Sermon Archive
The Tyranny of Choice
Sermon preached by John Armes at Holy Communion on 25 May 2003, Baptism of Alfie and Peggy Hellier
There's a wonderful moment in the film, You've Got Mail, starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. The Tom Hanks character says, ?The whole purpose of places like Starbucks is for people with no decision-making ability whatsoever to make six decisions just to buy one cup of coffee - short/tall, light/dark, caffeinated/decaffeinated, lowfat/nofat - so that people, who don't know what the hell they're doing or who on earth they are, can, for only $2.95, get not just a cup of coffee but an absolutely defining sense of self.?
There's a point where the present day obsession with choice becomes a kind of tyranny. 'All I want is a cup of coffee! Please give me a cup of coffee!' In the face of this it is quite comforting to hear Jesus relieve us of one decision, 'You did not choose me, I chose you.'
Of course, in context this is undeniably true. He is speaking to disciples whom he called away from their fishing, or in Nathanael's case from sitting under a fig tree. These are his friends, note, because he chooses to call them friends. And we know that these are friends who already misunderstand him, and are shortly to desert, deny and betray him. So, when Jesus says, 'No one has greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends', the emphasis is not on friends but on the one who lays down his life. The friendship given by Jesus has not been earned or deserved but it is freely given to the extent of dying for them. He has chosen, not them, and they are left only with the question, 'What response can we make?'
We might well ask the same question. For we too are the recipients of unsolicited friendship, of God's gratuitous love. Perhaps this is most vividly true for those of us who were baptized as infants. Like Peggy and Alfie baptized this morning we had no say in what happened, we were unconscious of God and yet the sacrament named us as beneficiaries of God's grace. But the gospel reading makes it clear that this is true for all of us, of any age; we were chosen long before we had to choose.
Some of us may identify with this very strongly - a sense almost of being dragged into faith. We may have begrudged it, resented it, tried all sorts of tactics to avoid it, yet somehow found ourselves drawn irresistibly into a faith that interrupts the smooth movement of our lives. 'You did not choose me, I chose you.'
I suppose St Paul, with his Damascus road conversion, is the prime example of this. Yet I dare say that most of us, even those who most eagerly assert their freedom of choice in all things, recognise in retrospect factors that made the faith we now profess somehow unavoidable.
This is a bit unsettling for liberal-minded Westerners. We recoil at the thought of denying other people free will, yet here am I suggesting that God doesn't have the same scruples! I suppose what I'm really saying is that it is profoundly true, and at the heart of our faith, that God has already chosen in our favour. Not us the church, or us Christians, but us human beings. God too has freedom, the right to make choices and God's choice is already made. And whilst we may prefer to disregard God's choice, or disregard God, we cannot unmake the choice God has made. Of course, we have a choice, namely how we respond to God, but Jesus' point is, I think, that God's choice precedes ours, is not dependent on ours, and this choice is in our favour. It is God's choice that prepares the ground for our response.
That surely is how it should be. Christian faith is not in the end an expression of preference. It is not an invitation for us to pick and choose the bits that make us feel good and ignore the rest. It is a response to a truth and a goodness beyond us and greater than us. And this means a response to what God has already done for us. God has chosen, not us.
So, what response are we to make? Or, on this day when two children are sealed in baptism with the sign of God's choice, what responses do we encourage them to make with us? Looking at the readings three important things emerge.
The first is that we are to love one another. Just as the Son abides in, is one in love with the Father, so we are to abide in the love of Jesus. He calls us friends, and this friendship is expressed in our love and care for one another. Baptism, then, is not something that happens as a rite of passage, to be forgotten about until we are grown up. Baptism is an act by which we become part of a community. It is our responsibility to reflect in the life of this church an atmosphere that Alfie and Peggy can drink in - an environment of love, caring, friendship. We are to incarnate, make real for them, what it is to know and be surrounded by the love of God.
The second, therefore, is that we are to express the generosity of God. God who chooses to call us friends. Look how the early church were 'astounded that the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on the Gentiles'! Baptism is offered to all and the baptized believer is one who is learning both that he or she is chosen by God and that that same choice underlies God's attitude to all people. It is our responsibility to be a community in which people of all sorts, people quite unlike us (the equivalent of the Gentiles to the Jews of Jesus' day) are to be called friends. In this way Alfie and Peggy will be helped to encounter the rich diversity of human experience, to discover that God is able to encompass everyone with his love and find themselves challenged to extend this love to others.
The third is that we are to bear fruit. And we do so in imitation of the one who laid down his life for his friends. To do this means that we cannot take the easy option, leave the problems to others or allow ourselves to be swept along by invisible laws. It does not allow us to turn a blind eye to earthquake victims in Algeria or the inequities of the world's economy or racism and sectarianism in our own land. Christ comes to us by water and by blood [1 John 5.6]. In other words, through the water of baptism, Peggy and Alfie are baptized into the death of Christ. God calls them, like us, to catch a vision of a better world and to take pains to make that vision reality. This is lasting fruit, but it does not come cheap. We are here to help Peggy and Alfie discover what it means to follow Christ.
'You did not choose me, I chose you.' God has chosen - not 'short/tall, light/dark, caffeinated/decaffeinated, lowfat/nofat', he takes us as we come, without embellishments. God has chosen - not to gain an 'absolutely defining sense of self' but rather to offer us a definition of who we are - his friends. God has made his choice - we are God's chosen ones. This is for Peggy and Alfie, as it is for us, a lifelong invitation to love generously and to accept the consequences - to discover that in God's choice we find not a tyranny but perfect freedom.
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