What would you do if you were stuck in one place and every day was exactly the same, and nothing that you did mattered?”
One of the guys looks over his beer and responds, “that about sums it up for me.”
Because it’s a movie, and a comedic one, hilarity ensues.
At the tragic end of the same scale, however, I’m mindful of a friend who tells the story from a Christian Peacemaking Team accompaniment journey to a war-torn country in the developing world. His group was in a village, and they asked a villager if she could imagine herself happy. She thought for a long while before finally responding, “I guess on the day that I die. That will be a happy day.”
At my ordination service, many years ago, I had some friends perform a song called Solo la Pido a Dios. It’s a song by Argentinian singer-songwriter Leon Geico. It translates simply as, “One thing I ask of God: that God not let me be indifferent to the suffering.”
In particular, from my privileged North American position, I ask that God not let me be indifferent to the suffering of those whose conditions I am complicit in. To turn that around, what I am saying is that I bear responsibility for the suffering of the villager who cannot imagine the simple happiness I take utterly for granted. My wealth is not separate from her poverty, and because my wealth and its security are contingent – to whatever degree – upon her poverty and insecurity I cannot rest from the work of trying to create a more just and peaceful world, for when I do I stand convicted of the great moral crime of indifference.
The gospel reading this morning insists that we do not know the time when time runs out. In that vein, Steve Jobs was absolutely right in insisting that we should be asking ourselves what to do with the time we have been given. But the arc of the story of faith pushes us to inquire further. The question is not only “do I want to do what I am going to do today, is it going to bring joy to my life.” For our lives to be complete – to be morally whole – we must push through the fog of indifference to ask also, “what might I do so that on this day someone else experiences joy as well.”
My joy cannot be complete if there is no joy for you.
We are all, whether we like it or not, whether we admit it or not, bound together in this world. As Martin Luther King was fond of saying, we wear a single garment of destiny; we live, and move, and have our being within a great web of mutuality. Whatever affects one directly affects us all indirectly, and, therefore, injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
I had lunch last week with some colleagues with People of Faith for Equality Virginia. We were talking about marriage equality and about bullying, and about taking action in regards to those concerns in January and February. It’s not my marriage, my security, my well-being or my safety that is at stake in those conversations. But it is my soul that is at stake. “One thing I ask of God: God do not let me be indifferent to the suffering.”
This is the choice that Joshua puts before the people: choose this day whom you will serve – the God who brought liberation to the captives, who let the oppressed go free, or some other god unconcerned with the well being of others far distant from me.
Choose this day whom you will serve: the God of exodus hope, the God of liberating love, the God of faithful justice; or some other god. As for me and my household, we will strive to serve the Lord, the God made known in the life of the one called to bring good news to the poor, to restore sight to the blind, to bring liberty to the captives and let the oppressed go free.
God, do not let me be indifferent to the suffering.
Amen.
posted by David Ensign at
9:24 AM
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