Choices

Matthew 26:36-49

            Every time I encounter this episode in Christ’s life, I am amazed at the contrast between Jesus and his disciples. When faced with the agony of the path that was before him, Jesus chose to remain committed to His Father. Yet his disciples all betrayed him. Either they fell asleep when he asked them to be there for him, or they ran away when the mob came, or they sold him out, either for the money or as an ill-fated attempt to start a revolution, in the end they all betrayed him and left him to face this terrible night alone. As followers of Christ today, I must assume that we do not want to make those choices that cause us to betray our Lord, but many people who claim to follow Christ do, by their actions betray our Lord. How does that happen?

            Merit sat in his car across the street from the Mount Olive Presbyterian Church. It was Wednesday morning and he had come by to talk with the pastor. Rather than pulling into the parking lot and going in, he had pulled up on the street and turned off the car. What had stopped him was a faith crisis of sorts. This was not the one that people often face, where he was questioning the validity of the Bible or the existence of God. No, this was the opposite. This week he had come to face the reality that he had betrayed Jesus.

            As he sat there, he began to wonder how he had gotten himself into this mess. He had grown up going to Sunday School and church almost every week. He had liked his Sunday School teacher and even though the services could be a little long he kind of liked the work sheets they gave him to keep him occupied. On occasion, he would even listen to the preacher, when he told stories. It was in youth group that he really got into this Jesus thing. On one of the retreats, he felt moved to commit himself to serving Jesus with his life. The youth leaders had pointed to Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane when he prayed “Not my will but yours be done?” and said if you want to show your love and commitment to Jesus, that when faced with a decision he should ask “What would Jesus want me to do?” and then do that.

            The very next week, he got his chance. He was on his way to football practice and he came around a corner near the entrance to the locker rooms and he saw some of his teammates picking on William a shy skinny kid. They had him backed into a corner poking him with sharp pencils, saying “What are you doing down here. This is only for tough guys.” As he cowered in fear in the corner. Merit stepped in front of William and ordered his teammates to stop. They got mad and told him to but out, but knowing that Jesus would want him to stand up for this kid, he stood his ground. “You’re gunna pay for this.” one of the kids had said as they walked away.

            About a week later, he was called into the coaches office and told that someone had reported that they had seen him smoking pot behind the bleachers of the football field. He had to go through a week of emotional anxiety and two drug tests, just to prove his innocence. After that experience, his enthusiasm faded a little.

            After high school, he went to college to prepare for his career. He had always been good with numbers, but he was also very good with people. He decided that the route that would take him to the top was to try and combine those two things. So in college, he took a double major in psychology and accounting, looking toward a career in the business world. While he was in college, decided that he needed to join a fraternity so that he would have some connections after graduation. As he was going through the application process, the hazing, he realized that if he wanted to fit in, he had better keep Jesus to himself. If he started talking about his desire to serve Jesus now, then they probably wouldn’t let him in and of course, after he was accepted as a part of the group, he could then let his commitment to Jesus show through. He made it in to the fraternity, but he never got around to the second part of his plan.

            One of the first things to go was church. It wasn’t really a conscious choice. He was really busy with his studies and he had a work study job that took up some of his free time. So, on Saturday nights, he liked to go out and let off some steam. He was a regular at the frat parties and they would go into the wee hours of the morning. By the time he woke up on Sunday, it was usually to late to go to church. He did still take some time to read his Bible a little and pray, but after awhile that dwindled down to next to nothing. The end result of this was that he found himself asking the “WWJWMTD” question less and less.

            After college he found a job working for a family owned chain of department stores. It was a fairly large company for a family owned business, and it had plenty of potential for him to move up. He started in the accounting department and after two years, when the manager of the department left the company, even though he was younger than most of the people there, he was put in charge of the department. As he began his new responsibilities, the owner of the company, Mr. Newma, took him out to lunch. As they were talking, the owner asked “Do you know why we made you manager when there were others who had more seniority?” Merit was surprised by the question and said “I though it was because I had good skills with people.”

            “That is exactly the reason.” the owner said. “I care about the people who work for me and I want them treated well. You see, Merit, I am a Christian and I try to use as my guiding principle the question “What would Jesus do?” This statement caught Merit’s attention. He hadn’t though of that in quite some time. Mr. Newma continued, “One of the ways I try to ensure that is by trying to find managers who care for their people like I do. You will do well in this company if you keep that in mind.”

            As he returned to work, Merit thought a lot about their conversation. He knew that he should care about the people that worked under him, but he also thought, “I know people like to pretend that they care for their people, but when it comes down to it, Mr. Newma is only concerned with the bottom line. I will do my best to care about the employees, but I don’t want them to keep me from getting ahead and if my department isn’t producing, I won’t get what I want.” As he walked back into the building, he thought, “I should start going to church again. It will certainly help my career.”

            It should be noted that even though Merit returned to church, it was different than when he had left. In his youth, he wanted to know about Jesus and how he could serve him with his life. This time, Jesus was an after thought. He was not there because he loved Christ and wanted to serve Him, it was because it looked good to the higher ups. Sure there were times when he found it interesting, but these days doing what Jesus wanted him to do had move way down the list of his priorities. So, when he was faced with challenges at work, his first priority was what would help him get ahead. He had gotten good at pretending to care about the people who worked under him, but to him they had become just expenses to the company, a cost of doing business. So, in spite of what the owner had directed, he seemed to find ways to move people on as their salaries began to creep up. That way, the bottom line always looked good.

