‘as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.’ - Joshua 24:15
Friends, can you believe it the kids who left school this year and everyone younger than them have no memory of Woolworths! Kids, if you don’t know what Woolworths was it was a department store that had everything; you could get whatever you wanted. What made it great was the sweet dispensers at the front of the shop. It was Pick-and-Mix heaven! You got yourself a white paper bag and then you went around the sweet dispensers each with different sweets. Today if you buy Haribo—and I love Haribo by the way—today if you buy Haribo you get the boiled eggs (yum), you get the Cola bottles (wow), but you also get gummy bears (average). Haribo is great but it's a mixed bag, right. Some things you love, other things you’re happy to give away. Woolworths ‘Pick and Mix’ was better… better by far. You picked whatever you wanted. Love cola bottles? Half a bag of them. Like boiled eggs? There’s the other half, right! You see, you got everything you wanted and nothing you didn’t want! The grown-up equivalent for pick and mix is the ‘All you can eat buffet’. You don’t have to order an English breakfast and have things like cooked tomatoes or mushrooms on your plate, if you don’t want! You get a plate and you fill it with everything you want and nothing you don’t want! For me that means: Sausage, bacon, eggs, some more bacon, some more sausage and black pudding on top. Everything you want and nothing you don’t want! It’s a great way to run a sweet shop. It’s a great way to run a hotel restaurant, however, it’s a terrible way to have a relationship with God.
Today’s readings are all about choice, our choice, to choose God or not. Christians—and our Jewish older brothers and sisters—belong to what is known as a revealed religion. That just means we don’t invent God, we don’t make God up, no, God reveals Himself to us. God says: ‘This is who I am, this is what I’m like, this is what I love, and this is what I hate!’ He gets to tell us who He is and as our Creator He gets to tell us who we are! The choice we get—after God has revealed who He is what He loves and what He hates—the choice we get is: Do we want a relationship with Him? Do you want Him? Our Old Testament reading today is from the end of the Book of Joshua, which means a whole lot of history has come before this, a lot of which we’ve studied, right. God reveals Himself to Abraham, God tells Abraham what He is like, and gives Him a choice to follow Him. God reveals Himself to Isaac—Abraham’s son—and then Jacob, and then Joseph, and each time they get a choice: do they want this God, do they want to follow Him? God’s people end up in Egypt—we’ve just studied this history—and God reveals Himself to Moses and says ‘This is what I’m like, choose Me’! God’s people are enslaved, and God sets them free, leads them out of Egypt, through the Rea Sea, and across the desert; all the while feeding them and telling them what He is like. Moses dies, and God leads the people through the River Jordan and into the Promised Land where God fights for His people, That’s basically the whole of the Book of Joshua. Now, at the end of the book of Joshua, Joshua says to the people: ‘You now have a choice. After God has freed you, fed you, led you, and fought for you, you now have to choose: Do you want Him? Do you want this God? God as He really is, as He has shown Himself to be? Listen to our first reading: ‘Joshua said to all the people, ‘If serving the Lord seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served beyond the Euphrates, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land you are living.’ You get to choose whether or not to have a relationship with this God who has shown you—who has revealed to you—what He is like. Joshua goes on: ‘But as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.’ God’s people get to choose for themselves whether they follow the true God or the fake alternatives.
Now, this morning you may well be thinking, ‘Well there is no chance that I’m going to swap St George’s for the local Mosque!’ ‘There is no chance I’m going to swap my Bible for the Book of Mormon. Fr Mike, I’ve made my choice we can move on.’ Ok, good… but! Today we live in a world where you get to pick all the things you want and none of the things you don’t. Kids, when I was your age, if I wanted to listen to music we had this thing called radio. You had to listen to whatever was on and you hoped that at some point your favourite song would come on! Now-a-days we have Spotify and Apple Music where you only listen to what you want. You get to listen to everything you want and nothing you don’t want. TV, when I was a kid there were only four channels, you either watched what was on or you turned it off, that was the choice. Kids TV was on 3.30-5pm, Monday to Friday. Outside of those times there was no point turning on the TV. Today, with iPlayer, Amazon, Netflix and Youtube you get to watch everything you want and nothing you don’t want. Now, that works well for music and TV! Don’t get me wrong at home we have streaming services and it’s fantastic! When we’re exhausted Amelie, my daughter, can have a few minutes of her favourite show. Having everything you want and nothing you don’t want, is great for music, TV, and sweets, however, it’s terrible when it comes to God. The danger—the very real danger—in a society where you get to pick-and-mix so much is that we end up pick-and-mixing God, pick-and-mixing Jesus. The danger is we take what we want and we leave the rest. Oh, we’ll turn up at church on the days when there is nothing else on but I’ll pick the bits I like, and I leave the rest! We’re not in danger of picking another god, just a pick-and-mix version, a Spotify-version of Jesus. Everything I want and nothing I don’t want. Actually this is nothing new. In the fourth century St Augustine said: ‘If you believe what you like in the Gospels and reject what you don’t, it’s not the Gospels that you believe it’s yourself.’ The danger we have is not going to a different religion—it is not becoming Mormons or Muslims—it’s, almost, without knowing it, making our own religion the religion of me! Taking the bits of Christianity that I like and ignoring the bits I don’t we end up not belonging to Jesus’ Church at all, but to the Church of Me.
