Text: Joshua 24

“As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.”

For the whole decade of the 80’s, my formative years in childhood, these words hung on a felt and burlap banner in our dining room. Very 80s More-With-Less coded, tbh. Gold and brown. 40 years ago, these were the Biblical words that my parents chose to inscribe and make visible. 

Many years later, long after that banner had gone by the way-side, I was given a much more lovely calligraphy version of this verse by my parents. I’m sure they hoped I too would hang it up in my home. I didn’t. Mainly because I’m a contrarian and I like to choose my own art, not because I disagree with the statement.

The context of these words is what we heard in our scripture passage this morning. Because we heard it in the CEB, we actually heard a slightly different translation than many of us are used to:

“Choose today whom you will serve…but my family and I will serve the Lord”

Last week we heard the story of the gift of the ten commandments to a people who were fresh out of Egypt. Here we are now, a whole generation later. 40 years. Most of the folks hearing this are remembering those commandments in the hazy way that I’m remembering the banner on my dining room wall. Or not at all because they weren’t even there.

This people have been freed from enslavement but they have been wandering as nomads, living day to day in subsistence, not putting down roots or being fruitful and flourishing. But, they are right on the verge of a new kind of existence. They are about to experience the kind of abundance that is so fruitful they do not even need to toil and the land will flourish. Neither they nor their ancestors ever knew this kind of abundance.

God knows that in a life so full of gift and fullness it will be easy to forget whose they are and that they have covenanted to be community in a specific kind of way. It will be easy to forget how central to their experience the God of liberation and justice is. So God needs to retell it. It’s super boring to get through that whole litany of history and all the names and details and blah, blah, blah, but that’s God’s purpose in telling again the story of their ancestors.

And we (maybe speaking just for myself) may find it long but that’s six books of the Bible’s narrative condensed down into a few paragraphs! That does mean that like all story tellers, God decides what parts to leave in and what parts get glossed over of left out. God also makes a decision about how to invite the listeners into the story.

The Hebrew people do not – many of them at least – have a first hand experience of liberation. Nor do they have a first hand experience of their ancestors Abraham or Jacob or Esau. But God says, “You have seen with your own eyes.” And God goes on to remind them of all the ways that God has protected them and gone before them in the decades following the escape from Egypt. God’s provision, not their own. God’s protection, not their own. God is always front and center.

That claiming of God’s centrality is what Joshua is doing when he says, “As for my own household and me, we will serve Yahweh.” It’s what my parents were choosing to claim and be reminded of when they hung that wall-hanging in the dining room.

Now I was to tell you about the other quotation that was prominent in my household as a child. This one my parents still have, 40 years and at least half a dozen moves later. It was another one that might be familiar:

True evangelical faith cannot lie dormant…

It clothes the naked,

it feeds the hungry,

it comforts the sorrowful,

it shelters the destitute,

it aids and consoles the sad…

it binds up what is wounded.

Those are words from Menno Simons and the whole quote is longer than that, but those are the main ones that appear on the poster.

The reason that I name that is because in our family, in our churches, in our communities, the narratives that get repeated, that get posted on our walls or our social media feeds are the ones that shape our choices about how we will live and who we will choose to serve. That narrative about how we enact our faith is an important – and I would say central – part of how I choose to serve God.

For the people of Israel, who are a generation out of enslavement, who have not ever had an experience of abundance or fulness of life, who have been completely dependent on God, the story for them is that God is their center. The way that story is told in Joshua is very much about violence and conquest. There is a lot of talk of enemies and God’s ‘hornet’ or ‘smashers’ going ahead to conquer.

Hard as it is to hear, that is kind of important to that moment in the Hebrew story. An exploited and desperate people are about to experience goodness and fulfillment. They need to remember gratitude and how to share wealth and return to the one who created them. A people who have been beaten and violated and abused are experiencing a great reversal. Not by their own power or violence but at the hand of God.

It is pretty hard to stomach the parts of the story about people going into a land that they didn’t farm and cities that they didn’t build. Those verses and the narrative that goes with it have been used to justify colonialism and land-theft for 100s of years. My ancestors are included, as they plowed up and settled on land that had been stewarded for millenia by the Cree and Anishnaabe. That colonial violence is having a deep impact on the people of the Middle East currently.

I have said it before (and I will almost certainly say it again) in about how we read scripture, that we may not like the way things played out in the biblical story, but we can’t do anything about that. What we can do is have an impact on our own stories and on the here and now. We, like Joshua and the people of Israel are invited to choose God, to choose life, to choose a God who liberates and provides and upholds. 

Choose this day who you will serve. As for me, I am going to serve the Lord

Joshua’s people are ready. They are eager. Much like the generation before, they declare with trust and responsiveness to God’s story, Yes! Let’s do it! And together they establish a covenant that will help them move forward in accountability to God and each other together. 

We see a ritual of sorts play out, in which Joshua establishes a covenant with the people themselves as witnesses (that’s the accountability with each other) and a stone as a secondary witness. That stone is in the place of worship. The reminder ever time they return to worship that they are in relationship to God. 

The choice to turn toward God and toward each other is going to be a choice not just once but again and again and again. Choose this day. And this one. And this one. Who will we serve?

When I think of the story of God in the Hebrew Bible, as we read today, and which are prominent in the fall season in this lectionary, I hold that beside the story of God revealed in Jesus; the story of the Gospels and the liberation that Jesus brings. I also continue to retell the story of God as revealed through my Anabaptist ancestors. Menno Simons’ quote does a good job of helping me answer the question about who I will serve and how.

We are each being asked to serve other gods every single day. It is so alluring to turn to gods that will ask less of us, give easier answers, power (or the illusion of it). Tell and retelling each other the stories of liberation and justice, of the God who gave us Jesus, who goes before us to call us into an abundant life of service. That is how we will continue to say, as for me, as for this family at Evergreen Mennonite Church, we will serve God.

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