A Life Full of Choices: A Sermon Delivered at Luther Village Family Camp

Photo by Damian Siodłak on unsplash.com

Does anyone here like to cook or bake?

 

Over the years, I have discovered that cooking and baking are two very different things. In cooking, I start with a recipe to get the base list of ingredients and cooking times. If the recipe is new, I might buy the exact ingredients I need. Very often, though, I am missing an ingredient or two and either drop them from the meal or replace them. It’s fairly easy to change up things like the protein, the vegetable, and even some of the seasonings to use what I already happen to have on hand. I especially love making chili because I can open the fridge, freezer, and cupboards and just throw in whatever ingredients I find!

 

I learned pretty quickly that a baking recipe really needs to be followed to the letter. The exact amount of flour, sugar, baking powder, salt, and the like must be used or the recipe turns out either completely different or completely disastrous. There isn’t total rigidity. When I was baking the banana bread, I changed the walnuts for chocolate chips, but for the most part, baking requires you to be specific in what ingredients are used and how much.

 

Baking is a science. You should always pick the best ingredients and follow the law of the recipe. Cooking is more flexible. Sure, you could go out and buy the best ingredients, or you could cook with what you have and let God take care of the rest. Of course, in the end, just because you follow the recipe, doesn’t mean everything will work out. Sometimes, we make poor choices in ingredients. I once replaced pasta with lentils (because I had some in the cupboard and wanted to use them up) and ended up with mush. I think we ended up ordering pizza that night.

 

Our lives are full of choices, and not just in the kitchen. We live with so many choices, so many obligations, so many demands and opportunities that can become overwhelming. How often have you had two opportunities fall into your lap and you had to spend time weighing out the pros and cons, praying that you will make the right decision? How many times in your life have you made a choice knowing that you have to just wait and see what happens in order to see the fruits of that decision?

 

This is where today’s parable comes in. Yes, the sower planted with good seeds. Yes, there are now weeds strewn among the wheat that puts the ideal harvest the sower had imagined at risk. Ideally, the servants could just rip out the weeds, but the sower knows that to tear out the weeds now risks ruining the maturing wheat as well. And so the sower must wait, living with both the wheat and the weeds until the day of harvest when they may be separated in due time.

 

Our lives are littered with situations where there is no clear or easy answer. That is where faith becomes so important. In this parable, Jesus tells us that in challenging situations we have the promise that, in the end, God will sort things out. That doesn’t mean everything will turn out just fine. Sometimes we don’t choose well. Sometimes things go wrong.

 

We don’t live in an ideal world and each week we’re faced with challenging decisions, some small and others large, to which there is no clear answer. Some decisions we’ll get right, others wrong, and still others we won’t know whether we were right or wrong for months or years to come. But we still need to make them. And then, each week, no matter how we fared, we can come back to church on Sunday morning to be reminded that God loves us anyway and promises that, in the end, God will hold all of our choices and all of our lives together in love.

 

The promise here isn’t that Christian faith prevents hardship; the promise is that we are not justified by our right choices but rather by grace through faith. And knowing we have God’s boundless goodness, love, welcome, and forgiveness in spite of our choices frees us to live in the moment.

 

Amen.