Sermon for the 12th Sunday after Pentecost
Lectionary 21 Proper 6
August 23, 2009
Texts: Joshua 24:1-2a, 14-18; Psalm 34:15-22; Ephesians 6:10-20; John 6:56-69
Choices!
Life is full of choices.
Think of all the choices you have made this week.
In the scheme of things,
Some were fairly trivial.
Deciding what to wear in the morning
Or what to have for dinner in the evening.
Some were more significant.
Decisions such as
How to spend your income.
How to spend your time on the weekend, or your day off.
Or what project you were going to tackle
At work, home or in preparation for school.
You may even have been confronted with some major choices this past week.
Maybe you had to made a choice
Concerning medical care for a child, spouse or parent.
Maybe you reached a career juncture,
Where you had to make a choice about what to do next.
Maybe you had to make a choice about something
To do with your home.
Or, maybe you had to make a educational choice
About attending further education, choosing your major,
Or deciding whether to stay in school.
And each of us makes a continual string of choices
About how to align our use of resources:
Time, money and energy with our life goals.
Even if we are busy, we usually feel at peace
If we are doing something important to us.
However, if we are really busy,
And doing something that either feels like wasted effort
Or is something that just isn’t important to us,
We are easily exhausted and disgruntled.
The choices we make are reflective
Of what we value in life, or in other words, what our god is.
In the Old Testament lesson today,
Joshua posed a major choice to the Israelites.
They were assembled at Shechem,
An important crossroads in Palestine,
On the eve of Joshua’s death
And the eve of coalescing the 12 tribes into a federation of Israel.
Joshua assembles the people
To have them renew their covenant with God.
He knows that he is about to pass on
And wants to make sure that the people
Are headed in the right direction.
In the longer text that Larry read this morning,
You heard Joshua recount the history of God’s Chosen People.
You heard how God chose Abraham
And gave him Isaac,
And how God chose their ancestors
And brought them out of slavery from Egypt,
Then saved them from the Egyptians at the Red Sea
And accompanied them through the wilderness years.
God chose them
By giving them land in Palestine
And fought with them
Against an array of enemies,
So that they could occupy fertile lands,
Vineyards and olive groves.
In short, Joshua gave the people a twelve verse summary
Of the history of God’s saving actions among them.
After the history lesson,
Joshua posed a choice to the people:
Choose to serve the Lord your God,
Who brought you out of Egypt;
Or choose to serve the gods of your ancestors,
The gods of Egypt,
Or the gods of the people whose land you now occupy.
In those days, it was commonly thought
That certain gods protected the people of certain lands.
Joshua poses a choice to the people:
Chose your favorite local gods
Or choose the universal Lord YOUR God.
In many ways,
The choice that Joshua posed to the Israelites
Is the same choice that we face today.
A god is often defined
As that in which you trust completely.
A god is that which you can depend on to do good to you,
And to whom you can run to for refuge.
Today we are asked to choose
Whether we trust completely in God
Or whether we are looking for other safety nets.
When we hear the First Commandment:
I am the Lord your God,
You are to have no other gods before me,
Our mind immediately gloms onto an image of other gods
As those idol-like gods constructed by the ancients.
It is easy to think,
Oh, no, I wouldn’t worship a golden statue
Or a carved wooden idol.
But when we are tempted to worship other gods,
The temptation we face
Is much more subtle and sophisticated.
Some of the gods we are tempted to worship,
To name just a few,
Are money, our homes and leisure time.
Now all of those things are good,
And they are necessary in our lives.
Our God does not want us to be without money, homes or leisure,
But there is a difference between enjoying them
And placing them at the core of our existence.
Another god in which some of us are tempted to put our trust
Is our own power or position.
When we base our entire lives on achieving a certain status,
Position, or career goal.
When we begin to think that everything will be perfect and wonderful,
If only.....
And you can fill in the blanks,
For what that if only is.
This is a point at which we are entering a red zone
Of being in danger of choosing another god.
This is the point at which you can cross the line
Of focusing all your energy on that goal,
Leaving no energy for worship and dedication
To the God who has chosen you
Through your baptism.
The choices we make
And how we decide to use the resources
And time entrusted to us,
Are reflective
Of who or what we consider to be our god.
Our God does not want us to put our ultimate trust
In anything but God.
As he approached death,
Joshua knew that the Israelites
Would have a hard time
Staying dedicated to the Lord their God.
He tells them that they will find it hard to serve God,
And he warns them that God will turn on them
If they abandon God.
The whole point of Joshua’s sermon at Shechem
Was to remind the people
That they had been chosen.
They did not choose God,
Rather, God chose them,
And showed saving grace to them.
The people acknowledge that the Lord their God
Had brought them out of slavery and out of Egypt
And protected them along the way.
That God is their God.
They swear their dedication to God,
And promise to serve only God.
Now if you know anything about the history of God’s chosen people
You know that Joshua was right.
Their history is littered with examples of God’s people backsliding.
The Baals, foreign gods, wealth and power all tempt them
Into abandoning their promise and commitment to serve only God.
The entire Old Testament is a sine wave
Of God’s people serving God, then abandoning God,
God punishing them, and then rescuing them yet one more time.
This pattern of being tempted away from serving God,
Is one that may feel quite familiar to us.
It is very easy for us to find activities
That seem more appealing than serving and worshipping God.
And we can find all kinds of important things that demand our resources.
Slowly, but surely, our relationship with God weakens
And we find that we know longer know and trust God,
But have found other things (aka gods) on which we now depend.
If you have ever read C.S. Lewis’ “Screwtape Letters,”
Which is a manual for the devil’s nephew,
You have a catalogue of the many things
That can help us to make bad choices.
The devil tells his nephew, above all,
To keep his victim from attending church
And from hearing God’s Word.
The devil suggests all kinds of schemes
Including encouraging a disgruntlement
With organized religion in general,
And the victim’s specific church in particular.
Anything to keep the victim from being in the presence of God.
When we fail to spend time in God’s presence
And no longer hear God’s Word regularly,
We begin to forget that it is God who has called and chosen us.
When the Israelites persisted in failing to serve God,
God went on the ultimate rescue mission,
Sending God’s son, the Word of eternal life.
This rescue mission was not just for God’s original chosen people,
But for all of us who are chosen by God in baptism,
And who have come to know and believe
That Jesus is the Holy One of God.
By ourselves, we, too are prone
To the same kind of backsliding that the Israelites experienced.
We are subject to a whole array of temptations
And things that draw us away from God.
But unlike the ancient Israelites,
We have the Word of God in Christ Jesus,
And the gift of the Holy Spirit to strengthen us.
We don’t have to serve and believe on our own.
With all its foibles and failures,
The Christian Community is still a place
Where we can collectively hear God’s strengthening Word
And where we can support each other’s attempts
To serve, believe and navigate the minefield of temptations.
Simon Peter, Jesus’ disciple, who occasionally gets it right,
Hits the nail on the head in this morning’s Gospel.
When Jesus asks his closest disciples if they are going to leave him,
Simon Peter answers: “Lord to whom can we go,
You have the Words of Eternal Life.”
Like the Israelites, you have a choice,
A choice to serve the living God
Who has called you in Baptism and nurtured you,
Or a choice to rely on any number of human designed structures.
The Good News is that God sent Jesus
So you would hear the saving Word,
The Word of Eternal Life.
God chooses you.
God wants you.
In Jesus God rescues you.
Amen