“Who Will You Serve?”
Fourteenth Sunday After Pentecost
August 25, 2024
Burnt Hills United Methodist Church
Video from Livestream (starts at 35:38)
It’s an old song.
It’s an old tale from way back when.
It’s an old song.
And we’re gonna sing it again.
It’s a sad song—it’s a tragedy.
It’s a sad tale.
It’s a sad song.
We’re gonna sing it anyway.
Any fans of Hadestown in here?
It’s a really, really great show. No surprise that it won all the Tony Awards a couple years ago. Anaïs Mitchell crafted a beautiful re-telling of the familiar Greek myth of Orpheus and Euridyce. A tragedy about, spoiler alert for a thousands year old Greek myth (I guess?), is about two lovers who end up separated for all eternity because Orpheus just couldn’t not look behind him on their way out of hell. And right from the get-go, Mitchell makes sure that everyone in the audience knows how this story is going to end, true to the form of the conventions of Greek theatre. It’s an old song. It’s a sad song. We’re gonna sing it anyway.
Our scripture lesson this morning is, perhaps, also familiar. As for me and my house, we will serve the LORD. I’m guessing you’ve seen it once or twice, hanging on the wall of someone’s family room or at the entry to someone’s house—or maybe it’s hanging on a wall in your house. It’s a lovely sentiment.
Choose this day, who you will serve. The gods of your ancestors from when you lived in the region beyond the river? The gods of the Amorites in whose land you are now living?
As for me and my house, we will serve the LORD.
The LORD. The God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob. The God who delivered you from bondage in Egypt. The God who nourished you with manna and quail and sweet water as we wandered the wilderness. The God who brought you into this land and vanquished your enemies. That’s the God I and my household will serve.
It’s a fitting capstone to the Book of Joshua. If you read the book in its entirety, you’ll find that it’s full of these awesome depictions of fierce battles between the armies of the Israelites and the various Canaanite peoples.
Jericho.
Ai.
Jerusalem.
Hebron.
Eglon.
Laschich.
The Amorites and the Hittites and the Jebusites and the Perizzites.
And through it all, the LORD remains with the Israelites and ensures victory after stunning victory. As long as the people remain faithful to the LORD and follow Joshua’s instruction, they remain victorious.
So now, people of God, choose this day if you will serve the LORD or if you will serve other gods. I know which one I and my family will serve.
The end. Roll credits. A fitting end to the Book of Joshua.
And yet. That’s not the end of the story.
Whenever I teach about the Hebrew Bible, I always try to emphasize the fact that we really can’t make sense of any of it without first understanding the traumatic shock the community of faith endured following the destruction of Jerusalem and the first temple and subsequent seventy-year captivity in Babylon in 587 BCE. It is the defining collective trauma experienced by this group of people who are our spiritual ancestors. And, while I could go on and on about the intricacies of the geopolitics of the Ancient Near East and Levant and their histories that we are still learning more and more about every day, we’d be here way longer than any of us actually want to be here on a Sunday morning.
Suffice to say, losing everything—losing your city, your temple, your place and entire understanding of yourself and who you are—losing everything is a lot to handle.
Maybe some of us are at that place this morning. We never know what a day is going to bring.
But the good news, friends, is that we, just like them all those thousands of years ago, are not alone in the midst of our trials and tribulations. We have been given the greatest gift of all—we have been given the gift of each other. And we can lean on one another to help put the pieces back together and try and make sense of what happened to experience our traumas.
Because what doesn’t kill us doesn’t make us stronger. But letting ourselves heal will.
That’s what the people of God were experiencing in the aftermath of this traumatic chapter of their history. It was during this chapter and the years following it that stories, long preserved through oral tradition, started to be codified and written down. Stories about their history and their relationship with the God of their ancestors. Stories about where they came from and how they came to possess the land and how they lived in the land and, ultimately, how they lost the land. Stories that would get preserved and shared from generation to generation.
Only take heed and keep your soul diligently lest you forget the things your eyes have seen. Make them known to your children and your children’s children.
And, over time, the scrolls that these stories were written down in would come to have names. Names like Joshua and Judges and Samuel and Kings. These four books—six, if you break Samuel and Kings up into two books each like our Christian bibles do—all tell one giant, overarching story.
The story of how the people came to take possession of the land.
How they lived in the land.
How they related to each other while in the land.
And, finally, how they lost the land.
The authors of Joshua knew that this ending was coming—the events depicted in Joshua take place about four hundred years or so before the Babylonian Captivity started. The authors of Joshua were living through this post-captivity, post-exilic reality.
They were curating their own history to make sense of their present reality for the sake of the generations that would come after them. All trying to answer the oldest, perhaps most devastating question any of us can ever wrestle with: Why?
It’s an old song.
It's an old tale from way back when.
It's an old song.
And that’s how it ends.
When we look at this morning’s passage through those lenses, perhaps we come away from it with a different perspective. What, on its surface, appears to be a sentimental picture—choose this day whom you will serve, but as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD—turns into ironic foreshadowing of things to come.
Because, here’s the thing. In spite of what the people say here at the end of Joshua:
God forbid that we ever leave the LORD to serve other gods! The LORD is our God.
He is the one who brought us and our ancestors up from the land of Egypt, from the house of bondage.
He has done these mighty signs in our sight.
He has protected us the whole way we’ve gone and in all the nations through which we’ve passed.
The LORD has driven out all the nations before us, including the Amorites who lived in the land.
We too will serve the LORD, because he is our God.
In spite of all of that, as we read the rest of the story, we learn that over the ensuing four hundred years, the people—especially the people with whom power and authority over the land are entrusted—fail to serve the LORD.
