[This is a manuscript written from a message I gave a couple weeks ago at Westside. If you already heard you probably don't want to waste time to reading it]

Would You Rather?

I was thinking about the game this week. Remember the game? The one where you are given two similar options, either both exceedingly fantastic or as exceedingly and creatively disgusting as can be imagined by the questioner and you simply choose, which you would rather.

The only rule to the game is this you have to choose. It’s a pretty simple game as games go.

Here’s an example
Would you rather receive $1000 a day for the rest of your life or $16 833 000 in a lump sum right now, which presuming I was to live to the ripe old age of 75 and die on my birthday would make the totals equivalent.

Now those ones are kind of fun. Would you rather choose lots of money or… lots of money. But then there are the other kind of would you rather questions. Would you rather lick the pond scum clean off a toad or have your toenails peeled back. It’s a tough choice.

And while the fantastical scale of the game that allows the walls of reality to become somewhat permeable; would you rather be invisible or able to fly, while that might make our ordinary daily decisions seem somewhat monotonous; would you rather mild marble or medium cheddar cheese, there is still that element of would you rather that runs through every decision we make.

Every day with every choice we choose one thing to the exclusion of another and yet sometimes as inconsequential as those decisions are, we still struggle to make them. We are paralyzed by the appearance of choice.

Happiness researchers, employed at the Happiness Research project in Palo Alta California (not a real place, at least I don’t think so) who I can only surmise must be either the happiest or the saddest people in the world having studied happiness all day, have concluded that most of our happiness quotient (as they happily call it) has little to do with our big moments of joy or sorrow but is instead driven by the cumulative experience of our lives. Another way to say it is, the big moments even out over time. Other happiness researchers, presumably when they get together at happiness research conventions, call this the set point equilibrium theory of happiness. Now that just sounds happy doesn’t it.

But there’s a new spin on happiness theory that I’ve just been reading. One that is perhaps a little more germain to our discussion here. New research suggests that our happiness in the “would you rather” world of life is often tied more closely to what we didn’t choose than to what we did. They’ve suggested that the biggest barrier to happiness most of us face in the western world is simply that we have too much choice, that there are simply too many options and that every time we make one decision to the exclusion of every other option we become consumed with a latent anxiety over what we’re missing out on.

Take the idea of marriage. We love the idea of marriage. We love the idea of choosing a person and walking down the aisle. Oh the romance and the warm fuzzy feelings. But the truth is 6 yrs, 9 months and 13 days later, there are still moments where I wonder what I’ve done, every other option that I no longer have available to me. Now I don’t know if that admission makes me a bad person but I do know that it is only by virtue of the fact that my wife is a much better person than I am that I even have the luxury of asking said question.

But instead of celebrating what we choose, we spend our energy fretting over what we could have chosen. In poker they say it this way, fold em and forget em, but we don’t. We become focused not on what our choices will bring into our lives but on what our decisions will exclude from us. Internally over time we begin to define ourselves, or we limit ourselves, not by what we’ve chosen with our lives but by the decisions we didn’t make.

And so we start to make non-choices and non-decisions. We make decisions that are designed for little else but to limit their impact on our lives. Instead of making the fierce decision to live for something we make the ongoing, weak, insipid, decision to live for everything, which is, of course, in reality, very little.

And this, above all else according to cutting edge happiness research is the greatest factor in what can hang a cloud of anxiety and dissatisfaction over our lives. We simply become afraid to choose. My favorite line from the great writer Brad Bird, who penned among his masterpieces, the Iron Giant, Cars and now Rattatouile, was a line in the movie, The Incredibles. One of the characters says this, “saying everyone is special is just another way to say no one is special.” The reality is if you have 496 top priorities in life, you have no priorities and if you go through life forever paralyzed to choose one thing to the exclusion of another you will find yourself at some point in the distant future, at the end of your days, with nothing of value left to speak of. And so far we’ve just talked about the meaningless choices of life. The Would you rather choices like what of the advertised 10 000 coffee options will you choose at Starbucks? Or will you have your sub toasted… or not? But what about the big decisions, the hard decisions, the difficult decisions, the fierce decisions of life that come along and ask something truly significant of us.

On Boxing Day December 26th 2005, while you and I were most likely recovering from too much turkey, ham or other miscellaneous Christmas meat, Australian tourist and mother Jillian Searle was faced with the most fiercely agonizing decision I can imagine. Her family’s Thai vacation was washed away in a moment as she sat near the pool of her resort having breakfast. Her husband, seconds earlier, had just walked back into the hotel to grab some sunscreen when a wall of water engulfed the beach side face of the resort.

