Scripture Readings:
Hebrew Scriptures – Joshua 24: 1-2, 15-171
1Then Joshua gathered all the tribes of Israel to Shechem, and summoned the elders, the heads, the judges, and the officers of Israel; and they presented themselves before God. 2And Joshua said to all the people, “Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel: Long ago your ancestors—Terah and his sons Abraham and Nahor—lived beyond the Euphrates and served other gods. … 15Now if you are unwilling to serve the Lord, choose this day whom you will serve, whether the gods your ancestors served in the region beyond the River or the gods of the Amorites in whose land you are living; but as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.” 16Then the people answered, “Far be it from us that we should forsake the Lord to serve other gods; 17for it is the Lord our God who brought us and our ancestors up from the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery, and who did those great signs in our sight. He protected us along all the way that we went, and among all the peoples through whom we passed….
Epistle – Ephesians 6: 10-202
10Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his power. 11Put on the whole armor of God, so that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. 12For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. 13Therefore take up the whole armor of God, so that you may be able to withstand on that evil day, and having done everything, to stand firm. 14Stand therefore, and fasten the belt of truth around your waist, and put on the breastplate of righteousness. 15As shoes for your feet put on whatever will make you ready to proclaim the gospel of peace. 16With all of these, take the shield of faith, with which you will be able to quench all the flaming arrows of the evil one. 17Take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. 18Pray in the Spirit at all times in every prayer and supplication. To that end keep alert and always persevere in supplication for all the saints.
19Pray also for me, so that when I speak, a message may be given to me to make known with boldness the mystery of the gospel, 20for which I am an ambassador in chains. Pray that I may declare it boldly, as I must speak.
“As for Me and My Household, We Will Serve the Lord!”
“Choose this day whom you will serve…but as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.”3 That is a stunningly clear, firm, ritually-enacted commitment – a good one to remember on a Sunday such as this when we’re all invited to reaffirm the covenant of our membership vows as United Methodists.
Joshua’s challenge at Shechem may be ancient history. The covenant made that day is among the earliest memories of those who called themselves “the people of God.” But, what about us now? How should we recapture such a decisive drama as this across all of the centuries of sacred time and make its affirmation our own?
This story rings in my memory every time that I’m faced with a situation where a clear-cut choice of right and wrong confronts me, or a community to which I belong is calling us all to take a stand: “Should everyone have access to quality health care, or should it only be available to the privileged few?” “Should every adult be allowed to enter into a committed covenant with the one that he or she loves, or is marriage meant only for the blended genders of the privileged majority?” “Is it right to kill killers simply because the state sanctions capital punishment?” “Is clean air and clean water meant only for those who can pay for them?” The list of our choices, and whom we serve in making them, is endless.
Joshua’s challenging question lives on today every time a parent presents a child at the baptismal font. The question of ultimate loyalty confronts us, as well as our confirmands, on a day in which we boldly recite again this promise to them that’s printed in our bulletin:
With you we renew our covenant to participate in the ministries of this church by our prayers, our presence, our gifts, our service, and our witness. With the help of the Holy Spirit we will so order our lives after the example of Jesus, the Christ, that surrounded by love you may be confirmed and strengthened on this spiritual journey that we call life.
Whenever we come together we do so in the midst of a veritable constellation of gods vying for our attention and allegiance: gods of clan or soil, race or ideology, economics or politics. Today we gather to witness the entrance of two new members into God’s family called United Methodists. But the question put to us all must be heard as an echo of Joshua’s challenge: “Choose this day whom you will serve….” Our day-to-day living out of our membership vow is an answer to that challenge.
How do you suppose we’re doing?
We shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking that we understand how or why others will respond to this question of ultimate allegiance. People don’t all fit the same mold; their reasons for doing things differently than, say, the way we do them is complex. This applies as much to the group gathering at the picnic in Fuller Park after this worship service as it does those of us engaging in a dialogue later tonight about a book with as controversial a title as Saving Jesus from the Church: How to Stop Worshiping Christ and Start Following Jesus.4 Actually, this applies to any kind of social group, but especially any one calling itself “religious.”
