Love and Choice

 The scriptures referred to are Ephesians 1:1-14

In his book Guns, Germs and Steel scientist and historian Jared Diamond tries to answer the question of why certain peoples developed a high degree of civilization and why others didn't. In other words, why did the people who lived in Eurasia come to dominate the modern world instead of Native Americans, aboriginal Australians or Africans? He counters the implicit racist explanations by going back into prehistory. Some of the things that gave certain peoples a head start are an abundance of easily cultivated plants and domesticable animals. These things made the choice to cease being hunter-gatherers and become farmers an attractive option. Once people commit to farming and raising their food, they develop settlements which become cities and eventually nations; they make innovations and introduce efficiencies in farming that in turn produces surplus food, which frees some individuals from being farmers and allows them to specialize into other human endeavors, such as becoming builders, soldiers, artists, scientists, healers, politicians, priests and so on.

Even though he makes a good case that some people just happened to be in good farming areas, he does look at the fact that certain very suitable farming areas, like California, the Argentine pampas and the fertile coast of Australia, were not exploited until very late in history. He looks for the reasons these weren't developed by the natives but ultimately there are things we cannot know. Part of it comes down to human choice. Being a farmer can be a mixed blessing. It is hard; you are at the mercy of the weather; and even if farming gets harder, it is very difficult to simply abandon everything and move on. Some societies chose, for reasons we may never know, to simply remain hunter-gatherers.

In the beautiful doxology that opens the letter to the Ephesians, Paul lists among the spiritual blessings that God has showered upon us, the fact that “he chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him in love. He destined us for adoption as his children through Jesus Christ, according to the good pleasure of his will...” This and a handful of verses in the New Testament assure us that our salvation doesn't depend on our fallible human efforts or fickle human wills but on God's choice to love us and seek us out. But these same passages give some people misgivings because they seem to say that God predestined some people to be saved. And doesn't that mean he just lets others be damned? How could a loving God do that?

This is a deep theological problem and I am not going into it in detail. For one thing, the danger of arguing the notion that God predestines some people for salvation makes it easy to get trapped into arguing for double predestination: that God has chosen some people, ahead of time, to go to hell. This is the inevitable result of treating the subject with rigid human logic. Logic, which is simply a method for staying self-consistent, is an indepensable tool in some areas of thinking, such as math or physics, though even there we run into paradoxes. While logic is helpful in areas other than the hard sciences, it can lead to some peculiar stances when applied too rigorously to unpredictable and notoriously inconsistent things like human beings.

Read any comment section on the internet and you will see some very harsh and one-sided assessments of people by those with whom they disagree. It seems that Republicans are evil people who are deliberately sacrificing the welfare of the majority of citizens to enrich the few; Democrats are evil people who want to destroy hardworking people in order to give their wealth to the undeserving; people who are homeless or poor have decided to live that way rather than work; religious people are both evil and stupid; atheists are also both stupid and evil, etc. We all are prone to assume that people who make what we see as bad decisions do so perversely with full knowledge of the negative outcomes. But that's not how it is in real life. No one says, “I want to be poor or homeless.” Nobody says, “ I want to be on the wrong side of history.” Both Democrats and Republicans, fascists and communists think they are making the right decisions. And often what turns out to be a bad decision looked like a good or at least harmless one at the time. Sometimes a potentially dangerous decision seems to be worth the risk. The only way to be sure is to look at it in retrospect. We cannot judge President Truman's decision to drop the bomb on Hiroshima on the basis of what we now know about the proliferation of nuclear weapons in the world. We need to judge it by the facts that he had at that time.

It's interesting that Truman's famous saying, “The buck stops here,” goes back to the days of riverboat gambling. A buck knife rested in front of the dealer to indicate who he was and perhaps to use to defend him against accusations of cheating. He was the one responsible for shuffling and distributing the cards. But it wouldn't be a real game is the deal determined the winners. It's not just the hand you are dealt but how you play it. What you're given and what you do with it are both important to the outcome. God deals us different hands but he is not interested in who wins in the conventional sense but with how and why we use what is dealt to us and by what we keep and what we discard.

A fun type of science fiction is alternative history. Harry Turtledove loves to imagine what the world might be like if, say, America had never broken away from Britain, or if the Byzantine empire had not fallen, or if the South had won the Civil War. Sometimes he comes up with science fictional reasons for the change but sometimes he merely imagines a few changes in a few places where things might have gone differently. Other authors have done the same. What if Hitler had invaded Britain after Dunkirk? It is possible that he may have won the war and the two superpowers today would be America and Nazi-occupied Europe.

When you look back at history you see ways in which what happened seemed inevitable but also ways in which human choice played a role. Looking at Diamond's explanation of why certain peoples became dominant and others didn't gives us the same paradoxical viewpoint. Some places had more resources, so when societies made the change from hunter-gatherers to farmers, it seems inevitable. But there were always those places and societies that had the potential but didn't act on it. Why were these roads not taken?

