You can always choose: Homily for Sunday, September 1, 2024

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You can always choose

The first reading we get is when Moses is about to show the people the land that they are to occupy. It’s the promised land. It’s a land flowing with milk and honey. It is a land that they did nothing to deserve or earn, but nonetheless it is theirs.

But Moses gives a very important reminder to the people as they are about to cross into the promised land. You can’t do whatever you want. Sometimes people define freedom in that way. Freedom is when I can do whatever I want. But that’s not true. That’s not freedom. That’s license.

We limit our license all the time in the name of freedom. Freedom is about becoming. What type of a person are we going to become? For when we truly become ourselves, it is then that we are most free.

I’ll give you an example. Those of you who are parents, I suspect there were times when your children were little and they got sick in the middle of the night. Now, if freedom was only doing what you wanted to do or being able to do whatever you want, you would have left them to their own devices because you probably wanted to sleep. You probably didn’t want to get up and to attend their needs at least initially.

But why did you? Because you were a parent. You were a mother or a father. And you recognized at that moment the ability to stay in bed and sleep was not as important as becoming a good mother or a good father. You sacrificed your license, being able to do whatever you wanted to do, in the name of what you needed to do in order to become yourself.

And I think with a little thinking you can think of all kinds of examples where that is true in our life. That’s what Moses is trying to get the people to understand. That God has given them statutes, rules, commandments, call them what you will, not because he’s a mean God, but quite the opposite. Because he wants the people to thrive. He wants the people who follow his commandments to give such a witness that everyone who looks upon them will see their wisdom and their intelligence.

And they’ll see more importantly the profound and powerful love of God because God is so close to them, caring for them and guiding them and shepherding them. But we know we don’t always choose to become our best self. Jesus reminds us of this in the gospel today.

Sometimes we can focus on the external realities of life. I would suggest that we have all kinds of instances where we don’t focus on what is essential, but we focus on things that are external and often superficial. Why does this person do that? Why does that person think the way they do? Why is it that they don’t have my favorite thing in the supermarket when I want it? Why is it that it takes a package so long to get to me?

Jesus is saying those external things, they’re not unessential, they’re not unimportant, but they’re not most important. They don’t have meaning if we aren’t really concerned about the depth of our heart and the place of the Lord Jesus in that heart, in our lives. It’s easy to clean the outside. We do it all the time. At least I suspect we do.

I have to be honest, I don’t always act the way I feel like acting when I’m out in public. Somebody annoys me and I just kind of smile and, “Oh, yes, okay.” But that’s not really who I am. I’m angry. Somebody cut me off in traffic. I’m not who they think they are. We do that all the time. We focus on the externals.

But Jesus came to clean us on the inside. All these things that are mentioned as traditions were ways of reminding the people that God was truly the one who cleansed. God was the one who cleaned. God was the one who forgives sins and wipes away the grime of evil in our lives.

I mentioned at the very beginning the book by Dr. Victor Frankel. Dr. Frankel was an amazing, amazing psychiatrist. He, in fact, had an unbelievable track record dealing in particular with people who were so depressed that they were institutionalized because they might kill themselves. If they were treated by Dr. Frankel, they lived. They didn’t actually take their own lives.

How was that? Well, I’ll give you an example he mentions in the book. There was a man who came in to see Dr. Frankel who was really depressed and really sad. His wife, to whom he had been married for many, many, many years, had died. And he didn’t know what to do. He was lost. He didn’t have the person who loved him through thick and thin, good and bad.

And Dr. Frankel talked to him, and at one point in the midst of their therapy, Dr. Frankel asked him, “Would you rather that you would have died so that you would not have to experience this suffering and heartache?” And the man said, “Oh, no, no, not at all. This is horrible. I wouldn’t wish this on anybody, and certainly not my wife. No.”

And Dr. Frankel said, “Then try to see it as a gift you give your wife. She doesn’t have to suffer because you’re taking on the suffering.” With that sense of meaning and purpose, the man became better. He saw that there was a reason to live. He saw that there was a way in which he was called to do something at that particular moment.

Dr. Frankel’s life was one of great difficulty. I said he was in the concentration camp. What I didn’t mention is that he could have left Austria and not been in a concentration camp. But his family could not, and he wouldn’t leave. His meaning, his purpose, his reason for living, he would have had to have left them behind in order to be free, to have license.

But he just simply couldn’t. He loved his wife. He loved his parents and his relatives. Most of them did not survive. His wife did not. His parents did not. But then he saw the way in which he was called to survive the absolutely brutal aspects of the Holocaust. He thought of the lectures he would give as a professor of psychiatry. He was a medical doctor and a psychiatrist.

He saw that he had something to give and something to offer by the wisdom that he had acquired from his experience in the concentration camp. He realized, for example, that he, like so many of us, was capable of taking moral shortcuts in the name of survival. Not sharing because, well, you never know when you might get what you’re sharing next. And he has a great line in his book. He says, “Through all of these things, this we know, the best of us did not survive.”

In other words, those people who hung on to their morals, who lived by their convictions, who embraced the principles for which they stood, oftentimes died. But not only that, Dr. Frankel realized that the best of him did not survive either. He survived physically, but he lost something very powerful, very, very difficult. He lost the best of himself.

Now, he did great good in the world. He died in the late ’90s, I think, at a very old age, actually. But the reminder to us is very clear. Who is it that God is calling us to be?

No one knows us better than God himself. God loves us, God made us, and God knows what we can be if we simply listen to the statutes and commands and the direction and the wisdom and the guidance and the love of our God. And so in the midst of hardship or difficulty or stress or whatever, remember that you can always choose God. You can always choose to follow Jesus. You can always choose the gift of eternal life.

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