“I had no choice.” Of all the things we heard this past week from the deeply disturbed mind of Cho Seung Hui, that stands out for me as key: “I had no choice.” Cho Seung Hui felt trapped and cornered. He felt driven to do this terrible thing. In his mind, every victim was to blame – they were rich kids, achievers, representing everything he thought he could never be. And so, planning both carnage and suicide, Cho told us we had had a hundred billion chances to stop him. In his cold, calculating heart, he had no choice but to do what he did.
Most of us, I am sure, would dispute that. We look at the weeks of planning, purchasing guns, writing manifestos, and brooding, and we would say to Cho, “But you did choose. You chose to kill. You chose to destroy. You did have a choice, and you made a horribly wrong one.” Yet apparently that is not what he felt. He felt himself to be in a trap from which there was no escape, and more, he felt himself to be a victim not unlike Jesus Christ, sacrificed by the principalities and powers. T. S. Eliot lamented that “April is the cruelest month”, and it seems that way when we think of the Columbine killings, done in April of 1999, the Oklahoma bombing in April of 1995, and the martyrdom of Martin Luther King on Good Friday, April 4, 1968. This season, when we remember how the Lord Jesus was crucified, evokes from those in whom rage runs deep a strange desire to mimic that ancient crime. “I had no choice.”
And yet, this is the Easter season, as our pastor reminded us last week. This is the season of life, this the season in which we recall not only that Jesus was crucified, dead, and buried, but also that on the third day He rose again from the dead and now He lives. Against all odds, against the powers that took Him down, He lives. And He brings life.
I take you now to Moses, who had brought the people of Israel out of captivity in Egypt. He had rescued them from slavery and struggle. Through the waters of the Red Sea they had come, unscathed; through desert and drought, battle and blistering heat, now they were at the very edge of the land of promise. It looked as though soon Canaan would be theirs. It was all done, wasn’t it? What else was there to decide? What else needed to be done? But Moses spoke of making a choice, an ultimate choice:
See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity … I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life
Choose life! Of course! Who wouldn’t? I have set before you life and death. How may we choose life?
I
For one thing, we can choose whether to live or to die emotionally. We can choose to live with vitality and joy, or we can choose to shrivel like rotten fruit on the vine. We can choose to live with purpose and meaning and direction and energy. Or we can choose to dry up. We can choose to let authentic life just slip away.
When Moses told the people that God was giving them a choice between life and death, he reminded them that God’s word of life was right there in front of them, ready for the taking.
Surely, this commandment that I am commanding you today is not too hard for you, nor is it too far away. It is not in heaven, that you should say, "Who will go up to heaven for us, and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it?" Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, "Who will cross to the other side of the sea for us, and get it for us so that we may hear it and observe it?" No, the word is very near to you; it is in your mouth and in your heart for you to observe.
Moses was telling the people that right here, right now, matters. They have the choice of taking this moment and living, or they can let it pass, dwindling away into nothing. God’s truth is here for us, now. God’s life is available to us, now. Seize the moment. Carpe diem. Those who really choose to live are those who live with all their senses throbbing and with their hearts in love with all the gifts of God.
Cho Seung Hui made his moment a moment of death. Somehow he could not get past old wounds. He believed that everything was against him. His past was too much; it overwhelmed him. Some of us, you see, are buried in the past. Our lives are full of regrets. Nothing is as good as it used to be. Everything is downhill. And when you live in the past and not in the present, you have chosen death and not life. You have chosen self, which is death, and not God, who is life. If you choose to dwell in negativity, the end is not far away.
Maybe I can illustrate this with something a little whimsical. God knows we need whimsical in these bleak times! I am remembering my grandmother and what a wonderful cook she was. We looked forward to holidays when we would be invited to her house for a delightful meal. But every Thanksgiving, every Christmas, every special occasion, when we would fill our tummies and push back from the table, she would say, “Well, it’s not as good as the last one I made.” Easter wasn’t as good as Christmas, and Christmas wasn’t as good as Thanksgiving, and Thanksgiving wasn’t as good as birthday, and birthday wasn’t as good as last Easter, and so on back. We used to say that we wished we had had a taste of Grandma’s first meal, because every one of them had been downhill since then!
Oh, but you know what my grandmother really wanted, don’t you? What did she want? She wanted affirmation. She wanted a room full of family members saying, “Oh, no, this was wonderful.” She wanted to hear her family crow, “This was superb. Nothing could have been better than this.” My grandmother wanted her ego stroked! Of course! Who doesn’t?
