Choose now

I reflect on decision-making in faith, drawing from the biblical figure Joshua. I discuss how Joshua, instead of formal analysis, recounts Israel’s history to remind them of God’s goodness and love. He highlights Joshua’s challenge to the Israelites to choose whom they will serve, declaring his own commitment to the Lord. He encourages us to consider our choices, remain faithful to God’s actions in our lives, and renew our commitment through the Eucharist. He calls the parish to embody God’s love and actively participate in serving the Lord within the community.

The Power of Choice: Serving God in a World of Options

00:00:00  When it comes time to make a decision in your life. Do you have a preferred method of working out the pros and cons and what the possibilities are and how you might navigate your way through that? I mean, there are whole industries dedicated to this and whole methodologies of analysis and how you do this, the strengths and weaknesses, what the opportunities, what the threats are and and all those kinds of possibilities. What we see in our first reading today is Joshua doing this with the people. But instead of going through some kind of critical analysis, he tells them a story. We don’t get the whole story in our reading today. We just get the beginning and the end. But he reminds the people as he takes them on this journey – he reminds them of what had happened in the beginning that they had encountered a good God, a God who loved them into life, a God who had called just one individual, one couple – Abraham and his wife, Sarah. Out of all the possible people.

00:01:22  And he reminded them that they were foreigners. They weren’t part of this community that eventually became part of the Holy Land. They were from beyond the river and another whole section of the world, and they worshipped their own gods. And yet God saw something in them and invited them to come and to make this journey into this land of the promise. And as Joshua gathers the whole community here in Shechem, it was kind of the shrine of the people that they had established up until this point. And it was right in the centre of the land that the Lord had first shown to Abraham and to Sarah to say, this will be the land of the promise, this will be the land that you will eventually occupy. This will be the place where you will be able to settle and to form a home. This was, you know, about 500 years had passed since that promise. It’s a long time to wait. An awful lot had gone down as they’d gone down to Egypt and experienced all of the hardship of that period of suffering, of being slaves, of being subjected to such hard labour and work.

00:02:43  And then even as they’d made their journey from Egypt across the Sinai Peninsula into the Promised Land, they’d experienced so much along the way of rejection; of starvation. You know, the Lord had fed them and nourished them with the quails in the evening and the manna in the morning. The what? What is that stuff that is there on the ground? And Joshua tells them, look, you’ve now come into a place where there are fields that you have not planted, where there is this fertility of the trees that you did not grow. There are these houses that you now are able to live in that you did not build. And yet the providence of God is there. The providence is inviting them into this freedom, into this life. So Joshua then makes this bold declaration. He said, it’s up to you. But as for me, in my house we will serve the Lord, because there are lots of other possibilities. There were, of course, the people who had already settled there, who worshipped their own gods, the gods of the Baal.

00:03:52  The gods of Asherah are the gods that were possibilities, that were there. And so Joshua knew that the people had to make that choice and make that decision. And as this bold act of leadership, he declared what he would do and what he would offer to the people to do. It’s a wonderful reminder that we always get to choose. We always get to make that decision. Or what will I be today? How will I live today? Will I be true and faithful to the decisions that I’ve made in the past? Will I remember what God has done with me and for me in the past? Will I allow those memories to stir me to make the right decision today? Or will I settle for something? Will I choose something less? I mean, we always choose what seems to be good in our eyes. But if that is the choice for pleasure, if that is the choice for something that just seems good or seems right in the moment, it’s rarely that absolute good. The better good, the good that will actually allow us to experience that full human flourishing that we’re invited into.

00:05:13  Joshua leads them into this renewal of the covenant, and we’re led in the same way each time we gather for the Eucharist to make that same choice, to make that same decision. Will I be faithful to God? Will I believe and trust in the promises of the Lord who makes himself available in the bread? Become his body? Will I open myself to be fed and nourished by him? Will I allow that gift to slowly change me and transform me, so that I might give myself in service to those around me? That’s the invitation that we experience today, and particularly as we renew our sense of commitment as a parish and as a community to say, yes, we want to serve the Lord here in Campbelltown. We want to be the people that God has called us and chosen us to be. We want to be that sign of his witness, and to be that representation of his love and goodness within the world. As for me, in my house we will serve the Lord. What will we do in response?