God freed the tribes of Israel from slavery in Egypt. And God chose Moses to lead them through the wilderness to the Promised Land. Along the way, Moses taught them about what God demanded of them. They wrote down all the laws passed on by God through Moses, and they accepted them as their covenant. They promised to follow in God’s ways, and in return God promised to bless them and use them to bless the whole world. They finally arrived in the Promised Land forty years later. Many of the elders of the people, like Moses, died before they reached their journey’s end. The younger generation suddenly found that they were now the older generation. Those who had only been children on Mt. Sinai were now the leaders, the elders, the ones to whom the people looked for wisdom and guidance. Joshua spoke to the children and children’s children of those who first accepted the laws of God on Mt. Sinai. And Joshua explained to them that they had to decide for themselves whether they would follow God as their parents had chosen to follow God. Joshua asked the tribes of Israel, “Will you serve the Lord your God and worship no one else?” Joshua demanded that they consider carefully before accepting the faith of their mothers and fathers. Choosing to follow the God who delivered them from slavery would be costly. Faith in the God of Moses would require a great commitment. God would demand faith in belief and in word and in deed. Their whole lives would be an offering to be shaped and used for God’s purposes. Joshua warned them that their lives of faith would be a witness before God. The promises that they made would testify before the whole world about their God. Joshua warned them to think carefully before they answered. “Choose this day whom you will serve,” Joshua told them. And the people called back to him together, shouting, “We will serve the Lord our God, and we will obey only the voice of our God.”

Our faith is constantly changing. What we believe in is growing with each new day that we live. Every moment that we experience the presence of God or feel the absence of God in our lives, our faith takes new shape. In Confirmation class this fall we did an exercise where we drew pictures of what we imagined God looked like when we were children. And then we drew a second picture of what we imagined God looked like now, now that we’ve grown older. For nearly all of us, our images of God grow as we grow. Our relationship with God changes as we experience life. And as I explained to the class members, Confirmation isn’t an end to our studying and growing in faith. Once we’ve been confirmed or once we’ve become members of the church, our faith continues to be forged through the challenges of life. We’re never the same person we were a year ago, or a week ago, or a moment ago, because we hold the potential of learning something new all the time. I read a book over my vacation that claimed that our bodies are constantly recycling themselves. The substances that comprise our physical bodies are in a continual state of renewal. This book claimed that every year or so, our bodies have entirely recycled themselves. The water and nutrients and fibers of our physical self are all new from year to year. Our faith is like that as well. We can’t sit still in our faith. Our beliefs are never static, because they’re constantly being challenged or confirmed or reformed with each new life experience. When we’re children, we’re expected to come to the church that our parents have chosen and learn the faith that our parents believe. But each of us must come to a point in our lives when we examine our faith and decide for ourselves what’s meaningful. Holding onto faith is like holding onto a fist full of sand. It’s always moving and shifting and slipping through the cracks to fall back to the earth. The only way we keep our hold on faith is to continually replenish it. The only way we keep our faith alive is to nurture is through study and conversation and questioning and testing. Possessing faith requires continual work, because our faith is constantly changing. We must choose this day and every day what we believe, because faith is always in motion.

In the end, we’re the sum of our choices. Our identity rests upon the choices that we make here and now. We aren’t who someone else wants us to be. We aren’t who we wish that we were. At the heart of it, we are who we decide to be. In the movie “Being John Malkovich” people are able to be inside the head of the actor John Malkovich. For fifteen minutes at a time, people see through his eyes, hear through his ears, sense and experience and feel about the world the way that John Malkovich experiences it. Most of the time, he’s just doing the mundane tasks of life… he’s driving to work or listening to the radio or phoning in a catalog order for new bath towels. He’s just being John Malkovich. But one person after another who experiences fifteen minutes of life through his eyes comes back saying it was the most thrilling experience ever. They say that the experience of being John Malkovich was revolutionary because, for those fifteen minutes, they knew exactly who they were. In their own lives, they weren’t sure who they were. They tried to live up to other people’s expectations. They muddled through their choices never sure if they were making the right decision. But when they saw the world through someone else’s eyes, they knew who they were. His decisions made sense from his perspective, in a way that their decisions were often confused and ambivalent. In the Christian faith, we say that God has given us the awesome responsibility to choose for ourselves who we’ll be. God has placed into our hands the task of deciding what sort of life we’ll live. It’s up to us to decide, moment to moment, who we are in hearts. Too often, we forget that we’re always choosing who we’re going to be. We get caught up in the routines of life, and we forget that we’re making a series of choices. We are setting our priorities and committing to a certain course. True, there are lots of powers that affect us that are outside of our control. People can blame their family history or addiction or a troubled childhood for who they are. But in our hearts, it’s up to us to decide who we are. It’s never anyone else’s choice but our own. Most of the choices we make don’t really seem momentous. Our choice of this color bath towel over another color seems like a tiny decision. But in the sum total of all our decisions, even the tiny ones, we define ourselves. Joshua warned the Israelites not to choose too quickly to accept the promises of their parents. Joshua warned them that there’d be a cost to their choices. There’s always a cost to our choices, because our choices set the course of lives. We should think carefully about who we choose to be. We should consider long and hard what our priorities are.

Choose this day whom you’ll serve. In the end, we’re going to serve someone. Our choices may ultimately serve our own self-interests, or they may serve our civic duty. Our decisions may contribute to corporate greed or to environmental conservation. Our choices may reflect our allegiance to our family or our church or our nation. Choose this day whom you will serve. If we have the courage and strength, perhaps we can answer the same way that Joshua answered. “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” Amen.