The Reverend Carolyn Estrada

Difficult?

Maybe it is hard to get up in the morning in time to make the 8 o’clock service, but difficult?

Coming into a beautiful space, being surrounded by a community that loves and supports us, feeling ourselves caught up in the comfortable cadences of the liturgy and nourished by the Eucharistic table, leaving with a sense of peace and well-being?

What’s difficult about that?!!

I’ve often heard people say that they go to church because it makes them "feel good."

Or they complain about a sermon that makes them feel uncomfortable – as though we should be dispensing "happy pills" from the pulpit, or serving them along with the communion bread.

Not that there’s anything wrong with feeling good!

Certainly, our relationship with God can be a great comfort to us!

But our lessons today remind us that these teachings are, indeed, difficult.

Following Jesus isn’t easy!

This morning’s Scriptures ask us to choose a relationship with the God who has first chosen us:

I will be your God, and you will be my people, God told the Israelites.

All our Easter season lessons were variations on the theme of God’s love for us and our having been chosen by God.

Today’s lessons focus on the other side of the equation, on our choice of God, our choice to LOVE God back.

How often do we even think of our relationship with God as a choice?

"Choose…whom you will serve," Joshua says.

"Are you in or out?" asks Jesus.

Most of us, I think, are Christians by habit: we grew up that way. The last time we consciously thought about CHOOSING God may well have been when we were confirmed – or, perhaps, when the alarm went off this morning.

But do we understand the implications of that choice?

And do we think of that choice for God as an expression of our love of God?

We heard today that many of the disciples – people who had followed Jesus – turned back and no longer went about with him: his teaching was too difficult; they could not accept it. They could not continue making that choice to follow him.

And Jesus asks Peter: "Do you also wish to go away?" Are you in or out? Are you going to drop the class, too?

Peter’s response isn’t our own fantasy response, made from the relative safety of hindsight, mainstream middle America, and "sanitized" expectations: Peter doesn’t proclaim unqualified support: "No way! I’m not going anywhere! I’m with you forever!" Wherever you go, Bro, I follow! Lead on!"

Instead, his is a tepid, "To whom could we go?"

He makes his choice almost by default.

In an oppressive society, as a marginalized person, Peter had no where else to go. Here in Jesus was the voice of hope.

Jesus’ teaching may have been difficult – but it offered Life and Light.

Of course, yes, I am with you.

I want what you have!

I want what you offer!

I want to love you, even as you love me!

Jesus’ teachings have not changed; they are today as difficult as they were for Peter and the other disciples: love God; love your enemies; do good to those who hate you; and discover the Kingdom of Heaven in your midst.

Life, light, hope.

It’s not that people don’t still want those things – the life that Jesus offers.

It’s just that so many other things seem to call out, offering the same benefits!

Our media constantly bombards us with opportunities for a future filled with happiness, success, popularity, abundance – a kind of secular equivalent to Light and Life.

In our own lifetimes many of us have seen our contemporaries, even our own children, turn away, sleep in, do something different on Sunday mornings, no longer make the choice that you and I have made to be here this morning.

They’ve made their choice for Jesus at baptism, or confirmation, and now they’re on to the next thing…

What we often fail to recognize is that our choice for God is not a one-time, once-and-for-all thing. It is on-going, made over and over again in every thing we do, every act we take…

Our choice for God is not made with our mouths, but with our lives.

Our choice for God is not a list of creeds and strictures externally applied and enforced, but the essence of the Hebrew schema: the loving of God with heart and soul and strength.

Our choice for God is not a certificate we hang on the wall, but a way of being.

How DO we love God?

What does it mean, then, to choose God?

This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?

Yes, this teaching is difficult. That’s one reason we come together as a community, to support one another on this difficult journey, to help each other get better at loving God.

Annie Lamott defends making her teenage son go to church, even though he hates it, not because God doesn’t love teenagers who don’t go to church, but because she feels he needs to see people who "love God back." "Learning to love back," she says, "is the hardest part of being alive." (cited in Christian Century Aug. 23, 2006, p. 6)

Learn to choose God, she is telling him, from the witness of those who have chosen God. Learn to love God by being with people who love God.

Dorothy Soelle, a feminist theologian and activist, talks about how she grew up hearing the gospel of God’s saving love for her – but nothing about what it might mean for her to love God in return, to choose God. It was discovering the mystics who taught her to go from "thinking about" God to loving God in such a way that her love for God animated her prophetic witness, her activism. She chose the God who had already chosen her.

Augustine tells us there can be only two basic loves: the love of God into the forgetfulness of self, or the love of self into the forgetfulness and denial of God.

Do we choose to love the gods of our captivity – or to love the God who brings us out of Egypt and into new life in Cana?

Do we turn our backs, like some of the disciples, and go away from following Jesus, get distracted by other options, or seduced by other promises – or do we choose the new life in him?

Yes, this teaching is difficult.

But we choose it!

We choose it!

Not because "to whom else would we go?" as Peter said, but because it works!

It is life-giving!

It enriches our world, gives texture to our lives, and brings joy and peace to our souls.

May we continue to choose God in all that we say and all that we do, that our choice to love God SHOWS in our lives, making us instruments of God’s love in this world.

Amen.