Rev Canon Edmund Newey
Christ Church Cathedral

The Thursday before last, just over 50 million of us in Britain had a choice.

In fact we had two choices: first, whether to vote; and secondly who to vote for.

Every day all of us face countless choices. Some are simple and quickly resolved: What to wear? What to have for breakfast? Some are complex and involve a lot of thought: How to use what money we have? How to spend a precious hour or two of free time and who with?

The odd thing is that when we make a choice we rarely know what its consequences will be.

The 1998 film Sliding Doors plays on this.

The film has two separate plots, based on whether or not the central character, played by Gwyneth Paltrow, catches a particular underground train.

Choose to leave work just a little sooner and she catches her train, a little later and she just misses it; and on the catching or missing of the train hang two utterly different sequences of events involving love and loss, fulfilment and infidelity.

From one trivial choice – when to leave work – follow two unforeseeable ‘trains’ of events, each unfolding in separate, parallel universes.

We cannot know what the consequences of our voting or failing to vote on May 7 will have been.

This, I guess, is one of the reasons why fewer and fewer of us see voting as a priority. What difference, we wonder, does my little pencil cross make in the grand scheme of things?

And yet the choices we make, or fail to make, do have a profound effect on our lives: the sum of all these small choices expresses what we want the life of our society to look like.

Jesus tells a famous story about choice: A woman named Martha welcomed Jesus into her home. She had a sister named Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to what he was saying.

But Martha was distracted by her many tasks; so she came to him and asked, ‘Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me.’ The Lord answered her, ‘Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing.

‘Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.’ As so often, Jesus tells this story to provoke us.

We feel for Martha – after all someone has got to do the washing-up.

But the point of the story is not to put Martha down: Martha’s choice was good, but Mary’s was better.

The better part is that chosen by Mary: to recognise the unique opportunity before her, to say yes to the call of God in her life, to allow herself to be changed by the one who gives life in all its fullness.

What consequences will follow if we make that choice?