Year B — Proper 10

The Rev. Gerald W. Keucher

We just prayed the God might grant us both to know what things we ought to do and to have grace and power to accomplish them. To know what God wants us to do and to have the strength to do it. I think this is both easier and more difficult than it may appear.

If you’ve reached the point in your formation as a Christian that you would really like to know God’s will for your life, here’s what I would suggest is the first step before anything else. To be ready to perceive how God wants us to live our lives, we need to begin to understand our lives the way God understands them.

And God knows that everything we have is a gift from God. God made us, and not we ourselves. All that we are and all that we have are gifts from a good Creator Who loves us. The way we start really to feel this in our bones is to start giving back to God a proportion of what God gives us. In my experience tithing or proportional giving off the top is the necessary first step to maturity in Christ. A whole lot of things become a whole lot clearer almost as soon as we start giving that way. And most of those things simply can’t become clear if we don’t practice proportional giving.

There are other considerations as well. When we’re trying to make a decision or figure out what God wants us to do, where do we go?

Well, first, we might go to the Bible and to the liturgy. Being familiar with the Bible and having the words of the liturgy and the hymns running through our minds really helps us. Those stories and those words come to us and inspire us when we’re thinking about what we should do.

I don’t want to suggest that you can just open the Bible at random and find the answer to whatever concern is on your mind. As you know, the Bible is big and complex. God speaks through the words of Scripture, but His voice can be a little hard to hear.

God speaks through our conscience and that little inner voice we have. That’s another place to go when we’re trying to figure out what we should do. But that little inner voice can be tricky too. Sometimes it’s right on, and sometimes that voice holds us to account and leads to good self-examination. Other times it speaks in ways that are self-serving and deceptive. We can tell ourselves what we’d prefer to be told, rather than what we need to be told.

The third place to go is to the community. Here. This place and these people. Talk it through with the clergy and people here. Talk about the messages you think you’re getting from Scripture and from your inner voice. Let others who have your best interests at heart help you discern what is real and true. Let the community support you in what you decide.

We’ve been talking about the formation we need to figure out those larger decisions. The words of the Bible, the Prayer Book and hymns; our inner voice, and the community of believers are all part of what prepares us. Rosa Parks, for example, hadn’t planned not to move when the bus driver told her to on December 1, 1955, but it also didn’t just happen out of the blue.

She was a deeply committed member of the AME Church; she knew the Bible. She had thought deeply about her life-long experiences of segregation. For 12 years she’d been the Secretary of the Montgomery NAACP chapter. She had a church community and the community of the NAACP that had formed her.

In a 1992 interview, Mrs. Parks said, “I had not planned to get arrested. I had plenty to do without having to end up in jail. But when I had to face that decision, I didn't hesitate to do so because I felt that we had endured that too long.” Many things had prepared her for that moment. Without that preparation she would probably not have made the same decision. Without the community of which she was a part, her action would probably not have led to the bus boycott that galvanized so much change.

Many things had prepared her for that moment. The same things prepare us for our moments of decision.

And those moments come much more frequently than we think. As we do our jobs, as we manage our relationships with friends and family, as we shop and drive, there are moments of decision every single day. We are constantly making decisions: How shall I respond to this person? What will I do with this call at work? What will I say in this situation?

We make all these decisions based on the preparation we bring to the situation. The people we like to be around are the people who bring kindness, patience, self-respect, humility and generosity to their daily interactions. They weren’t just born that way. They’ve been preparing for the important small decisions of life by practicing proportional giving off the top, by becoming familiar with Scripture, by practicing self-examination, and by testing their perceptions in the Christian community.

The preparation we need for the big life-changing decisions turns out to be exactly the same preparation we need for our everyday encounters. The Bible, the Prayer Book and the hymnal; our self-examination and our habit of proportional giving; our participation in the life of the parish — all these things prepare us for decisions great and small, and all these things prepare us to be a community of support for one another.