Facing The Unknown in Faith
Sermon Preached by
The Rev. Dr. Andrew Stirling
Sunday, January 8, 2012
Joshua 5:15-6:7
There is a gentleman that I run into from time to time. While I wouldn't say we are friends, we certainly talk about many different subjects. We usually meet either on the way in or on the way out of a coffee shop in the area where I live. At the beginning of the New Year, just a week ago, he decided to ask me these questions, and we do pose each other rather challenging questions at times.
He said, “Andrew, you are a man who has travelled widely, you are a man who reads the newspapers, you are a man who is interested in the world. [I think he was puffing me up a little bit.] I was wondering if you could tell me what you think - I am really interested to know - about some of the greatest events of this past year. I have been thinking about it a lot. What do you think was the greatest disaster, for example, in 2011?”
Well, I had to weigh this very carefully. After much thought and deliberation, I said, “I think it was Manchester United's loss to Barcelona in the Champions League final.”
So not expecting that answer, he said, “What do you think was the most significant event then of 2011?”
I thought some more, and I said, “The Leafs signing Joffrey Lupul. I think that was the most significant.”
Then he said, “What was the greatest achievement in 2011?”
I said, “I think the passing record of Aaron Rodgers with the Green Bay Packers.”
By this time, I had lost all credibility with this man!
Do you sense an interpretive theme here? Do you sense a particular bias of interest on my part? Oh definitely, for I had overlooked, had I not, so many of the important things. The greatest disaster: probably the terrible effects of the tsunami in Japan. Of significance: probably in Canadian politics the majority for the Harper Government. When I think of great accomplishments, it would be the Nobel Prize for Physics won by Perlmutter, Schmidt and Riess for discovering and confirming the expanding universe by observing distant supernovae. Those are probably the things I should have said! But, I didn't!
Why? It was because my mind at that very moment was a little mischievous, yes, but was also reflecting some of the interests of my life. Is it not true that in so many parts of our lives we look at things and we discuss things from the point of view of our own interests and our own biases and our own viewpoints? It is not that I was wrong in any of my statements: they were probably perfectly accurate within the realm of sport; but in the realm of life as a whole were totally vacuous and relatively unimportant. But for me, just at that moment, my biases kicked in, and I saw the world through the lens of one particular perspective.
I think we need to keep that in mind when we encounter our text from The Book of Joshua today. In many ways this passage is ancient. It is as old as the history and the story of Jericho, which has, according to archaeologists, one of the richest and oldest traditions in the whole of the Middle East. In fact, recent discoveries in archaeology have taken people back thousands of years to Jericho being in many ways a focal point, a gathering point of cultures between the east and the west within the Middle East. Jericho has been a centre of trade, a centre of political conflict, of immense importance in terms of being at the top of the Jordan: it is a powerful place. Jericho is also one of the most important places in the Bible.
Even when I visited Jericho a number of years ago, I didn't forget it, because it was such a fascinating place. You could get this sense of age and antiquity from it. It was the first time in my life that I had ever come face-to-face with a real live camel, and when asked whether or not I wanted to ride o the camel, I declined - for the camel's sake! Marial also was seemingly not interested in climbing the camel, but that was more because of the odour of the camel than anything. You can see why I am terrified now when the camel comes down the aisle towards me on Christmas Eve!
Jericho was the first time I saw a camel. It is just one of those places that stay in your mind and it is so much a part of the history of Israel. But, in this text we have the story of the conquering of Jericho by the Israelites. It many ways it is one of the most loved and one of the loathed of all of the biblical stories. It is loved for a number of very good reasons.
It is loved because it is the story of a minority people, the Israelites, who were able to take over this city of immense importance, that in its time had been heavily fortified, and to win a military victory over it and conquer it. It is the classic little guy winning the big battle. It is a lovely story because it is the story of how a pagan people, a people who had worshipped many Gods and turned their back on the Word that they had heard of the One God, and who had in fact lived lives that were really quite dangerous.
It was a world that often sacrificed children. It was a world that was rife with social problems. So, the Canaanites who were running Jericho were defeated by this minority group, and it was a good thing. It is a story that is loved, because what an image it is of people walking around the walls of a fortified city, blowing trumpets and horns, and bringing the wall down! It is a marvellous story!
It is a tremendous story, because it is a story that children can understand, and it is one of the foundational stories of so many of the Sunday school and Church School programs over the years. Who of you have not heard about the blowing of the trumpet and the walking around the walls of Jericho, and “the walls come tumbling down”, and you probably heard of it when you were four or five. It is an amazing story!
