Joshua 24:1-2, 14-18
The Tribes Renew the Covenant
24 Then 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. 2 And 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.
14 “Now therefore revere the Lord, and serve God in sincerity and in faithfulness; put away the gods that your ancestors served beyond the River and in Egypt, and serve the Lord. 15 Now 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.”
16 Then the people answered, “Far be it from us that we should forsake the Lord to serve other gods; 17 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. God protected us along all the way that we went, and among all the peoples through whom we passed; 18 and the Lord drove out before us all the peoples, the Amorites who lived in the land. Therefore we also will serve the Lord, for Yahweh is our God.”
When Dara and I bought our first home—a small, two-bedroom, galley-kitchen, one-small-bath model built in the early 1900s—friends gave us a “Christian” welcome mat with an edited section of Joshua 24:15 on it. So, when you came to visit, the welcome mat made clear we were drawing a “line in the sand,” and challenging you to draw one, too: “Choose this day whom you will serve…but for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.” As I look back on those days 40 years ago, I think, “Boy, what a welcome!” In that same spirit, a “welcome” mat today might say, “We’re vaccinated—if you are not, go away.” Even more benign welcome mats, such as one with Steelers emblems all over them, say to guests: “Warning—rabid Steelers fans here. Wear a Cleveland Browns jersey at your own risk!” or “Go Steelers, or Go Home!”
Unfortunately, “welcome mat” theology is all around us. More of them appear now as Facebook memes, Instagram posts, or tweets, but if you can’t summarize your entire faith system in less than 144 characters, you just don’t believe. And, as many of the Facebook memes say, “If you don’t repost this, you don’t care.” Imagine if Jesus had been required to state the entire Sermon the Mount in 144 characters:
Blessed are the ones who believe like me, and phooey on the rest of you. You are salt and light—figure it out. Laws are good. I’m better. No eye-poking.
Doesn’t quite have the same impact, does it? But please repost it as the sum total of your theology, or bad things may happen to you.
Seriously, not many important things can be adequately communicated through humorous cartoons or clever catch-phrases. And even when they sound simple and profound, like this text’s “…chose this day whom you will serve…but as for me and my house…”, rarely is this the reality.
The broader context of today’s scripture is pretty self-explanatory: Israel had been “watered down” by intermarriage with other surrounding cultures and was now devoted to a plethora of gods. I’m sure in some cases they still revered Yahweh, but the “God of Israel” may have been relegated to just a singular place on the mantle with some nicer, more valuable statues, including a few that promised control over things like sunshine, rain, land, and sex, and not necessarily in that order. Joshua is being a leader and doing his “meme-loving” best to make it clear to Israel what they should be doing, and he promises to lead by example—“…as for me and my house…”
But let’s take a look at the dynamics behind the three most important phrases in this text: “choose this day,” “as for me and my house,” and “we will serve the Lord.”
“Choose this day…” When is the last time you were faced with making a choice, and it was crystal-clear easy to make one? Today, we are faced with a ridiculous variety of choices, whether it is ordering an ice cream cone, buying a car, or deciding how to understand a passage of scripture. I broke my iPhone case a couple of weeks ago, and since we were on the road, I made the rounds of two or three different “discount” department stores (remember that phrase—if you are under 50, you’ve probably never heard it). The first one didn’t even have a case for my model of cell phone, and the second had very expensive cases, but LOTS of them in tons of colors, styles, and materials. Oh, the choices! I was looking for the cheapest “protection” for my phone I could find, as when I got home, I planned to order the exact replacement for the one I had broken, probably through Amazon. (Modern parable: If you are afraid of using a cell phone without a case, you probably shouldn’t even have one.) I must have a case, as my phone acts like a bar of soap without one, and I can’t afford to be replacing the device, so I surround it with a clamshell-like, magnetized sarcophagus that takes the beating when I drop it, but since this shattered (in fairness, protecting the phone) at my latest drop, I was looking for one of those cheap, blobby plastic things as an interim. Finally, the third store had one of these for only $5.00. Adding up the total cost of cases I have purchased for this particular iPhone, I’m guessing that it would have cost half as much to just replace the phone in the first place.
Where was I going with this? Oh yeah, choices. The world doesn’t make them easy for us today, and if you happen to be partnered with someone who doesn’t like too many options, they will just shut down on you. But woe is you if you intervene and make the choice for them! But choosing is just the first part of this statement. It says “choose THIS DAY”! Now we have a deadline, and it is immediate. This is the ploy of the salesperson—“This is the last one!” or “Someone else is considering this car, so if you don’t buy it now, it may not be available this afternoon.” Let’s call this the “forced choice.” And if we read the scripture carefully, we see that Joshua is suggesting that Israel had already chosen other gods, and he was chiding them that they must pick one of them, but meanwhile, he was going with Yahweh (“the Lord”). He may be employing a bit of psychology here (“YOU don’t HAVE to root for the Steelers—you are free to root for any of those other PITIFUL, LOSERS”).
