As for Me and My Household
Rev. Mark Schaefer
Kay Spiritual Life Center
November 6, 2005
Joshua 24:1-3a, 14-25; 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18; Matthew 25:1-13
Joshua 24 1 ¶ 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. 3 Then I took your father Abraham from beyond the River and led him through all the land of Canaan and made his offspring many.
14 ¶ “Now therefore revere the LORD, and serve him 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. He 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 he is our God.”
19 ¶ But Joshua said to the people, “You cannot serve the LORD, for he is a holy God. He is a jealous God; he will not forgive your transgressions or your sins. 20 If you forsake the LORD and serve foreign gods, then he will turn and do you harm, and consume you, after having done you good.” 21 And the people said to Joshua, “No, we will serve the LORD!” 22 Then Joshua said to the people, “You are witnesses against yourselves that you have chosen the LORD, to serve him.” And they said, “We are witnesses.” 23 He said, “Then put away the foreign gods that are among you, and incline your hearts to the LORD, the God of Israel.” 24 The people said to Joshua, “The LORD our God we will serve, and him we will obey.” 25 So Joshua made a covenant with the people that day, and made statutes and ordinances for them at Shechem.1 Thessalonians 4 13 ¶ But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers and sisters, about those who have died, so that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. 14 For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have died. 15 For this we declare to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will by no means precede those who have died. 16 For the Lord himself, with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call and with the sound of God’s trumpet, will descend from heaven, and the dead in Christ will rise first. 17 Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air; and so we will be with the Lord forever. 18 Therefore encourage one another with these words.
Matthew 25 1 ¶ “Then the kingdom of heaven will be like this. Ten bridesmaids took their lamps and went to meet the bridegroom. 2 Five of them were foolish, and five were wise. 3 When the foolish took their lamps, they took no oil with them; 4 but the wise took flasks of oil with their lamps. 5 As the bridegroom was delayed, all of them became drowsy and slept. 6 But at midnight there was a shout, ‘Look! Here is the bridegroom! Come out to meet him.’ 7 Then all those bridesmaids got up and trimmed their lamps. 8 The foolish said to the wise, ‘Give us some of your oil, for our lamps are going out.’ 9 But the wise replied, ‘No! there will not be enough for you and for us; you had better go to the dealers and buy some for yourselves.’ 10 And while they went to buy it, the bridegroom came, and those who were ready went with him into the wedding banquet; and the door was shut. 11 Later the other bridesmaids came also, saying, ‘Lord, lord, open to us.’ 12 But he replied, ‘Truly I tell you, I do not know you.’ 13 Keep awake therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour.
I.BEGINNING
This Tuesday, Virginians will go to the polls to elect a new governor. And it’s about time. Because I am sick of the constant barrage of political commercials on television. I live in the District of Columbia—I don’t have anything to do with all this, and yet because all the TV stations in the region are located in Washington, I wind up seeing all these ads. What’s really fun is when both Maryland and Virginia have heated senatorial contests going on.
But I watch these ads and marvel at the way the appeal for the vote is presented. One candidate will say, “I am the way forward, my opponent is the way backward, and is dishonest and will increase your commute times because of runaway development.” The other will say, “If my opponent is elected, all your taxes are going up and all the criminals will be let out of jail.” In the attorney-general race, one candidate presents himself as the only thing standing between your children and sex offenders, while the other candidate points out that the first guy is being funded by Pat Robertson and can’t be trusted to believe in science.
I have watched weeks and months of mud-slinging and hyperbole and have pity on my neighbors across the Potomac. I imagine Joshua standing before the assembled elders of Virginia saying “Choose this day whom you will vote for!” and the Virginians shrugging their shoulders out of disgust.
II. THE TEXT
That is the kind of decision we’re used to having to make. A choice between Candidate A or Candidate B. Between diet and regular. Regular or decaffeinated. It does not seem that we are ever presented with a situation and a choice as stark as the one that Joshua presents to the Israelites:
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.”
