Joshua 24:1-2a, 14-18
Psalm 34:15-22
Ephesians 6:10-20
John 6:56-69

Today, I'm going to talk about decisions. Immediately, my mind is filled not with the discipline of Decision Analysis, which I studied years ago at MIT, but rather with aural memories of Billy Graham's radio show, "The Hour of Decision".

I find that we, as Christians in 21^st Century America, are truly faced with an hour of decision, a decision we have been postponing for decades.

Joshua, in his farewell address, puts it to all Israel: Here is your choice. You can either serve THE LORD, or you can choose from a variety of other gods.

To help with the decision, Joshua lays out the track record of THE LORD. On the one hand, Joshua clearly discerns the power of God in the events and processes of the world we live in. But there's a lot in this which makes us uneasy. Maybe that's why it was elided in today's lectionary reading. First of all, there is barely a hint of monotheism here. At best, it is what Richard Niebuhr called henotheism, the idea that ones own national or ethnic god was better than all the rest. Were the Israelites being asked to make a decision for the one true God, or something else? And God's mighty acts are capped with, "What is more, THE LORD drove all those peoples out before us, as well as the Amorites who used to live in this country." To drive the point home, back in chapter 12, there is a neat table of the 31 kings who had been conquered (the king of Jericho, one; the king of Ai near Bethel, one; etc., ending with "total number of these kings: thirty-one).

I think you can see where Sharonists and radical settlers in Israel are coming from. But Joshua stresses, "This was not the work of your sword or your bow." Don't you think it is blasphemy to read this book as a right to oppress? Particularly if ones ancestors defaulted on the contract?

Joshua ends by saying that you must choose wisely. It is not a "no-brainer", because there are responsibilities and consequences. In the verses following today's reading, Joshua lays those out:

"You can not serve THE LORD, because he is a holy God, he is a jealous God who will not forgive your transgressions or your sins. If you desert THE LORD to follow alien gods he in turn will afflict and destroy you after the goodness he has shown you."

This is a long-term commitment which the prophets bring up again and again. Don't put your reliance in the alliance with Egypt, which is just a broken reed. You must put your trust in THE LORD. Don't think you can lie on your beds of ivory and cheat the poor with false weights and measures. THE LORD loves justice.

Jesus finds that as he teaches more and more, he becomes less popular, and his disciples began to desert him. So finally, he must ask the Twelve to make the radical decision, are you going or staying? How can they make that decision? How can we make that decision? After all, Jesus didn't have the track record of smiting the Roman oppressors and delivering Israel from occupation. For the Twelve, the ones who were selected by Jesus, there was no real alternative. "Lord, who shall we go to? You have the message of eternal life "

Recently, there has been a lot of talk about the rapidly approaching conjunction of Mars, which will be at its closest for about 60,000 years. My telescope has been in high demand. Even this morning as I lay half-awake I heard the "meteorologist" attribute the salubrious weather of this weekend to the planets being "lined up". (Maybe I should have said, "weather-reader".)

I am thinking of another conjunction, though, and that is the conjunction this weekend of the 40^th anniversary of the great March on Washington. The Washington Post described it as a commemoration of the 40^th anniversary of the civil rights march and the "I Have a Dream" speech. The two stories on the march in the Metro section were titled, "A New Generation Joins Protest" and "Amplifying King's Call For Social Equality". The stories themselves were equally as pathetic.

What were people really doing here? One thing is that they were quoting from Dr. King's article about the World House (from his final book, Where Do We Go From Here? Chaos or Community?): "We must work passionately and indefatigably to bridge the gulf between our scientific progress and our moral progress. One of the great problems of mankind is that we suffer from a poverty of the spirit which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance. The richer we have become materially, the poorer we have become morally and spiritually."

People were gathering to protest the wrong choices that we as a nation continue to make. In Massachusetts, for example, as Horace Small pointed out last night, the funding for the school breakfast and lunch program has been cut, in favor of building five new prisons. Now, the obvious question is, for each child today, whose ability to learn is hampered by hunger, how many future inmates of those prisons will be generated in ten years?

When terrorists attacked the US two years ago, President Bush said that it was because they envied our freedom. My guess that it was because of unconditional military support for the Sharonist government of Israel and the dictatorial governments of the region, as well as the way the US throws its political, military and economic weight around.