How about “as for me and my house…”? We get the “me” part, but what about “my house”? There was a time when this phrase was understood to mean that the head of the household set the values and rules for everyone under that roof, but that is as outdated today as Facebook, for most of you. What IS a “household,” anyway? Does it mean those who are part of the same family? And, if so, what kind of family? Single parent? Adopted? “Nuclear?” Even a more modern phrase like “family values” rarely communicates anything clearly today. As a product of the 60s and 70s, I still relate to “family values.” When it came to faith issues, the family I grew up in and the one my wife and I raised were “church going” families. And after I became a pastor, my “family values” included hours and hours attending church events and functions “as a family.” We tried so hard to not “poison” our two children with church culture that was either too restrictive, prescriptive, or prosaic so as to taint their fledgling faith, but now that they are fully-grown adults, we have received feedback from both that, despite our best efforts, the prevailing church culture did dull their spiritual senses quite a bit. And because we parents seemed to “thrive” in it, each of them had to find ways to love us, but build an emotional “moat” around the parts they just couldn’t accept (I wonder if this is that “hedge of protection” so many K-LOVE Christians pray for today?).
Perhaps we need to redefine “my house,” or even “family values” today? Perhaps we parents would do better to keep all of the members of the family—in whatever form “family” takes, in your situation—“in the loop” when it comes to defining any values we feel we should “share.” Maybe “shared values” is the better expression? A modern Joshua may say, “As for me and those of my faith community who have agreed to share our values…” If we were raising our children today, we would engage in far more “feedback” conversations about how our kids were understanding and experiencing their “forced” church culture, and would hope to help them sort out these convictions to make their own choices. At least I would like to think we would do so. However, we have certainly been enriched by the faith conversations we have had with them as adults. It’s never too late to do the right thing.
And finally, we come to the “serve the Lord” parcel of this pericope. What does it mean to “serve the Lord”? To keep this message from becoming an even longer tome, let’s assume “the Lord” to be the Judeo-Christian deity, Yahweh, and even Yahweh, as revealed by Jesus Christ, since we are in the context of a community of Christian believers. This doesn’t make it much easier, though, in trying to define what it means to serve Yahweh.
For some, it simply means keeping God’s “commandments,” although often in dispute is what areGod’s commandments? Does this include ones from the “Old” Testament (Hebrew Bible), and if so, which ones? The danger here is in “cherry-picking” favorites while leaving more inclusive ones, such as “welcoming the stranger” or “leave some gleanings for the poor” because they set a broader agenda than with which we are comfortable. Others believe that “serving” God means doing what Jesus taught us to do, and that is a harder assignment. “Loving our neighbor as ourselves” has had libraries written about what it may mean, while “becoming the servant of all” and “the last shall be first” are even more intriguing. What if we go back to “shared values,” and at least agree to have conversations with our faith community to see if we can arrive at a few “servant goals” to work on, supporting one another while trying, and employing regular “recalculating” when making a few wrong turns? I have found that if I become the “God of my own choosing,” my personal faith values run the risk of becoming horribly self-centered, almost narcissistic ones that I will use to judge others instead of using them to collaborate and cooperate with the broader community. I am not even free to engage in biblical interpretation without consulting the others in the “cloud of witnesses,” in this shared-values model.
I confess to being too regularly “turned off” by the “servant ministry” typology. If this phrase is used to describe a willingness to “lose myself” in the faith mob, or put every aspect of my identity and my journey into subservience to what that “mob” has defined as “servant ministry,” then I will opt out, most often. However, if we think about servant ministry as a vision of what Jesus modeled, then I am more interested in going along. Again, we need each other, as well as the respectful, informed work of the scholars to help us ferret out what this “model” may look like. AND it will need to be put into a context that is able to be lived out by the faith community AND will speak to our contemporary “target audience,” or it will grow quickly just as irrelevant as denominational expressions have. Does anyone out there really believe that the current war raging within United Methodism is viewed by our “target audience” as a good witness? Or that either faction in the battle has the “right words” that will “transform the world”?
So, as you see, understanding and acting on “Choose this day whom you will serve…but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord” is a lot harder than it looks. We would have to look at the longer and broader ministry of Joshua to be adequately enlightened, but as members of the Christian faith community, maybe we just take Joshua’s challenge and let it point us toward Jesus the “author and finisher” of our faith? Oh, and Jesus invites us to serve ALONGSIDE of him, “taking up our cross” to follow. But remember, this “cross-bearing” is not something we do in solitude or in silence. It is a collaborative task and a shared value among all of us people of faith.
But if that doesn’t work for you, here’s the “Sermon on the Mount” tweet again:
Blessed are the ones who believe like me, and phooey on the rest of you. You are salt and light—figure it out. Laws are good. I’m better. No eye-poking.
Amen.
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