When the Israelites say that they will serve the Lord, Joshua tells them that they don’t have what it takes. They protest, and he says to them, “You are witnesses against yourselves” and they respond “We are witnesses”—in effect, putting themselves on record should they ever go against their own word.
The choice that Joshua presents the Israelites with seems odd to us. These are, after all, the people whom God delivered out of Egypt into the Promised Land. The ones to whom Moses passed on the Law at Sinai. Is their choice really an option? Isn’t it an obvious choice? It seems strange to hear Joshua categorize the choice in such a way, as though there were other possibilities.
III. ISRAEL
Scholars look at passages like this, and many of the passages of the Bible that were written before the Babylonian Exile and point out that Israel might not have always truly been what we could consider a “monotheistic” people. They were monotheists in that they had one God—for them. But the existence of other gods was not ruled out entirely. And some even point out that the prohibition “You shall have no other gods before me” suggests that there are other gods, it is just that Israel is called to worship one: the Lord. Scholars would point out that it wasn’t until after the Exile that the Israelites would come to understand that their God was the only God, and was God of the whole creation.
Joshua is not challenging the Israelites with a choice that was necessarily obvious to them. Indeed, given the long history of the people’s struggles with idolatry, that we find in the writings of the prophets, it is clear that this probably wasn’t the most clear-cut choice available to them. He is challenging them to affirm their relationship with the Lord as against all other gods.
In so doing, Israel establishes itself as a people in relationship with the Lord and not with any other God. And serving this God is different than serving the other gods of the nations around them. For the Lord invites the people into modeling an alternative community. One not driven by fear and violence but by justice and righteousness. “What does the Lord require of you but to seek justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God?” writes the Prophet Micah. The prophetic tradition understood that serving the Lord was not like serving the foreign Gods. The Israelites were to be a people apart—distinguishable from the others, not only in the foods they ate and clothing they wore, but in God they served and the way they lived their lives as a result.
That modeling of the alternative community began with the Sinai covenant and is renewed by Joshua’s challenge to the elders of Israel: “Choose this day whom you will serve.”
IV. THE CHURCH—THE COMMUNION OF THE SAINTS
A. Jesus’ Teaching
Like Israel before it, the Church, too, is called to be an alternative community, one whose allegiance is not to the world, or to the state, or to any human authority, but to God. We understand that Jesus has called us to set ourselves apart from the world, and the ways of the world. Hear these words from Mark 10:
42 So Jesus called them and said to them, “You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. 43 But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, 44 and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. 45 For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.”
“But it is not so among you…” Jesus’ words remind us that we are not to follow the injustices and idolatries of the world. As for us and our household, we serve the Lord. Our allegiance is first to God.
B. The Saints
It is a statement of allegiance that so many of the Saints paid dearly for. Today is All Saints Sunday, a Sunday on which we commemorate the Saints of the Church. Now, it’s usually around this time of year, that you get the question: “Do Methodists believe in saints?” and the answer to that is “yes”. Now, we do not canonize saints, the way the Orthodox and Catholic churches do, nor do we pray to the saints, but we certainly recognize the canonization of others, and certainly Methodists have churches named “St. Luke’s” and “St. John’s” and so on.
But for United Methodists, like most protestants, when we use the word “the saints” we refer to all those in the church who have gone on before us and who are with us now. The church is “the communion of the saints”—that great fellowship that spans the millennia and the miles, that unites every Christian in every place and in every time.
And as we celebrate our connectedness to that “great cloud of witnesses”, that communion of the saints, we recognize that the Church throughout history has always had those who believed their faith and culture put them at a crossroads, and that often meant danger and often loss. The last century, violent as it was, saw its share of saints:
1. Martin Luther King
Martin Luther King chose the path of service to God to combat racial injustice and it cost him his life.
