Do This to Remember

Joshua 24:1-25a; Matthew 4:8-10

The people answered Joshua’s challenge: It is the Lord who brought us out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. It is the Lord who did those great signs in our sight, who protected us all along the way. It is the Lord who gave us this land where we now live. Therefore, we will serve the Lord, for the Lord is our God.

In our experiment with the Narrative Lectionary, we’ve reached a key turning point in the Old Testament story that we began right after Labor Day and that will lead us into the coming of Jesus at Christmas. The people of Israel has arrived in the Promised Land.

Until now, we’ve been reading the story of how Israel got to the Promised Land. How after the flood, God swore off using violence against the bad guys as the means of repairing a broken creation. And so God calls a people, starting with Abraham, and how eventually God leads that people out of their slavery in Egypt into the land where God has promised that they can live in freedom. A life that, as we saw last week, is a life that is fully lived as God wants human beings to live, in harmony with God and with one another, where everyone lives in dignity and everyone has enough and people live together in peace.

And now, the people have arrived in that land and settled there. Now the time has come for them to begin that life together in the Promised Land where God has brought them.  From here until Advent we’ll be reading about the time the people of Israel was living in the land. And the reality is, most of the time, the people were pretty bad at keeping the covenant that God made with them in the beginning. The commandments mostly were not kept very well. Worship of the Lord continued alongside the worship of other gods, even among the kings and priests. And the prophets began to criticize all the ways of Egypt that kept coming back into the life of Israel, all the cruelty and injustice, all the fear and suffering. The absence of justice and harmony and respect, and the absence of real trust and faith in the Lord, which for the prophets were two sides of the same coin.

And then, when finally the people were driven out of the land and sent into exile, how they reflected on their experience, how they asked what faith in God meant now that God’s experiment in calling a people into a land to live out a unique covenant and relationship had run aground. Even as some of them returned to the land and tried to rebuild some of what was lost, yet never fully succeeded, and they began to hope for a Messiah, for a day of resurrection and new beginnings, when God would once again deliver the people from their captivity and lead them into a life of freedom. And how some of them began to believe that the Messiah had indeed come, and that the life of resurrection had begun. And started to spread that news and that resurrection life wherever they went.

But all of this is still in the future, when Joshua assembled the people of Israel for the first time as a free people fully in possession of the land that God had brought them to.  This assembly begins with Joshua standing before the people and telling them the story up until then. About what God did for Abraham, and then for Isaac and for Jacob. About how God brought Israel out of Egypt and saved them more than once from destruction and defeat.

And then Joshua goes into more detail about events closer to his own time, events that some of those in the assembly would themselves have witnessed. The battles and challenges the people had faced together. And Joshua reminds them that they had not accomplished anything by their own efforts – that it was God who gave them victories and a land they had not worked and towns they had not built and vineyards and olive trees they had not planted.

The book of Joshua is not very popular today, because in our modern world where wars and conquests have become common, these stories have been misused to justify the right of stronger peoples to make war and conquer the land and the towns and the vineyards of weaker peoples.  The book of Joshua has been used to justify that might makes right, and because the story can be misused in that way, it’s a complicated project to reclaim the story and try to read it in a way that honors those who suffered greatly from genocides and ethnic cleansings and other horrors of modern times.

After all, as we also read today, Jesus rejected the temptation to exercise political power – Jesus understood that to serve the one who offered him all the kingdoms of the world and their glory was to serve the devil, not God. And the covenant that Joshua made that day with the people of Israel, as Jesus recalls, requires us to serve the Lord alone. And Jesus knew that the temptation to conquer kingdoms and peoples doesn’t come from the God of the covenant. How to reconcile the book of Joshua with the clarity of the insight Jesus gives us is a complex question and would take a lot more than one sermon to really explore it.

For the moment, suffice it to say that Joshua did not see the story as an invitation to rob and plunder and exterminate the former inhabitants of the land. For Joshua, the takeaway from the story is that we didn’t take this land by our own efforts or superior strength. God put us here in this land because God has a project to give birth to a people that will live in this land as God intends all people to live. This is God’s project that is intended to bring blessing to all people, and we – against all odds and without any work on our part to earn it – we have been invited into God’s project.

So now, Joshua says, we all have to decide: are we going to serve the Lord and live the life that the Lord had in mind for the people called to live in this land? Or will we serve the gods our ancestors served before Abraham? Or the gods the former inhabitants of this land served? My choice, Joshua says, is to serve the Lord.

And the people all respond: Of course we will serve the Lord. And the people repeat the story that Joshua told. We saw what God did for our ancestors. We saw what God has done for us. How can we even think of not serving the Lord – because the Lord is our God, the Lord is the one who has helped us and brought us here. How can we not serve the Lord?

And this is where the story, to me, really gets interesting. Because Joshua says to the people, I don’t think you realize what you’re saying. To serve the Lord is not as simple as you think. It is not a matter of saying, Well, the Lord gave us this land, so of course we’ll be sure to pay our respects from time to time to make sure we get to keep it. If the Lord wants us to sacrifice a few sheep or goats now and then, of course we’ll do it. It’s a small price to pay to keep such a powerful god on our side.

Joshua says to the people, That’s not how this works. Trusting the Lord means recognizing what the Lord is trying to accomplish and that means living into the covenant. Living the commandments and making that vision our own. Setting aside the ways of Egypt for good. Really coming to know what it means to be in relationship with this God who loves justice and mercy and compassion and wants us to experience and practice those things as God does. Because if we don’t do those things, if our relationship with the Lord is transactional – we give to the Lord so the Lord will give to us – if we treat the Lord as just one more god who needs to be appeased and don’t enter into the project of being the people the Lord wants us to be – then we will have no right to complain if the Lord throws us out of the land and sends us into exile.

And – ominously, for those of us who know where the story goes from here – the people say, Don’t worry, we understand, and we will do it. Even though they won’t. Even though we still don’t. 

We come here for an assembly this morning that follows a pattern that is recognizably descended from the assembly of Israel at which Joshua spoke more than three thousand years ago. We begin by telling the story. The story of what God has done for us, the obstacles God has overcome for us, the story that shows us who God wants to be for us. A God who frees us from bondage, a God who wants us to live in harmony with God and one another, a God who loves us enough not to abandon us when we fail to trust enough to live as God calls us to.

And for us, the story always leads up to the story of Jesus on the night before his death, telling us how to continue the story – what to do to remember him. Just as Joshua told the people of Israel long before what to do to remember what God had done for them – to serve the Lord going forward, by honoring the covenant, keeping the commandments. Our assembly today, as our assemblies have for thousands of years, leads up to us renewing the covenant and proclaiming once again our faith and trust in the One who has called us into a new and different kind of life.

We are not as naïve as the people Joshua spoke to long ago. We know not to be so confident that our faithfulness will last the day, let alone the week. But we also have learned just how far our God will go to make this covenant a reality for us. In a world where people do not live in harmony with one another or with God, we remember that God hasn’t given up on this world yet. That God continues to call us to be faithful in new and surprising ways. That the life God calls us to is good, and blessed, and that we can always begin again to trust in God and the kingdom God is still inviting us to share.