Except that to choose to live in the past is to choose death. To choose to look backward for something better than now is to choose death. To choose never to get over the past, that is death. To choose never to forgive yourself for your mistakes, that is death. When God says, “choose life”, He is offering us new hope, new opportunity, new horizons, now. Choose life, leave the past to deal with itself.
“I had no choice”. Cho did have choices. But he let them go. He rejected every friendly overture, he fed only on his own fears, and the end result was death. You and I can choose to fill each moment with sixty seconds’ worth of distance run, or we can choose to let life slip through our fingers like water through a sieve. We can choose to live every moment to the full, or we can choose to waste it all and come to the end wondering where it all went. The key is to live in the presence of God and draw from His energy. “This word is very near you … it is in your mouth and in your heart.” It is now.
II
But there are other life choices that we can make too. Is it not only that we can choose life for ourselves, but there is another choice. We can choose whether to affirm life for others, or we can choose to stifle them. We can choose whether to bring life to others or to abandon them to all the deaths that our world can bring. Sadly, Cho Seung Hui seems to have chosen isolation; from all that we know, it appears that he lived entirely within himself, and offered nothing at all, to anyone else. To disconnect from others is to choose death. But to choose life is to give life to others.
There are many different ways I could go with this point, but one way is suggested very strongly by a phrase in the text. Moses says,
Choose life so that you and your descendants may live.
Choose life so that you and your descendants may live. Think with me about choosing life for our descendants, for our children. After all, Virginia Tech is not an isolated incident. We have been overwhelmed of late with horrible stories of death, many of them involving children. A father strangles and hangs his two small children and himself in the woods near Barnesville. A mother, it seems, destroys her husband and her little ones in an apartment in Frederick. So many young men are shot on the streets of the city that their names are buried somewhere on page 3. Children killed, children hurt, children in danger.
And it is not only that children die or are wounded. It is also that something dies in the spirits of children when these things happen. Children suffer small but significant deaths when they and their friends are under assault. Their sense of security is wounded. Their carefree existence is shattered. Their right to be children, playing and learning and laughing, is violated. When we permit a violent society to continue, we are choosing death for our children just as surely as if we had used the guns ourselves.
So God’s word says, “Choose life so that you and your descendants may live.” Choose life! Brothers and sisters, we as Christians must do some things to choose life for our children.
For one thing, I believe that we can no longer stand idly by while weapons circulate. We must do something about the flood of guns that has invaded our schools and has shown up on our streets. I am not a politician, nor am I an NRA member, so I don’t know all the technicalities. But I do know that I want to write letters and make calls and work toward the elimination of firearms from civilian life. Protecting the ability of hunters to bring down a few birds is not worth the life of one American child. The gun shop owner that sold those weapons to Cho may say for public consumption that he is very sorry, but the fact remains that he sells assault weapons every day, with little or no concern about anything except profit. That has to stop. That cannot continue. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live.
How else may we choose life? Let us choose life by raising our children in a non-violent atmosphere. Let us choose life by putting aside forever the symbols of death. My wife and I never permitted our children to have toy guns or weapons of any sort. If they whined, they whined. We were the parents. We were in charge. If they claimed that everyone else was doing it, we told them that we were not everyone else. This was our family, and in our family we used no weapons. Let us choose life by raising our children in a non-violent atmosphere. Let us choose life.
Let us choose life by exposing our children to peaceful images. Let us choose life by paying attention to what is happening in the media. From what I have seen of Cho’s video, it looks as though he took his script out of the gangster movies and the shoot-em-up shows that are offered every single day in the media. So-called entertainment that demeans women, or labels ethnic groups, or exploits sexuality, or suggests that guns are the way to solve problems are not worthy of our support. Do we have a choice? We certainly do. I’ve never yet seen a TV set that didn’t have a little button marked, “Off”. Push that button; send a message to producers that we do not intend to pollute the minds of our children with rubbish. My son-in-law, just a few weeks ago, testified before the Federal Communications Commission about TV programs that purport to entertain but actually debase African-Americans. I am proud of that. It was a way to choose life.
