April 24, 2006
Decider
Deciding is in vogue. Of course, it’s never been out, but The Decider-in-Chief has just now decided, so maybe we should do some deciding ourselves.
Actually, there’s really nothing new about it for us churchers. If this gospel we espouse is about anything, it’s about change. If change is about anything, it’s about deciding. And whatever else being human is about, it’s for sure about making choices and living with change. God imagined us to be deciders and started us off that way for easy. We got Eden for next to nothing as a place to live and make decisions, decisions about naming things and, of course, the decision about the apple. It turned about to be harder than we thought.
Next thing you know down the line, it was not deciding about choosing apples, it was deciding about choosing a cross. Decide, Jesus said, it’s yours, and he gave us a place to practice. We call it church. It’s no Eden, but it’ll do in a pinch.
We’ve made a lot of decisions over the centuries, but we keep choosing other things. There’s always other stuff to look after, stuff like doctrine and orthodoxy and sex and who can and who can’t do this or that. All the while the shadow of that same cross keeps lurking over all those decisions, all those councils, all those heresies and schisms, waiting, wondering whether we’d choose that cross, or not, up or down. Last I heard, Jesus’ offer to decide still stands.