            Ten years went by and Merit had reached as high as he could go in a family owned company. Having gotten his MBA, he had been promoted to Chief Financial Officer. He had put in his time at church, he was even serving as an elder. His boss seemed to trust him implicitly. But Merit was getting a little restless. He was paid pretty well by industry standards, had a nice home, good family, but as is the case with most people, he started looking at what he did not have. He convinced himself to have the life he deserved, he would need to hit it big in the market. The problem was that he did not have the kind of cash available to make the big score. Then one day he got a tip from a “very reliable source” about stock that was poised to take off. As he thought about where he could borrow a large enough sum to make the investment worth while, he realized that the employee pension fund had a large pool of cash waiting to be invested. “I can just borrow the money for a few days, then when the stock spikes, I can sell and pay the fund back with interest, of course, and keep the profits for myself.”

            He borrowed $50,000, bought the stock and sure enough, two days later, good news came out and the stock spiked. He then sold it making 30% profit. He paid the money back with double the interest they were making on their accounts and still cleared over $10,000. To ease his conscience, he even gave 10% of his profit to his church. Of course, he knew lending himself company money was not right, but he justified it by telling himself that he was helping the employees as well as himself. Deep down he knew that Jesus would not approve of his actions, but over the years, he had come convinced himself that Jesus’ instructions were not relevant for this day and time. Even though he claimed the name of Christian, he had turned away from Jesus a long time ago, seeing him as get out of hell free card and a line for his resume, rather than the one who he wanted to pattern his life after.

            A few months later, he got another tip and this time it took a week, but this time, the $50,000 netted him almost $20,000 and that was after tripling the interest. Over the next year, he refined his technique. He got good at covering his tracks in the financial records, even going so far as to draw up loan papers to himself, so that if he were caught, he might be able to snow someone who wasn’t as knowledgeable about the law. With each trade, he became more and more confident in his ability to pick a winner and with each trade, the thought that he was playing with the retirement funds of the whole company, people who’s financial future depended on that money was replaced by the delusion that he was somehow helping them.

            Two days ago, he had gotten one of those tips. The inside info was that the stock was going to double within a week. With the right investment, Merit could be set for life. He sold a number of investments in the pension fund, so that he could have plenty of cash available and he wrote himself a loan for $10,000,000, almost one third of the total in the fund. He told himself that he would give the fund back a third of the profits and the church would get half a million (over a three year span, after all, he didn’t want people asking too many questions). He purchased the stock and waited for the good news about the company to break. But instead of the news being good that day, the company announced that it had filed for bankruptcy. The stock dropped almost to nothing.

            What was he to do? Maybe he could tear up the loan paper and try to make it look like the loss was due to a poor investment choice for the pension fund. The other option was to step forward, confess to what he had done and face prison. No matter what he chose, he knew he would end up in prison. Either a government sponsored one or one where the bars had been forged from the guilt of his bad deeds. It was then that he realized that his actions would affect more than just himself. The employees would suffer from his actions. His family would be subject to public humiliation, his church would be dragged into this and, he realized so would Jesus. As an elder, he was a representative of Jesus. He was supposed to ask WWJWMTD. If only he could go back in time and ask that question before he made these bad choices. If only he had followed the owner’s example and not stopped asking that question. He realized that through his actions, he had betrayed Christ, every bit as much as the disciples that fell asleep on him in his hour of need. Every bit as much as Judas, who had used Jesus for his own personal reasons.

            Suddenly, it became clear what he had to do. He needed to turn back to Him and start asking that question once again and then do what Jesus would want him to do. As he greeted the pastor, He said “Can you come with me as I go talk to my boss? I could use the support as I try to do What Jesus Would Want Me to Do.”

           Over the years of my adult life there have been no shortage of scandals. No area of life has been immune. Politics, sports, every level of government, businesses large and small, the financial markets, schools, the scientific community, youth sports, ..., even in the church. Many of these scandals have had devastating effects on, in some cases, millions of people. I most of these cases the person or people at the center of those scandals, were people who should know better. It would be interesting to look back over their lives to see the choices that they made that led them to the point where they were able to put their selfish desires above what is right and justify their scandalous actions. I don’t think that any of them, when they were a child, had as a goal to be an example of how to make terrible choices. My guess is that, in most cases, there was not one major choice, but a series of small moral compromises, choosing to turn from what is right, in other words what God would want them to do, toward what their own self interest, leading to a betrayal of God by hurting the people that God loves.

            You and I do the same thing. How often do we turn our backs on Jesus by putting our own wants ahead of what Jesus asks of us. Like Merit in our story, we can start out wanting to serve Christ, but if it gets a little to inconvenient or expensive, we decide to only go part way in our commitment to him. Each time we do we take a little step further away from him. Today I call you, like the prophets of old to return to Him. To once again commit to serving him with all that you have and are. To every day, ask WWJWMTD and then do it.

This was the sermon September 8, 9 at St. Mark Presbyterian Church.  Click here for audio sermons. The images are from http://freechristimages.org/