Over the last few weeks we’ve been in the Gospel of John as Jesus teaches people about God and promises to feed—with His own body—all who follow Him. It takes a while! John chapter 6 is a long chapter, but when His disciples—when the crowds that have been following Him—realise that Jesus isn’t talking metaphorically, isn’t talking spiritually, but means this feeding thing literally, what happens? We’re told in our Gospel reading: ‘On hearing Jesus’ doctrine, many of his disciples said, ‘This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?’’ People who had given up everything to follow Jesus now walk away, they go back to their normal lives…why? Because they don’t like all of Jesus’ teaching. They want parts of Jesus—they want pick-and-mix-Jesus we might say—they want the being-nice-to-strangers-Jesus, they want answering-prayers-Jesus, they want welcoming-little-children-Jesus, but not the bits they don’t like. With this attitude we realise that they don’t actually want Jesus at all, they want a fake Jesus they’ve made up in their heads! ‘From this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him.’ Now, if this was us being rejected we might be tempted to run after the crowds and say, ‘Oh sorry, you’ve misunderstood, please come back’… but Jesus doesn’t do that. Instead he turns to the Twelve and says: ‘You do not want to leave too, do you?’. Jesus is saying: ‘You can either have me, real me, actual me, the me I’m revealing to you, or you can go too!’ And that’s the challenge for us this morning, for each one us, myself included. Jesus says to us: ‘Choose Me, all of Me, the bits you like and the bits you don’t like, or you can go.’ This is where Peter comes in.
I love Peter, he is one of my favourite disciples, because he wears his heart on his sleeve and just blurts out what he is thinking. When it comes to what Jesus has been teaching, when it comes to being fed with His body and blood, Peter understands it about as much as everyone else; that is, He doesn’t understand it at all. Maybe that’s you here this morning. Maybe you faithfully come to church but frankly a lot of what happens doesn’t make much sense; if so you’re like Peter at this point. So many people are leaving in John 6, so many people leaving the Church today, numbers of Christians in Great Britain are down a lot! They’ve heard Jesus’ teaching and, like the crowds, they’ve walked away. That’s the choice we all face, right. Are we going to leave too?! Peter’s answer is so important to all of us. Peter doesn’t say: ‘I get it all’, ‘I understand it all’, Peter doesn’t even say ‘I like it all’. No, Peter says this: 'Lord, I have come to believe and to know that you are the Holy One of God.’ In other words, I know you, Jesus, I trust you, I love you. I may may like everything you’re saying, I may not understand everything you’re saying, I may still have questions, but I know you, so: ‘Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.’ ‘I’m picking you, Jesus’, says Peter, ‘not my personal version of you, not pick-and-mix-you, but You!’ And that’s the challenge we all face today. Will we, individually, personally, choose Jesus, not the pick-and-mix-Jesus, not the Jesus without the bits which annoy us, not a fake Jesus. Will we—me included—choose the real Jesus or will we choose to go? Will we, like so many of 21st century Britain choose to walk away, or like Peter, will we choose to say?: ‘Jesus I know you, I love you. I may not understand everything, I may may like everything that you say, but I believe you are the Holy One of God and that You have the words of eternal life.’ This morning, will we choose to go to a fake Jesus—which is no Jesus at all—or will we choose to say like Joshua: ‘as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.’? Amen (from Fr Mike).