Difficult Choices

Perhaps it didn’t happen exactly that way. Scholars are never sure with the Hebrew Scriptures, since they were edited and reworked more than once, especially during the Exile. Even so, let’s imagine ourselves into the scene at Shechem. There you are standing with the crowds. Perhaps you’re one of the representatives of the Benjaminites. And there’s your buddy over there with the Ephraimites. Oh, and your sister married into a Reubenite clan. Are you one of the judges or officers? Perhaps you’re a respected elder of your clan – at least some of us here could play the part of “elder!” Your great, great grandparents were among those whom Moses led out of Egypt with God’s help. They agreed to live as God expected, and especially to worship only Yahweh. Your ancestors wandered around the Sinai desert. Moses died before the tribes reached the Jordan River and the land that God had promised to Moses. Joshua took Moses’s place, and all have finally reached the Jordan and received their promised allotted portion.

Now here you are. Joshua is about to “sleep with his ancestors,” and reminds you of the promises the tribes made along the way. “You have a choice,” you hear him say, “you can worship the old gods your ancestors worshipped in Egypt, you can worship the gods that other people in this land worship, or you can worship the one true God, Yahweh, who liberated us from Egyptian slavery. You can choose to do the hard work that God expects of you, or not. I know what I expect of my own family, but what about you?” So, is it an easy choice for you? The way the crowd responds it sounds like it is. “… we also will serve the Lord, for he is our God,” the people answer. Well, yes, but are you really ready to give up those sacred statuettes you smuggled out of Egypt in your trunk? Are you sure? Couldn’t that one of Isis still have some power in it? And what about the Baals of these Amorites, and the Canaanites’ Astarte? Is Yahweh more powerful than they? Are you sure you don’t want to hedge your bets and worship them all?

Now, fast forward a millennium or so. Crowds again. Only this time it’s that itinerant rabbi who’s been performing all these miracles and talking about “signs.” Where in the crowd are you this time? Were you among those who were amazed when he somehow managed to get a lot of people fed with very little? Did you rush across the Sea of Galilee to catch up with him at Capernaum and get some more of that miraculous food? Did you hear him talking about eating his flesh and drinking his blood? Yech, who wants to do that? What kind of strange cult is this? Or maybe you’re part of the group travelling with the rabbi’s closest friends. Perhaps you’re one of those wealthy women who’ve been bankrolling his ministry. Or maybe you’re just an ordinary shepherd or farmer or housewife who finds Jesus so compelling, so life-giving. Is Jesus a little shaken when people call his teaching “difficult” and begin heading for home? Is that why he offers his friends the choice of also leaving? And are you surprised when Peter answers, “Hell no! Where else would we go? You’re teaching us what we need to hear.” Is that your answer also? There’s no one else to go to? Shouldn’t you be tending the crops or the animals, or schmoozing with the fish wholesalers? Who knows about what wool is getting this season? Wait, we need to get ready for our trip to the in-laws’ house. And whom can we approach to help us dodge the taxes we owe? If we could just get the Romans off our backs …. Is Jesus really the only choice?

Fast forward to today, or maybe yesterday. Jesus has come back and called all of us who claim to be his disciples to hear his latest teaching. We’re part of a large crowd, say at the county fairgrounds, or maybe even the Marshall Football stadium. We’re listening to him. Strangely, his message sounds familiar. “You have a choice, folks,” he says. “You can give up your old ways of doing things, you can refuse to do things just because everyone else does, and you can take on my lifestyle of living and dying for others. What are you going to do?” Are we still yearning for those old gods that we’ve carried here from the 1950s? Do we think that if we could just recreate Leave it to Beaver, the pews will be filled to overflowing, and all the confusion and disorder of our lives will disappear? Are you sure? Do we really want to return to the Cold War? Do we really want to return to the time before the ordination of women, when women couldn’t sit on vestries, be delegates for General Convention, or, even in some parishes, even read the New Testament lesson?

Or perhaps the neighbors’ gods are calling out. Perhaps we’d rather worship the almighty dollar. There’s always another one to be made. How about military heroes? Perhaps if we worship them, they will keep us safe from all those terrorists. Or maybe sports stars are the ones we truly worship. Yes, Jesus, you were right to gather us together in this stadium. You know only too well that, if a visitor from outer space were to alight today, there would be no doubt in its mind that many more people have professional spectator sports as their dominant religion than the way you taught.

But the bottom line is, Jesus, your way of life is difficult. Your way of life is difficult not only because you want to nourish us with your Body and Blood. We accept that we don’t completely understand the mystery of communion, but we accept your willingness to feed us that way. Your way is difficult because we know that it involves dying. We believe that your way also will lead to resurrection. Even so, in the meanwhile, dying to old ways, changing the parts of our lives that distance us from you, and keeping you as our model, as we make choices in stores, in voting booths, in our use of money, and in our relationships with others, is so difficult! Yes, you give us a choice, a choice to love and serve you or not, but it’s a difficult choice!

It was June, 1939. German Lutheran theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer was spending the month in New York City.1 “I do not know why I am here,” he wrote friends, as he pondered his difficult choice. As a leader of the Confessing Church, Bonhoeffer had publicly defied the Nazi government. Hoping to save his life, his American friends had arranged for him to serve as a visiting professor at Union Theological Seminary in Manhattan. Yet, after only a few weeks in New York, Bonhoeffer decided to return home. “I will have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war,” Bonhoeffer wrote, “if I do not share the tribulations of this time with my people.” Bonhoeffer did not return to Germany seeking martyrdom. In fact, he used family connections to land a position in military intelligence. Despite the danger, Bonhoeffer then chose to use his position to advance the underground conspiracy to assassinate Hitler that was led by his brother-in-law, Hans Dohnanyi.

In 1943 both Bonhoeffer and Dohnanyi were arrested. They were held for eighteen months in a military prison. When the Gestapo learned the full extent of the conspiracy, Bonhoeffer was sent to Buchenwald and finally to Flossenburg prison camp. On April 9, 1945, he conducted a prayer service for the other prisoners. Then he received the summons to prepare for death. He hastily told the others, “This is the end, for me the beginning of life.” He was hanged the next day with five other resistance fighters. The camp doctor who witnessed the execution wrote: “I saw Pastor Bonhoeffer... kneeling on the floor praying fervently to God. I was most deeply moved by the way this lovable man prayed, so devout and so certain that God heard his prayer. At the place of execution, he again said a short prayer and then climbed the few steps to the gallows, brave and composed. His death ensued after a few seconds. In the almost fifty years that I worked as a doctor, I have hardly ever seen a man die so entirely submissive to the will of God.”2 Today, despite having died at the age of thirty-nine, more than sixty years ago, Dietrich Bonhoeffer is one of the most widely read Lutheran theologians, and his works have inspired millions.

We may not face the choices that Dietrich Bonhoeffer faced. But, as professed followers of Jesus, we too have difficult choices, and we too acknowledge “the cost of discipleship.” It’s not easy to give up our attachment to old ways of life. It’s not easy to forsake the pleasures, the political stands, the self-absorption, and the neglect of the needs of the poor that others embrace so easily. It’s not easy to commit ourselves to one whose way of life was so radically at odds with the values of his own time and of ours. But that is the call that we accepted when we strode through the red doors. We choose to follow you, O Lord, to the Cross and beyond.

1. The following account is based on Robert Ellsberg, All Saints (New York: Crossroad, 2000), 160-2.

2. Eberhard Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Biography, p. 927.