Challenge to Faithfulness
THE TWENTY-FOURTH SUNDAY AFTER PENTECOST
Joshua 24:1-3a, 14-25 • Psalm 78:1-7 • 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18 • Matthew 25:1-13
We all have a story of salvation to tell. What does your version sound like? When you tell the story of your people’s faithfulness—of the relationship with God that spans the generations and that has brought you to this moment—what story do you tell? Where does the story start? Who are its main characters? What are the plot twists and turns that reveal a covenant relationship built on God’s love and mercy and lived out in the lives of your spiritual ancestors? What are the themes that emerge again and again as your people have fallen in and out of love with the God whose love has never abated?
The Book of Joshua records a part of salvation history that we don’t tell very often. It’s the story of what happened after the twelve tribes of Israel entered the land of Canaan. It’s the story of Joshua’s leadership after Moses’ death. It’s the story of God’s people crossing the River Jordan, encountering the resident tribes, and destroying them through military conquest. It’s the story of Israel carving up the Canaanites’ land and redistributing it among their own ancestral tribes. It contains a few episodes of remarkable faithfulness that we teach to our children, like that of Rahab the Canaanite woman who gave shelter to two of Israel’s spies, but mostly the book is a blood-thirsty campaign of genocide that results in Israel’s occupation of the land promised to Abraham.
Like I said, it’s a part we usually skip over. But our spiritual ancestors did not record this part of our story because they wanted future generations to celebrate the violence carried out in God’s name. They recorded it because they wanted us to remember that we belong to a God whose identity is distinct—unequivocally distinct from all the other deities that are celebrated and worshipped throughout history, distinct in a way that doesn’t allow mixing or merging with other religions. And they wanted us to remember that, because we belong to that particular God, we must live in a particular way. The Book of Joshua isn’t written to be an historical account of how God’s people came to possess the land of Canaan. It’s a spiritual account of what happens when God’s people come face to face with the challenge of remaining faithful to God when that faithfulness is hardest to maintain. And that’s a story worth telling.
“Choose this day whom you will serve,” Joshua demands of the people of Israel, “…but as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.” If only faithfulness came as easily as the people’s response to Joshua’s words.
This is Joshua’s farewell speech to the people of Israel. These are his final instructions. Like any gifted leader, Joshua has a realistic understanding of the challenges that his people will face after he is gone. He knows that saying you will be faithful to God and being faithful to God are two different things, and he anticipates that Israel will have a hard time embodying the distinct identity of their God as the years go by.
“Choose this day whom you will serve,” Joshua said to the people, putting to them the decision of faithfulness. And what did they say in response? “Far be it from us that we should forsake the Lord to serve other gods; for 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.” In their reply, the people rehearse for Joshua a brief summary of all that their God had done for them, including enabling their conquest of the Canaanites. Given God’s unwavering provision, how could they choose any deity but the God who had brought them thus far?
Yet, in a moment of remarkable leadership, Joshua refused to accept the people’s declaration of faith. “You cannot serve the Lord,” he said to them incredulously, “for he is a holy God. He is a jealous God; he will not forgive your transgressions or your sins. If you forsake the Lord and serve foreign gods, then he will turn and do you harm, and consume you, after having done you good.” As if he had the power to see the future, Joshua knew that the God who had saved his people when they were slaves in Egypt and who had provided for them in the wilderness and who had brought them safely into a new land was not the same God to whom the people would turn in the years ahead.
But how did he know that? How was Joshua so sure that the people were making a promise they couldn’t keep? For starters, it helps that the Book of Joshua was revised into its current form generations later—after the people of God had experienced the hardship of attack, defeat, and exile. Those who retold this moment of decision already knew that the people of Israel would suffer great loss, and they identified the people’s faithlessness as the cause of their downfall. But you didn’t have to be a fortune teller or a revisionist historian to know that remaining faithful to the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob wouldn’t be easy. That’s because our God isn’t the God of the prosperous and the powerful but the God of the weak and the vulnerable, the poor and the oppressed, the destitute and the brokenhearted. And building a nation around a relationship with that particular God isn’t easy at all.
Have you ever had a favorite restaurant go out of business because it grew too fast and lost touch with what made it special? Have you ever felt the spark that drew you to a challenging job fade when lean times at the company gave way to sustained success? Have you ever thought that a church which once embodied God’s mission in the community seemed to lose its way when it got so big that its leaders forgot what it means to be faithful?
Joshua knew that, as the nation grew in prosperity, God’s people would have a hard time staying true to their humble roots and to the God that had blessed them in their humility. He knew that it was only a matter of time before the people began to associate their success not with the God of the poor but with the gods whose carved images are overlayed with precious metal—the so-called gods of the Canaanites whose worship was never really removed from the land. And Joshua knew that, once you turn to a god who promises wealth and strength and success, only a path of pain and hardship can lead you back to the God who is found amidst the outcast and the downtrodden. How did he know? Because that unchangeable truth is written into our human nature.
We believe in a God who saves us not by giving us the power to avoid hardship but by promising to accompany us into it. That is the theme of salvation history. That is the truth that is lived out in every generation that belongs to our God. But it’s a truth that many people would rather forget.
If you ask a rich person which god they prefer to belong to, what do you expect them to say? It’s a whole lot more fun to belong to a deity who blesses the rich and rewards the powerful. Even though we know that those gods cannot promise anything but fleeting happiness and false security, we turn to them again and again because they are the gods that we have made in our own image—the idols of our success. This might not be our favorite part of our people’s story, but Joshua’s words are important for us to hear.
The Book of Joshua uses the language of violence and total destruction not because our God calls on us to commit genocide but because of our propensity to abandon the distinct ways of our God for the ways of the world around us. Joshua’s warning to the people is a warning to us—that, no matter how hard we try to get rid of those false gods, their allure is never-fading. It is a dangerous and evil myth, of course, that ethnic homogeneity could ever produce religious purity. Remember that caring for the stranger in our midst is a fundamental imperative in our religious tradition. The Book of Joshua’s portrayal of the Canaanite religions as self-serving is overly simplistic, just as its depiction of ethnic cleansing isn’t historically accurate either. But one aspect of the story is as true today as it was for the people who gathered around Joshua and heard his challenge.
When we replace the God of our ancestors with the god of our accomplishments, we bring ourselves face to face with God’s judgment. When we worship the idol of progress instead of the God who cares for the poor, we call God’s wrath down upon us. When we forget which God we belong to, we rob ourselves of the beautiful and life-giving truth that our God saves us. We are saved not because we have the power to make the world a better place but precisely because we don’t. We are rescued not because we can invent our way out of a crisis but specifically because we can’t. Choose this day whom you will serve, Joshua says to us—the gods of your greatest accomplishments or the God who rescues you, saves, you, and redeems you. To the only true God be all glory, honor, and praise, now and forever. Amen.
© 2023 The Rev. Evan D. Garner
St. Paul’s Episcopal Church – Fayetteville, Arkansas