They fail to care for the impoverished.
They fail to welcome the immigrants.
They fail to provide for widows and orphans.
Rather than serving the needs of their people, they exploit them.
Rather than putting their people first, they put themselves first.
It’s what we talked about a couple weeks ago, right? They moved heaven and earth to consolidate their own power, their own influence, and their own wealth at the expense of the people of the land God put in their care. They failed to serve the LORD.
And when we re-read the Book of Joshua with all this in mind—when we re-read the Book of Joshua fully aware of how this story is setting up this four-hundred year-long saga—we see these kinds of hints shining through.
For example, early on in the narrative, we see the story of Rahab—a Jerichoite prostitute, forced to live with her family in the margins of the city. Literally, she and her family live between the inner and the outer walls of the city. Because she saves Joshua’s spies, her and her family’s lives are spared, even though God, through Joshua, commands the army to utterly destroy Jericho and all of its inhabitants. But what do they do with Rahab, this woman who spent her life literally on the margins of her social order, and her family?
They force her and her family to stay outside Israel’s camp.
In spite of everything, she only gets to trade the margins of one culture and social order for another.
All that happens at just the very first city that Joshua and his armies get to after crossing the Jordan River. Right from the start, this understanding that Joshua and his armies completely and utterly wiped out everyone who was already living in the land of Canaan when they got there, as commanded by God, is undermined by the example of Rahab.
And it’s not just Rahab. Instances like this pop up all throughout the book of Joshua. Instances that force the reader to wrestle with the fact that this land was never just the Israelites’ land. A group of Gibeonites and Hivites. Jebusites in Jerusalem. Gaza and Ashdod and Ashkelon and Gath and Ekron, all still controlled by the Philistines.
Perhaps that command to utterly destroy everyone in the land—leave no survivors—was, itself, also an ironic inclusion in the narrative. A command that’s impossible to follow. One of the cruel facts of war is that there are always survivors. There will always be a remnant left behind to pick up the pieces and refugees left to make sense of their traumatic reality.
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| Graffiti on the west side of the Berlin Wall offers a glimpse into East Germany —Photo Credit: U.S. National Archives |
It’s a sad song—it’s a tragedy.
It’s a sad tale.
It’s a sad song.
We’re gonna sing it anyway.
It’s certainly something that the authors of Joshua, writing as survivors of their own traumatic defeat in war four hundred years later, understood something about.
Choose now, this day, whom you will serve. Will you serve the gods of your ancestors from the land beyond the river? Will you serve the gods of the Amorites in whose land you now live? As for me and my family, we will serve the LORD.
The original readers of the Book of Joshua knew how this story was going to end. They knew that the priests and kings and scribes and wealthy elites weren’t going to serve the LORD, the God of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, as they controlled the land. And scenes like that of Rahab and her family, this marginalized group of others, would have stuck out like a sore thumb.
Because while Rahab’s descendents would, eventually, physically move from the margins of Israelite culture and social order in, towards the midst of Israelite culture, the Book of Joshua still says that her descendents are distinct—they’re still seen as “other” among the Israelites.
Still separated from the care of their social order.
How often do we still see that today?
How often do people stay in toxic and abusive situations because of the meager social protections they offer?
How often must the migrant worker toil and sweat to feed provide us with food with no labor protections of their own?
How often must the miner, who has dedicated their life to providing us with power, fail to be included in our noble dreams of a green economy while their community is stripped as bare as the earth they moved?
How often must the formerly incarcerated, eager to work after having paid off their proverbial debt to society, recidivate because of a carceral system that focuses on punishment rather than rehabilitation and we can’t afford the dignity of work to someone with a record?
How often must the person living with a disability struggle to find a place to fit in structures and systems not built to fit their needs?
How often must the refugee, transformed into one because they had the misfortune of being born on the wrong side of some geopolitical or economic conflict of our own design, be forced to remain on the borders—on the margins—in intolerable conditions?
How long, O LORD, must we keep singing this old, sad song?
But here’s the thing.
To know how it ends and still begin to sing it again as if it might turn out different this time.
Well I daresay that’s the purpose of this thing we call faith.
I daresay that’s the purpose of this thing we call Church.
Because the God that Joshua challenges us to serve, dear friends, is still alive. And Joshua’s invitation is extended to each and every generation of our family of faith. All those who came before us and those who will come after us.
There will always be the poor among us.
There will always be the refugee among us.
There will always be the orphan and the widow and the resident alien among us.
There will always be the downtrodden and imprisoned among us, yearning to be free.
And it’s in those places and in those faces that scripture tells us we find the face of God—the face of Christ.
It’s no accident, after all, that the Gospel of Matthew goes out of its way to put Rahab, a refugee who lived and died on the margins, into the genealogy and lineage of Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith.
Jesus, an impoverished man himself, who wandered the outskirts of the backwaters of the might of the Roman Imperial machine.
Jesus, the one who preached a message of liberation for the oppressed, freedom for the prisoners, good news for the poor, gave sight to the blind, and proclaimed that the year of the Lord’s favor was at hand—a message that got him killed by that very same imperial power.
Jesus, the one who could not be contained by the powers of sin and the powers of death. Whose resurrection from the grave and ascension into heaven shows to us that no matter how we think that old, sad song might end—no matter how many times it has ended the same way every single time we’ve sung it before—this time, it’s gonna be different.
That, when we choose to serve the LORD, when we seek first the welfare of our neighbors rather than ourselves and trust that, through the power of the Holy Spirit, our neighbors will take care of us too, we have nothing, absolutely nothing to fear.
May it be so.
Amen.
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