2. Dietrich Bonhöffer and Martin Niemöller
Dietrich Bonhöffer and Martin Niemöller were part of the Confessing Church in Germany during the Third Reich. They opposed the regime and gave loyalty to God. Both were arrested. Niemöller was placed into concentration camps. Bonhöffer was executed mere days before the end of the war.
3. Oscar Romero
Oscar Romero was an El Salvadoran priest elected Archbishop, because he was believed to be “safe”. He quickly got involved in his country’s situation after the murder of two parishioners and became an outspoken advocate against the violence in the country. He was gunned down while celebrating the Mass on Easter Sunday.
4. Paul Rusesabagina
Paul Rusesabagina was a hotel manager in Rwanda. When the Hutus began to slaughter Tutsis in his country by the thousands, he, himself a Hutu, turned his hotel into a place of refuge for Tutsis and used his extraordinary talents to keep everyone alive at great personal risk.
The Saints have always had to face the consequences of making a choice to serve God above all else.
V. THE CHOICE
A. Choosing
It is no less the case with us. The choice is still before us. We look back at the Joshua story and we find it a little odd. Odd because Joshua seems to accommodate the idea that the people might choose a god other than the Lord. And we smile as we think back upon our spiritual ancestors’ polytheistic, or quasi-monotheistic past and we decide that those kinds of questions no longer really concern us.
And yet they do.
Perhaps the choices are not as obvious to us because we have relegated faith into a corner of our lives. We have religion (or its more obnoxious isolationist cousin spirituality), and then we have politics, art, sports, family, etc., etc. Joshua and the Israelites didn’t understand religion as something separate from everything else. They understood it—as many Jews do to this day—as a way of life.
The question we are being asked is not: “Insofar as you have any religious beliefs, do you believe that Yahweh is God?” The question we are asked is: to whom do we give our entire life and being? Whom will we serve?
B. The One Chosen
But the choice is not like those we are accustomed to being presented with. The one we are invited to choose first chose us. God gave us the gift of life without regard to our merit. Through the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, God extends the gift of eternal life freely, by grace.
Through grace God invites us into relationship, pardons us, cleanses us of all sin, and strengthens us to grow in personal and social holiness. The choice between God and something else is not the same as the choice between two political candidates—where the differences are owed primarily to hyperbole rather than fact. Serving God represents something wholly other—a rejection of the brokenness of the world and an embrace of the love of God and a desire to share that love with others. God showers us with love and desires for us to do the same with others.
C. As for our household
As with the people Israel, a people in service of God looks different than any other group, because it is a community formed by grace—and it stands apart from the idolatries of the world.
The world may choose the gods of racial hatred and bigotry, bust as for us and our household we will serve the Lord, who made all people in the Divine Image and who seeks human dignity for all.
The world may choose the gods of greed and consumerism, but as for us and our household we will serve the Lord, and share our blessings with those in need and who are ‘the least of these’ our brothers and sisters.
The world may choose the gods of violence and retribution, but as for us and our household, we will serve the Lord, the God of Peace, who calls us toward forgiveness and reconciliation.
The world may choose the gods of self-gratification and self-idolatry, but as for us and our household, we will serve the Lord, and build community and relationships of fidelity.
The world may choose the gods of exclusion and isolation, but as for us and out household, we will serve the Lord: who tells us that God’s house shall be a House of Prayer for all people.
The world may choose the gods of fear, but as for us and our household we will serve the Lord, who said through the prophet Isaiah: “do not fear, for I am with you, do not be afraid, for I am your God.”
VI. END
For us, in a myriad ways, every day is an election day. Every day we are presented with choices in which we declare our allegiance. The choices are not always as clear as we would like. They are often fraught with difficult consequences. But every moment, we are afforded the opportunity to be a people of Love and Grace, a people of Justice and Mercy, a people of Faith. Every day, it is as if we can still hear the words of Joshua echoing down to us through the ages: “Choose this day whom you will serve…”
