July 11, 2021
/The Seventh Sunday After Pentecost
Ephesian 1:3-14 | Ps 24 | Mark 6:14-29
The Rev. Bradley Varnell
We love choices in America. We like choosing our favorite bands, our favorite toothpastes, we like choosing from an array of options on a menu, or whether to watch a new movie or binge an old show from the comfort of our living rooms. In many ways American identity, and the American understanding of freedom is bound up with the idea of choice. To be free is, ultimately, to be free to choose. We are a people who love duty, as long as we choose duty. Choice reigns supreme – especially in our religious lives. Gone are the days where virtually everyone who was born into a particular tradition – Jewish, Catholic, Baptist, what have you – died in that same tradition. The Pew Research Center has documented increased shifting among religious adherents. About 40% of people who belong to a particular denomination or church tradition didn’t grow up in that tradition. Many of you are part of that 40%, as am I. We choose to leave one faith behind for another, or perhaps for no faith at all. The key is we choose. We choose our churches and traditions, just like we choose any number of things in our lives.
I think this ability to choose, to follow your beliefs as they evolve is a gift in many ways, but it also can lead to a danger. We’re often brought up and taught the goodness of choices, and it can lead – and in America I think it has dangerously led – to a place where the chooser is the be-all, end-all. The stuff of life – from cereal brands to Sunday morning – become subject to my choice and will, my choice and will become what matters. They are the ultimate goods. Everything else becomes subject to my choice. Even God. God becomes one thing among many which we can choose or not choose. God is meaningful if I choose God. And God is not meaningful if I don’t choose God. I’ve seen this creep into some forms of religious life, especially among clergy, a kind of what’s good for you is good for you mentality. Our churches, traditions, and worship are great for people who choose it, but if people don’t choose it that’s certainly fine for them. They aren’t missing out on anything or losing anything. They just made a different choice.
In this scheme God doesn’t stand apart from us as the giver of all meaning, God becomes one choice among many, who has meaning only because we have chosen to give God meaning. I think this is wrong, and sinful. And I think our first lesson today helpfully reminds us of the proper role of choice and choosing in our relationship with God.
Throughout our lesson from Ephesians the author is at pains to emphasize that it is GOD who makes the important choice in the God-human dynamic. The author says that before the foundations of the world we were chosen by God, destined for adoption. It is not we who choose God (or don’t choose God). It is God who has chosen us. God has chosen us to live and love. To know him and worship him. God has made the choice to make us his children, heirs with Christ, inheritors of the divine life. We may act as though we can choose or not choose God. Worship him or set him aside, but that is just an illusion. God doesn’t begin working on you and me when we choose him. Whether we choose or not, God is at work in our lives. Holding us together, keeping our universe going, speaking life into every atom of our being. God has chosen us, before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless to live for the praise of his glory. We don’t get to pick God. But we can choose how will we respond to God. Will we choose to acknowledge God’s choice, God’s work, God’s destiny or will we choose to ignore it, to live our lives resisting God’s decisions to call us into adopted childhood?
This choice isn’t just for a few folks – the choice which God has made is a choice for all people. Every one of us, every person who has lived, is living and will live on this planet was chosen before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before God. To resist this choice, to work against it, to ignore it, is to live against the grain of the universe. Before the world was, God chose us. To resist that choice is to resist a decision older than creation, older than the universe itself. It is resist God’s decision to know us, to love us, to be with us and for us. It is to resist God’s decision to love us with everything God has.
The knowledge that God has destined us for himself is, I think, good news. The fact that it is God’s choice, not ours, that determines our relationship with God means that no doubt, no fear, no wandering around can separate us from God. God has made the choice to be with us, to be for us, to be our God. And you and I cannot change that – your lack of faith, your abundance of faith, doesn’t make God choose you more or less. Before the foundation of the world you were chosen. And God has waited centuries and millennia to know you, to love you, to show you what it means that you were chosen by him. Rest in that choice. Rest in that security. God has chosen to know you. To be your God. So let him. Amen.