Rebecca Sheridan
Sunday, October 14, 2018
Joshua 24:1-15

I’ve gotten my TV back now that the Yankees are out of the World Series. If you come to visit our house in October, you will likely quickly pick up that at least one person in our house is a Yankees fan. With MLB TV on in the background and everyone but me donning Yankees apparel, in addition to renditions of New York, New York and Take Me Out to the Ball Game where we root, root, root for the Yankees sung at the top of our kids’ lungs, it’s hard to miss. My hope is that you also pick up, even during this time, that we love God and that we are a Christian home, from the chalk blessing from Epiphany that we put on our door to the Holy Family icon that greets you in the entryway and the painting of Jesus on the cross in our living room.
I know that our family is not unique even though we’re pastors in putting Christian symbols and scripture verses up in our home to share our faith. In our reading from Joshua today, we hear that famous verse from 24:15, “As for me and my family, we’ll worship God.” You don’t have to raise your hands, but how many of you have some kind of wall hanging in your home that has that verse on it from Joshua 24:15? It’s a great one, a declaration of our commitment to God. It is a simple way to share our faith with people who visit our home, to let our guests know that our family worships God. However, just like Joshua warns the Israelites, the warning to us today is that this is not a stagnant, once and done commitment. It’s not enough to simply put up the flag of Christianity in our home or a plaque with some nice words on it to tell people outwardly that we are committed to God. That’s the easy part. The hard part is actually living our lives putting God first, before anything else.
This chapter from the end of Joshua is called “Renewing the Covenant,” but it is the second time that Joshua exhorts the people of Israel to follow God instead of other gods or idols. The first time Joshua asks the Israelites to recommit to God is in chapter 8, after the walls of Jericho are destroyed. Let’s take a minute this morning to review where we’re at in the story of the Old Testament as we’ve been walking through it this fall, because God renews the covenant with the people of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob many, many times. We started with Noah and the flood – God almost completely wipes out every living thing because God is so frustrated and angry with the sinfulness of creation. The flood is God’s big do-over, but God promises Noah that the Earth will never again be destroyed by a flood, no matter how bad we get. Then we heard how God promised Abraham and Sarah land and descendants, but they didn’t QUITE trust God completely – until in their very old age God gave them Isaac. We heard how Joseph’s brothers sold him into slavery, and Potiphar and his wife put him into prison, yet Joseph remained faithful to God to be able to save the family that betrayed him from famine. And then the last two weeks we’ve been recalling the story of Moses and the Israelites as God led them out of Egypt and gave them the Ten Commandments as rules to live by. Yet, some of you may remember, the Israelites get tired of wandering in the wilderness for forty years, so they build a golden calf to worship. Moses is so angry, he breaks the Ten Commandments, and he has to go up Mount Sinai again to get another set. Our story of faith from the beginning is one of seeking to follow God and failing, over and over again. From Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit in the garden until now, we are constantly tempted to commit our lives to other things other than God. One of the most tempting gods, in fact, are ourselves. How many of us at one point or another in the day or the week have thought that it would be better if we could do things our way, and have our will be done rather than following God’s will? We say we worship God, but often we worship ourselves and our own wants and desires more often and more easily.
With today’s reading, Moses has died, and Joshua has been appointed the new leader of the Israelites. Joshua is the sixth book of the Old Testament, and God hasn’t given up on his people yet, miraculously. Joshua recounts the same history to the Israelites who have now finally entered the promised land. I often tell people one way we can trust scripture is true is to think about the kind of people would write a memoir that paints such a terribly honest picture of their ancestral heritage? The Israelites just do not look good through much of scripture, yet they honestly tell their struggle to be in faithful relationship to God for us to be encouraged, too. Because here’s some good news: God never gives up. God sticks with the Israelites, as stubborn, strong-willed, and wayward as they are. God keeps his promises. God gives them land. God gives them more than they need to live well in that new land. And God still sticks with us today. God says in Joshua 24, “I handed you a land for which you did not work, towns you did not build. And here you are now living in them and eating from vineyards and olive groves you did not plant.” Therefore, Joshua urges his people, “Fear God. Worship him in total commitment. Get rid of the gods your ancestors worshiped on the far side of The River (the Euphrates) and in Egypt. You, worship God.” Joshua says they can go worship other gods if they want to, but they ought to be clear about that instead of giving God lip service and turning the other way. Then he says that famous verse, “As for me and my family, we’ll worship God.”
Joshua is not just talking about showing up in church for an hour on Sunday to check that to-do off the list. We are not any better than our ancestors in the faith of old. We mess up. We make a lot of other things in our lives more important than God. We build our own golden calves, whether it be making ourselves slaves to our phones or to our calendars, making up excuses for why we don’t have time to pray, why we can’t honor the Sabbath day and keep it holy, and so on. You know where you most struggle to put God before other things in your life. When we talk today about renewing the covenant with God in our own lives, it can’t start with what we’re able to do. If we put ourselves first, we’re only making an idol out of ourselves, thinking somehow we could possibly be more perfect than God. Instead, we can only start with confession to God, that we need help. We’re easily tempted by other gods. We’re easily pulled in other directions. We need forgiveness. We certainly need grace. “As for me and my family, we will worship God,” is not so much as a declaration as a plea, for God to help us – for God to bring us back into awareness that God IS at the center of our lives. As Lutherans, we believe we don’t make God the center of our lives, because God is always at the center of all things. The only thing we do is respond or become more aware of God’s action already at the center. We love God because God first loved us, messed up, imperfect, wayward, broken people. Just like God sticks with Joshua and the Israelites, thanks be to God, God is still sticking with us. Amen.