And there is more. How else may we choose life for our children? Oh, let us, people of God – let us choose life by providing our children with positive alternatives to the stuff that’s available on the streets. Let us choose life as a church that offers strong child-serving programs, a significant youth ministry, an outreach to young adults. As I go around to various churches to preach, I am appalled to discover that many of our churches involve almost no children at all and offer nothing of substance for teenagers. Some churches just expect that when their kids go off to college, they will never see them again. What are we doing? Are we forfeiting the future because it is messy to work with children and expensive to deal with youth? Are we writing off a whole generation, and so consigning them to death? It must not be! If this week teaches us anything at all, it is that Christians must reach out strongly, widely, and touch the lives of young people with sensitivity and love. Choose life for our children, not convenience for ourselves.
You know, the first twenty-three years of my ministry were invested with college students through Baptist Campus Ministry. I was a campus minister a good deal longer than I was a pastor, and in many ways my heart is still there. How instructive, then, it was to hear some of the surviving Virginia Tech students mention that they were receiving help from their Bible study group or from their prayer cell! How pleased I am that in Blacksburg, campus ministers are present for hurting students. How proud I am that one of them at work down there is a former student of mine from my days at the University of Maryland. And yet how disappointed I am that in 2007 D. C. Baptists no longer do much of anything in ministry on the campuses of this metropolitan area! I cannot take the time now to rehearse that history, but I can sound the alarm to say that if we do not invest in our young people, there will be more Chos, there will be more Virginia Techs, and there will be more hurting youth who have no place to turn in times of pain. My prayer today is that we choose life as people who care. “Choose life so that you and your descendants may live.”
III
Cho Seung Hui claimed, “I had no choice.” The words still haunt, do they not? “I had no choice.” But we have seen that we can choose to live life with vitality and energy in the here and now; we have seen that we need not to dwell on the past. Choose life. And we have seen that to choose life is to act to give life to our children and not just pull back into isolation. Choose life.
But there remains another way to choose life. There is something else we can do, and it is the most fundamental of all. I can choose whether to receive the gift of eternal life, or I can choose to throw it away and embrace death forever. At the heart of all this is the greatest issue of all – do we choose eternal life or do we choose eternal death? There is more to us by far than yesterday’s mistakes and today’s pleasures. We are creatures made for eternity. We have an ultimate destiny.
Do I have a choice? I have a choice to put my confidence in the one who said that it was His mission to give life, and life more abundantly; or I can reject that gift and send myself into oblivion. My choices have eternal consequences.
Now I am not one who runs around threatening the torment of hell, nor do I paint fantastic pictures of heaven’s golden streets and pearly gates. I am not all that interested in the temperature of hell or the furniture of heaven. But I am nonetheless persuaded that our God has not made us just to throw us away. I am persuaded that our God loves us and wants fellowship with us forever. I am convinced that our God so loved the world that he gave His only Son so that whosoever believes in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life. Everything I see tells me that the most fundamental choice of all is whether to receive eternal life or whether to embrace death.
Moses put it pointedly to the people of Israel:
If you obey the commandments of the LORD your God that I am commanding you today, by loving the LORD your God, walking in his ways, and observing his commandments, decrees, and ordinances, then you shall live and become numerous, and the LORD your God will bless you in the land that you are entering to possess. But if your heart turns away and you do not hear, but are led astray to bow down to other gods and serve them, I declare to you today that you shall perish …
Men and women, the choice is straightforward. The choice is urgent. Trust God, walk in His ways, serve Him, and He assures us of eternal life. Or serve other gods – the usual pantheon of greed and power and self-will – serve other gods and die. Perish. Not because God sits up in heaven and decrees it, just for fun. But because we have chosen, like sheep, to go our own way, do our own thing, take it all into our own hands, and destroy ourselves.
Do we have a choice? We certainly do. We have the choice of receiving the gift of God, which we do not deserve. We have the choice of accepting the love of the One who died in our place, the one who chose death so that we could choose life. We have the choice of believing in that One who went to a cross and suffered the loss of all things, so that we could have all things. We have that choice.
Or we have the choice of doing whatever feels good at the moment. We may choose to ignore God’s ways and rebel against God’s will. We may choose; but it is a choice of eternal death. It is a choice of incredible misery. It is a choice of unspeakable pain.
As for me, I choose life. I choose Jesus Christ. I choose to love God because He first loved me. I choose to follow Christ, I choose to trust Christ. I choose life. Won’t you? Won’t you today, right now, choose life?