The truth is: not all Christians are the same, just as not all Muslims, Hindus or Buddhists are the same. In order to be compassionate, fair and honest, we’ve got to be very nuanced in our perception of who religious people are. It’s become increasingly evident – especially in our concerns for peace with justice and in the care of creation, that the world simply isn’t made up of contiguous segments that bump up against one another and yet don’t have any effect on one another. We are inextricably interdependent and interrelated. There is just no way that Christians can go it alone.
Think of how we hurt and even destroy other people – all too often in the name of God. Think about the way that the competitive character of our capitalist society has been described: “It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there!” we hear. Survival of the fittest may have accurately described one aspect of evolutionary theory, but it’s all too often been applied to the religious and social arenas. And so we’ve come to view society something like a food chain – complete with it’s “top dogs” and “sharks” all the way down to its “bottom-feeders” and “pond scum.”
Such a metaphor becomes gruesomely barbaric and tragically inhuman, because if we do begin to see people so simplistically – as if they were members of different species who have to eat each other or be eaten – then cannibalism becomes unavoidable. The kinds of “ethnic cleansings” that we’ve seen – from our own history with Native Americans in this country to Nazi Germany’s treatment of the Jews in Europe, to murder in Cambodia, in the Balkans and in Darfur – all may be viewed with the horror, now, that it deserves, but such things will be inevitable as long as we convince ourselves that some “deserve to die” and coexistence is seen as impossible. The 21st-century tools of science and technology only make us more effective cannibals.
We descendants of Abraham and of these, so-called, “chosen people of God” are ourselves chosen now and brought into this covenant as heirs. Why? Not on the basis of anything we’ve done or will do to deserve it, but purely on the basis of inclusive love and grace. And any covenant into which we enter brings with it a responsibility for us to live lives that reflect that covenant.
So then what’s a covenant? Is it a promise or a commitment? It is both and much, much more. Biblical covenants involve the giving of ourselves for others. As Meyers puts it in his book, Saving Jesus from the Church:
The ministry of Jesus was, and is, and will always be about compassion…[so]… Perhaps faith is not a transaction at all, but a covenant of compassion with only one requirement – it obligates the recipient to become a “healed healer” taking the reign of God to others.5
Ultimately, a covenant – whether it’s in a marriage, membership within a church, or with our relationship with God – is an invitation into intimacy. It’s saying that we are not alone; through good and bad we’re in this together because we share life together.
Too much of what we do in the name of the church, though, is done to comfort or build up just ourselves. The familiar is comforting, and it is an essential part of any covenant communion – that we know what to expect; we surround ourselves with those we love and who love us, and we do the things that we enjoy doing together and have done many times before. But there’s a point at which comfort has to give way to challenge.
The world has changed. The church has changed. We have changed – and, God help us, not always for the better. And so we look for – some of us with real excitement, others with a bit of apprehension and exhaustion, maybe some even with desperation – to imagine that it isn’t so, that nothing’s changed! We want to believe that the naïve, wondering, loved-and-cared-for child that we once were, like Peter Pan, never has to grow up into the complexities, compromises and confusions of adulthood.
As we look back for reassurance to our personal pasts, it’s important to remember those saints on whose shoulders we now stand – the Faye Beals, Frank Stockings, Margaret Whitmers and Ethel Adams of our world – to remember, and never forget, the direction that our ancestors in the faith faced. So it’s also worth remembering that back at the time that Jesus stirred things up he wasn’t yet the superstar that he is today. At the moment that he instructed his disciples to follow him, he was just a charismatic traveling preacher who attracted as many enemies as easily as he did followers. Who knew where Jesus would lead them? So for those who did begin to see the confrontation that was coming with Rome, and with those quislings in whom Rome invested ultimate religious authority, for Christ’s sake, why not get out while the getting was good?