Back in December of last year, the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press released the results of a survey of 38,000 people in 44 countries which found that over the previous two years "discontent with the United States has grown around the world. ... Images of the U.S. have been tarnished in all types of nations: among longtime NATO allies, in developing countries, in Eastern Europe, and most dramatically, in Muslim societies." The only exception seems to be Bulgaria, that is, "New Europe".

Should this not be cause for reflection and analysis, perhaps a redirection to work more closely with the international community? Our national response was simply to enter into a permanent state of war and to redouble our efforts to become even more powerful militarily, though the wars we fight and the following military occupations have made us even more unpopular around the world, using up our reserve of sympathy within a year and a half. We think little of abrogating long-standing treaties and refusing to enter into new ones, such as one to slow the rate of global warming. We now spend about $400 billion dollars annually on defense, about half of the world's military budgets. But we also spend an additional $200 billion on homeland security and actually deploying and using that $400 billion capability in Afghanistan and Iraq.

It has been said that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. I find Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War quite instructive, as did the framers of the U.S. Constitution. In a nutshell, although Athens was the prototype of democracy, this form of government neither ensured good decisions nor just relations with other countries. Athens apparently also practiced the prototype of realpolitik. Athens was so consumed with fear and hatred of Sparta, their former ally against Persia, that when the Isle of Melos refused to become an ally of Athens instead of remaining steadfastly neutral, the Athenians "put to death all the grown men whom they took, and sold the women and children for slaves, and subsequently sent out five hundred colonists and settled the place themselves."

Athens was so consumed with fear and hatred of Sparta, their former ally against Persia, that the people rallied around Alcibiades (a foe of democracy, a would-be dictator) who led the expedition to capture Syracuse, the result being (in the words of Thucydides) "They were beaten at all points and altogether; all that they suffered was great; they were destroyed, as the saying goes, with a total destruction, their fleet, their army--everything was destroyed, and few out of many returned home. Such were the events in Sicily."

This is the danger of poverty of spirit and surfeit of technology and power.

When we attack nations to root out terrorism, it is, as Richard Deats described it, like using a bulldozer to weed a garden. More innocent civilians have been killed by the war in Afghanistan than had been killed in the Sep. 11 attacks, yet the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden are still unknown.

In Dr. King's terms, we have a mismatch between internal and the external. "When scientific power outruns moral power, we end up with guided missiles and misguided men. When we foolishly minimize the internal of our lives and maximize the external, we sign the warrant for our own day of doom." We continue to emphasize the technology of war, at the expense of any kind of arts and industry or other human development. Spiritually we are unilaterally disarmed. We allow our leaders to choose prisons over children. Morphologically, we look like the fiddler crab, completely unbalanced by one enormous claw and one atrophied claw.

Here's the conjunction: Such spiritual defenses are exactly what Paul, in his general letter to the Christians at Ephesus, talks about. He gives some good advice and a lot of encouraging words. But today, we find our spiritual defenses in sad neglect, so we must read Paul's words as a challenge, perhaps The Challenge to make the most important decision facing us.

What was Paul talking about? Spiritual armor and weapons. Weapons of truth and integrity. These are the weapons you must use "when the worst happens". When he says "worst", I don't think he meant, "worst spiritually", but "worst". After all, in Matthew 10.26, Jesus says, "Do not be afraid of those who kill the body, but cannot kill the soul; fear him rather who can destroy both body and soul in hell."

Within 300 years, however, Christians were carrying not spiritual armor, but actual weapons of war. Like the earlier disciples of Jesus, his later followers fell away from confidence in the Lord. Moreover, in the space of 100 years, Rome went from disallowing Christians in the army to the point where only Christians were allowed in the army.

The Challenge to us now is whether we can recover our courage to trust in God, to serve THE LORD, as Joshua demanded, our courage to follow Jesus, even after most of those who followed him before have thought better of it, and our courage to put on our spiritual armor, to fear what should be feared, and to trust in the God who should be trusted. This is our choice. As for me, I choose THE LORD.

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© Copyright 2003 John Stewart.
Last modified: Mon 12 Jan 2004