Twenty-First Sunday of Ordinary Time

Ladies and gentlemen, what is your decision?  What’s this? We’re not a jury or a group of referees at the Olympics.  Well in fact, we come to this Eucharist to make a decision or at least to reaffirm a decision that is meant to define who we are.  Our life history has been formed and shaped by decisions we have made, fundamental choices which permanently affected the course of our lives.  Some were life-changing moments, others strengthened or weakened the direction we had adopted.  Our life is more than all that happens to us.  How do we respond to, integrate, digest and accept into our lives the events that form the reality of our being?  Do we just bounce from one to another, react with the depth of ping-pong balls?  Or are we called to take responsibility for the attention and energy that we devote in serving any gods who parade before us?  Decide today whom you will serve.

It is easy to get lost in a multiplicity of choices and think that our worth and importance lie in the options and choices open before us.  Levels of decision and commitment can seem to be obstacles to the fast-moving opportunities real life offers. Its not your decision or responsibility anyway.  Move on.  Don’t take it to  heart.  But real decisions are made in and from the heart.  More information or certainty would not make a difference where trust and dependability create a relationship.  To decide is to move beyond the known and controllable and to let the future be created by who you are. It is to recognize that mystery and revelation are at work in reality.  People who live from decisions formed in their hearts show it in their faces and the way they live their lives.  Their choices manifest their decisions.

This saying is hard.  Who can accept it?  The hard sayings of life confront us with moments of decision.  We don’t have to accept them.  We can shrug our shoulders, invent cloaks and blinders of denial, denigrate and disparage any messenger who questions the façade we sport.  We don’t even have to accept the hard sayings of:  you are being laid off from your job; you have cancer; your child has died.  The world as we knew it is no more.  We can refuse to enter a changed reality by resentment, bitterness, blame or a whole arsenal of defensive tools.  To accept means letting our life be reshaped by the word, event spoken to us.  It requires a decision.  We have been brought to a limit and are invited to pass over into a mysterious reality.  Will we prefer to serve the gods your fathers served beyond the River: gods of certainty, unquestioned truths, safe and authorized?  Or the gods of the Amorites in whose country you are now dwelling: the cultural indifference to anything beyond the evident and manageable, the secularization which muffles and nullifies sacred times and spaces and voices.

Joshua called together all the people who stood in ranks before God.  They were called in freedom and to freedom to a decision to serve God in their lives.  To serve other gods was to fall back into slavery – only in a different location.  As a result of this, many of his disciples returned to their former way of life.  In standing before Christ, we are called in freedom and to the freedom of following Christ.  It is a gift which needs to be opened and activated.  The opportunity rises not from a prudent cost/benefit analysis but from a possibility opened by God.  No one can come to me unless it is granted him by my Father.  This saying is hard.  It means dying to the world as we have known it and entering the world shaped by the decision of God who makes us members of the body of Christ.  Christ is God’s decision for the sake of the world, inviting us to decide to live for him.  Ladies and gentlemen, what is your decision?

Karl Rahner once wrote that the devout Christian of the future will either by a “mystic”, one who has experienced something, or he will cease to be anything at all.  For devout Christian living as practiced in the future will no longer be sustained and helped by the unanimous, manifest, and public convictions and religious customs of all, but by summoning each one from the outset to a personal decision…based on the experience that the basis of one’s existence is the abyss, the mystery: that God is essentially inconceivable and that this inconceivability grows the more nearly his self-bestowing love touches us.

  (Theol. Investigations VII (1971).