Dec 26 2005 the Asian Tsunami wrecked havoc across huge swathes of our planet. We all read the reports. We all stood unbelieving as the magnitude of the statistics started rolling in. Some of us even jumped into action to respond but nowhere was the story more dramatic than the microcosm of Jill Searle’s experience. As the water rushed over her family Jill, managed to grab a hold of two year old son Blake and five year old son Lachie. But as the water pulled back into the void it had just left beyond the beach she found herself struggling to hold herself and her two sons tight to a resort fence. Her husband, at this point, watched helplessly from the first floor balcony as Jill pleaded with a women nearby to grab hold of Lachie. As agonizing seconds ticked by it become apparent she wasn’t going to be able to hold all three of them and eventually she was forced to make the decision that I can’t even begin to imagine being faced with. She let her five year old son slip from her grasp so she could use her second hand to steady her hold on two year old Blake.

The water pulled back as quickly as it had appeared. Her husband rushed down from the hotel to find his family. At the foot of the resort he found Jill and Blake still clinging to the fence, Lachie nowhere to be seen. Immediately they starting searching for their five year old son. They called his name, they asked everyone they could find and through two hours of tears, and panic and frantic search they thought their son was lost to them.

And then, incredibly, two hours later, Lachie was found. Discovered by a security guard holding onto a doorway to keep his head above water. Now imagine our “would you rather” paralysis set against the decision of a lifetime Jillian Searle made in a moment. And if that contrast isn’t enough, imagine explaining your decision to your five year old son, later that day. Or later that year. Or a decade later. Or a lifetime later. The real decisions of life are difficult and they have consequences and ramifications and impacts that stretch beyond the horizon of what we can see in the moment but not deciding is not an option. In happiness research terms non-decisions lead to anxiety and despair. In the terms of Jill Searle’s story non-decisions lead to…

One of the things that the story of Jesus continually confronts both 2000yrs ago and today

Is this idea that we don’t have to decide that we can simply and continually add things to our life indefinitely; wealth, success, happiness, religion. He confronts this perception that life is some kind of infinite black hole that we can keep adding things into without ever letting anything go of anything significant.

One of his biggest issues as he walked through the religious quagmire that was 1st century Judaism was this inherent belief that somehow religion and God could be added on to a life without any space being created.

Truth is we perpetuate this sometimes too. What do we say, how do we talk about God? “You have a God shaped hole in your heart” I saw it on a T-shirt. Now I get the intent but, the problem is, it almost makes it sound like God just fits. Without any work from us. Without any decision to create space for him. God just fits.

Jesus broaches this subject with the Pharisees in an exchange recorded in the book of Matthew. In the passage he says this,

The teachers of the law and the Pharisees tie up heavy loads and put them on men’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them.
Everything they do is done for men to see: They make their phylacteries wide and the tassels on their garments long; they love the place of honor at banquets and the most important seats in the synagogues.

This is not the mild mannered Jesus we find on flannel cut outs wearing white robes and blue sashes across our Sunday Schools. This is a fierce Jesus, a decisive Jesus, a pissed off Jesus, with something to say, and he indicts these religious leaders, these teachers of the law and these Pharisees on their penchant to make rules to add to life. Things to follow, things to do, things to be, and then he says that they foist these regulations on everyone else where they become a burden on people’s shoulders.

He says this picture of religion, this weight, is heavy because it’s constantly adding on, adding on rules, adding on expectations, adding on good and compelling and worthy and religious things to do but never with an eye to the things we need to remove from our lives. Never with an eye to creating space in our lives to actually experience God.

Then he makes some comments about their clothes, says they are way too impressed with themselves and moves on to other things.

Now some background to some of Jesus’ comments here. The word Phylacteries is an odd one. That’s because it’s a transliteration of a Greek word that was used to translate the Hebrew word so by the time it got to English it didn’t mean a whole lot. A transliteration is basically an English spelling of Greek word. But what he’s really talking about here is something called the t’fillon in Hebrew. He says, you make your t’fillon wide.

T’fillon was small little leather box that contained little pieces of parchment on which were written excerpts from Torah. Torah is the Jewish name for the first five books of the Old Testament. Now these boxes were then strapped with a ribbon or belt of leather onto the foreheads or the hands of extremely pious Jews. That may seem like a bit of an odd practice but it actually comes from a very literal reading of a command of God in the book of Deuteronomy, to take the law of Moses, or the commands of God, and bind on your forehead.

The full text says this

Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength. These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts. Impress them on your children.
Talk about them when you sit at home and when you walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up. Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads. Write them on the doorframes of your houses and on your gates.

This section is called the Shema which is Hebrew for “hear”, from hear O Israel. This is the central, most important, command of God to the Jews. They recite it as prayer and they take it very seriously. So over time the practice of the t’fillon developed, where the prayer was literally bound to the forehead. We may take God in a more metaphorical sense here but the Jews, especially the Pharisees, took it very seriously and literally.

