gods

 

Who are your gods?

To clarify, by god I mean something beyond, and greater than, yourself, in which you put your hope and trust for salvation – that is, for healing; to make you well, or whole.

I am not aware of knowing any atheists (it is, quite simply, very hard to live that way in the world) (though I do know some who aspire to be atheists).

To be honest, I am not sure that I know any monotheists either (again) (and also).

There’s a story told of Moses’ apprentice and successor, Joshua, calling together the public figures of his community and putting a challenge to them: choose this day whom you will serve. Because we don’t only hope and trust in our gods, we invest our energy and entrust our resources to them. Or, to put it another way, we serve them.

The Market. The Nation, or the Land. Family. Our football team. Our addiction or distraction of choice. Church.

That story about Joshua is paired with a story about Jesus in the lectionary for this coming Sunday (Joshua 24.1-2a, 14-18 and John 6.56-69). Interestingly, Joshua and Jesus are the same name, rendered in two different languages, with a responsive meaning to cry out for help / to rescue or deliver or save. In the Jesus story, many of his would-be apprentices walk away, deciding that it is simply too difficult, too demanding, to apprentice under him. Jesus asks his core apprentices, Do you also wish to go away? Are you, also, desiring, intending, planning to gradually go on your own way? There is a sense of cost to this, an understanding that if to be with Jesus is difficult, then so is continuing on without him.

Peter (who is to Jesus as Joshua is to Moses) nails that dual sense of cost. Yes, it is costly to be your apprentice, but, to whom else would we turn? It is in apprenticing under you that we enter into and continue in a life of unparalleled quality. Anything else is a slow decline towards death, in comparison.

I’m pretty sure most people I know long for a deeper quality of life, one marked by greater freedom from the things that hold us captive, greater healing from the wounds those things have caused us. I’m not sure anyone who is, or who longs to be, healthy wants less quality of life (though, ironically, the path to greater quality of life involves less busyness and fewer things).

The question is, who are your gods?