From Me to We
Talking to a friend a few weeks ago, he told me that now, 18 months after the start of the pandemic it has begun to feel like he is in a crisis of faith. It has been hard living like we have, hasn’t it? Stuck in our homes, vacillating between being scared and being tired, weary of making decisions that weigh risk or reward, not sure whether we preference an article we read in a newspaper, or something we heard on the radio, or the latest word from a politician. Things that used to require no thought like riding the bus to work now require us to think about exposure and variants. It is hard to know what is the right choice for our communities, our families and ourselves.
All of this, though, is just a backdrop to this crisis of faith. What a gift it is to be able to join worship hundreds of miles away from where we live. And what a joy it is to know that even when we are wearing our pajamas or following guidelines to stay in our homes we can hear the Word preached, and we can join together in this new way, wherever we are.
But it is tiring, isn’t it? Learning how to be faithful in this new world. Finding our way, and recognizing those things that we miss. It is hard not to feel as if our faith is changing, feeling different, and maybe even harder. Those small moments that make us feel like church are simply more difficult now- shaking hands in worship, or giving a hug to someone who is grieving. Feeling the power of bodies in the same room together, singing our songs of faith, praying the words that we know deep in our bones. Eating bread and drinking wine at the table. Joining our voices as one as we turn toward the God that has been with our people through time. It is a gift to find new ways to be together, and it is a challenge that the old ways are not yet what they were. I remember for me what it felt like to walk into this space after being away for so long and to be able to sing together. It made my heart hurt because those are songs I have sang my whole life, with people here, with my family, with communities that are figuring out how to gather somewhere else, too.
Yet, the thing about a crisis of faith, is that if you feel this in your spirit- if you arrive to this service weary and heavy laden as you see maps turn red and fear what is happening in our world- If you feel tired or uncertain about what it means to believe, you are in excellent company. Our scriptures are full of crises of faith, some obvious, some not so obvious. But when belief is hard, our ancestors in faith have asked these same questions in a different time.
Today we read a word from the final chapter of the book of Joshua. This passage includes a text you can find decorating the homes of many Christian folks I know, “as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” But before we get there, let’s remember how we find Joshua standing before the Israelites and offering them a choice.
The book of Joshua begins after the death of Moses, while the people are still wandering and waiting for the land that was promised. Joshua, named by God as one who was faithful, is commanded to take up the mantle of Moses and to bring God’s people into the land that was promised to them. But, we can’t engage this text without recognizing, though, that this is a complicated story, because the land that God is sending them to is already occupied by another people, the Caananites, and to get there to that promised land, they don’t just wander into a place and suddenly find it flowing with milk and honey. They will take the land by force, defeating powerful armies and taking the land for themselves. They will exile and decimate another people for their own promised land. The Lord says to the Israelites that God “gave you a land on which you had not labored, and towns that you had not built, and you live in them; you eat the fruit of vineyards and olive yards that you did not plant.” This is a book that is not written simply for us to take life-lessons about the choices we make to serve God, it is also a disturbing story of stealing a land by those who already know what it feels like to be exiled from their home. It is a story of promise, but also perhaps, a story of forgetting, forgetting who they were as they stood on the edge of the land they desired, forgetting what it means to be in exile when the promise of home shine before you.
It is after this military defeat, when Joshua gathers all the elders, the heads, the judges, and the officers of all the tribes of Israel at Shechem. They gather because they have entered the promised land, they have established their homes and their gardens, and now that they have entered into this land, it is time to renew the covenant, to respond to what God has done. According to our text, Joshua has gotten old and advanced in years, and tells these leaders that he is going the way of all the earth. So this speech, that we hear a sliver of in our reading, is a goodbye text, the words of one who has served God his whole life and wants to remind the people he has led not only what God has done, but what God will do in the future.
So, they gather at Shechem, having stolen the land, having captured the towns and the vineyards and the olive yards, and what we don’t hear this night/day, is that Joshua tells them the story of God’s love and care through time. Joshua reminds them of Abraham and Isaac, of Jacob and Esau, he reminds them of the flight across dry land as the army of Pharaoh were close at their heels, he reminds them of how they were attacked on every side as they wandered far from their land, and how at every step, from time before they can remember, that God has been with them. God’s hand has surrounded them, even when they have been unfaithful, when they complained in the desert and cried to go back into slavery in Egypt, when they worshipped other Gods, in every single moment, God has chosen them over and over again.