Jesus steps into a context of deep religious meaning and says, you make your t’fillon wide so everyone can see it. You strap the law literally onto your head but you haven’t made any space in your life to actually live it.

Listen to the start of that passage in Deuteronomy again;

Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.

Where do we know that from? Most of us know it as a quote from Jesus. At one point Jesus taught that this was the greatest commandment in all the law. Like every god-fearing Jew Jesus revered this passage. So he’s certainly not disparaging the command. He’s just saying that it’s too important to think you can just strap this on top of your life without letting go of something inside. This is too important to think that it can come without a cost.

Now interestingly enough what does he indict them on here? Largely their pride. You want everyone to see how great you are. Your t’fillon is wide. You love the seat of honor. Your ego is out of control.

Now if you skip over to the book of Luke, Jesus is found teaching about this very passage. He says this is the most important law in all of the scriptures and if you really want to get it right, if you really intend to get what it means, to follow through on it, then you need to add a second piece. He says you will need to love your neighbor as yourself.

Love your neighbor as yourself? That’s a big statement. How do we do that exactly? How do we even know who our neighbor is asks a teacher of the law who voices our inquiry from the crowd listening to Jesus.

And Jesus as he is wont to do tells a story, a famous story, the Good Samaritan story, in which a Jewish man is beaten and left for dead by robbers and then helped by a Samaritan who passes by on the road. A Samaritan who were despised by the Jews as low and dirty and beneath them. A Samaritan who a Jew would be loathe to touch or rescue or be rescued by.

It would seem that in the imagination of Jesus, a neighbor is defined by his actions far more than by her status in life. And that a low and disregarded Samaritan could actually be a better neighbor and a better example of the shema than even one of the chosen people.

It would seem, that for the greatest commands of God to be added into our lives we have to be willing to let go of at least some of our pride, the pride that would make us think ourselves above another, the pride that would lead us to boast about and display our importance to those around us. There’s a space that needs to be created in our lives for God. You can’t add him without letting something go. You can’t love God if you love yourself more than your neighbor. And you can’t simply add the greatest commands of God on top of your life with good and compelling and respected and religious practices without taking the time to see what it is that needs to be let go of.

Jesus continues and he says this, your tassels are so long and impressive. My goodness what tassels you have! The word in the Hebrew is tzitziyot and it means, wait for it, tassels. He’s telling them he likes their clothes but the idea comes again from Torah, this time in Numbers

Adonai said to Moshe,
Speak to the people of Israel
instructing them to make, through all their generations, tassels (or tzitziyot) on the corners of their garments, and to put with the tassels on each corner a blue thread.
And when you to look at it remember all of God’s commands and obey them, so that
(and this is the important part)
you won’t go around wherever your own heart and eyes lead you.

Number chapter 15, parentheses mine.

So again Jesus says, that’s great that your tassels are so pretty and so long, I bet everybody thinks that your tassels rock but once again you have completely missed the point. You can’t just stitch on fancy tassels and think you’re done with this

Why did God ask you to stitch the tassels on? So you could look at them and remember God. They were meant to be a pneumonic device to help you remember. And what are you supposed to remember? God commands. Why? So that you wouldn’t go around wherever your own heart and own eyes would lead you.

Again his point is that you can’t just add this to your life, you can’t just add tassels to your clothes, you can’t just fit God in, without giving something up. In this case it will cost us some of what our own heart and our own eyes would lead us toward.

So what’s Jesus’ point here? That following God is all about what you lose?
Well yeah, sort of.
He says the only things that are worth including in our lives, the things that are worth striving for- they come at a cost. The best things in life may be free but they don’t come without a sacrifice.

So when we strap religion on our foreheads and we make our outsides look presentable but on the inside we refuse to let go of what drives us in unhealthy directions or we start to attach significance to our clothing and it becomes the stuff that we acquire and own and display that defines our worth, the tassels and bobbles and trinkets and tiny shiny things that catch our eye- when those things start to defines our worth above the choices that we make to pattern our lives around a pre-eminent model of fully engaged, humanity we find in Jesus- when those things take precedence, life doesn’t work the way it was supposed to. When life is all about adding on expectations and practices and patterns and never about what needs to be let go of it becomes heavy and it becomes a burden. It becomes religious. The writer Paul at one point even goes as far as to call it the religious life that crushed our ancestors and crushed us. And Jesus says to the Pharisees you make life heavy with all of your expectations and you don’t do a thing to help.

Now of Jesus teachings something very different was said. And here’s the part we forget at times, it wasn’t always rosy and glowing and enthusiastic. In one section of John’s gospel Jesus has just finished teaching and John says that many of his disciples (Now realize this is not just a random crowd. These were his disciples who were following him as he taught) Johns says they turned to each other and said, “This is a hard teaching – who can follow it? And from this time many turned back and no longer followed him.”