We prize individual freedom and we like to think it is unfettered. But freedom is never total. There are always factors that limit people's choices. A Jew born in Nazi Germany had very limited choices on how to live her life, just as a black man born in the South before the Civil War would have. A person born without legs could hardly expect to grow up to be a prima ballerina. Our freedom lies within the sphere of the possible and largely within the inner circle of the probable.

And yet there are alternatives that a few find. Edith Hahn Beer, was a young Jewish law student living in Austria during World War 2. When faced with being deported to a concentration camp, she managed to create a Gentile identity with the help of a friend. She became a Red Cross nurse and was transferred to a military hospital. She ended up marrying a German officer. Her daughter was the only Jewish child born in a Nazi hospital, though only Edith knew that. Edith and her daughter survived the war and when her husband returned from a Russian prisoner of war camp, he could not live with the fact that he had married a Jew and had a Jewish child and so he divorced her. This ex-wife of a Nazi went on to become a judge after the war and married a Holocaust survivor. She lived an improbable life.

We also know of slaves who rose to prominence, like Frederick Douglass.And then there is Helen Keller, the deaf, dumb and blind girl who became a well-read woman who wrote influentially, spoke to audiences and even learned to sing!

So what is the truth? Are we what we choose to be or are we shaped by outside forces? The only adequate answer is yes to both. We are influenced by things beyond our control that limit our choices to some extent but we can make choices that in turn enlarge the range of what we can do.

So how does God operate within the world of humans making choices? Don't we choose to become Christians? Let me first ask this: Do people in love choose those with whom they fall in love? Yes and no. First of all, the decision has to be mutual. I can decide I want to fall in love with a specific person but if she doesn't decide to be in love with me, it's not going to happen. But even if it is mutual, the crucial detail of whether we ever meet in the first place and even know the other person existed is out of our hands!

I met my wife because a former girlfriend of mine, with an eye to matchmaking us, invited Julie to a going away party for a girl Julie didn't even know. And even after being introduced, we didn't show much interest in each other until my ex told me of a subject in which we were both interested and got us talking. If either of us had not gone to the party, or if I hadn't years ago had a history class with the girl who became my ex or if the ex and I hadn't become friends after initially not liking each other in history class...well, the chain of causation goes on and on. Viewed from one perspective, it was all happenstance and coincidence, but viewed from another perspective, that of being happily married nearly 50 years, it now seems inevitable.

The same thing can be seen in my evolution from a pre-teen brought to church by my mother into a teen fascinated by C.S. Lewis to a young man majoring in Biblical Studies at Wheaton College to a newlywed who entered nursing to provide him with an income that will help him go to seminary to a young father who makes more as a nurse than he would as clergy to a copywriter recruited by a Keys radio station because he produces award-winning commercials to a lay preacher asked to become a Canon 9 priest by his parish. When I look back on it from where I am now, it looks inevitable. There is a Rube Goldberg kind of round-aboutness to achieving my original goal but the destination of that path always seems to have been a matter of, not “if,” but “when.”

Our choices are important but who offers us the choices? Would Frederick Douglass have risen so far from slavery if his master's wife hadn't been disobedient and taught Douglass to read? Would Edith Beer have survived the Nazi invasion to help re-establish justice in her country if her Gentile friend hadn't lent her a non-Jewish identity? Would Helen Keller have escaped her dark silent world if her parents hadn't hired a determined Irish girl named Annie to try to break through and teach Helen sign language?

Would you have become a Christian had God not presented you with the people and circumstances that led you to him? God may choose us beforehand but we are not puppets. He doesn't force us but offers us his love. And we cannot be certain that he is not also offering his love to those around us. Even those whose conversion seems improbable may be those he is seeking most ardently.

Captain Mitsu Fuchita led the planes that bombed Pearl Harbor. He came from Japan, a nation where Christians are still a very small minority. But Christ found him and he became an evangelist. He spoke at my church when I was a teen.

Joy Davidman was an American Jewish Communist. One day her husband ran off with another woman, leaving her with their 2 small sons. Christ found her. She grew in faith through the writings of C.S. Lewis and started a correspondence with him. Later she married Lewis and influenced his writings.

Anne Lamott was an alcoholic, pill-popping woman who got pregnant by her married lover. Her dysfunctional family looked down on religion and yet she was attracted to the singing of an inner city black church. Though she always left before the sermon, Christ found her. She sobered up and has become a respected writer of hilarious, heart-breaking, Jesus-infused memoirs and fiction.

Being predestined to receive God's grace doesn't mean we had no choice nor that we are better than others. And it doesn't mean that others aren't also destined to experience God's love and forgiveness. We may very well be the matchmaker between God and the person he loves. So we must act as if every person is destined to become Christ's and as if we were merely the latest step in that process. Because we don't know...yet. But some day we will look back and see the marvelous, intricate, unanticipated and improbable journeys by which we have all come to God's love. And it will look as if it couldn't have happened any other way.

First preached on July 12, 2003. It has been updated.