So the question of course, is who will they choose? When they have entered the promised land, land that was never theirs, how will that change them? Will it make it harder to choose God? Will they remember these stories, and the faithfulness of God? Will they remember the feeling of that dry land under their feet as they crossed the Red Sea? Will they remember the God who took them out of slavery and brought them to this place? When Joshua tells them that on this day, they have to choose who they will serve, this God or that, the God of the Ammorites or the God of Israel, how can they choose?
It is easy to take this much read verse from the book of Joshua, “As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” And assume that this is the answer to any crisis of faith- just to get back to an individual decision about who we are and where our allegiance lies. This individualist reading aligns with our culture values, because in a world like ours the choice is always individualized. The economic machine is set to remind you that your personal choices determine the kind of person that you are.
But there is something more nuanced here, because it isn’t just about you and your house, your family, your individual life, because those gathered around Joshua are the representatives of the tribes that have come into this new land, and so this question is not just about what we choose individually, but what we choose together. Who are we as a people, when our faith is tested? Who are we when it is tiring to believe? Who are we when we stand on stolen land and at the very same time try to live as a people that are commanded to care for our neighbor as ourselves?
If you were to google a word about this passage in Joshua you would encounter over and over again a preacher encouraging you to focus on your individual choices as a way to prove to yourself and the world that you commit you and your house to serving the Lord. But, I don’t think that is the good news. I don’t think relying on our own power is what it means to live into the gospel.
Here is the truth. This question, asking you to choose the God you will serve? Here is how it can be answered: You can’t begin to consider the question without first confronting the salvation history of God’s people. You can’t answer this question without knowing that God has been with us since the very beginning, with a hand at our back, bringing us up out of the pit, carrying us when the world feels as if it is going to be destroyed. You can’t answer this question without remembering Abraham, and Sarah, but Hagar, too, and Jacob, and David, and Samuel, and Mary and Joseph, and the baby Jesus. You can’t answer this question without seeing how through time God keeps showing up, again and again and again, saying, here, here among your people, I’m here.
And you can’t answer that question without turning to the person who is sitting next to you, whether here in the sanctuary or home on the couch, you can’t answer this question without looking at them and wondering, what in our relationship is an answer to this question? How does who we are together point us to this story of God? How can we choose with the life of the person sitting next to us in our minds?
Perhaps it is too early to tell, but it feels to me like we are again standing on the edge of a land that we can see just off in the distance, when we won’t say the word pandemic everyday, when every cough won’t send our anxieties spiking. And so, we too, like those tribes, with our complicated truth, with our privileges that we did not earn, on our lands that were never ours, with vaccines that aren’t available to people in countries other than our own, we hold those complicated truths and we receive this same question. But people who have come to the promised land are a changed people. When we get there, when we tell the stories of this time, we will be on the other side, in those gardens and those vineyards and those olive yards. And it is hard to be a people that remember when we called out for God to save us when we are on the other side. It is hard to remember wandering in the desert when you have stepped into the promised land.
So we remember our stories, not just of God’s continual presence, but of our need. The need of our ancestors for God, the need of our people through time for this one who will never abandon them. Our need when we were scared and unsure, when we were in a crisis of faith, when we didn’t know if we would make it through, these stories of God’s presence are not just a reminder of what God has done, but also who God is, and who we are. When we live in this new land, in this post-pandemic world, how will we choose God? Will we care for our neighbor differently? Will we remember that it has never been just about us and our house, but has always been about all of us and all of creation? Will we remember what it means to choose when it felt like we had no choice?
Because for us together to say yes, to say yes to this God of the exiled and the wandering, to say yes to this God of the broken and the downtrodden, to say yes to this God who has a difficult teaching, who came to us in Christ and called us to a life of service to the other, to say yes to this God, together, is to align ourselves with a God who is bigger than just that future promised land. This is a God of the distant past and the future, of our past story, no matter how hard it is to remember, and a future story of a world that can be different. That can be more holy, that can be more faithful.
So, as for our house, we gather around the Word and the table, we gather when we can’t sing our songs, when we see through a screen and when we can be in the same room, we gather and remember our stories, so that when the promised land is no longer a distant reality, we will, together, choose the one who has always been faithful to us, who never leaves us, never abandons us, who has been with us through desert wanderings and into the new future we will create together. Amen.