Joshua 24: 15-18; Jonah 1:1-3

Forks in the road

Dear friends, I used to be a great fan of the Muppets and in the first Muppet movie Fuzzy Bear and Kermit the Frog are driving down the road in Fuzzie Bear’ s Studebaker (Fuzzie called the Studebaker the “Bear’s natural habitat”).  Kermit says that they are supposed to turn right at the fork in the road.  As they approach a spot where two roads converge there actually is a huge dinner fork sticking up by the road. What makes that extra funny is that Kermit is surprised by that fork in the road for a moment and Fuzzy is completely unaware.

In some ways we do not have to make as many decisions on the road anymore. With GPS and Google maps we are told to turn.  But once in a while we do have to pick where to turn and we do so based on our analysis of the situation or of our instinct.

A week or so ago a young teenager called Brooklyn took a picture of a young man named Alex  she fancied. Alex is a bagger at a Target in Prosper, Texas.  This picture went viral, but for no apparent reason.  People just kept on clicking on it and twittering it on.  But nobody really knew why.  There wasn’t anything special about the boy or the situation as far as anyone could tell.  Some say some internet company sponsored the craze just to show the potential of marketing on the web.  What it really exemplies is the consequences of little clicks on devices and how with minimal motions of our fingers we can have an impact.

Let us recap what we learned from our encounter with the texts earlier. Joshua is facing the people in a moment of recommitment. They are back in the land of their ancestors, but a lot of other people have moved into the vacuum and the Hebrew people will have to learn to live with them.  So here is a practical and at once spiritual and moral question by Joshua:” Do you still want to stick with God,” or do you want to go with the gods of the people around you?  Think of the consequences, friends.  If they say: we’ll try out another god and shelve their faith of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob,  Hebrew faith might have gone the way of the Greek and Roman gods.  And the way you and I came to Christ was through the faith of Israel. The Church might not have been born.  So this was an enormously important decision, just as important as the decision of the early Christians to open up the faith in Christ to all the world’s people instead of to the Jews alone.  Jonah is asked to be obedient and warn the people of Nineveh, but he does not listen. He makes the decision to board a ship and goes in an entirely different direction. In his case God has a way of bringing him back to his task, but at the cost of near shipwreck for his fellow passengers. The story of Jonah illustrates how decisions matter.

Now think of yourself being in these pews.  What decision brought you here, what fork in the road were you facing?  Friends, sometimes in order to be fully aware of the decisions we will make for the future is to review our decisions of the past.  We are given a certain number of momentous decisions in our lives.  Some we take without thinking, because in our context and culture and family that decision is understood.  We think there is no alternative.  This may even be the thought of young European Muslims who decide to travel to Syria to fight with the Islamic State. They may think it is the only thing they can do, but years later the blood and murder of women and children will haunt them as they raise their own.  Friends, you and I might have had the same face and haircut or even similar clothes if we had made very different decisions about our life. We would have different spouses or none at all, we may have had other jobs or none at all, we may have lived in different climates. Our world would be different.  It is true, God goes with us and God’s grace is always present with us, but we are free to choose. Our choices have not been pre-determined.

The Kung Fu master Steve de Marco supposedly said the following: “every decision we make and every action we take has meaning and affects everything else, now and always.”(in Awakenings, Asian Wisdom for everyday).  What this means is that not every thought we have or every movement we make will radically change life as we know it, but it will have some impact, some consequence which reverberates through creation.  No action happens in isolation.

So friends, I would like to think about your faith in particular, like the people of Israel under Joshua’s leadership, how has the way you said yes or no to God changed you and changed your world? We may say: “I didn’t think about it.” But our thoughts and actions have consequences and we are responsible for them.  God is with us as we make them, but we must choose. “Not thinking about it” is not an excuse.  May we live consciously every day and may God bring us back time and time again to where we are supposed to go.