It is also one that is loathed. It is loathed, because we are told in this text that there was an oracle from God for war. In fact, the conquering of Jericho was at God's behest. It was God's desire to bring the wall down and conquer Jericho. There is implicit in this text a sense of violence, where in fact families were slaughtered within the city in order that they could not rise up again and cause mischief to the people of Israel.
Even though there are moments of grace when one person and her family are spared in the form of Rehab, nevertheless, despite Rehab being saved, this is a story that is violent, and some people recoil from it. I have actually heard people say that one of the reasons that they have a problem with faith is the story of Jericho, and they blow it up to such an extent that in this they see the hand of a pernicious God, so therefore they recoil, and they want nothing to do with the God of The Old Testament in particular. Is that not in a sense the wrong way to look at things?
Let's be absolutely honest here: did the writer of the Book of Joshua and those who were the scribes that wrote it down in the tradition of Deuteronomy, did they write it down to advocate genocide as a principle and to wipe people out as a matter of a course of life? No, they didn't! Did they advocate insurrection and violence as the only way that God's people can move ahead and succeed? By no means! Do you think that this Book was written in order to please and titillate little children in order that they could have a nice story about walls falling down, and some years later on, enter into the consciousness of a society because it is a cute story? I don't think so!
My point is that it is as absurd to look at the story of Joshua in that way as it is for me to look at the great events of the world through the lens of sport and sport alone. In other words, what we are looking at is based on our perspective, and when we read back into these ancient texts from the principles that we have learned over time, from the teachings that we have received, let's be honest about it, from Jesus of Nazareth, and we look back to hundreds of years before his birth, we have got to be very careful, and we have got to be very fair to the text, for it seems to me that the absurdity of trying to draw too much from the text is as important and as strange as not reading enough into it. And so, we need to be careful.
When we read the story of Joshua, what we are really reading is just what we are reading at Christmas, and what I said before Christmas: we are reading the story of God's activity on behalf of the people. It is what God is doing. God is protecting and guiding and nurturing people who have recognized Him. In a world that had often turned its back on God, or hadn't even heard the name of Yahweh, the people of Israel were an important means of God proclaiming his love and his grace and his salvation to the world.
Indeed, it is fair enough to say that when you read the Book of Joshua, Joshua got carried away at times. Clearly, in the writing of this there is an ancient tradition of hyperbole in excess, no question about it! Nevertheless and here is the point for today, neither you nor I would be talking about the Lord God had Joshua not won the Battle of Jericho. That minority people would have ultimately been forced from the face of the earth. Their very survival was at stake. This wasn't just an act of a pernicious God; this was an act of God to save his people in order that they might glorify him and bring his truth and justice and word to the world.
Here we are thousands of years later, so distantly removed from what happened in Jericho, yet I believe there is something that happened there that has an impact on us today. It is not just that we have faith and that we have this tradition brought to us; it is that we face an unknown future as Joshua did. If we watch how Joshua dealt with that unknown future, you and I might be able to derive benefit from it. That is what I want to look at this morning.
I want to do so by affirming a very basic principle in this text. It is namely this: that the Battle of Jericho began with a meeting between God and Joshua. It is fair enough to say that when Joshua went to Jericho with his priests and his small army and with his cohorts, he had behind him this great history and this great tradition. He had the story of Moses: he was Moses' successor. They had come out of Egypt. They had won their liberation. But now, they were on the brink of entering a promised land, and they knew that their very survival depended on it. While the future was important to him, so too was the past: the past had been the foundation, but the future was what was necessarily before him.
I was reading a fascinating article in an old National Geographic magazine. I think it had been sitting in a doctor's office since 1942 or something like that! It was a very old issue, and it was a story of Admiral Richard Byrd, who was the great explorer to the South Pole. On his second time back to the South Pole, Byrd noticed that he was trying to travel along what is known as the 180th Meridian, which is the date line but was unable to do so. No matter how much he fixed himself on that particular point, he kept vacillating. He said, “One minute I am yesterday, and the next minute, I am tomorrow!” I was moving between these two poles. This is what he said:
All the time we continued flying as closely as possible along the 180th Meridian. Even without wind drift, for which adequate correction can be made, it is obvious that no navigator can fly exactly along a mathematical straight line. Consequently, since this is the International Date Line, we were zigzagging constantly from today into tomorrow, and back again into yesterday.
He said that he could not hold that line and that he was constantly moving.
I think Joshua was like this. I think he was moving between faith in what God had done in the past - yesterday - but also in hope of what God would do right now and into the future. For Joshua, to use this analogy, the 180th Meridian was God the constant, and the fluctuations of time was God's presence. Joshua needed to rely on the covenantal relationship that God always had and to be able to trust in that. Joshua had to have a meeting with God.