We can use this Sunday in late August to remember all of those who’ve been part of this covenant before we entered into it, and then to gently invite each other to stop pretending and to rejoice that what we have been and what we are matters a whole lot less than the people we are being called to be. This simple gift waits for us at every moment of our lives that we listen and pay attention to God’s messengers – and who isn’t a messenger of God? We don’t have to stay at the beginning of the story of our lives; right now we’re being invited into a new beginning.
“Choose, today, whom you will serve,” Jesus basically asks his followers.6 How many of us would’ve bolted under those precarious circumstances? It took more courage than we know for Peter to say that he was sticking with Jesus. We tend to forget just how much courage it takes to be a Christian – probably because we tend to forget what being a Christian asks of us. It takes courage to face oneself honestly and change our attitudes and deeply held convictions when our faith asks this of us. It takes courage to forgive somebody who’s wronged us, or to ask someone to forgive us the wrong that we have done to them. It takes courage to take a stand for a conviction when you have to make that stand alone. It takes courage to get involved in other people’s lives and in society’s greatest and most urgent needs. It takes courage to be a Christian. The choice is up to us.
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1 The book of Joshua presents a conclusion to the story of the exodus. God directs Joshua to lead the people across the Jordan (so the story goes) to occupy the land that God had promised them – it began with the conquest of Jericho. It’s a terrible irony that this defeat of the Canaanites really may never have been completed. From the point of view of ancient history it was bloody, and took about a century or two, and yet some would say that the violence has never ended and is represented, today, by the ongoing struggle between Palestinian and Jew – both with ancient claims on this so-called “promised land.”
Even so, the shapers of this sacred history believed that by God’s initiative and faithfulness, the people have been able to return to the land west of the Jordan; and Joshua calls the people to reaffirm their covenant fidelity to this saving God. As any one of us knows, though, the temptation to worship other gods is always present.
2 The author of Ephesians presents the Christian lifestyle as a relentless struggle against both human agents and the ever present spiritual powers of evil. He portrays this by employing the dress and equipment common to Roman soldiers of that era – echoing images from Isaiah that spoke of righteousness and faithfulness as “belts” around one’s waist and loins (Isaiah 11: 5), complete with “breastplate” and “a helmet of salvation” (Isaiah 59: 17). Toward the end of the passage the author also underlines the significance of prayer in this ongoing struggle to be the persons that God has created us to be.
3 Joshua 24: 15b,d.
4 By Robin R. Meyers (pastor of Mayflower Congregational Church and philosophy professor at Oklahoma City University), this is the text that we’re using for our Adult Christian Education fall book study. As the author puts it in the prologue of his book:
The most urgent questions of all go unasked: What kind of God did Jesus reveal? That question has been submerged beneath “battles for the Bible” and bitter disputes over the metaphysics of a Galilean sage. So it has become fashionably iconoclastic these days to ask, “Can I even call myself a Christian now?” Yet perhaps this is the wrong question, at least for those of us still in the church. Instead we should be asking, “What is the proper object of our worship, and what would it take to make Christianity compelling, even irresistible, again?” How can our faith become biblically responsible, intellectually honest, emotionally satisfying, and socially significant?
5 Op. cit., Robin R. Meyers, Saving Jesus from the Church (HarperCollins Publishers, New York, N.Y., 2009), pp. 124 and 125.
6 Today it’s part of the gospel reading that’s very telling in this regard (never mind that Peter and the rest come off much better here than the ways in which they’re portrayed in the other gospel stories!):
63It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life. 64But among you there are some who do not believe.” For Jesus knew from the first who were the ones that did not believe, and who was the one that would betray him. 65And he said, “For this reason I have told you that no one can come to me unless it is granted by the Father.” 66Because of this many of his disciples turned back and no longer went about with him. 67So Jesus asked the twelve, “Do you also wish to go away?” 68Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life. 69We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.” [John 6: 63-69]