So there’s a difference between hard and heavy.

Heavy is the weight of every choice we are too afraid to make. I want this but I don’t want to give up that.

Hard is the consequence of every choice we summon the courage to live. It’s letting go of 10 good things to fully live one great thing.

Heavy is trying to be religious on the outside and far from God on the inside. Heavy is being in a relationship and agonizing over every better option out there. Heavy is staying put where you are and dreaming about where you could be. Heavy is living for what we could lose at the expense of everything we could gain with life.

Hard on the other hand, is very different. Hard is letting go of the choice we didn’t choose so that we can live the one we did. Hard is making the decision to live the life of Christ when we don’t know exactly where that will take us. Hard is creating the space in our world for our decisions to be meaningful, so that our choices can do more than be the conveyor belt which moves us from day to day but can instead become the catalyst for completely new expressions of the kingdom of God in our life.

Heavy is when we make reactive decisions from a fear of losing out. Hard is when we make proactive decisions from an awareness of where we are headed.

In the book of Colossians, Paul writes to a community of early Jesus followers people who are still trying to figure out the difference between hard and heavy and he says this-

Why, do you let yourselves be bullied by religion: “Don’t touch this! Don’t taste that! Don’t go near this!”? Do you think rules that are here today and gone tomorrow deserve that kind of attention? Such regulations indeed have an appearance of wisdom, with their self-imposed worship, their false humility and their harsh treatment of the body, but they lack any value in restraining real indulgence.
Since, then, you have been raised with Christ, set your hearts on things above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things. For you died, and your life is now hidden with Christ in God.
_Col 2:20-3:4

Look at what he says here. Don’t get caught up with a reactive, religious, heavy, posture to life, one that is doing what it’s doing because of someone else’s expectations. In other words don’t do what you do so that you won’t go to hell. Instead, put that frame of reference away, set that lens on life aside and start to make your decisions, start to live your life from a new awareness of what you already have in Christ.

Listen to his language, you have been raised with Christ (already), so set your hearts on things above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God, for your life is now hidden with Christ in God. He says given what you already have, who cares about what you could lose. Who cares about what the expectations of a few naysayers are- decide to towards the potential that God has already invested in you. Sure there’s a lot to lose in life but it’s nothing compared to what there is to gain in finding a life patterned after model of Jesus. There is always more to gain as we decide to follow Christ into the fierce decisions of life than ever there is to lose. That doesn’t mean we can see everything coming or that we know all of the implications of everything we choose but it means we set a trajectory and we make the hard, difficult decision to follow after that path. And sometimes to do that we have to let go of lots of good and great and compelling options that don’t help us head in that direction.

I know how difficult that is. My goodness, I don’t consider myself and indecisive person but there are choices that I agonize over. I analyze and dissect and try to uncover every possible variable that could factor into the outcome, but the bottom line, at the end of the day, is very simply- that (a) we can’t know every possible outcome – we simply don’t have the necessary technology and (b) we can’t successfully move through life in the pattern of Jesus without making hard decisions.

It doesn’t matter whether you are discussing a decision that relates to your career, or your marriage, or your intent to follow after a relationship with God you simply can’t have it all. And if we persist in looking at our decisions through the lens of what we are missing out on, life will inevitably become heavy and burdensome and sucked dry of all the joy that God intended for us to experience in choosing for ourselves.

I know it’s tough for us to reorient our perception but fortunately for us we can make those decisions in the awareness of what we already have because in the story of God, the incredible addition of grace has already been factored into our equation.

And if you had to choose- would you rather; make the right choice in the absence of grace. The choice that would let you have everything you wanted in that moment or would you rather make the wrong choice in an honest attempt to follow Jesus, knowing that above all else you make that choice in the grace and love of the creator of all that is.

Sometimes life’s decisions are hard. Sometimes it’s not easy to carve enough space out of our pride to really love our neighbor as ourselves. Sometimes it’s not easy to follow Jesus to the exclusion of where our hearts and eyes would sometimes take us. And I can’t imagine the weight, the burden of possible outcomes, when in an instant, in a moment, Jill Searle had to make a choice that defiantly denies my attempts to communicate its gravity. Did she make a good choice? Did she make the right choice? I don’t know. There is no measure for me to evaluate that.

But could it be – that as we go through life and we are faced with our own unforeseen, unimagined decisions and we attempt to make choices, which are at one time both courageous and yet motivated by our desire to love both God and neighbor in the pattern of Jesus- could it be that our frail, broken and best attempts combined with the grace of God could result in something far better than we could have ever seen in that moment, that all the things we thought we were losing to make that fierce decision, would one day pale in comparison to what God had in mind for us to become.