The Choice Is Ours--September 26, 2024

 The Choice Is Ours—September 26, 2024

“Those conflicts and disputes among you, where do they come from? Do they not come from your cravings that are at war within you? You want something and do not have it; so you commit murder. And you covet something and cannot obtain it; so you engage in disputes and conflicts. You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, in order to spend what you get on your pleasures.” [James 4:1-3]

I was listening to a news report on the radio yesterday morning, and they were covering the worsening conflict between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon, while Gaza continues to burn and hostages remain held captive by Hamas. And at some point, the reporter quoted some expert who has been talking to the bigwigs and decision-makers among those groups of people, who said, “The feeling is that we just have no choice but to go to war.”

It was that phrase that stuck in my memory: “no choice but war.” It reverberated through my ears and throughout my body as I continued dressing in the dark of the pre-dawn morning while the news blared. No choice, they think, but to escalate the tensions. No choice, they believe, but to launch more volleys of missiles back and forth. No choice, they feel compelled to conclude, but to set off more explosions that will kill mothers and babies (who will be termed “collateral damage”) along with enemy soldiers (who will be declared “permissible killings”). No choice, everyone on every side will tell themselves, but to give themselves completely into violence… again.

To be perfectly honest, what has stayed with me since hearing that sentence on the news is NOT that I find it so bizarre or unusual, but exactly because it is thinking that is all-too-familiar and all-too-easy for us to find ourselves nodding along in agreement. We have a way, we as the human species, of telling ourselves that the conflicts, the violence, the division, and the cruelty of our kind is inevitable. We tell ourselves that sometimes in life we just have to launch another war, because somebody else has The Thing We Want and we have told ourselves that we have The Right To Take It At Any Cost. In other words, we tell ourselves that we have “no choice” but to attack, to kill, to bomb, to take others hostage, to “escalate tensions,” and to plunge each other into bloodshed. And once we have persuaded ourselves of that, hey, it's nothing personal, but we just had “no choice,” we believe the lie we’ve told ourselves and we turn “no choice but war” into a self-fulfilling prophecy. We kill because we tell ourselves we “had to.” We see our children killed in response because “collateral damage was unavoidable.” We do it all, because at some level, we refuse to question the underlying assumption that we should be able to take what we want in this life, and if somebody else stands in our way, we can do whatever is “necessary” to get it in our clutches.

And whether it’s hostages taken from Israel or settlements built on Palestinian land, or an invading army from Russia into Ukraine, or our ginned up fears about refugees or migrants who must be on their way to take our lives and our livelihoods, we human beings find ourselves playing the same damnable game over and over again, making the same terrible mistakes in a vicious circle, because we keep accepting the underlying (but unquestioned) assumption that we “have no choice” because we have to get what we want, and we have to be afraid of “those people” we have cast as our enemies who must also be seeking to take what we have.

But James calls our bluff. He stops us and forces us to ask what we were unwilling to question. He brings us up short and says, “But wait—you really DO have a choice!” James says that the conflicts and disputes that arise between people aren’t inevitable like the force of gravity or the sun rising in the east. They are not a law of nature or a rule carved in the stone tablets of the universe. And it just isn’t true that “we have no choice.” We do. The problem, James says, is that all too often throughout human history, we choose the way of taking… the way of violence… the way of conquering and plundering… the way of assuming that “those people” we see on the “other side” are inexorably out to get us and we cannot let them win. And after we’ve made the choice to give in to that utterly self-centered way of thinking (and acting), then we tell ourselves we had no other options. We just “had no choice.”

James calls that whole way of thinking basically a load of manure. We do have the choice—we just keep choosing wrongly. We do have the option—our species just keeps telling itself that there’s no other way, and that there’s only so much good to go around in the world, so we’ve got to get the other guy before he gets us. We do have the ability to choose differently, and for James, that has everything to do with choosing the way of Jesus rather than the way of selfishness that leads to war with each other.

As we have been exploring this week, James has been contrasting the rotten so-called “wisdom” of the world that is rooted in selfish ambition over against the genuine wisdom “from above” that is rooted in gentleness, peace, mercy, and the willingness to seek the good of our neighbor rather than only our own. And what we have seen over and over again from James in this whole section is his open invitation that we are not doomed to keep falling for the counterfeit wisdom of “Me and My Group First.” We might have told ourselves that we have “no choice” but to accept that kind of logic, but we are wrong, according to James. We can make the decision, at any point, to choose differently, and when we do, we can see other possibilities that we never even had considered before. The way of Jesus is always open to us; we do not have to accept the lie (as popular as it is, and as often as it is just taken as “common sense”) that we have no choice but to break into conflicts, disputes, fights, and wars. James reminds us that we have always had the permission to walk the way of Jesus and say NO to the violent ways of the world. We may choose right now to let go of Selfishness and Greed as our directing principles. We are free to walk right now in the goodness and righteousness of Jesus. We may. We have the choice.

The real question, then, is: What will we choose with this day? Whose path will we walk? Which way will become our way of life?

Maybe that’s the good news and the bad news all at once: There’s no running from it, and there’s no letting ourselves off the hook or passing the blame on to something else. We have to make the choice, with every day and every action, whether we will fool ourselves into adopting the selfish ways of greed and bloodshed, or whether we will believe Jesus knows what he is talking about when he says there is another way.

Will we trust him? Will we dare to choose the way of Jesus?

Lord Jesus, enable us to walk in your ways, and to accept the potent freedom you have given us to choose your way of life in a world full of death and greed.