"Choosing Well"
Rev. Steven A. Peay, Ph.D.

First Congregational Church – Wauwatosa, Wisconsin
Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost
September 4, 2004

[texts: Jeremiah 18:1-11/Philemon 1-21/Luke 14:25-33]

The July 13th issue of The Christian Century included an article length review of Barry Schwartz’s book The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less. What he concludes is that the vast variety of choices available to us in modern America is not making us happier. Rather, they’re making us less happy, because the burden of choice is more than we wish to take on. Schwartz recounts his experience of going into a store to buy a pair of blue jeans. The reviewer recounts it this way, “he went to a Gap store and naively asked for a new pair of blue jeans. The clerk asked if he wanted slim fit, easy fit or relaxed fit; regular or faded; stone-washed, or acid-washed; button-fly or regular fly. Spending much longer in the store than he’d planned, investing ‘time, and no small amount of self-doubt, anxiety and dread,” he eventually settled on ‘easy fit.’

Piqued by this experience, he made a loose inventory of his local supermarket, where he found 85 varieties of crackers and 285 of cookies, 230 different soups, 120 pasta sauces and 175 kinds of salad dressing. A book on American consumerism told him that the typical supermarket carries more than 30,000 items. He began to suspect that at some point ‘choice no longer liberates. It might even be said to tyrannize.’”

Let me give you yet another example. The current issue of The New Yorker has an article that points out how the mustard industry was changed by the folks who make ‘Grey Poupon.’ Originally it was one hundred thousand dollar a year business and hardly French, save the name and the style of mustard – you can find out more at the mustard museum in Mount Horeb. The mustard seeds are from Canada and it’s made in Connecticut. Still, savvy marketers – remember the Rolls Royces and the “Excuse me. Do you have any Grey Poupon?” commercials – brought a change from plain old yellow mustard. Now there are shelves of mustards. The article, by the way, is about a fellow who hopes to do the same for ketchup!

I suppose it’s summed up well by Schwarz when he makes the point elsewhere in the book that, “Remember that ‘he who dies with the most toys wins’ is a bumper sticker, not wisdom.” At root, he helps to remind us that part of our task is choosing well and not allowing the process of choice to overwhelm us.

Choices abound and each day we have to rise and make choices that not only affect ourselves, but others as well. We not only have to make choices about what we will do to make a living, what we will 'be' when we grow up, now it seems we can also choose never to grow up, but also about how we will live, what we will eat, wear, and on and on. Soren Kierkegaard, the existentialist philosopher, referred to choices overwhelming us as the source of two kinds of despair. The despair of possibility, he tells us, comes from the lack of necessity. And the despair of necessity comes from the lack of possibility. Those living in the third world may suffer from the second, but those of us in the United States, where life is a matter of choice, certainly can understand the first – even when it comes to something as simple as shopping for groceries or for shoes, or even blue jeans, as Barry Schwartz discovered.

While we can comment on the situation in our own time, we cannot think that this concern is one unique to us. After all Kierkegaard lived in nineteenth century Denmark and he was confronted with the difficulty of choosing well. It must be a part of the human condition. Perhaps that is why the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah inviting him to the potter's shed so long ago? The story we read in the prophet is one of choice and change. The potter works with the clay, but the clay is not a passive agent. As clay is spun on the potter's wheel centrifugal forces are engaged and the clay pushes out from the center. The clay resists the potter's hands and if the potter isn't careful the clay can get away and spoil the creation. The imagery suggests to us that change is an essential part of life. It is, I believe, a central characteristic of the divine-human relationship. John Henry Newman's wise words in the Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine come to mind, "to live is to change; and to be perfect is to have changed often."

The potter seeks to make something both useful and beautiful and I think we can see examples of everyday items that manifest those qualities all around us. Several years ago I enjoyed watching the 'art nun,' Sister Wendy. I remember on one occasion how I was struck by her enraptured comments on a truly lovely piece of 18th century Japanese lacquer work. What is to us a piece of high art started life as a saki bottle. What this says to me is that the most common, ordinary things of life, including us, are raised to the level of the beautiful and the good because of the imprint of the Creator's touch. As Matthew Fox writes in Original Blessing: A Primer of Creation Spirituality:

Humanity is not separate from the royal kingdom/ queendom that the universe is. As science has made clear, humanity represents the most laborious and lengthy effort of the cosmos and therefore of Dabhar [the Creative Word of God] to grow ever more beau tiful. In humanity for the first time in twenty billion years, the cosmos can reflect on itself. Here the awe some doctrine of our being royal persons finds a beautiful expression, one that moved Teilhard de Chardin to exclaim, "Being in the forefront of the cos mic wave of advance, the energy of humanity assumes an importance disproportionate to its appar ently small size." [p. 101]