Before Joshua went into Jericho, he did three things. The first was to recognize that he was standing on holy ground. It is right there in our text: “You are standing on holy ground so take off your shoes.” When you are meeting with God, it is a holy activity. What God was saying to Joshua at the place of their meeting was that he needed to confess that he was in the presence of the holy God.
One of the things that moved me many years ago when I visited the Holy Land was when I went to the Al Aqsa Mosque at the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. It was the first time I had been in a mosque of that enormity and we were all informed, as you are in mosques, to take your shoes off and to go barefoot. We went barefoot into the mosque, and there at a time of prayer a little later on there were people on their knees with their faces down praying. I read up some more about this and the recognition is just like Joshua in Jericho, that the people of God, when they are meeting with God need to get on their knees, and they need to bow their heads: they need to recognize that they are in and on holy ground.
The meeting with God for Joshua was not just an ordinary everyday meeting. It wasn't a chit-chat about life; it wasn't a meeting to carry out some minor details. This was a meeting between Joshua and the holy, gracious God. He was on holy ground. He bent down and knelt, and put his face to the ground and prayed in recognition of God. It is one of the most wonderful things that you can do, and it is one of the traditions in Islam that I deeply admire.
When we come to Communion in the form where we take it up at the rail, we kneel and we receive the sacrament. For us, this is a sign, a tribute, recognition of our meeting with God, and in our meeting with God we come humbly. I think one of the great New Year's resolutions we should have is to think about our worship in that way. I think we need to take the time to meet with God more often than we do. I think in our busy lives, with the uncertainties of our world, with the demands that are placed upon us, with all the myriad of instances that are out there, there is a need to do what Joshua did: to kneel, and to pray, and to meet with God.
Look how that meeting with God set the future. Look what transpired because of that meeting with God. It wasn't just an ordinary business meeting. I don't know about you, but I am not the world's greatest lover of meetings. I like the beginning of meeting, when we chat and renew acquaintance, and I love the adjournment of the meetings when we get to leave them. But meetings, I don't know, I can't say that I find them fun! But they are important.
There is a need for meetings. There is a need for order in meetings. There is a reason for people to exchange views in meetings. You develop collective ideas in meetings. You make decisions in meetings. And, you learn from one another. Meeting are important, and they are important not only just to get the business done, but to have a sense of what might arise out of them. I always think that it is fitting in a business agenda, when the meeting is called, one of the first things on the agenda is business arising from the former meeting. The former meeting, in other words, is to determine what the future is, and the current meeting is to discern whether the agenda and the decisions of that last meeting are fulfilled.
When Joshua and God had their meeting, Joshua heard something profound. What he heard profoundly was the Battle of Jericho, even before it had begun, was already won. This is an incredible moment in the Book of Joshua. This is THE moment in this whole story: God had confirmed to Joshua that he would be successful. Now, of course the word that Joshua received sounded absurd to him: to walk around the walls seven times, to blow trumpets and horns, to put the priests rather than the soldiers out front. It seemed like a bizarre way to do things. But, God was showing the way forward. It was a priestly way. It was a religious way. It was a theological way. If the people would follow in a sense the priests around, then the victory would be theirs. The people recognized God would be held up first, and then the victory would come.
Daniel Meeter, one of my very good friends, wrote in the book that I edited on the doctrine of the Trinity some years ago the following about the Trinity and God and worship. This is what Daniel wrote:
First of all, Christian worship is what happens when God comes to have a meeting with us in Christ. Of great importance in this definition is that God is both present and active in our worship, and that God's activity is primary in the meeting. Also important is the word ”˜meeting', and the connotations of a business meeting are not to be avoided. God has come to have such meetings with us in order to accomplish certain business. In Biblical history, these business meetings took the form of covenantal transactions, where the People of God understood what God wanted them to do. In our own day, in the twenty-first century, God makes us a form of worship, and he meets us in the services to create faith in us, and to stimulate and strengthen that faith that we need to face tomorrow.
Daniel is saying this: that our worship is our meeting with God, it is our moment to say “Lord God, we know you lead us into the future, we know that you understand what that future is, and we are meeting with you to do the business of learning what that is in our prayers, in our sermons, in our music, in our fellowship, in our learning.” We do not go into the future with an unknown past; we go with a known God, who is our Meridian line, who is our source of strength, who is the One who knows what the future holds, but he wants us to go with him in faith.
The story of Joshua and Jericho is marvellous because of that. Other lessons you might be able to peel away from it, extract from it, or even eliminate from it, pale compared to this truth: Joshua won the Battle of Jericho because God had already prepared the way. If this is our faith as we approach the New Year and if we build ourselves up as people of worship and praise, then we can have that same certainty that God has already gone before us, and to God is the honour and the glory and the praise. Amen.