“Choose Life”

The Life-Leaning Bottom Line

Luke 4:6-20

“What we choose changes us…” begins a prayer that we use regularly in small groups around this church.  “What we choose changes us.”  

Today we are talking about what it is we choose, when we choose life.  In the list of the leading causes of life, today we speak of coherence.  Coherence means what holds everything else together, the bottom line that makes everything else that happens to us make sense, no matter how random those events might look one at a time.  Coherence is the story line, the narrative, that threads through our lives to tie everything together.  And coherence is something we choose.

Victor Frankl was the 20th century psychiatrist whose ideas about this have shaped our thinking.  Frankl was Jewish, and he spent time at both Auschwitz and Dachau during World War II.  He watched thousands of people face their own death, the loss of their families, the loss of all their possessions, the destruction of everything that had made up their lives.  And in those camps, he saw that different people responded to the horror of what was happening to them in quite different ways.  Some were defeated from the start.  But in the midst of it all, some people were able to look with hope toward the future; and even to find meaning in what was happening to them.  The difference, Frankl wrote, is in the human capacity to choose how we will respond—to everything that happens to us.  It’s the ability that each of us has to create a narrative, a story with a hopeful ending, a story that does not look away from, but includes even the most awful things that happen in life.  It’s the choice to see that even the hardest story can be told as a story of redemption, a story of what survives and thrives, rather than of what has been taken away.  This is not the choice that everyone makes for themselves.  But it is a choice that no one else can take away from you.  It comes from inside of you.  

Coherence is a bottom line that leans toward life, and that steers us toward more life—not only for ourselves, but for everything that we come into contact with.  In some way, it explains every other choice we make.  How does he keep going when his life looks so hard from the outside?  It’s just the way he is.  Why does she always seem peaceful?  It’s something inside of her.

Victor Frankl’s work has been refined into a method of psychology that is called logotherapy.  It calls on us not to invent a hopeful bottom line for our lives, but to realize that we all have one already, and that our work is to discover it.   To me this sounds like faith:  confidence that God is there, and that God is good, even when all the circumstances we can see right now might suggest otherwise.  The trust that all shall be well, in some way we may not be able to imagine right now.  In Martin Luther King, Jr.’s words, to remember that even when it looks like the whole world has conspired for evil, “the arc of the universe bends toward justice.”  

The people who live with that kind of confidence and trust—the people who are not defeated by even life’s hardest blows—are those who know what they have confidence in.  They know that there is something, or someone, worth trusting in.  Something bigger than they are.  An ultimate goodness that will make everything else make sense.  

I hear that confidence—I see it—expressed nowhere more clearly than in the life of Richard Pervorse.  Richard came to the church last fall for the first time—in the first week he came back to Sacramento, after many years away.  He’s now a fixture around this church; everyone knows Richard, because he’s part of everything we do. He lives here, actually; he is our on-site maintenance and security person.  And I want you to hear his story.

[Please listen to above audio file for complete sermon, including Richard's story.]

Richard knows who he is. He knows what makes his life make sense; what will be the bottom line for him in every decision he makes, everything else he chooses.  It’s that perspective that helps him find meaning in all the parts of his life that might otherwise make no sense at all.  

We won’t all have the same narrative, the same bottom line, for our lives.  It’s important to know your own bottom line, to discover for yourself what it is that makes everything else in your life make sense, what helps you put the hardest moments of your life into a larger perspective. How you will choose to live in a world where everything is not always right.

Our Scripture reading today, the passage we read from the Gospel of Luke, was Jesus’ bottom line.  It was the first sermon he gave, his “coming out” speech to the people in his hometown, the people who had watched him grow up.  This is who I am, he said; this is what I will choose, no matter what else happens to me.  I know that the Spirit of God is upon me, he said.  My work is to pour myself out so that others might live life fully.  To see where things are not right and to do something about it. And to make sure you know that in the midst of all those things that look so wrong, God is not very far away.  God is right here with you.  “And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down.”  It was enough.  It was the bottom line.