The Unfrozen Chosen
Scripture Reading: John 15:9-17
The TV show Mad Men ranks high on my list of all-time favorites. For those unfamiliar, Mad Men is about the drama—professional and personal—that takes place at a small Madison Avenue advertising agency throughout the 1960s. The central character is Don Draper, the impossibly handsome, supremely confident (at least outwardly so) creative director of Sterling Cooper. As the creative director, he’s the one responsible for coming up with ideas and then turning them into ads.
Among my favorite scenes in the show are the creative presentations, those times when Don and his team pitch their idea to the client, hoping to receive buy-in. One of the more memorable pitches comes early in season 1. The pitch is for a lipstick manufacturer whose current ad campaign focuses on the array of colors that women can choose from. The pitch, however, goes in a different direction, instead emphasizing the power of a woman choosing just one color. The agency’s concepts feature drawings of men with lipstick stains on their cheeks with the headline “Mark your man,” the idea being that a woman’s choice of lipstick empowers her to put her mark on her man.
The owner of the company is unimpressed and not shy about saying so. “I only see one lipstick in your drawing. Women want colors. Lots and lots of colors.” Don, sticking to his principles and his creative concept, refuses to budge and calls an abrupt end to the meeting. It’s the kind of thing that would never happen in the real world where client relations dictate pleasing the client at all costs.
What I find interesting about this scene is that both sides are concerned with the concept of choice; they just approach it from different angles. On the one hand you have the freedom to choose from many options, and on the other the power of choosing just one. It’s about having choices versus making a choice.
As advertisers know better than most, life in a consumer society such as ours is about making choices. We’re constantly presented with choices. In fact, it’s more like we’re bombarded. Just walk down the toothpaste aisle of your local drug store and you’ll be presented with an amount of choices that borders on the obscene. How many types of toothpaste do we need?
[N]othing is more countercultural than grace.
As concerns our faith in Jesus Christ, however, there is no choice. We don’t choose Jesus. “You did not choose me,” we hear Jesus tell the disciples in today’s reading, “but I chose you.” As applies to the twelve disciples, that’s indisputably true. They didn’t knock on Jesus’ door. Jesus chose each one of them to step from whatever they were doing prior and invited them to come and follow him. They left their fishing nets, their tax booth, or whatever else in response to Jesus’ having chosen them.
However, when applied beyond the twelve disciples to ourselves, the idea that we don’t choose Jesus but are chosen by Jesus becomes a startling claim. It’s startling because it runs counter to how we think about our faith being a personal choice, a decision that we make. After all, in a consumer society, isn’t religious faith just another choice? You have your preferred brand of toothpaste and your preferred brand of religion.
But as you have heard me say before, and as I promise you will hear me say again, the gospel is profoundly countercultural because the gospel is all about grace. And nothing is more countercultural than grace. Whenever we see it in action, it stops us in our tracks.
Last Friday I attended a conference in New York City. It was run by Mockingbird Ministries, an organization that, according to their website, is about “connecting the Christian faith with the realities of everyday life” but whose theological emphasis is all about grace.
One of the speakers was an Episcopal priest, Sarah, who I was already familiar with through a podcast that she cohosts. Even though she went to Yale and is an Episcopal priest who is married to an Episcopal priest, Sarah does not put on airs. She calls things as she sees them and is not shy about dropping in the occasional four-letter word in her commentary and even in her preaching.
Sarah told a story about her son Neil, who is in middle school. He’s artistic. He is the lead in the school play and he also plays the bassoon. As can happen in middle school, this made him a target for bullying from another student. The initial teasing escalated into violence, with the other boy grabbing Neil by the neck and choking him.
Sarah met with the principal who assured her how seriously the school was treating the matter. The boy was put on in-school suspension for a week. Sarah, who again, is an ordained minister married to an ordained minister and who preaches all the time about grace, was consumed with a desire for justice. She wanted the boy who had harmed her son to feel the unflinching harshness of the law. Only a one-week suspension? Why not two weeks? In fact, suspension wasn’t good enough. This called for expulsion!