Clay, then, is an apt metaphor for the human person and human society. As long as clay is kept moist, it is workable. And the clay, though it is an inanimate object, through the forces of physics becomes an active agent in how it is formed. It is only when clay has been fired that it becomes rigid and breakable, rather than bendable. How then, following on this metaphor, do we keep ourselves in a formative state, so the Potter can guide us in our formation toward the useful and beautiful beings we were meant to be? We get a hint of what we must do in the writings of Irenaeus of Lyons, one of my favorites among the great teachers of the early church:

It is not you who shape God; it is God that shapes you. If then you are the work of God, await the hand of the Artist who does all things in due season. Offer the Potter your heart, soft and tractable, and keep the form in which the Artist has fashioned you. Let your clay be moist, lest you grow hard and lose the imprint of the Potter's fingers.

We allow our clay to remain moist by making choices that are consonant with the will of God. We remain open to formation by striving to become the other-centered, loving people God made us to be in the beginning.

However, because we are an active agent in our formation, we react to the Potter's fingers. Unlike clay, we are gifted with the freedom of will and the ability to make choices. Clay cannot choose to be anything other than what it is and must stay that way until it is formed into a vessel or some other piece; not so with us. We may have been made from the "dust of the ground," but we have had "Divine breath" blown into us and have become "living souls." We can choose to make ourselves into something other than what the Creator desires precisely because we have been given the freedom to choose.

When Jesus addresses the crowd that follows him he reminds them that they must make a choice in doing so. Jesus may choose those whom he wishes to be his disciples, but the disciple must first count the cost and realize that the demands that are to be made upon him or her will be real. Jesus uses some very difficult hyperbolic language here to make his point. While we can see the hyperbole in the call to "hate father, mother, wife and children," we can't get away from the importance of what Jesus is saying. The one who chooses to follow Jesus must relativize everything else in life. Everything, including the human relationships that are most dear to us, becomes secondary to the love and service of God. We make a choice to follow and that involves our keeping faith with our action in the way we live, in the way we relate to other people, and in the attitudes we hold. Jesus' call to "take up the cross" is no small thing. For Jesus the cross is more than a metaphor for the difficulties one encounters in life. The cross is a total offering of self on behalf of others, it is loving without measure, and it is complete devotion to God. In short, it is the way of discipleship and it tells us that half-hearted discipleship isn't. The follower of Christ is not one who seeks the lowest common denominator or the path of least resistance. So, back to the question of the clay, how do we become better followers?

Those who choose to follow Jesus are in a constant process of formation – we are always becoming what we are to be. As the potter works on the clay reforming it over and over again until it is perfectly useful and beautiful, so does God work on each of us. So long as we keep ourselves moist – and we do that by means of study, of prayer, and of active service – God can turn us into something useful and beautiful. We become better followers by everyday opening ourselves to formation, realizing that God is far from finished with us, and by seeing each day as an opportunity for growth, for change, for improvement. We are possessed with the freedom of conscience, but we are called upon to form that conscience and to use it in the right way.

We see an exercise in conscience formation in Paul's letter to Philemon. When Paul wrote this brief letter to Philemon, he was inviting him to change. I wish we had time to just explore the wonderful puns that are here in the Greek, because they add to the subtlety of the argument. Suffice it to say Paul calls Philemon to make a choice, a choice for change, a choice for the good. He asks him to take back Onesimus, his slave who had run away, and to take him back not as a slave, but as his equal in Christ. In short, Paul is asking Philemon to make a radical choice to change his way of being, his way of looking at the world, and at the society in which he lives. Paul, echoing Jesus, is saying, love people who are different from you in the same way you love your very self. The extraordinary choice Philemon is called to make is the ordinary demand of Christian life, to live out responsible freedom. It's a call to change again and again, until we become perfect – complete, as God is.

The poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote in his Letter to a Young Poet, "People have (with the help of conventions) oriented all their solutions toward the easy and toward the easiest side of the easy; but it is clear that we must hold to what is difficult." What he wrote is true for the Christian. Our choices are not the easy ones, but the difficult. Over the years those who have chosen to follow Christ in the Congregational Way have treasured this freedom of conscience, this matter of choice. For us the Way cannot be the path of least resistance, but the freely and well chosen one of Covenant relationship. It's comes down to choosing to be a “follower of Jesus Christ” and then living out what that entails.

I would invite you to consider the 54 words of the covenant of this church. Whether you are a covenanted member of this church or not I invite you to prayerfully read the covenant and to heed its call to follow in the Lord's Way. Read those words and their call to discipleship with its cost and its joy and when we stand to sing "Take my life and let it be consecrated Lord to thee," let it be an act of covenant renewal for each one of us here today. I invite you to do this; you are free not to do so. It's a matter of choice, a matter of entering into growth and change, of being formed by the Potter's hands or by our own -- a matter of choice and I invite you to choose well.