I confess decision-making is hard. Each weekend during Lent our theme
or our focus will be taken from that opening prayer, The Confiteor,
“I confess...” and then some aspect of the Gospel that is read that
Sunday. In today’s gospel, we see Jesus facing crucial, difficult,
hard decisions and making them. It’s an interesting scene, Jesus in
the desert being tempted, because it’s what scholars call “narrative
theology.” What that means is “nobody was there.” What that means was
there was no documentary. What that means was it is not an eye-
witness report. We know that there was no one there with a videocam
to record it, and it wasn’t on the 6 o’clock news. In fact, it’s the
story of Christ’s whole life because we know, both in private and in
public, he had to make hard, crucial and difficult decisions. He was
asked to meet the public’s expectations and he said, “No.” He was
asked if he were most of all, a miracle-worker. And he said, “No,
that’s not it.” He was asked by a whole movement to be promoted as
King and proven to be a political messiah, and he said “No.” And his
decision, although it was hard to make, led to his crucifixion and
his death.

We all have to make hard and difficult decisions along the way and,
in some cases, every day of our lives. I remember, in 1988, I had
been ten years at St. Monica’s Parish in Moraga, and it, for me was,
I think, an effective ministry and a comfortable ministry. And I had
to decide whether to resign so that I could come here or to not
resign. I had to make that decision and it wasn’t easy. And then, in
1999, we had the fire of the school here. A few months later,
Monsigneur Wade died. Our associate pastor, Margo Schorno, died. I
was 61, which would be the last chance to move somewhere else, and I
had to decide whether to move on and start anew in a new place or not.

We all have difficult decisions to make. They start early. We have to
decide for our children what school they go to. They have to decide
what college they are going to, what courses they are going to take.
Then we have to decide what career or profession we are following. We
have to decide what life partner we are going to take. And then along
the way, families are faced with the decision of a job change,
sometimes a promotion that involves traveling across the whole
country or refusing to do that. We have to decide who to help and how
to help them, whether it is somebody asking us for money on the
street or the second collections in church here, or a needy neighbor.
Sometimes we have to decide how to intervene, or whether we should,
when we have a friend or relative or neighbor who is drinking too
much or gambling too much. And sometimes we have to decide how to end
a relationship that is painful and that is necessary to end.

We have a lot of health questions. We have to decide whether to begin
cancer treatment or whether to continue treatment for cancer. We
sometimes have to decide whether to move an elderly parent to an
assisted care facility or to a bed-and-board facility. And we have
end-of-life decisions. Sometimes we have to decide whether it’s time
to discontinue a life support system for a terminally ill relative,
and beginning-of-life decisions, what to do when we are faced with a
teenager’s pregnancy. A lot of hard decisions to make!

And day-to-day decisions, we often have to decide how we are going to
spend our day well or live our lives well, every day of our lives.
It’s not easy. It’s hard. I am going to suggest a story and the
gospel of Jesus to help us. Here’s the story.... Once upon a time, a
little girl had just learned to jump rope and her mother told her she
could bring the jumprope with her to church. So, after Mass was over,
she was outside and she began jumping rope in front of the parish
priest and her mother, and she was doing very well demonstrating her
skill and the priest and her mother applauded. Then her mother said
to her, “Will you go around the corner and practice somewhere else
while I’m talking to Father?” She returned a couple of minutes later,
dragging the rope behind her with a sad look on her face. Her mother
said, “What’s the matter?” And her answer was, “I can’t do it without
the applause.” For me, “the applause” has lots of meanings. It’s
encouragement. It’s affirmation. It’s support. It’s advice. It’s
concern. It’s love. I hope for all of us that, in some way, the
Church is there for us as a community when we need that kind of
applause. And, most of all, I hope every one of us has one or two
good and wise friends to help us make hard decisions. We need the
applause.

And then there’s the gospel of Jesus. Now, that doesn’t mean that we
ask “What would Jesus do?” and we find out. Because the questions we
get faced with are totally different from the questions he was faced
with. I had a question this week from a couple, “What to do with
frozen embryonic cells, what to do with them now that they don’t need
them?” Jesus was never faced with that question. You won’t find it in
the Bible. But what we have to do is listen to the values of Jesus,
the stories of Jesus, the wisdom of Jesus, so that when we have to
make hard decisions we can weigh the pro and con with the deepest
values that are involved, and also have the example of Jesus standing
up and making decisions, even hard ones, when they have to be made.

I confess decision-making is hard. May God help us, and along the way
may we even help one another. Amen.