But while the boy was serving his suspension, Sarah’s son Neil said something that surprised her. “Why don’t I bring him lunch?” he suggested. “Oh my God,” she thought, instantly chagrined, “My son is a better Christian than I am.” Again, grace is countercultural, even for Christians.
Grace is a gift that’s freely given to the undeserving, to fearsome middle-school bullies and feckless and faithless disciples. Today’s passage from John’s Gospel finds Jesus in the middle of a long monologue that takes places during the Last Supper. This is the last meal that Jesus will share with his disciples before being arrested later that very night.
Jesus knows what’s coming. He knows that when push comes to shove his disciples will all shove off. To a man they will all abandon him. And yet knowing that, Jesus can still refer to them as his friends. “No one has greater love than this,” he tells them, “to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” “I do not call you servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends.”
It’s said that you can’t choose your family but you can choose your friends. The bond of friendship, unlike family, is not based on a shared last name but on shared interest and experience. We’re born into a family, but we choose our friends. That makes it all the more remarkable that Jesus chooses to befriend people who will misunderstand him, who will disappoint him, who will fail him, who will betray him, who will abandon him, and in the case of perhaps his closest friend, who will even deny him.
And still Jesus can say to them on the night that he will be betrayed, “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you.” Knowing what they’re about to do—that they’re about to flee from him as if they never knew him—Jesus still professes his love for them. Despite their many failings of him, his love for them remains unfailing. And despite our many failings—despite all of our empty promises to Jesus and all of our betrayals—his love for us will never fail.
We treat the word “love” lightly in the English language. We use the word with abandon. “How was the movie? I loved it!” “I love mint chocolate chip ice-cream.” “I love that color on you.” “I love waking up early in the morning and seeing the sunrise.” “I love. I love. I love.”
“As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you,” Jesus says. “Abide in my love.” Given how easily we toss around the word “love,” it’s hard to fully grasp what’s at stake here. It’s hard for the human mind to take in what Jesus is saying. But in a nutshell he’s telling us that the same love with which the Father loves the Son, the Son—Jesus—also loves us. To be loved by Jesus is to be swept up into a holy and divine love, a love that has no beginning and no ending, no parameters or perimeter, a love that is not conditioned upon our having done anything to deserve it.
“Abide in my love,” Jesus tells us. While this may sound like a command, i.e., like the law and not grace, we would do well to remember the metaphor that Jesus uses in verses one to eight, just before today’s reading. There Jesus likens himself to a grape vine and the disciples to the branches that receive sustenance through the vine. The vine does not command the branches to obey; their relationship is organic. The branches feed off the vine. Or as Jesus says, “Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine,” neither can you unless you abide in me” (John 15:4).
…to be chosen is not a mark of achievement but a mark of humility.
To abide in the love of Jesus is simply to trust that we are who Jesus says that we are—his friends. It is not something that we must strive to earn. It is not something that we run the risk of losing if we are not faithful. It is rather a gift that Jesus freely gives to us. He chooses us to be his friends and to bear fruit in his name.
Now, this word “chosen” is charged with theological meaning. As Presbyterians, our default theological setting is to attribute to God rather than to ourselves the ability to choose. In that regard, what Jesus says in verse 16 may be among the most Presbyterian verses in the Bible: “You did not choose me but I chose you.”
Presbyterians have always regarded ourselves as being chosen, not in the sense of being better or greater or more deserving. Rather, we have been chosen to receive God’s grace. At the same time, Presbyterians have been lampooned as the “frozen chosen,” which suggests that we care more about doctrine and doing things decently and in order than we do about loving one another, as Jesus commands in this passage.
At some times and in some places, that accusation may well have been true. However, that’s only because folks forgot that to be chosen is not a mark of achievement but a mark of humility. We were incapable of choosing God, but God, in his mercy, through his Son Jesus, has chosen us. The fact that we are chosen marks us as God’s own, marks us as friends of Jesus Christ, and marks us as God’s unfrozen chosen appointed to bear fruit in his name.